Walter Scott, “The Betrothed” (1825)

[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), St Ronan’s Well (1823) and Redgauntlet (1824). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

The Betrothed is a novel about adultery, and therefore about fidelity, monogamy and faith, but what’s interesting — and I should say straight off, in many ways this is not a good novel — is the way Scott frames adultery neither as deplorable faithlessness nor as exciting transgressive desire, but as a state of extrapolated nonconsummation. The way he figures desire in terms of postponement and deferral.

The basic dynamic of this novel is: a beautiful young woman is quote-unquote ‘married’ to an older man she does not fancy, and falls for attractive young man she does fancy. That’s the triangle around which the novel is constructed. It’s a tale as old as time, of course, and there are plenty of other versions of it, in culture, and in life. A book like (say) Lady Chatterley’s Lover derives intensities of desire out of precisely such a situation. For a writer like Lawrence desire and sexual satisfaction are intensified by the obstacles placed in their way. It’s not that Lawrence couldn’t have written a novel in which Mellors has sex with a willing, unattached young woman of his own class; it’s that he considers it sexier if sex has to transgress class and marital status. It’s a very common belief I suppose: the one that says forbidden desire is more intense and thrilling than the licensed kind. And it’s a short step from that to believing that desire as such is construed by what restricts or forbids it. I don’t know if that’s true, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I don’t know how far that’s true. But perhaps many people do think that way.

But The Betrothed does not tell that kind of love-triangle story. In this novel the beautiful young woman is somehow both married to and not married to the older man, and she somehow both wants and doesn’t want to consummate her attraction for the younger man. It is not, here, that desire is construed by the obstacles before it; rather it’s that desire itself always figures a kind of schrodinger’s cattish both-and-neither status, a polysemy that threatens to evade resolution entirely. It is almost as if Scott is saying: it is not practical difficulties or taboo but continuing irreconcilability that construes desire. As if he is saying that consummation entails not overcoming the obstacles the world puts in the way of desire, but in deferring consummation as such.

That seems to me a really interesting idea, especially for a writer like Scott whose praxis was a kind of continual productivity that endlessly performs a writing-towards-climax that therefore endlessly defers stopping, and so the very climax it purports to be heading towards. A kind of Tantric Textualising. Its just a bit of a shame that this particular novel is so poor.

The setting is 1275. Though The Betrothed is called one of Scott’s ‘Crusader’ novels, the crusades are all offstage here — Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, has called on both the native Britons and their Anglo-Norman settler overlords to put aside their differences and join the third Crusade. But the whole story happens in the Welsh marches. Sir Raymond Berenger, lord of the castle known as Garde Doloureuse, invites the Welsh king Gwenwyn to a feast, and in his cups promises that when they two next clash in battle (as the Welsh and the English are, of course, always doing) he’ll meet him fairly on the open field. This proves to be a bad idea.

Prince Gwenwyn asks for the hand in marriage of Sir Raymond’s beautiful daughter Eveline; but it’s no go, because Eveline has already been promised in marriage to an English bigwig nobleman, the elderly but still vigorous Sir Hugo de Lacy, Constable of Chester. The Welsh consider this refusal of Gwenwyn’s suit an insult and make war on the Garde Doloureuse. But here’s the thing: though the castle is secure, and Sir Raymond could easily sit out a Welsh siege until Sir Hugo de Lacy arrives with his army to relieve him, he considers himself bound to keep his word to the ragged-arse Welsh bandit (ragged-arse Welsh bandit is my phrase, not Scott’s, but that’s the gist) to meet him in open battle. Out rides Sir Raymond with his small force, leaving the castle under the command of a prosperous Flemish weaver called Wilkin Flammock, who has settled nearby and is making money like a good bourgeois. (Wilkin’s daughter, Rose Flammock, is Eveline’s waiting-maid). Wilkin cannot believe that Sir Raymond is prepared to throw away something so precious as his life just because he said he would to a drunken Welshman — this, he says, is not how things would be ordered in Flemland (Flemgard, Flemnce, whatever it’s called). But Sir Raymond is adamant: his word is his bond, his honour is at stake, yadda yadda. Out he rides and is immediately killed. The Welsh besiege the castle.

Things look bleak for Eveline. She goes to the castle chapel and has the first of the book’s two mystic visions: an icon of the Virgin Mary comes to life, reassures that she will be rescued and that she will marry her rescuer. Rescue arrives, although Scott keeps the ambiguity live — Old Sir Hugo leads his army, routs the Welsh (killing Prince Gwenwyn in the process) and saving the day — and his son, handsome and dashing young Damian de Lacy, leads the actual charge against the bandits. So you could say he is the one who rescues Eveline. This ambiguity becomes important later on.

Old Sir Hugo has declared himself for the Crusade and sworn not to go under a roof until he has fulfilled his vow, and so stays in a luxury tent just outside the entrance of Garde Doloreuse. He restates his desire to take Eveline as his bride, and she, seeing in this the fulfilment of the Virgin Mary’s words, accepts. They are formally betrothed. But there are several problems. The main one is that Sir Hugo, though a nobleman and brave warrior, is old and ugly, where his son Damian is young and handsome: in modern parlance, Eveline fancies the latter and doesn’t fancy the former. More practically, before they actually marry Sir Hugo has to go all the way to Jerusalem, kill loads of Saracens, recover the Holy City and get back home again. He can hardly do this in less than three years, which is a hell of a time to leave poor Eveline just hanging around — not least because her castle is manifestly vulnerable to attack by angry Welshmen, not to mention by the angry and rebellious English proles, many of whom are rumbling unhappily about the general state of things. Sir Hugo says he’ll try and get his crusade-vow rescinded.

The next phase of the story involves Sir Hugo and his bride-to-be (and their combined retinues) going on a journey — he to Gloucester to meet the Archbishop and beg, and indeed bribe, to be relieved of his vow to go a-crusading, she to visit a Saxon kinswoman of hers, the Lady of Baldringham. The first task goes badly: Sir Hugo is imperiously commanded to go on Crusade after all — remorseful that he has bound young Eveline to so protracted a betrothal, he tells her that if his return is one day later than the three years he has promised, then she can consider herself relieved of any obligation to marry him.

But Eveline has other things on her mind. Her visit to her kinswoman had not gone well. The Lady of Baldringham is a woman who remains true to her Saxon heritage and despises Eveline’s branch of the family for marrying-into and hobnobbing with the Anglo-French. When Eveline visits she compels her to sleep in a haunted bedroom. Why does she have to sleep in a haunted bedroom? Aren’t there any other bedrooms? Sure! There are loads of other bedrooms, but still that’s where she must sleep. Why? Because! Eveline tries to wriggle out of this (‘“I — I — have heard speak of that chamber, gracious aunt,” said Eveline, timidly, “and if it may consist with your good pleasure, I would not now choose to pass the night there. My health has suffered by my late perils and fatigues …”’) but there’s no help for it.

That night she is visited by the ancestral ghost of Vanda, once wife of Baldrick — this is the second of the novel’s two mystic visions. The backstory of this is: centuries before, tired of being married to Vanda, Baldrick formed a cunning plan: he sent soldiers to Baldringham to murder Vanda, telling them to return with the wedding ring as proof that he was released from the marriage. They throttled the poor woman and, since her hand was swollen by her death, were compelled to cut the ring finger off entire. Now ‘Vanda of the Bloody Finger’ appears to Eveline in the middle of the night. She makes the sign of the cross over her with the bloody stump of her missing finger, and utters this prophetic curse:

Widow’d wife and wedded maid
Betrothed, betrayer and betray’d

Eveline considers this a bad omen. Ruh-roh!

Still, off to Palestine Sir Hugo must go. He commands his son Damian to mount guard over his betrothee at Garde Doloreuse, which is agony for Damian because he lurves Eveline, and she him, and yet they both honour and respect Sir Hugo. They compromise: Damian never enters the castle, and Eveline never visits him in the military camp outside.

For some years everything is quiet, and Eveline is enormously bored. Then a flurry of late-novel action is rather bewilderingly dumped all at once into the story. First: Eveline is kidnapped by the dastardly Welsh and carried away. She is bunged in a cave (formerly used as a tomb for antique Welsh princes, and so full of mouldering bones) the entrance to which is blocked up with boulders. Damian, impetuously chasing after these Welsh ruffians without stopping first to put his armour on, is severely wounded. Rescued, Eveline insists that the injured Damian be carried inside the castle of the Garde Doloreuse to be nursed back to health.

Then, in a plot-knot that I wasn’t sure I quite followed, and which I might be misremembering, there’s a sudden uprising by the put-upon peasantry. A noble’s head is cut off (for seducing the miller’s daughter). King Henry sends an army to suppress the peasant revolt and, having relieved the peasant siege of Garde Doloreuse, demands admittance so he can arrest Damian de Lacy who for some reason, though which reason precisely I’ll admit it got past me rather in the reading, is believed to have been leading the peasant revolt (how though? he’s been languishing on his sickbed for weeks ). He’s also believed to have betrayed his uncle, in a sexual sense, with his uncle’s affianced bride. Eveline refuses to let the King’s men in, thereby confirming everyone’s worst suspicions and positioning her as a traitor. Oh no!

“Alas!” said [Eveline], “the vengeance of the fiend is about to be accomplished. Widow’d wife and wedded maid — these epithets have long been mine. Betrothed! — wo’s me! it is the key-stone of my destiny. Betrayer I am now denounced, though, thank God, I am clear from the guilt! It only follows that I should be betrayed, and the evil prophecy will be fulfilled to the very letter.” [ch 28]

Wo indeed. Sir Hugo has, at this point, been gone longer than the three years he stipulated, and many believe him dead. But though Eveline could, legally, terminate her betrothal and marry the man she loves, she considers that such an action would be dishonourable. Though everyone thinks she and Damian are shagging, in fact they’re not.

In fact Sir Hugo is not dead. He has, instead, returned to England disguised as a ‘palmer’ or pilgrim, accompanied by a Breton minstrel called Renault Vidal, his constant companion. His ship got wrecked on the Welsh coast, depositing him in the land of his mortal enemies — oh no! — but his minstrel, who happens to speak Welsh (lucky, that!) has guided him to safety and they now arrive at outskirts of Garde Doloreuse — hurrah! — but only to discover that Sir Hugo’s son and betrothed are lovers and traitors to the king and his castle is under siege with them inside it — oh no!

There’s an extra wrinkle: in addition to his handsome, dashing son Damian Sir Hugo has another son, a wastrel and scapegrace called Ranald. This character has, ‘by misrepresentation’, traduced his virtuous brother, persuaded the king his father is dead and obtained the grant of Eveline’s forfeited lands, dressing and calling himself ‘Constable’. It is he who finally captures the Garde Doloreuse for the king, sending Eveline to a nunnery and loading his brother with chains in the castle’s deepest dungeon (oh no!). His father, not dead but so effectively disguised as a palmer than nobody recognizes him, arrives at the Garde Doloreuse just at the moment this new ‘Constable of Garde Doloreuse’, dressed in the garb which his father used to wear, is handing out a royal charter of immunities to the community of Flemish settlers, led by Wilkin Flammock.

Twist! The Breton bard who has been with Sir Hugo all the way to the Holy Land, and back, suddenly mistakes Ranald for his father, because he’s dressed like his dad, and so jumps on Ranald to stab him in the spine, killing him instantly.

What?

There’s something very interesting, in a mad way, about this development, so I’ll come back to it. But first: the rest of the story. I quote that eminent scholarly resource, Wikipedia:

Sir Hugo now makes himself known, and is welcomed by the king, the assassin is executed, and, convinced that his betrothed’s love has been given to Damian, the old Crusader resigns her to him, and consoles himself by taking part in the subjugation of Ireland.

That’s all folks! Scott’s version of this denouement takes a few more words to tell than this, but not all that many more actually. Very abruptness, much abrupt.

One thing that does happen is that the ghost of ‘Vanda of the Bloody Finger’ appears one last time to revise her former prophecy:

It was, she thought, the Britoness Vanda; but her countenance was no longer resentful — her long yellow hair flew not loose on her shoulders, but was mysteriously braided with oak and mistletoe; above all, her right hand was gracefully disposed of under her mantle; and it was an unmutilated, unspotted, and beautifully formed hand which crossed the brow of Eveline. Yet, under these assurances of favour, a thrill of fear passed over her as the vision seemed to repeat, or chant,

“Widow’d wife and wedded maid,
Betrothed, betrayer, and betray’d,
All is done that has been said;
Vanda’s wrong has been y-wroken —
Take her pardon by this token.”

She bent down, as if to kiss Eveline. [ch 32]

This ‘excuuuse me, I hadn’t finished speaking actually’ mode of prophetic reveal seems a bit lame, frankly, but I’ll forgive Scott that, if only for the splendid use of ‘y-wroken’, there. A word I shall try to work into my conversation going forward.

So, yes. It’s not a very good novel, The Betrothed. It’s not even (you grasp the distinction I’m making) a very good Scott novel: oddly structured and ineptly paced, a brisk start that gives way to a series of momentumless piddlings, capped off with a rushed and incoherent series of sallies, perils, adventures, battles, sieges, popular rebellions, plot-twists and rapid plotknot-tyings-up. The historical flavour is thin, there aren’t any of those pungent or memorable characters that 19th-century readers of Scott so liked in his writing, and the supernatural stuff just doesn’t land, somehow.

This may simply reflect the logic of the novel’s premise — the heroine must spend the bulk of the story in a betwixt-and-between state, neither single nor married, and the whole is therefore defined by an enforced passivity — although I wonder if the problem isn’t the radical passivity of the storyline here so much as the fact that Scott didn’t trust himself actually to write passivity wholeheartedly, or perhaps didn’t trust his readers to follow him down that path, so that instead of committing to his concept he keeps forcing-in extraneous moments of activity, battles and pursuits and locking the heroine up in a cave-tomb full of mouldering bones and so on. Absent those elements, this would have been, I think, a rather more interesting study of a situation where (to appropriate Arnold) there is everything to be endured and nothing to be done, a world defined by waiting-around, a world without agency. A woman’s world, in other words. Passivity and passion, after all, are versions of the same word (Christ’s passion is not a strong emotion, though some people today perhaps believe it is; it is, on the contrary, Christ’s freely-chosen passivity — he’s God, he has all the agency in the world — indeed, in one sense he is agency; nobody could force God onto the cross, it was a path he accepted, to allow himself passively to die). But this is not the novel Scott has written, and though there is something articulate here about female trauma (Chad T. May argues that the scene with Vanda of the Red finger signals ‘the trauma of history … Eveline’s vision comes with the assurance that her marriage will repeat the violence of Vanda’s own’ [Chad T. May, ‘“The Horrors of My Tale”: Trauma, the Historical Imagination, and Sir Walter Scott’, Pacific Coast Philology, 40:1 (2005), 101]) the melodramatic posturing with which it is framed tangles unproductively with the more, I think, interesting poetics of passivity and passion.

It was not a book that came easily to its author. The apparatus of the scholarly ‘Edinburgh Edition’ [Walter Scott, The Betrothed, ed. J. B. Ellis with J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Edinburgh, 2009), 279–92] gives some sense of just how tangled the writing of this, relatively short, Waverley novel was.

This is the story. In April 1824, during the final few months of writing Redgauntlet, Scott started planning his next project: a four-volume set of two shorter (though still long-ish: The Betrothed is nearly 500-pages) novels broadly about the Crusades. He started The Betrothed in June 1824, but he did not make good progress — in letters he complained that visitors to his home at Abbotsford kept interrupting him — and by October 1824, with uncharacteristic slowness, he had only got halfway through the first of the two novels. Nor did his publisher, James Ballantyne, think very highly of what he had written. So he ditched it and began instead working on the other Crusader novel, The Talisman. This seems to have gone better, because by the 17th December it was agreed between Scott and Ballantine that The Betrothed would be given up — a strange decision in some respects, since the first of its two volumes had been proofed and printed, and a big stack of its sheets were sitting in the publisher’s offices waiting for the rest so as to be bound into volumes. Then in February 1825, for whatever reason, the decision to abandon The Betrothed was itself abandoned, and Scott resumed writing the story. It was finished by March, though Scott wasn’t happy with the ending — rightly I’d say (nobody is happy with the ending of this one). He tinkered with it without really fixing it, eventually sending the finished book off at the beginning of June.

Form meets function, I suppose: a book about powerlessly waiting around, about existing in a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other state, was created in uncertain fits and starts. It was received by contemporaries respectfully enough, although its reputation dipped sharply in the mid-20th-century. In 1954 Hesketh Pearson wrote: ‘The Betrothed was clearly composed in a somnolent if not stertorous condition and would score high marks in a competition to decide which was the dreariest and stupidest book ever produced by a writer of genius’ [Pearson, Walter Scott: His Life and Personality, p.54]). Harsh, dude!

Too harsh, in fact. There is something interesting in this novel. In trying to pin down what, I’m going to come back to the plot-twist near the end.

So: in the very first chapter of the novel, the Welsh prince Gwenwyn receives the communication that his proposal of marriage has been rejected. His loyal bard Cadwallon extemporises a furious song (‘Cadwallon, not the Prince, seemed to become the central point of the assembly, on whom all eyes were bent … “We wed not with the stranger,” — thus burst the song from the lips of the poet. “We wed not with the enslaved Saxon — the free and princely stag seeks not for his bride the heifer whose neck the yoke hath worn!”). Cadwallon urges his beloved leader to war:

“Men of Mathravel and Powys, be the dreaded flood of winter — Gwenwyn, son of Cyverliock! — may thy plume be the topmost of its waves!” All thoughts of peace, thoughts which, in themselves, were foreign to the hearts of the warlike British, passed before the song of Cadwallon like dust before the whirlwind, and the unanimous shout of the assembly declared for instant war. [1]

So Gwenwyn leads his men to war, kills Sir Raymond and is then himself killed by Sir Hugo. Fast-forward to the end of the novel: we learn that Sir Hugo’s trusty companion, the Breton troubadour who speaks English with a French accent and goes by the French name ‘Renault Vidal’, is actually Cadwallon. He had disguised himself as a Breton troubadour in order to get close to Sir Hugo so as to kill him and avenge his dead Welsh prince.

Well alright… but, what? Vidal/Cadwallon has been right by Sir Hugo’s side for three years. He could have killed him at any time! When their returning ship was wrecked on the Welsh coast, all Vidal/Cadwallon had to do was reveal Sir Hugo’s true identity to the locals and so doom him. Instead he disguised him as a humble Palmer and used his Welsh knowledge to lead him out of that dangerous land. Then, having finally arrived back at the Garde Doloreuse, Vidal/Cadwallon sees a completely different person — scapegrace young Randal — dressed in the Constable’s coat, mistakes him for his father and kills him. What?

At this moment, Vidal threw himself, with singular agility, over the heads of the Flemings who guarded the circle; and, ere an eye could twinkle, his right knee was on the croupe of the Constable’s horse — the grasp of his left hand on the collar of De Lacy’s buff-coat; then, clinging to its prey like a tiger after its leap, he drew, in the same instant of time, a short, sharp dagger — and buried it in the back of the neck, just where the spine, which was severed by the stroke, serves to convey to the trunk of the human body the mysterious influences of the brain. The blow was struck with the utmost accuracy of aim and strength of arm. The unhappy horseman dropped from his saddle, without groan or struggle, like a bull in the amphitheatre, under the steel of the tauridor. [ch 31]

That’s a vivid piece of writing and stands out in a novel in which there aren’t many such. But it also foregrounds the bizarre improbability of this turn of events. Locked in a cell, Vidal/Cadwallon is visited by the still-living De Lacy senior:

The Welshman’s eyes looked eagerly ghastly, as if flying from their sockets, while he exclaimed, in a tone of surprise, mingled with horror, “Do the dead come before monarchs? — Or, if thou art alive, whom have I slain? — I dreamed not, surely, of that bound, and of that home-blow? — yet my victim, stands before me! Have I not slain the Constable of Chester?”

“Thou hast indeed slain the Constable,” answered the King; “but know, Welshman, it was Randal de Lacy, on whom that charge was this morning conferred, by our belief of our loyal and faithful Hugh de Lacy’s having been lost upon his return from the Holy Land …”

The prisoner dropped his head on his bosom in evident despair. “I thought,” he murmured, “that he had changed his slough, and come forth so glorious, all too soon. May the eyes drop out that were cheated with those baubles, a plumed cap and a lacquered baton!”

Those eyes flying oedipally out of their sockets, not once but twice, are figuring something I’d say.

Now: Vidal has spent every day for three years in close proximity to Sir Hugo. How did he mistake this stripling for him? And more to the point, if he wanted to kill him why didn’t he do so long ago? Sir Hugo asks of him ‘wherefore he has for years forborne to take the life he aimed at, when it was in his power — nay, when it must have been lost but for his seemingly faithful service?’ Cadwallon’s answer is in two parts. He say that when he first became Sir Hugo’s servant he meant to kill him straightaway (“When I first took upon me thy service, it was well my purpose to have slain thee that night!”) but somehow didn’t get around to it, and that when Sir Hugo declared for the crusades, that meant he couldn’t.

“Indeed,” said De Lacy, “But why didst thou forego it [killing me], when following opportunities put it in thy power?”

“When the slayer of my sovereign became God’s soldier,” answered Cadwallon, “and served his cause in Palestine, he was safe from my earthly vengeance.”

King Henry, present during this interrogation, is unimpressed by this reasoning (‘“A wonderful forbearance on the part of a Welsh assassin!” said the King, scornfully’) and it’s hard not to agree with him. Something else is going on surely.

“But one other question,” said De Lacy, “Renault, or by whatever name thou art called. Ever since my return thou hast rendered me service inconsistent with thy stern resolution upon my life — thou didst aid me in my shipwreck — and didst guide me safely through Wales, where my name would have ensured my death; and all this after the crusade was accomplished?”

“Well then,” said the bard, “know the truth — I was too proud to permit either wave or Welshman to share in my revenge. Know also, what is perhaps Cadwallon’s weakness — use and habit had divided my feelings towards De Lacy, between aversion and admiration. I still contemplated my revenge, but as something which I might never complete, and which seemed rather an image in the clouds, than an object to which I must one day draw near. And when I beheld thee,” he said, turning to De Lacy, “this very day so determined, so sternly resolved, to bear thy impending fate like a man — that you seemed to me to resemble the last tower of a ruined palace, still holding its head to heaven, when its walls of splendour, and its bowers of delight, lay in desolation around — may I perish, I said to myself in secret, ere I perfect its ruin!”

This, surely, gets closer to the truth — of Vidal/Cadwallon’s improbably delayed revenge, but also of the novel as a whole. The Welsh bard is saying: I wanted to kill you and therefore didn’t want anyone else to kill you. Here the bard speaks to the exclusivity of desire, its possessiveness. But he is also saying ‘I didn’t want to kill you’; and these two things turn out to be versions of the same thing. We could say: Cadwallon has fallen in love with Sir Hugo. And moreover that the nature of this love is to approach its object of desire along an asymptote. It’s what Tennyson, fifteen years later, could articulate so brilliantly in ‘Ulysses’. That’s a poem that carries an implicit interlocuter who might say: you don’t love being in Ithaca, Ulysses? Well, pick somewhere else then. It’s common sense: choose a place you do love and go there instead. But no, says Tennyson’s Ulysses. He says: that’s not it. The place I do love is precisely the place that I can never, quite, reach. For Ulysses, as for us, the object of desire is that through which

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move

In the case of Cadwallon, the impossibilities of conventional consummation (between Welshman and Norman, between man and man) only veil the deeper truth: that this is how consummation as such works, threading between aversion and admiration, contemplated only as something which I might never complete. This, Scott’s novel is saying, is the shape of desire. This, it says, is love.

There’s quite a bit more I could say here, but this post has gone on long enough. It occurs to me (for instance) that this is one reason why the novel is set during the time of the crusades — fidelity is faithfulness, in marriage and in religion. Scott knows as we know that the crusades are doomed never to recover Jerusalem for Christianity, but he’s saying: that’s not important. It’s not the consummation, not the end-point, that matters. It’s the deferral.