Walter Scott, “Kenilworth” (1821)
Kenilworth (1821) is not one of Scott’s most loved novels. I mean, all of Scott’s novels, once universally adored, are no longer loved (except amongst a small and select cognoscenti) so perhaps that’s not saying much. But its fall has been more precipitous than most. For in the 19th-century, when everybody read Scott — when Henry Crabb Robinson was literally always reading Scott, straight through, whatever else he was also reading, such that when he finished the last of the Waverley novels he started again with the first — Kenilworth was deemed one of Scott’s best. Stephen Arata says ‘Kenilworth falls into that abundant category of Scott Novels forgotten by most twentieth-century readers’ but he adds:
yet it is an important book in the context both of Scott’s career and of the cultural history of the novel. In some respects it marks the apex of his popularity and influence. Brought out by Constable in January 1821 at the literally unheard-of price of thirty-one shillings, it was the first novel published in the triple-decker format: a fact that in itself makes Kenilworth arguably the most influential work of fiction of the nineteenth century. Despite its high price, the book sold briskly: 10,000 copies in the first three weeks, another 3,000 in the next month, a second edition within six weeks of the first. And if you read through the contemporary reviews, what you find is one unending hymn of praise. In 1821 the Author of Waverley was almost beyond criticism. Balzac called the plot of Kenilworth ‘the grandest, most complete, most extraordinary of all’ Scott’s achievements. The novel’s popularity lasted, too: Kenilworth was one of the half-dozen Scott novels most often reprinted in the nineteenth century. [Stephen Arata, ‘Scott’s Pageants: The Example of Kenilworth’ Studies in Romanticism 40:1 (Spring, 2001), 99]
Arata’s answer to his own question (‘what did nineteenth-century readers respond to in Kenilworth that later readers have trouble discerning?’) is: ‘spectacle’. There’s something in this, although I’m not sure it’s the whole story. Arata does a good job of both showing how the pageants Scott orchestrated in real life, for the Scottish tour of George IV, caught the public imagination — creating in fact much of the tartan-and-bagpipe sense we still have of what Scotland ‘is’ — and that 19th-century readers liked reading about pageants. I’m sure they did. The thing is, I think readers, and viewers, still love pageants and big displays. A primary aesthetic of contemporary TV and cinema is ‘the spectacle’ after all.
I think there are more plausible explanations for the falling-away of Kenilworth as a novel, and would identify two in particular. One is actually one of the novel’s strengths, if read another way: its style. I don’t mean the characteristic Scott prolixity, although the novel certainly has that — the way I always think about that aspect of Scott’s work is that you can’t read him impatiently. That’s just not how he works, as a writer. Think of his novels as settling into a lovely hot bath rather than a thriller- or adventure- roller-coaster. But more than that, Kenilworth has a particular stylistic quirk in that it is absolutely saturated in a fruity, hey-prithee-thou-varlet cod-Elizabethan jargon of faux-historicity. From the first chapter —
“What, ho! John Tapster.”
“At hand, Will Hostler,” replied the man of the spigot, showing himself in his costume of loose jacket, linen breeches, and green apron, half within and half without a door, which appeared to descend to an outer cellar.
“Here is a gentleman asks if you draw good ale,” continued the hostler.
“Beshrew my heart else,” answered the tapster, “since there are but four miles betwixt us and Oxford. Marry, if my ale did not convince the heads of the scholars, they would soon convince my pate with the pewter flagon.”
— to the last
“Why, where tarries Lambourne?” said Anthony.
“Ask no questions,” said Varney, “thou wilt see him one day if thy creed is true. But to our graver matter. I will teach thee a spring, Tony, to catch a pewit. Yonder trap-door — yonder gimcrack of thine, will remain secure in appearance, will it not, though the supports are withdrawn beneath?”
“Ay, marry, will it,” said Foster; “so long as it is not trodden on.”
People can no longer take this kind of thing seriously, I suppose. It is not just a matter of style. Kenilworth is centrally about — is, in a way, a celebration of — a notion of gentility, chivalry and selfless knight-errant courtesy, a notion in which we no longer, perhaps, believe. But Scott did, and his original readers shared his faith that such a social code was not only valuable but was sublime.
The Cornishman, Tressilian, is the novel’s hero because he is so self-sacrificing and noble in his attempts to save Amy Robsart: beautiful daughter of a Cornish gentleman to whom he was betrothed, but who has jilted him to marry the aristocratic Earl of Leicester. The wrinkle is that Leicester is Elizabeth’s favourite at court. Talk is that Her Majesty desires to marry him, which would make him King. Leicester does not wish to jeopardise his position at court or his larger ambition. Accordingly he does not tell the Queen that he is married, and keeps Amy locked away in secret in a manor house in Berkshire: Cumnor Place. Here Amy has access to every luxury but freedom, and waits for the occasional days when her husband visits.
Leicester has a hypocritical attendant called Richard Varney, a Machiavellian figure who plots to use his position to advance his own ambitions. Varney is gentle-seeming on the outside but the hidden truth of him is that he is capable of every villainy, including the attempted rape of Amy and multiple murder. This is one of Scott’s perennial strategies as a writer: I’ve argued elsewhere that he uses physical disguise (as in The Talisman when the humble, virtuous physician Adonbec el Hakim is revealed to be Saladin himself, in disguise) to do what Jane Austen, a much more accomplished writer in many ways, achieves through irony. It’s his way of articulating that appearance and reality don’t always align, in life; that people are their interactions can be complex, involved, opaque, that the really important things don’t advertise their importance. In Kenilworth he does something quite interesting with this, actually. There are three interconnected forms of disguise at play in the novel. One is the simple hypocrisy of Varney. Another is the more complicated relationship between, on the one hand, courtly mannerisms and especially the traditions of amour courtois — every male character at Court must perform hopeless love for and adoration of Elizabeth — and, on the other, the real-life desires and hopes of the people who act out there social rituals. This can be a matter of mere mismatch, as it is for Varney and his sidekick, the drunkard Michael Lamborne; or it can be that the outward show of courtesy exactly matches the inner natural gentility (as with Tressilian, and Sir Francis Drake, who has a minor but memorable role in the novel). Most characters, though, fall somewhere in the middle: they have ordinary human desires and failings, but perform nobility and courtliness, a fiction believed-in by all and practised to that end.
The third iteration of this Scottian theme is Amy’s hidden marriage. Indeed, the portrait of marriage as a mystery, a riddle, as a hidden thing, is a large part of this novel’s focus. Perhaps we think of marriage as a love-match, a natural and open connection between two people; but, Scott is saying, often it is actually a kind of secret, an imprisonment, a mismatch. There’s something interesting in that, I’d say.
We can read Lennon’s ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ as being about gay love in a homophobic society, or about an extra-marital affair or some other kind of forbidden connection; but it’s a song finds not merely disguise but a strange beauty in that state of affairs. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, literally hides his love away. Tressilian, nobly because disinterestedly — Amy, now, can never be his — helps the hidden wife escape. When Amy turns up at Kenilworth, Leicester’s stately home where Elizabeth is being entertained with a splendid pageant, dancing, theatre, fireworks and the lot, Leicester fears his political ambitions are undone. Varney proposes a solution: pretend that he is Amy’s husband, lock her up in a room in the castle and hope for the best (it is here that he attempts to, in Scott’s idiom, ‘outrage’ the virtuous if rather egotistical Amy). Leicester goes along with this deception, but is not happy about it, and is enough of a genuine gentleman that he himself will not directly lie.
Indeed these two episodes of the novel, the mystery of Cumnor Place at the novel’s beginning, and Amy’s appearance at Kenilworth, are superbly handled by Scott. The brilliance of the latter inheres in the sheer tension of the staging, something Scott manages to draw out with well-nigh Hitchcockian brilliance. That tension in turn depends upon the reader’s knowledge that though Leicester is a schemer, and capable of imprisoning his wife, he possesses too much genuine gentility to lie directly to the Queen. So Scott orchestrates Amy being smuggled into Kenilworth, being apprehended and locked up, escaping her locked room (Michael Lambourne, drunk, comes in planning on raping the Countess, is interrupted by the castle jailer, and as the two men fight Amy slips away), wandering the grounds in a state of distress and chancing upon Elizabeth and Leicester, walking together, arm in arm. Leicester has finally brought his plan to the point at which he can start to intimate that Elizabeth and he should marry. Naturally he is startled to see his wife, since he thought she was under lock and key a hundred miles away. He’s on the verge of confessing all to his Queen when Varney intervenes, taking him aside and proposing the deception I mention above.
The combination of these things, then, generates a marvellous vibe: the charm of Scott’s outré fustian and all this gorgeous Elizabethan costumery, the sense of personal honour as a genuine and wonderful thing, easily betrayed but intensely valuable and creditable nonetheless, and the sheer tension of the plot. But then — and this is the second of the two reasons I want to propose as to why Kenilworth has fallen out of favour — Scott botches the ending. The last quarter of this novel is a car-cash, or at least a coach-and-four crash.
In part this is because Scott has boxed himself in. Amy Robarts was a real historical personage, actually married to the Earl of Leicester (though this marriage wasn’t secret; it was Leicester’s second marriage, to Lettice, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, that he tried to keep from his monarch, the revelation of which caused him to fall from favour). The historical record shows that Amy died in Cumnor Hall, apparently after falling downstairs and breaking her neck.
Now, Scott is impressively cavalier with the historical record in Kenilworth. The main action is set at the time of the (historical) pageant in Leicester’s country seat, which happened in 1575. But the actual Amy Robarts died in 1560; and William Shakespeare — who appears as a side-character in Scott’s novel, and whose plays are quoted by all and sundry — was 11-years-old in 1575 (Scott has one character quote The Tempest, which dates to 1611). But though he’s content to mix-and-match a bunch of generic Elizabethanisms to give his stew the proper flavour, Scott clearly wasn’t prepared to alter the historical fate of Amy.
That entailed two wrenches to the fabric of the novel. One is that Amy must be bundled away from Kenilworth and back to Cumnor Hall, for that is where she died. So Scott cranks his melodrama handle. Varney, like toad-Satan at the ear of Eve, whispers to Leicester that Amy must be killed — in order that the Earl be left unencumbered and so be able to marry the Queen. When Leicester resists, Varney intimates to him that Amy has been unfaithful (with Tressilian). This drives Leicester into a jealous rage, under the influence of which he authorises Varney to take Amy away in a sealed carriage back to Cumnor Hall and dispose of her. But once Varney has spirited the Countess away Leicester repents his hasty judgment, and sends Michael Lambourne galloping after the carriage with a letter rescinding his former order (Varney, to keep his deniability plausible, and determined that his patron become King so that he himself can benefit, shoots Lambourne through the chest on the Oxfordshire road and rides away). Nonetheless, this development is a dreadful false step by Scott. I’ll explain why.
The repeated Shakespearian intertexts in this novel (anachronism notwithstanding) do some of the structural work to sustain the various shifts and twists of the plotting. But although Scott pushes a number of Othello-and-Iago pedals at this point in the story, this abrupt left-turn makes no sense. Othello was susceptible to Iago’s insinuating because he possessed just enough insecurity, as an outsider and a Black man in White Venetian society, for the anxiety to take root. Jealousy is pre-eminently the failing of the insecure. But though Leicester has many personal failings, sexual insecurity is absolutely not one of them. Scott’s plot-jink requires Leicester to be a kind of Othello and he just isn’t. For a novelist like Scott, who relies so largely upon the diversity and verisimilitude of this (lensed to be larger-than-life but still identifiable) characters, this is fatal. For fifty pages or so Leicester acts wholly out of character, for wholly plot-motivated reasons and it wrecks the novel. Then, with indecent haste, Scott wraps up his story: after hundreds and hundreds of pages of carefully paced, superbly tense and evocative writing, Amy is suddenly killed — with a bizarre Jonathan Creek-style contraption, a moveable upstairs-landing floorway outside her chamber, which Varney and the houseowner Foster (also in Leicester’s pay) swing without telling Amy. Then they can call to her, in the dark of the night, that Leicester himself has arrived, causing her to rush out of her room eager to greet him and so fall to her death. This, they do. Then in the space of less than a page: Amy’s father dies of grief; Varney, apprehended, takes poison and dies; Foster vanishes — it is later discovered that he had a secret chamber in the house in which he kept his hoarded gold, that he fled there after Amy’s murder, got locked in and so perished — Leicester is (unhistorically) so overwhelmed with sorrow and regret he departs for America and dies there.
It’s a catastrophe (in the technial sense of the term) that is catastrophic (in the modern idiom), a poor falling-away for a novel that starts so splendidly. Scott is mugged by history, bundled into sheer clumsiness. It’s a shame, it really is. For its first two thirds Kenilworth is certainly worth kenning.
