Walter Scott, “Redgauntlet” (1824)

[Continuing my read-through of the Waverley novels. Previously on this blog: Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823) and St Ronan’s Well (1823). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

This post, tediously long even by the standards of this series, is in three parts: a first on the story of the novel, a second on Jacobitism and a third on the queer dynamics of the book. The first part just re-tells the narrative, so if you’ve read Redgauntlet you can skip that. Of course, you could just skip the whole thing.

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1. The Story

Redgauntlet (1824) is a story about two things trying to come together that can’t, quite, manage to come together. Fittingly it is told in two modes that try and fail to come together: epistolary fiction and third-person narration. The shift from the first of these to the second happens about a third of the way through the book and is really quite jolting. We the reader have settled into a leisurely but absorbing adventure narrated by two best friends, young Edinburgh men, writing letters to one another. Abruptly Scott drops the letter form and simply picks up the narrative with a third-person, omniscient narrator. I don’t know of any other novel that does this.

The story is set in 1765. Alan Fairford, son of respectable Edinburgh lawyer Alexander Fairford (a character based on Scott’s own father), is studying for the bar — just as young Scott himself did. He represents his first client in court, a loon called Peter Peebles who has spent his whole life tangled up in an endless lawsuit and has been driven mad by it (Dickens manifestly drew on this aspect of the novel for Bleak House).

Alan’s best friend Darsie Latimer is a gentleman at leisure. He enjoys fishing: there he is, on the title page, at the top of this post. But there’s a mystery associated with Darsie’s past: raised by Fairford senior, he doesn’t know who his real parents are, and lives under an unexplained injunction that he must never travel south of the border into England. Nonetheless he takes a fishing holiday to the Solway Firth, on the border, with England visible across the water. Asking for trouble, the reader thinks.

Trouble finds him. First he is caught, far from his lodgings, in a storm, and a mysterious and ferocious stranger, Mr Herries of Birrenswork, reluctantly gives him overnight shelter in his house. There Darsie briefly spies a beautiful young women wearing a green cloak and falls in love without exchanging a single word. Afterwards Darsie befriends a local Quaker and learns a little about Herries’ reclusive yet fierce reputation in the locality. Since he happens to play the violin, Darsie falls-in with a blind fiddler, Willie Steenson, and joins him, playing at a party for the common folk. The beautiful young green-cloaked woman from Herries’ house is there too, and she whispers to him that he must leave, not just the party but the whole location — his life, it seems, is in danger!

Alan and Darsie’s letters alternate, containing in addition to their respective narrative accounts a great deal of affectionate banter, legal jokes and so on. The two men share an easy intimacy, each being entirely the most important person in the world to the other. A twenty-first century reader can hardly avoid feeling that they have the hots for one another, Darsie and Alan, and would make a lovely couple. This is not an eventuality Scott’s novel can acknowledge, of course. I’ll come back to it.

In Edinburgh, Alan is visited by a beautiful and mysterious young woman in a green cloak — she won’t give her name, calling herself only ‘Greenmantle’ — telling him that his friend Darsie is in great danger, and that he must persuade him to return to the city.

Darsie doesn’t leave Dumfriesshire though, and his peril becomes more perilous, to the point where he is knocked unconscious and kidnapped by Herries — which is to say, by the fanatical Jacobite aristocrat Hugh Redgauntlet, younger brother of Sir Henry Redgauntlet (who was executed after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion) who has been living under the ‘Herries’ pseudonym to avoid repercussions from the English for his fervid and continuing Jacobitism.

The epistolary form is dropped. For a while we get pages from Darsie’s journal: transported across the firth to England and locked up in a room in a farmhouse somewhere, guarded by Redgauntlet’s violent goon Cristal Nixon. Redgauntlet won’t explain to what end he has seized young Darsie, or what is going on. There’s quite a nice scene where the blind fiddler, Willie Steenson, comes by the farm and communicates with Darsie entirely by means of playing scraps of Scottish folk music, such that, by recalling the lyrics, each can talk to the other without the guards understanding what they are saying. This, however, comes to nothing — it seems to set up a jail-break, but Scott takes the story in a different direction. Redgauntlet orders Darsie to be dressed as a woman, to wear an iron mask with a silk outer-part to disguise him, and to ride alongside Greenmantle, guarded always by the ever-watchful Cristal Nixon, as they journey towards some mysterous but important rendezvous.

The cross-dressing aspect of this is interesting (again: I’ll come back to it) but we’re two thirds of the way through the novel now and the reader is growing impatient not only that nobody ever explains anything to anybody in this novel, but more to the point that there is no reason for this reticence. Redgauntlet is going to have to explain everything soon enough; there’s no merit in delaying, except to draw out the mystery and tension for Scott’s readership.

Meanwhile Alan Fairford hurries south to rescue his friend. He does some detective work, discovers that Herries (whom he knows from Darsie’s letters) is actually Redgauntlet, and crosses to England on a smuggler’s ship — there’s quite a lot of nicely done stuff in this part of the novel, actually, about the secret storehouses and unlicensed craft occasioned by the illicit trade between England and Scotland.

Then a clumsy piece of plotwork by Scott: intrepid young Alan is revealed, abruptly, to have a super-delicate constitution, and the sea-passage leaves him dangerously ill. The smuggler-captain carries him to a remote domicile called Fairladies’ House where the Arthuret sisters, elderly Catholic spinsters known for doing good works, have no choice but to take him in and nurse him back to health. To be precise, at first they try to turn him away, but the extremity of Alan’s condition overcomes their scruples. What is wrong with Alan? It’s not explained. More than seasickness, presumably; but once he has been nursed back to health, in a couple of days, the novel has nothing more to say about his bizarrely fragile constitution. The truth is: the Arthuret sisters have an eminent Catholic priest, Father Buonaventure, staying with them who, if discovered by the English authorities, would liable for execution — they would not, under normal circumstances, allow a stranger into the house for fear of exposing the eminent Father, and so Alan must be hurried to the brink of death by Scott so that he can be admitted.

His health quickly restored, Alan converses with Father Buonaventure, and is simultaneously irked and impressed by the fellow’s de haut en bas aristocratic manner. The priest agrees to direct Alan to Redgauntlet, and so to Darsie, on condition that he not betray that he’s in the country. Their interview is interrupted by a beautiful young woman — not Greenmantle, this, but Clementina Walkinshaw, a historical personage. Buonaventure directs Alan to a certain inn on the coast, much used by smugglers, where he will find Redgauntlet and Darsie Latimer.

The novel finally arrives at its big denouement. Every single character, pretty much without exception (even including the law-mad old fool Peter Peebles, for some reason) converges on Crackenthorpe’s Inn. Bearing in mind that Redgauntlet, requiring discretion, had chosen this pub as his meeting place because it is so out-of-the-way and little-frequented, this bends credulity out of whack, somewhat. Anyway they all rock up at Crackenthorpe’s, all the novel’s mysteries are unveiled, there’s a bit of action, one massive anti-climax, and the novel is over.

Anti-climax, do I say? So: we discover that Redgauntlet has dedicated his life to marshalling Jacobite forces for a third go at seizing the country and placing Bonnie Prince Charlie — by this stage, a middle-aged man , and no longer so bonnie — on the throne. The first Jacobite rising of 1715, which had been about restoring James II, had failed; the second Jacobite rising of 1745, the Bonnie Prince Charlie one, had enjoyed a little more success — the Jacobite army got as far south as Derby before turning back and being ultimately defeated. There never was a third Jacobite rising, so in a manner of speaking Scott is indulging in alt-history here, although then again, since no actual rebellion is staged, he isn’t, really. But this is the state of play: Father Buonaventure is one of Scott’s kings-in-disguise, Charles Stuart himself, come at Redgauntlet’s suggestion to Britain and promised that an army of Scots, Welsh and Irish soldiers is ready to be assembled to seize the throne on his behalf.

How does Darsie Latimer fit into this? The secret of his past is that he is the son of the dead Jacobite leader Sir Henry Redgauntlet, and therefore the heir to the title. Redgauntlet is his uncle, and ‘Greenmantle’ is Lilias Redgauntlet, Darsie’s sister — which gives a rather incestuous, Luke-and-Leia-Skywalker-snogging vibe to the earlier intimations of romance between them. For reasons that are not fully unpacked in the novel, it is vital to the Jacobite undertaking that young Darsie publicly claim his inheritance as Sir Arthur Redgauntlet (his real name) and pledge allegiance to Charles Stuart. Darsie, having been raised a Protestant in Edinburgh, is not prepared to do this. How his Protestant upbringing happened, and how he got separated from his sister is explained: Darsie’s mother ‘both feared and hated’ her brother-in-law Redgauntlet and ran away with both children. He managed to snatch one but not both back. Lilias has the story:

While you and I, children at that time of two or three years old, were playing together in a walled orchard, adjacent to our mother’s residence which she had fixed somewhere in Devonshire, my uncle suddenly scaled the wall with several men, and I was snatched up; and carried off to a boat which waited for them. My mother, however, flew to your rescue, and as she seized on and held you fast, my uncle could not, as he has since told me, possess himself of your person, without using unmanly violence to his brother’s widow. Of this he was incapable; and, as people began to assemble upon my mother’s screaming, he withdrew. [ch 17]

Darsie’s mother dying soon afterwards, he was raised by the lawyer Alexander Fairford. Why Redgauntlet stopped at this one kidnapping attempt, why nobody brought legal action against him for seizing and raising the girl, how he was able to live in Dumfriesshire for decades plotting a renewed Jacobite rebellion — none of this is explained. Nor does Scott lower himself so far as to how, exactly, Redgauntlet planned co-ordinating getting Darsie to the meeting point with Charles Stuart — it was, we might think, lucky for him that Darsie decided to take a fishing holiday at that exact time and in that exact spot, although it is very puzzling that, having him sheltering in his own house on the night of the storm, Redgauntlet didn’t just grab him then and there. He didn’t though, and had to stage a later riotous assembly in which a mob of angry fishermen attacked the Quaker, Geddes’, fishing nets in order to grab him.

Then again: since the whole uprising depends upon ‘Sir Arthur Redgauntlet’ declaring publicly for Charles Stuart and so rallying support to the cause, it’s more than puzzling, it’s actively bonkers, that Redgauntlet keeps Darsie so completely in the dark. You’d think he would take every opportunity to persuade him to accept the role he has planned, rather than springing it on him at the last available minute and hoping for the best.

But here we are. Redgauntlet has invited all the surviving senior Jacobites to Crackenthorpe’s Inn. They are all ready, it seems, to muster their various forces and assemble the army, awaiting only the word from their sovereign, Charles Stuart. But on meeting him they change their minds. Why? Because Charles has brought his mistress with him, Clementina Walkinshaw — the aforementioned woman Alan briefly saw at Fairladies’ house — and none of the senior Jacobites trust her (her sister occupies a position in the Hanoverian court, and they think Clementina is a spy). ‘Send her away, majesty, and we’ll assemble the army and put you on the throne,’ they say. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do, I’m sodding king, me,’ Charles retorts, or words to that effect. And, just like that, the whole rebellion is off.

In the event, the gathering proves a busted flush anyway: the nefarious Cristol Nixon has betrayed his master and summoned the redcoats. General Colin Campbell arrives and, by the King’s order, permits Charles Stuart to sail back, unmolested, to the Continent, providing the other Jacobites all disperse. And so it’s all over. In a hurried postscript Scott tells us that Alan marries ‘Greenmantle’ Lilias, that Darsie takes up his family name and estate, and that his uncle Redgauntlet ends his days as Prior of ‘the Scottish Monastery of Ratisbon’ where he acquired such a reputation for piety that there was a move to sanctify him after his death. This is denied him because the Vatican’s ‘devil’s advocate’ is able to show that he wore, beneath his habit, a ‘small silver box’ containing a lock of his brother’s hair — which, it seems, disqualifies him from sainthood.

2. The Jacobites

I thoroughly enjoyed Redgauntlet, although not so much for its ostensible plot, which struck me as clumsily paid-out. My view is not the consensus, in terms of criticism, I must say. David Daiches, for example, finds the final scene ‘brilliantly done’, indeed ‘one of the finest scenes in Scott’, praising this ‘picture of the slow disintegration of the meeting, of the embarrassment of the Jacobites when faced with the problem of reconciling their fierce protestations of loyalty to the House of Stuart with the realities of their present situation’ [David Daiches, ‘Scott’s Redgauntlet’, in Robert Charles Rathburn and Martin Steinmann (eds) From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad (University of Minnesota Press, 1967), 52].

This really isn’t how it struck me. It is, I suppose I must concede, testament to Scott’s success at building tension that the ending fell so flat for me: I was expecting something tremendous to pay-off so much expertly built-up mystery, and I simply don’t think the novel delivers that. Nor does the third Jacobite rebellion fail because its romantic world disintegrates on contact with the ‘reality’ of Hanoverian England. On the contrary, it seems an army is indeed ready and waiting to be called upon, and that Charles Stuart could indeed topple the throne, if only he hadn’t been so stiff-necked and had agreed to his generals’ demands to send his mistress away.

In other words this scene, implausible though it strikes me, touches on a different point: the fundamental untrustworthiness of woman. That in turn speaks to the main vector of desire the novel construes: men and their intense, passionate attachment to a man (Charles Stuart) — and two particular men, Darsie and Alan, and their intense, passionate attachment to one another.

To take the Jacobite angle first. Nowadays we tend, perhaps, to think of Jacobitism as a dead-end, a curio, a kind of political dodo. But Scott, growing up in the aftermath of the 45, knew better. The Jacobite cause was extremely and enduringly popular in Scotland, but also in England. As Rosalind Mitchison notes, ‘many Scottish and English people, of all ranks, thought that the claim of the main Stuart line to the throne was valid, and certainly better than that of Hanover.’ This view was widely held among ‘ordinary people, mostly shopkeepers and craftsmen, but also of the more articulate and better-recorded landed class. Jacobite families intermarried and led their social life with others of the same opinion. Low-level Jacobitism had links with the criminal world, particularly with smuggling.’

This is the world of Redgauntlet, and the final melting away of the expertly built-up tension undersells it, I think. In staging the moment when the Romantic and the Realist worlds collide, and having the former simply dissipate, Scott unbalances what is, in his other novels, a more effectively balanced and dramatically satisfying dialectic.

Neal Ascherson wonders what the clan chiefs and other Jacobite leaders thought they were getting into in the ’45. ‘They must have known how poor their chances of success were,’ he argues. ‘The chiefs must have understood what could happen to all their followers and their families if they ordered their men out to fight. They must also have wondered what they themselves would gain, even if this reckless enterprise succeeded.’ Ascherson thinks ‘the Jacobite promise must now seem delusional, even dishonest’. But, surely, this isn’t right. Of course, different Jacobites likely had different motivations, depending on what they believed they stood to gain in the event of Stuart victory, or indeed what they had to lose — for many of them, very little — by hitching their destinies to this cause. But there’s something else, something that was surely an overriding consideration for many Jacobites, one that Ascherson overlooks here: the divine right of kings, the belief that the monarch was anointed by God — these were not, for many people in the eighteenth-century, mere forms of words. These were deeply held beliefs for many. And that’s crucial, surely. If you believed, truly and genuinely, that James Stuart, and after him Charles Stuart, were chosen by God to be king, then joining the Jacobite banner was aligning yourself with God’s cause. Seemingly miraculous victories — as at Prestonpans and Falkirk in 1745 — were signs of God’s grace. [This is basically the argument of Paul Monod’s Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (1989)]. Eucatastrophe, as I have elsewhere argued, is thought by many to be the shape of the divine cosmos.

Before his strikingly non-eucatastrophic denouement, Scott convincingly portrays a world in which Hanoverian and Jacobite cohabit pretty well, in terms of day-to-day existence, under the notional authority of the former. Nanty Ewart, the likeable if alcoholic young captain of the smuggling rig the Jumping Jenny — a young man with a tragic past — was raised Presbyterian and retains a reflex anti-Catholicism. But his day-to-day involves many dealings with Jacobites, amongst whom are his colleagues and friends, and it is he who kills the traitor Cristol Nixon for betraying Charles Stuart to the redcoats.

Another example: Fairford’s first inquiry, when he comes looking for Darsie, is of Provost Crosbie, the chief magistrate of Dumfries, whose position requires him to uphold the Hanoverian dynasty and Protestantism: King, Church and State. With great sensitivity and deftness Scott shows how the actual business of running Dumfries requires a series of compromises and elisions, such that Whig and Jacobite citizens can rub along together. Crosbie’s own wife is a Jacobite, and a distant relative of Redgauntlet himself (Scott tells us that ‘the provost was certainly proud of his lady, nay, some said he was afraid of her … and the provost’s enemies at the council-table of the burgh used to observe that he uttered there many a bold harangue against the Pretender, and in favour of King George and government, of which he dared not have pronounced a syllable in his own bedchamber’ [ch 11]). Crosbie is a comic character, but he’s also manifestly a good provost, and his live-and-let-live manner of governance means that his community is flourishing.

I hesitate to use the word, since it is a piece of critical terminology over- (and often mis-) used by my students, but this is a novel very much concerned with liminality. It’s about the actual border between Scotland and England, where Darsie lingers, and the affiliative borders of Jacobite-Toryism and Hanoverian-Whiggism. It’s also about the literal border in national, or political, terms, and also about the border in trade terms (Scott is cross about trade tariffs between England and Scotland, and says so in his footnotes: ‘I am sorry to say that neighbourhood of two nations having different laws, though united in government, still leads to a multitude of transgressions on the Border, and extreme difficulty in apprehending delinquents’) and the smuggling world it creates — the border between lawful and unlawful, and the shadowspace between those two terms in which much of the novel is set. At the beginning of this piece I described Redgauntlet as a story about two things trying to come together that can’t, quite, manage to come together, and the liminality I’m discussing here is the articulation of that — although it also has a pragmatic side. If Provost Crosbie tried to force his citizenry into zealous and public acknowledgement of King George he would doubtless have a rebellion on his hands; if he himself embraced Charles Stuart he would lose his official position. So he works a compromise, and that compromise works: it keeps the peace, it enables everybody to get on with their lives. When General Colin Campbell walks into the Jacobite assembly at the end, unarmed, he is delivering the higher-up version of that same compromise, saying, in effect: ‘I’m here with my army and if you choose we can have a war, but it would be better all round for you simply to go home.’

A story about two things trying to come together that can’t manage to come together could be styled as tragedy, but that’s not what Scott does here. Rather he is — both in terms of content and form — figuring disconnection, or not-quite-connection, not only as just the way things are, the logic of the world, but as perfectly liveable, actually — as fine, as OK, even as good. It’s the opposite and the preferable option to a scorched-earth Year Zero absolutism.

The core disconnection in the novel, of course, is that between representation and reality. In saying this I’m not essaying a vaguely once-modish deconstructivist point about the differential-deferral of sign and signifier (not that I’m hostile to such lit-theoretical discourse, you understand). I mean something more direct: Waverley was ‘about’ the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and Rob Roy was ‘about’ the 1715 Jacobite rebellion — but there was no 1765 Jacobite rebellion for Redgauntlet to be ‘about’. Some of the details of the novel are repurposed from an secret trip by Charles Stuart to England in 1750 (although the actual trip was to London, not to the coast near Carlisle, and was not with the aim of leading a military uprising) to 1765, other details are simply invented. In this alt-historical move Scott opens a gap between the text and the world that ‘historical accuracy’, however we define it, cannot close. It’s a bold move, in many ways, and a first for Scott — a first in fact for literature as such, given that the text usually identified as the initiator of the ‘alternative history’ mode was not published until 1836 (with Louis Geoffroy’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde 1812–1832).

It all has to do, it seems to me, with judgment in a particular sense of the word. Scott’s attachment — we could call it an attachment of the heart rather than the head — to Jacobitism was more than mere ‘romantic’ affectation, I think. It spoke to something more profound: an inability entirely to let-go, however much he knew times had changed and new social and political logics were necessary, of the connection to the divine implicit in the notion that kings are God’s anointed. ‘Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise,’ Chesterton noted, ‘but all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.’ The further I read and re-read into Scott, the more I think this is the most brilliant critical insight into his fiction I have ever come across.

It is, in other words, about God, in the sense that Scott believes it is in this that the inherent dignity and worth of man (and woman) inheres. And so it is about authority, and also about love. The dynamic, or dialectic of Scott’s fiction — all the Waverley novels, not just Redgauntlet — that positions a movement from the romantic past to the bourgeois present and future, from Charles Stuart to George III, from the ethos of the Highlander warrior to the ethos of the Lowland bourgeois lawyer or tradesperson: this all anticipates what was to make the whole world shudder as Darwin broke the sense that the whole world, not just Kings, had to be evacuated of divine purpose. We’re still living in the aftermath of that collision.

Adam Phillips, counter-intuitively, describes a Darwinian naturalist as ‘someone who has to find out about God’ — that is, someone who has to find out

what believing in God does for us, such that when you take it away the whole experience of believing changes (just as you can only get a picture of a problem by noticing all the things that don’t seem to solve it). If God, Darwin intimates, is no longer the object of our love — our wonder, our admiration and devotion — then our sense of what love is, or might be, changes. To love God, for instance, is to love someone (so to speak) who is in a position to judge us, who holds the keys to the kingdom of morality … so Darwin invites us to imagine, among other things, what it would be like to love without being judged in return; to suffer without assuming that our suffering always has moral validity. [Phillips, Darwin’s Worms (Faber 1999), 25]

There’s a reason why the disguise Scott has Charles Stuart wear is that of a priest.

The encounter at the end of novel is between Charles Stuart himself, whose authority has proved inadequate to commanding his supporters to muster their armies for him, and the representative of King George III, General Colin Campbell — the vicar, we could say, of royal authority. This encounter demonstrates where actual political authority lies. But authority, and judgment, is more than a merely political matter in this novel. In its own small way, a way I’ve suggested is anti-climactic, Charles loses a kingdom for love: like Anthony sacrificing his ambitions to his love for Cleopatra, he won’t give-up his beautiful mistress in order to gain political power.

‘Woman’, in other words, figures the gap between royalist dream and Whig reality. Which will be say, woman is the thing that prevents the ‘two things’ that, in this novel, are trying and failing to come together.

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3. Lads

This brings me back to my earlier ‘Darsie and Alan as gay couple’ reading. That there is a homosocial, though not (of course) explicitly homosexual, dynamic to the novel seems to me hard to deny. ‘Homosocial’ is from Sedgwick’s celebrated Between Men: although Sedgwick is more interested in the way repressed male-male desire can surface as a struggle between two men for the same woman, where the woman is actually a kind of cipher for the two men’s mutual affect, shifted into hostility or rivalry — think of David Copperfield and Steerforth both competing for Little Em’ly (whom Steerforth goes on to seduce and ruin), or David competing with Uriah Heep for Agnes (whom David goes on to marry). There are quite a few examples in Dickens, actually: Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone fighting over Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend; Edwin Drood and Jasper’s murderous conflict over Rosa Budd in Edwin Drood. In Redgauntlet, Darsie and Alan don’t fight, but they do mediate their mutual desire through ‘Greenmantle’, with Scott removing the basis for actual conflict between the two men by revealing that Lilias is actually Darsie’s sister.

It’s remarkable how much tenderness and affection runs through the letters they exchange: from Alan (‘dearest Darsie … think of all this, my dearest Darsie … I have a tear in my eye and a smile on my cheek: dearest Darsie, sure never a being but yourself could be so generous …’) and from Darsie (‘and now, my dearest Alan, you are in full possession of my secret’). Alan describes Darsie, to his father, as ‘the person who, next to yourself, is dearest to me in this world’. Imprisoned by Redgauntlet, Darsie scribbles an account of his experiences, specfically for Alan: ‘My Dearest Alan, Feeling as warmly towards you in doubt and in distress, as I ever did in the brightest days of our intimacy, it is to you whom I address this history’.

Critics often note the parallels between Redgauntlet and Pamela. As Kathryn Sutherland says, Scott’s critical biography of Richardson appeared in 1824 ‘in the spring of the same year Redgauntlet began to take shape’

The two novels have much in common. Like much of Redgauntlet, Pamela is a narrative in letters and journal-form, the heroine’s story in her own words. Pamela is confined at the mercy of a man whose lawless behaviour is apparently sanctioned by the law … in comparable dilemmas, both hero and heroine write in an attempt to master those experiences which threaten to master them and annihilate personal autonomy. [This is from Sutherland’s introduction to the OUP edition of Redgauntlet, 1985]

This is quite right — and as Sutherland argues, Scott’s abandonment of the letter form of Pamela a third of the way into the novel is, inter alia, a recognition that epistolary fiction no longer ‘works’ in the 19th-century in the way it did for Richardson and his audience. But it’s also an acknowledgement, in the text, that the purpose of letters — to connect people, to communicate between two individuals — cannot be encompassed by the world. What Sutherland doesn’t note, in terms of the parallels between these two novels, is that Pamela is a novel of sexual desire and sexual frustration, and so, I would argue, is Redgauntlet.

Reading the novel this time, I found myself struck by the way what is, we can be honest, quite a ragged narrative string of plot-events, and a famously shonky hodgepodge of letters, third-person narration, journals and other bits and pieces— by the way that mess is threaded with a carefully balanced set of thematic pairs. So Herries of Birrenswork is ‘Redgauntlet’, a family name (his ancestor, a medieval knight called Fitz-Aldin, ‘from the great slaughter which he had made of the Southron, and the reluctance which he had shown to admit them to quarter during the former war of that bloody period’ acquired ‘the name of Redgauntlet’). This name connotes an assertive, sometimes aggressive and belligerent male. The novel’s chief female interest Lilias goes by the name ‘Greenmantle’, on account of the green cloak she wears. Red and green are opposite sides of the colour-wheel of course, and carry differing semiologies: red as in blood and fire, and a gauntlet the metal glove of a man’s strong hand (‘Redgauntlet was ay for the strong hand’ says Wandering Willie, the blind fiddler [letter 9]) — green as in mild fertility and viriditas, the soft, sustaining garment, the female principle. I’m not, you understand, endorsing these rather antiquated gender definitions; I’m simply pointing out their symbolic structural role in the narrative Scott constructs.

What does the red glove mean? In a striking, near-hallucinogenic scene, Lilias recalls being smuggled into the Coronation of George III by her uncle, Redgauntlet, where she is instructed to replace the gage, or glove, that is part of the coronation feast, with Redgauntlet’s own. The idea is that this will, in some sense, officially challenge the new king’s legitimacy, and perhaps lead to a duel. It doesn’t, of course, but the passage in which Scott describes it is fascinating:

A few dark and narrow passages at length conveyed us into an immense Gothic hall, the magnificence of which baffles my powers of description.

It was illuminated by ten thousand wax lights, whose splendour at first dazzled my eyes, coming as we did from these dark and secret avenues. But when my sight began to become steady, how shall I describe what I beheld? Beneath were huge ranges of tables, occupied by princes and nobles in their robes of state — high officers of the crown, wearing their dresses and badges of authority — reverend prelates and judges, the sages of the church and law, in their more sombre, yet not less awful robes — with others whose antique and striking costume announced their importance, though I could not even guess who they might be. But at length the truth burst on me at once — it was, and the murmurs around confirmed it, the Coronation Feast. At a table above the rest, and extending across the upper end of the hall, sat enthroned the youthful sovereign himself, surrounded by the princes of the blood, and other dignitaries, and receiving the suit and homage of his subjects. Heralds and pursuivants, blazing in their fantastic yet splendid armorial habits, and pages of honour, gorgeously arrayed in the garb of other days, waited upon the princely banqueters. In the galleries with which this spacious hall was surrounded, shone all, and more than all, that my poor imagination could conceive, of what was brilliant in riches, or captivating in beauty. Countless rows of ladies, whose diamonds, jewels, and splendid attire were their least powerful charms, looked down from their lofty seats on the rich scene beneath, themselves forming a show as dazzling and as beautiful as that of which they were spectators. [ch 18]

Redgauntlet instructs his niece to take his glove (‘here, hold this in your hand — throw the train of your dress over it’) and dark forward as the trumpeters sound a flourish

“Rush in at the third sounding,” said my uncle to me; “bring me the parader’s gage, and leave mine in lieu of it.”

I could not see how this was to be done, as we were surrounded by people on all sides. But, at the third sounding of the trumpets, a lane opened as if by word of command, betwixt me and the champion, and my uncle’s voice said, “Now, Lilias, now!”

With a swift and yet steady step, and with a presence of mind for which I have never since been able to account, I discharged the perilous commission. I was hardly seen, I believe, as I exchanged the pledges of battle, and in an instant retired. “Nobly done, my girl!” said my uncle, at whose side I found myself, shrouded as I was before, by the interposition of the bystanders. “Cover our retreat, gentlemen,” he whispered to those around him.

Room was made for us to approach the wall, which seemed to open, and we were again involved in the dark passages through which we had formerly passed. In a small anteroom, my uncle stopped, and hastily muffling me in a mantle which was lying there, we passed the guards — threaded the labyrinth of empty streets and courts, and reached our retired lodgings without attracting the least attention. [ch. 18]

It makes no difference, of course; but it stages a symbolic drama: emerging out of these dark, womb-spaces into a blaze of light and glory only to return immediately into it — like that bird flying through the feast in Beowulf (another ‘glove’ story, of course!) — it suggests the larger resonances of Scott’s novel. It’s about life and its transience, about the passing of something noble and wonderful and touched by God, into the inevitable blankness of ordinary day. There is, we could say, a brief moment of intensity, of adventure, of proximity, when the impossible love (between two men) becomes, fleetingly, possible: when one is dressed as a woman as part of that adventure, when the whole romantic, exciting dream trembles on the lip of becoming actuality: when, we could say, the hard ‘glove’ can wrap itself in the embracing ‘mantle’. It doesn’t last; reality means we must live out our pleasant-enough bourgeois compromises with the way the world actually is. But for a moment it’s exciting. Redgauntlet: it’s almost a (scarlet) glove story. It’s almost a love story.