Walter Scott, ‘A Legend of Montrose’ (1819)

[Previously within this very Notebook: The Bride of Lammermoor (1819); Kenilworth (1821); The Pirate (1821/22); The Fortunes of Nigel (1822); Peveril of the Peak (1823); Quentin Durward (1823); St Ronan’s Well (1823); Redgauntlet (1824); The Betrothed (1825); The Talisman (1825); Woodstock (1826); The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827); The Highland Widow (1827); The Fair Maid of Perth (1828); Anne of Geierstein (1829); Count Robert of Paris (1831); Castle Dangerous (1831); The Siege of Malta (1831/2008). These posts are lengthy and full of plot-spoilers.]

As a title, A Legend of Montrose looks like it might be about the place or the person — the person being James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose (1612 –1650), nobleman, poet, soldier and later viceroy and captain general of Scotland. Actually it’s not really about either, though the person makes an appearance. As the English Civil War spread to Scotland 1644–46, Montrose led the Royalist forces, his army predominantly consisting of highlandmen, against the Presbyterian Covenanters: ‘his spectacular victories, which took his opponents by surprise, are remembered in military history for their tactical brilliance’. Scott’s novel is set during these wars: his preferred title was A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (J H Alexander restores this as the novel’s title as it appears in the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, 1993).

Montrose won six major battles: ‘at Tippermuir and Aberdeen he routed Covenanting levies; at Inverlochy he crushed the Campbells, at Auldearn, Alford and Kilsyth his victories were obtained over well-led and disciplined armies.’ The battle of Inverlochy occupies a climactic place in Scott’s novel. But despite his string of victories, Montrose was on the losing side of the war. Eventually, in 1650, he was captured by the Covenanters and executed — hanged, drawn and quartered no less, his severed head being put on a spike at the Edinburgh tollbooth and the rest of his remains buried in unconsecrated ground. In 1661, after the Restoration, Charles paid for Montrose’s body to be disinterred, reassembled and laid to rest, with lavish ceremony, at Holyrood Abbey. By the nineteenth century Montrose was treated as a hero, a popular subject for historical fiction — John Buchan and Nigel Tranter both wrote heroizing novels about him. Here, an illustration from Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall Scotland’s Story: a history of Scotland for boys and girls (1906), is Montrose’s last walk: ‘the marquis looked so handsome, grand and grave that every one was full of sad astonishment.’

Marshall doesn’t include a picture of Montrose’s severed head stuck upon a pike. That’s not the kind of book she was writing.

Still, Scott’s A Legend of Montrose is not really about Montrose. It does include him as a character, and traces his run of military victories, culminating in Inverlochy, but the main focus of the story is elsewhere. Focus on legend, rather than wars of Montrose. Or, perhaps, on something else. Montrose first appears in the novel in disguise as ‘Anderson’, manservant to the handsome young Earl of Menteith, who is travelling through Scotland mustering an army for the Royalists. Why Montrose adopts this disguise is not explained, except that Scott loves having kings and princes disguise themselves as common people. In fact there’s something a little half-hearted about how he disposes this device in this novel: in chapter 7, less than a third of the way into the novel, Anderson’s disguise is revealed, and Montrose stands before the assembled Highwayman as their military commander.

The story focusses more on on Menteith. He meets, on his way, a mercenary soldier called Dalgetty, and recruits him to the cause. Now, Dalgetty is one of Scot’s most famous comic creations, character-wise: prosy, well-versed in the rigmarole of war, pompous, endlessly rehearsing stories of his time as a soldier of fortune in the Thirty Years War on the Continent, where he fought for whoever paid him, but especially treasured his time serving ‘under the banner of the invincible Gustavus, the Lion of the North’. He has named his own warhorse and constant companion Gustavus. Introduced as a minor character, Dalgetty swells almost to the point where he comes to dominate the novel — he’s always speechifying, reminiscing about Gustavus Adolfus, or polishing his armour, or talking to his horse, or advising others on military matters, and as the novel proceeds it loses its main plot in a lengthy digressive episode, that grows as it goes on, of Dalgetty going on a diplomatic mission to Inverlochy, being locked up, escaping and evading capture across the highlands. In the introduction for the 1830 ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of the novel, Scott conceded that he had fallen in love with his own creation, and given over too much of the story to him: ‘Dalgetty, as the production of his own fancy, has been so far a favourite with its parent, that he has fallen into the error of assigning to the Captain too prominent a part in the story,’ he says; although he also quotes a basically praising notice from The Edinburgh Review:

There is too much, perhaps, of Dalgetty, — or, rather, he engrosses too great a proportion of the work, — for, in himself, we think he is uniformly entertaining; — and the author has nowhere shown more affinity to that matchless spirit who could bring out his Falstaffs and his Pistols, in act after act, and play after play, and exercise them every time with scenes of unbounded loquacity, without either exhausting their humour, or varying a note from its characteristic tone, than in his large and reiterated specimens of the eloquence of the redoubted Ritt-master. The general idea of the character is familiar to our comic dramatists after the Restoration — and may be said in some measure to be compounded of Captain Fluellen and Bobadil; — but the ludicrous combination of the Soldado with the Divinity student of Mareschal-College, is entirely original; and the mixture of talent, selfishness, courage, coarseness, and conceit, was never so happily exemplified. Numerous as his speeches are, there is not one that is not characteristic — and, to our taste, divertingly ludicrous. [A Legend of Montrose, ‘Introduction’]

I found the endless Dalgetty speeches and business rather wearing than otherwise; but your mileage my vary. For many he is the main glory of the novel. I came across a piece in the British Medical Journal where Alastair MacLennan, director of Army Medical Services, reports on his favourite book: ‘like most Scottish boys of my generation I was brought up on the novels of Sir Walter Scott. These I thoroughly enjoyed. Of them all, I enjoyed A Legend of Montrose most and have returned to it again and again for the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with Rittmaster Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket and of the Marischal College, Aberdeen. Surely he is the best drawn of all Scott’s characters; what a strange mixture of soldier, divinity student, courage, selfishness, and conceit. As a picture of a Scots soldier of fortune he stands alone.’ [BMJ 283: 6301 (1981), 1254] But now I am allowing my account of Dalgetty to swell disproportionately in this blogpost as the character does in Scott’s novel. I want to get back to severed heads.

Menteith and Montrose, with Dalgetty in tow, travel to Darnlinvarach castle, where the host of highland soldiers will soon assemble. This is the home of the M’Auley brothers: Angus M’Aulay, laird of Kintail, and mad Allan, his strange and dangerous brother. Allan’s madness is explained as a function of his mother having gone mad when pregnant with him, during a feud with another Highland clan, ‘a small sept of banditti, called, from their houseless state, and their incessantly wandering among the mountains and glens, the Children of the Mist.’ These people ‘exhibit with all the irritability, and wild and vengeful passions, proper to men who have never known the restraint of civilized society.’ Uh-oh!

The then Laird of Darnlinvarach was hosting his wife’s brother, Lord M’Auley, Warden of the Forest. The Warden, out hunting, ran into these Children of the Mist, who killed him ‘with every circumstance of inventive cruelty.’ Then they did more: ‘they cut off his head, and resolved, in a bravado, to exhibit it at the castle of his brother-in-law.’ Lady M’Aulay, allows the killers into the castle for refreshment (‘the laird being absent, the lady reluctantly received as guests, men against whom, perhaps, she was afraid to shut her gates’) whereupon they unwrapped the severed head from the tartan in which it was being carried, placed it on the table ‘put a piece of bread between the lifeless jaws, bidding them do their office now, since many a good meal they had eaten at that table.’ This drives Lady M’Auley mad:

The lady, who had been absent for some household purpose, entered at this moment, and, upon beholding her brother’s head, fled like an arrow out of the house into the woods, uttering shriek upon shriek. The ruffians, satisfied with this savage triumph, withdrew. The terrified menials, after overcoming the alarm to which they had been subjected, sought their unfortunate mistress in every direction, but she was nowhere to be found. The miserable husband returned next day, and, with the assistance of his people, undertook a more anxious and distant search, but to equally little purpose. It was believed universally, that, in the ecstasy of her terror, she must either have thrown herself over one of the numerous precipices which overhang the river, or into a deep lake about a mile from the castle. Her loss was the more lamented, as she was six months advanced in her pregnancy; Angus M’Aulay, her eldest son, having been born about eighteen months before. [ch.5]

She reappears months later (having subsisted in the meantime upon who knows what: ‘some supposed she lived upon roots and wild-berries … [or] upon the milk of the wild does, or had been nourished by the fairies’) with the baby Allan, afterwards dying. Allan grows to manhood largely unhinged, driven by a fury of vengeance against the Children of the Mist, army of whom he hunts and kills, either on solitary expeditions, or as part of the military engagements of the time. On one of these latter he kills men, women and children and is about to kill a tiny girl when his brother intercedes — in the scene illustrated in the frontispiece, at the head of this post. Angus relates:

“One little maiden alone, who smiled upon Allan’s drawn dirk, escaped his vengeance upon my earnest entreaty. She was brought to the castle, and here bred up under the name of Annot Lyle, the most beautiful little fairy certainly that ever danced upon a heath by moonlight. It was long ere Allan could endure the presence of the child, until it occurred to his imagination, from her features perhaps, that she did not belong to the hated blood of his enemies, but had become their captive in some of their incursions; a circumstance not in itself impossible, but in which he believes as firmly as in holy writ. He is particularly delighted by her skill in music, which is so exquisite, that she far exceeds the best performers in this country in playing on the clairshach, or harp. It was discovered that this produced upon the disturbed spirits of Allan, in his gloomiest moods, beneficial effects … and so engaging is the temper of Annot Lyle, so fascinating the innocence and gaiety of her disposition, that she is considered and treated in the castle rather as the sister of the proprietor, than as a dependent upon his charity. Indeed, it is impossible for any one to see her without being deeply interested by the ingenuity, liveliness, and sweetness of her disposition.”

So, beautiful Annot Lyle alone has the power to bring Allan back from his fits of insanity by playing her harp. Here she is, soothing the troubled highlander, whilst Menteith stands behind her: he was essaying a surreptitious look, I think, down her cleavage and then noticed the engraver capturing the scene and looked straight down the camera instead.

Allan M’Auley is in love with Annot, naturally. So is Menteith. And actually, not Montrose, nor the rambling peregrinations of Dalgetty, are the heart of the story: it is, rather, the love triangle between Allan M’Aulay, the Earl of Menteith, and Annot Lyle. Menteith cannot marry Annot because she does not come from an aristocratic family, but he and she have a romantic connection, and it eventually drives Allan to murderous jealousy.

To cut ahead in the story: it is fortuitously revealed that Annot had been abducted as a baby by the Children of the Mist from Sir Duncan Campbell, such that she is actually Heiress of Ardenvohr and a noblewoman. So, with the splendid arbitrariness of Tory belief in bloodlines, Menteith can marry her after all, and does. But Allan M’Aulay, though he loves Menteith, cannot bear the thought of losing Annot to him.

One more detail: Allan has the second sight, and can foresee the future. Early in the novel he relates a vision he has had:

“Repeatedly,” Allan said, “have I had the sight of a Gael, who seemed to plunge his weapon into the body of Menteith, — of that young nobleman in the scarlet laced cloak, who has just now left the bothy. But by no effort, though I have gazed till my eyes were almost fixed in the sockets, can I discover the face of this Highlander, or even conjecture who he may be, although his person and air seem familiar to me.” [17]

At the novel’s end, on the wedding day, furious Allan urges Menteith to draw his sword, and when the Earl refuses (‘Menteith threw him off with violence, exclaiming, “Begone, madman!”’) he shrieks ‘then, be the vision accomplished!’ and stabs him:

Drawing his dirk, he struck with his whole gigantic force at the Earl’s bosom. The temper of the corslet threw the point of the weapon upwards, but a deep wound took place between the neck and shoulder; and the force of the blow prostrated the bridegroom on the floor. Montrose entered at one side of the anteroom. The bridal company, alarmed at the noise, were in equal apprehension and surprise; but ere Montrose could almost see what had happened, Allan M’Aulay had rushed past him, and descended the castle stairs like lightning. “Guards, shut the gate!” exclaimed Montrose — “Seize him — kill him, if he resists! — He shall die, if he were my brother!” But Allan prostrated, with a second blow of his dagger, a sentinel who was upon duty — traversed the camp like a mountain-deer, though pursued by all who caught the alarm — threw himself into the river, and, swimming to the opposite side, was soon lost among the woods. [22]

Menteith survives, but it is striking that Scott publishes, in the same year, two novels that involve stabbings of grooms on their wedding night: The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and this one.

The logic of this is a kind of short-circuit: we move towards a moment of climax, something the narrative has been building towards — the coming together of two lovers, a wedding night. But instead of this consummation, a violent intervention. In Legend Menteith survives and, we are told, recovers; in Lammermoor it is Lucia who stabs her bridegroom, and she afterwards dies.

Allan M’Auley loves the Earl of Menteith. He also loves Annot Lyle (who is actually Annot Campbell). He has inherited insanity directly, it seems, from his traumatised mother’s womb: she saw her own brother’s severed head displayed on her own dinner table, with a piece of bread in its jaws. Obviously a decapitated head cannot eat; mad Lady M’Auley flees the forest where she is able to live, and give birth, and presumably nurse her baby, despite there being no food: perhaps, the locals say, the fairies fed her. Appetite and its denial; the magic continuity of life. Perhaps — this is speculation — fairy food made its way into baby Allan and gave him his weird powers, his second sight. He loves Menteith as a person, and has his hopes vested in him in terms of the great war being fought against M’Auley’s enemies; yet he is tormented by a vision of a mysterious highlander stabbing Menteith to death. Who will do this dreadful thing? ‘By no effort, though I have gazed till my eyes were almost fixed in the sockets, can I discover the face of this Highlander,’ Allan says, ‘or even conjecture who he may be.’ Of course the prophecy will come true, as in Macbeth, although it will come true (as in Macbeth) in a surprising way. Allan cannot see who the killer is because it is he himself: an eyeball, we might say, cannot see itself. And yet the doom is inevitable. There is a satisfying narrative circularity to this, the statement of the prophecy and its fulfillment: another kind of short-circuit.

Inevtability is one of the topics of the novel. Here Sir Duncan Campbell, an honourable and noble gentleman (and father, it will later be revealed, of Annot), comes to treat with Menteith and the highlanders — for Campbell is on the side of the Covenanters. His point is that the royalist cause is doomed, as indeed it is: we readers of the novel know this, because it is a historical fact. Why tie yourself to a losing cause? Menteith says he has no choice: the throne bestowed Menteith’s ancestors with nobility, and Menteith in return will be loyal to the king. ‘The die is cast with you,’ Sir Duncan agrees. Menteith’s destiny is fixed.

“You will find it in vain, Sir Duncan,” said Lord Menteith, haughtily, “to set my vanity in arms against my principles. The King gave my ancestors their title and rank; and these shall never prevent my acting, in the royal cause, under any one who is better qualified than myself to be a commander-in-chief [he means Montrose]. Least of all, shall any miserable jealousy prevent me from placing my hand and sword under the guidance of the bravest, the most loyal, the most heroic spirit among our Scottish nobility.”

“Pity,” said Sir Duncan Campbell, “that you cannot add to this panegyric the farther epithets of the most steady, and the most consistent. But I have no purpose of debating these points with you, my lord,” waving his hand, as if to avoid farther discussion; “the die is cast with you; allow me only to express my sorrow for the disastrous fate to which Angus M’Aulay’s natural rashness, and your lordship’s influence, are dragging my gallant friend Allan here, with his father’s clan, and many a brave man besides.”

“The die is cast for us all, Sir Duncan,” replied Allan, looking gloomy, and arguing on his own hypochondriac feelings; “the iron hand of destiny branded our fate upon our forehead long ere we could form a wish, or raise a finger in our own behalf. Were this otherwise, by what means does the Seer ascertain the future from those shadowy presages which haunt his waking and his sleeping eye? Nought can be foreseen but that which is certain to happen.”

Sir Duncan Campbell was about to reply, and the darkest and most contested point of metaphysics might have been brought into discussion betwixt two Highland disputants, when the door opened, and Annot Lyle, with her clairshach in her hand, entered the apartment. The freedom of a Highland maiden was in her step and in her eye; for, bred up in the closest intimacy with the Laird of M’Aulay and his brother, with Lord Menteith, and other young men who frequented Darnlinvarach, she possessed none of that timidity which a female, educated chiefly among her own sex, would either have felt, or thought necessary to assume, on an occasion like the present. [9]

This is one way of talking about Scott’s business as a writer. Another kind of novelist has the freedom to take his or her story in whichever direction they like; a historical novelist is constrained by the facts of history. Scott’s heart is with the royalists, but he cannot write a novel in which King Charles wins the civil war and keeps his head — as Quentin Tarantino, chafeing against the reality of things, alters the path of history in Inglorious Basterds, and burns Hitler to death in a Parisian movie theatre. Scott shuffles details around, elides and tweaks, but he does not alter the main shape of history.

Scott did not believe in changing history merely to suit his fictional convenience, though he was willing to alter specific historical details to reveal with greater clarity fundamental historical patterns. He believed in telling the truth about history. He was often cavalier in his attitude toward novels, especially those produced by his contemporaries, Jane Austen excepted. But he was serious indeed about history and the duties of historians. [Harry Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Cornell 2018), 150]

This little scene, with Allan’s gloomy intervention — ‘the die is cast for us all’, and Scott’s characterisation of predestination, existential inevitability, as the darkest of metaphysics, the claustrophobic inescapability of our doom, like a noose closing around our necks — is interrupted by the appearance of beautiful Annot and her soothing music. It suggests that Allan’s madness is more than a derangement occasioned by the madness and death of his mother, that it is a response to his being trapped in this predistined bind. But it also says that there is a balm in this Gilead, a relief from the dark metaphysical pain: Annot’s music, and Annot herself. She represents an open futurity: not men fighting men, tied to their heritages and family trees and duties and responsibilities, but a woman, who can bring new life into the world.

Still, the process by which this new life can come, and futurity unfold, is interrupted. The noose of Allan’s dark vision tightens around Annot and Menteith’s wedding union. It is inescapable. Or nearly inescapable, because Menteith is not actually killed. Right at the end of the novel, Scott records disappointment amongst the highlanders that Allan’s second sight was not more precisely accurate, before adding a common-sense deflation of the whole idea of prophetic vision:

The Highlanders were somewhat puzzled to reconcile Menteith’s recovery with the visions of the second sight, and the more experienced Seers were displeased with him for not having died. But others thought the credit of the vision sufficiently fulfilled, by the wound inflicted by the hand, and with the weapon, foretold .. the incredulous held, that all this was idle dreaming, and that Allan’s supposed vision was but a consequence of the private suggestions of his own passion, which, having long seen in Menteith a rival more beloved than himself, struggled with his better nature, and impressed upon him, as it were involuntarily, the idea of killing his competitor. [23]

This, we could say, presents two theories of the supernatural: it’s an actual thing; it’s a metaphor for our states of mind. When the novel first relates Allan’s vision, Scott appends a lengthy note:

Wraiths. A species of apparition, similar to what the Germans call a Double-Ganger, was believed in by the Celtic tribes, and is still considered as an emblem of misfortune or death. Mr. Kirke (See Note to ROB ROY,), the minister of Aberfoil, who will no doubt be able to tell us more of the matter should he ever come back from Fairy-land, gives us the following: — “Some men of that exalted sight, either by art or nature, have told me they have seen at these meetings a double man, or the shape of some man in two places, that is, a superterranean and a subterranean inhabitant perfectly resembling one another in all points, whom he, notwithstanding, could easily distinguish one fro another by some secret tokens and operations, and so go speak to the man his neighbour and familiar, passing by the apparition or resemblance of him…. They call this reflex man a Co-Walker, every way like the man, as a twin-brother and companion haunting him as his shadow.” — KIRKE’S SECRET COMMOMWEALTH, p. 3.

The two following apparitions, resembling the vision of Allan M’Aulay in the text, occur in Theophilus Insulanus (Rev. Mr. Fraser’s Treatise on the Second Sight, Relations x. and xvii.): —

As with Lammermoor, a novel much concerned with doubles and spectral dopplegangers, Legend is a story haunted. Allan’s mother is driven mad by the severed head of her brother, like something out of a Senecan tragedy; Montrose, after whom the novel is and isn’t named, is doomed to decapitation and ignominious death. And both these decapitations are shadowed, as it were, by the unspoken figure of Charles 1st — alive, in England, during the action of Scott’s novel, but never on stage — and his inevitable headlessness. There’s no way round it: Charles gets his head cut off. This is a double symbolism: Charles, as man, is literally decapitated; the nation, of which (for a royalist like Scott) the king is the head, is de-kinged. And yet, strangely, though beheaded the nation passed from strength to strength. The ordinary people of England, the ‘body’, grow stouter and stronger, like non-noble Dalgetty swelling to dominate the book in which he appears. Meanwhile the aristocrats, the ‘head’, are trapped in their dark dooms.

The shift from Menteith being unable to marry the woman he loves because she has base rather than noble blood in her veins, to him suddenly being able to marry her because she is revealed as a foundling of noble stock — this is, in one sense, the old conceit of antique romance storytelling: Oedipus, Perdita and the like. But we can read it as a critique of the bizarre arbitrariness of belief in an aristocratic bloodline as such. What do we inherit? What, in this pre-Darwin, pre-Mendel novel, is passed down from generation to generation? In the case of Allan, madness. For Menteith, irrevocable loyalty to the doomed cause of the royal family. For Charles I, offstage, what is inherited is the divine and absolute right of ruling England — except that he didn’t actually inherit this, but instead inherited death and unheading.