Scott’s friend and admirer the Prince Regent once King, the distinctions came. In 1820 Scott went to London to receive the baronetcy which, as Lord Sidmouth had told him, it had been the Prince Regent’s desire to confer on him. Whilst in London he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his portrait for the King, and to Chantrey for his bust, and the degree of D.C.L. was offered him by both the English Universities. Three Edinburgh distinctions were conferred on him. He was elected President of the Royal Scottish Society; he was first President of the Bannatyne Club, which he had founded; and he was appointed Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Scottish Academy. Those years were his most active time as a citizen as well as an author, for he was chairman of nearly every public meeting, or charity, or educational scheme in the town. Every day must have seen him limping along Princes Street, recognised by all, coming from Parliament House, or his meetings, or his printer’s; perhaps one of a group talking eagerly, pausing to disperse at the door of some bookshop or on the steps of a club, or at the corner of Castle Street. Many a head must have turned to gaze after the rugged familiar figure; many a whisper to child or stranger must have followed him, “There, look! That is Sir Walter Scott!”
In August 1822 George IV. paid his state visit to Edinburgh, and stayed a fortnight in the capital of the ancient kingdom. This fortnight was perhaps the proudest and most brilliant of Scott’s life,—“his supreme moment”—and again it was in Edinburgh. The Tories, their dream of Jacobitism dead with the Cardinal of York, were more personally loyal than the Whigs; and Scott, most tory of Tories, was loyalest of the loyal. It was his influence that had brought about the royal visit, and on him devolved all the arrangements; and for weeks Castle Street was like a green-room, filled by all the actors in the great play. When the day came and in the rain the King’s yacht cast anchor in Leith Roads—where Mary Stuart’s galleys had in the mist cast anchor on a bygone August day—Scott rowed alongside and boarded the Royal George. The King toasted him in native whisky; and Scott, in his enthusiasm, asked leave to keep the glass. He put it, carefully wrapped up, in his deep coat-tail pocket, and went home holding the skirt of his coat carefully in front of him. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! At Castle Street he found that Crabbe the poet had chosen this inopportune season to arrive unexpectedly on a visit. Scott, ever hospitable, welcomed him warmly, and promptly sat down beside him; and crash!—the glass was smashed to atoms.
At six next morning, Queen Street—that sober terrace!—saw Sir Walter Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39 Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in French, had been promptly taken by them for a French abbé.
Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything. Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the levées and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday, at the performance by Murray’s company of Rob Roy, and at the banquet given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in his Life of Scott, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day think the kilt the national—if not the usual—dress of the Scot, and that Punch makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit—also due to Sir Walter Scott’s influence—were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson, Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745 were restored.
Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It was a cold January morning—seven o’clock—when Skene arrived, and Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand: mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance poured in—from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh, from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at periods most interesting for me. Down—down—a hundred thoughts.”
No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That eident hand!...
Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... Ha til mi tulidh.”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at Abbotsford. And so—first there, and then next winter alone with his youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at No. 6 Shandwick Place,—Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in the days of his prosperity.
Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished, not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels.
CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY
And the days of auld lang syne.
Burns.