Walter Scott, “Woodstock” (1826)
[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), Redgauntlet (1824), The Betrothed (1825) and The Talisman (1825). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]
Woodstock (1826) is Scott’s one and only English Civil War novel. It’s based on a local legend associated with the actual Woodstock — that is, Woodstock Palace, a country house near Woodstock village, itself eight miles or so northwest of Oxford. The palace itself is gone now. It was damaged in the Civil War, and in 1705 was gifted to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough as a reward for his generalship in the War of the Spanish Succession: he had it dismantled and rebuilt on a much larger scale as Blenheim Palace. Before that it had been a lodge owned and frequented by the royal family, although Scott invents the fictional royalist Sir Henry Lee and makes him owner — the full title of the book is Woodstock; or, the Cavalier. A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-One, and Sir Henry is the Cavalier in question. His home is seized by the Parliamentary army during the war and he is ejected from it whilst a group of roundhead officers move in to, as we would now say, asset-strip the place (they are ‘endeavouring to dilapidate and destroy the King’s palace at Woodstock’).
The legend on which Scott drew, and upon which he dilates in the introduction to the 1832 ‘Magnum Opus’ edition, is that these Parliamentary commissioners were harassed as they went about their business by a variety of supernatural agents: ghosts, bogies, terrors and the like. Candles were blown out, the beds in which the commissioners slept were upended, ‘chairs, stools, tables, and other furniture, forcibly hurled about the room’ by invisible agents. Dogs howled, there was ‘a sulphurous smell’, mysterious footsteps passed and repassed overhead and finally on the 29th October ‘at midnight, candles went out as before, something walked majestically through the room opened and shut the window [and threw] great stones violently into the room.’ The commissioners cleared out, understandably enough. Contemporary reactions to all this divided along party lines, Royalists rejoicing that the wicked Roundheads had been chased away, Puritans attributing all the goings-on to actual satanic apparitions, a sign that Charles’s supporters were leagued with the devil. This is what Scott himself says:
The account of this by the Commissioners themselves, or under their authority, was repeatedly published, and, in particular, is inserted as relation sixth of Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, by George Sinclair. It was the object of neither of the great political parties of that day to discredit this narrative, which gave great satisfaction both to the cavaliers and roundheads; the former conceiving that the license given to the demons, was in consequence of the impious desecration of the King’s furniture and apartments … while the friends of the Parliament, on the other hand, imputed to the malice of the fiend the obstruction of the pious work, as they judged that which they had in hand. [Woodstock ‘Introduction’]
This, then, is Scott’s premise, although the novel he actually writes falls into two parts so sharply it almost reads like two different, linked novels.
The first half sets the scene: Woodstock Palace immediately after the end of the Civil War. Sir Henry Lee, fanatically loyal to Charles II — this is after the regicide, so the twenty-year-old Charles is now king — is ejected from the house by order of Parliament, and goes with his daughter, the beautiful and virtuous Alice Lee, to live in the rude hut of his gameskeeper and forester Joceline Joliffe. Sir Henry is grouchy but defiant, even though it seems his son, Albert, has been killed in the late wars. There is one thing, though, Sir Henry won’t stand: his nephew, handsome young Markham Everard. Once upon a time Everard had been a favoured relative, courting Alice with a view to marriage, but now the family is By The Sword Divided, since Sir Henry stayed true to the King where Everard threw in his lot with the Roundheads — rose, indeed, to the rank of Colonel in the Parliamentary army. Sir Henry is furious about this, and his daughter is too dutiful to disobey him, so Alice and Everard’s ardent love for one another has been interdicted.
The book opens in a Woodstock village church in which the Rev. Nehemiah Holdenough is preaching — until, that is, Joseph Tomkins, a roundhead soldier in full unform, pushes him out of the pulput and takes over, with a sermon full of Puritanical flourishes, railing against monarchy and informing the congregation that the royal house at Woodstock is being sequestered by Cromwell and his followers. I’ll come back to Tomkins.
The first half of Woodstock, as a novel, details this ‘ejectment’ of Sir Henry from, and then his restoration to, his family home. The restoration happens because noble-hearted Everard (even though he knows his uncle hates him and that the toothsome Alice can never be his) intervenes with Oliver Cromwell to overturn the sequestration order. Cromwell — a vivid piece of portraiture this, by Scott, who manages to make him both intimidatingly forceful and a bit unhinged, mood-swingy, prone to prolix speechifying that goes nowhere and sudden out-of-the-blue emotional lurches. Anyway: Cromwell agrees that Sir Henry can have his house back. He does this not because he is feeling merciful, but rather because he is trying to capture the fugitive young King Charles, and considers this a clever ruse to snare him. This is ahistorical (actually young Charles was in The Hague throughout this period, impregnating his Welsh mistress Lucy Walter) but Scott shifts back some of the legends associated with Bonny Prince Charlie, on the run after the ’45, into the circumstances of his grand-uncle: wearing disguises, hiding inside hollow trees and so on.
In the novel, the rumour is that Charles has made his way to Bristol and escaped in a ship but Cromwell knows better: he believes he is somewhere in the Oxford area, and might indeed be hiding in Woodstock. So he addresses Everard’s adjutant, the roisterdoister young cavalier Captain Roger Wildrake (he and Everard are old schoolfriends and though they picked different sides in the Civil war, each swore to look after the other should their side win) — Cromwell tells Wildrake that Sir Henry can have his house back on condition that Everard uses his intimacy with the family to winkle out young King Charles from his hiding place. Wildrake doesn’t pass this information on to Everard.
Much of the first half of the novel is given over to the Parliamentary Commissioners experiencing all the supernatural gubbins mentioned above — Scott blends historical figures like Colonel Desborough and General Harrison with fictional ones like the aforementioned pulpit-usurping Joseph Tomkins, and all are terrorised by the ghosts, or devils, or whatever-they-are. Then, in part because they are spooked by all that ghostliness, and also because they are actively coaxed away by Everard, who not only shows them Cromwell’s order but suggests they’d find richer pickings to loot at Windsor anyway, they leave. Sir Henry returns and we’re halfway through the story.
But in the second half of Woodstock things go in a completely different direction. First lovely young Alice, drawing water from Woodstock Palace’s well, is accosted by a leery gipsy woman. Alice tries to run away but the woman follows ‘with prodigious long unwomanly strides’, making various bizarre suggestions, tossing a valuable gold ring into her water-pot and offering to tell her fortune:
“Look on my swarthy brow — England breeds none such — and in the lands from which I come, the sun which blackens our complexion, pours, to make amends, rays of knowledge into our brains, which are denied to those of your lukewarm climate. Let me look upon your pretty hand, — (attempting to possess herself of it,) — and I promise you, you shall hear what will please you.” [ch 18]
Alice gets away from the POC gipsy-woman, but almost immediately her brother Albert — not, after all, dead as the family had feared, but alive and well — arrives, bringing with him a loutish young Scot called ‘Louis Kerneguy’ (this surname is a variant of the more familiar Carnegie). Kerneguy eats like a horse, puts his big feet on the table and goes on and on in a broad Scots brogue: ‘I can bide the bit and the buffet, a hungry tike ne’er minds a blaud with a rough bane’ and so on. He is ‘a tall, rawboned lad, with a shock head of hair, fiery red, like many of his country,’ and though Sir Henry is affronted by his manners, his son Albert urges him to be understanding.
We soon learn that not only the Scots-ginger Kerneguy, but also the dark-skinned gipsy woman, are both, improbably enough, disguises adopted by Charles II himself, hiding from Cromwell’s goons. The situation is facilitated by the reverend Dr Anthony Rochecliffe, Sir Henry’s rector. Rochecliffe is a sort of secret agent working to help the royalist cause: there’s a whole sub-plot about how he was implicated in the death of his best friend at university during the war, how he is wracked by guilt and how this death turns out not to have happened, but I won’t get into that here. Woodstock Palace is a maze of hidden rooms and secret corridors, and Rochecliffe has been living secretly in one such. But then Cromwell arrives in the village with a troop of soldiers, determined to root out the fleeing King. Uh-oh!
Now, constant reader may, at this point, be asking him/herself: what about all the ghosts, the diabolic hauntings and so on? The truth is Scott effectively gives up on that side of the story in the novel’s second half. There is a brief reference to an, as we would nowadays say, Scooby Doo solution: the Parliamentary commissioners were chased out of the house by flesh-and-blood people pretending to be ghosts (Rochecliffe, Joliffe and others), the beds were up-ended by ropes fed through holes in the wall and yanked in the night and so on. We’re told this, but only in passing — it’s literally a couple of very glancing references, and one paragraph. Really, the novel has lost interest in all this by its second half.
Instead we get a couple of new developments. First the young King Charles — consonant with his later reputation as the ‘merry monarch’ — attempts to seduce pretty maiden Alice. It doesn’t go well partly because he’s never had to rely on actual seduction before and isn’t good at it (‘he was not at the trouble to practise seductive arts, because he had seldom found occasion to make use of them; his high rank, and the profligacy of part of the female society with which he had mingled, rendering them unnecessary’) and partly because of the stern and rather priggish virtue of Lady Alice herself. He initially assumes her reluctance to shag him proceeds from her belief that he is merely a low-born Scot called Kerneguy, and so, despite the danger in so doing, he reveals himself: ‘It is your King — it is Charles Stewart who speaks to you! — he can confer duchies, and if beauty can merit them, it is that of Alice Lee.’ When she still holds out, he lectures her on the moveable morals of sleeping with royalty:
“Know then, simple girl,” said the King, “that in accepting my proffered affection and protection, you break through no law either of virtue or morality. Those who are born to royalty are deprived of many of the comforts of private life — chiefly that which is, perhaps, the dearest and most precious, the power of choosing their own mates for life. Their formal weddings are guided upon principles of political expedience only, and those to whom they are wedded are frequently, in temper, person, and disposition, the most unlikely to make them happy. Society has commiseration, therefore, towards us, and binds our unwilling and often unhappy wedlocks with chains of a lighter and more easy character than those which fetter other men, whose marriage ties, as more voluntarily assumed, ought, in proportion, to be more strictly binding. … To such a connection the world attaches no blame. From such connections our richest ranks of nobles are recruited.” [ch 26]
But Alice isn’t having any of it: ‘think of the course you recommend,’ she rebukes him, ‘to a motherless maiden, who has no better defence against your sophistry, than what a sense of morality, together with the natural feeling of female dignity inspires.’ The dishonour would, she insists, kill her father, and ruin her house. Charles, baffled, withdraws.
Then the same scene is replayed in a different mode. Sir Henry’s forester, stout Joceline Joliffe, is in love with the maidservant of the house, one young Phœbe Mayflower. One day Phœbe, drawing water from the house well, is accosted by the Puritan Joseph Tomkins — the same character with whom the novel opened, when he disrupted the Rev. Nehemiah Holdenough’s sermon. Now, late in the novel, we discover that Tomkins is not a regular Puritan, but instead belongs to the sect known as Ranters. ‘The Family of Love, more commonly Ranters,’ the narrator informs us, ‘pushed jarring heresies to the verge of absolute and most impious insanity’ [ch. 29]. Scott adds that they cleaved to ‘a most blasphemous doctrine.’ What doctrine? The novel is too coy to spell it out in so many words, but it’s free love baby. Sexy sex for all, and don’t be a square about it, man. Coming upon Phœbe by the well, Tomkins attempts to persuade her that God wants the two of them to get right down to it:
“Believe, lovely Phœbe, that to the pure all acts are pure, and that sin is in our thought, not in our actions … the saint is above these ordinances and restraints. — To him, as to the chosen child of the house, is given the pass-key to open all locks which withhold him from the enjoyment of his heart’s desire. Into such pleasant paths will I guide thee, lovely Phœbe, as shall unite in joy, in innocent freedom, pleasures, which, to the unprivileged, are sinful and prohibited … Thus, my Phœbe,” he continued, endeavouring to draw her towards him “I offer thee more than ever was held out to woman since Adam first took his bride by the hand.”
Again the fanatical voluptuary endeavoured to pull the poor girl towards him, while she, alarmed, endeavoured, by fair entreaty, to prevail on him to release her. But his features, in themselves not marked, had acquired a frightful expression, and he exclaimed, “No, Phœbe — do not think to escape — thou art given to me as a captive — thou hast neglected the hour of grace, and it has glided past.” [ch. 29]
At this point, Joliffe arrives, drawn by Phœbe’s cries for help, and clonks Tomkins on the head with his quarterstaff, killing him stone dead.
This is, as my old Granny used to say, a turn-up for the books. Joliffe and Dr Rochecliffe must now dispose of the body (Tomkins had been reporting directly to Cromwell: it was he who passed on the information about the odd new visitor, going under the name ‘Kerneguy’, to the Lord Protector) so they try to dig a grave. But the forested landscape, hard soil tangled with roots, makes that difficult, and they spend so long doing it that Cromwell and his men arrive before they have finished. Joliffe and Rochecliffe are arrested; as are Everard and his friend Wildrake — who, indeed, attempts to kill Cromwell by stabbing him with his rapier, and is only foiled by the metal breastplate Oliver is wearing.
Cromwell then breaks into Woodstock house by virtue of blowing the main entrance up with gunpowder.
Boom! He arrests both Sir Henry Lee, and Albert Lee (the latter attempts to throw Cromwell off the scent by disguising himself as King Charles, but Crom. is not deceived for long). There are more explosions, and part of Woodstock collapses. Finally Cromwell insists all these folk that they will be hanged by their necks first thing in the morning — unless they, or any of them, are prepared to give up the fugitive king. None of them are, of course, so it’s off to prison for them to await execution.
In fact, and in a conclusion that flirts with anticlimax, Charles Stewart has already left Woodstock on horseback, later slipping out of the country and to the Continent. Cromwell’s men search the house and find nothing. Cromwell then, for reasons that are not in any especially convincing way explained, changes his mind about executing all the royalists, traitors and would-be assassins he has arrested, and instead lets them all go. Why? Ach, he’s a changeable fellow, seems to be Scott’s moral.
The last couple of chapters zoom forward a few years. Charles writes a royal letter from France instructing Sir Henry to give-up his animus against Everard and to permit the fellow to marry Alice (not mentioning that he tried his hardest to boink young Alice himself). Then we hop forward to the Restoration, when Sir Henry, Everard, Alice and their children join the crowds lining the streets to see King Charles II parade through Blackheath on his way to London. The King stops and greets Lee, and afterwards marches on, but the excitement proves too much for the elderly cavalier knight.
The array moved on accordingly; the sound of trumpets and drums again rose amid the acclamations, which had been silent while the King stopped; while the effect of the whole procession resuming its motion, was so splendidly dazzling, that even Alice’s anxiety about for her father’s health was for a moment suspended, while her eye followed the long line of varied brilliancy that proceeded over the heath. When she looked again at Sir Henry, she was startled to see that his cheek, which had gained some colour during his conversation with the King, had relapsed into earthly paleness; that his eyes were closed, and opened not again; and that his features expressed, amid their quietude, a rigidity which is not that of sleep. They ran to his assistance, but it was too late. The light that burned so low in the socket, had leaped up, and expired in one exhilarating flash. [ch. 38]
That’s all, folks!
***
Critics have generally approached Woodstock one of two ways. The first is to point out the biographical context out of which the novel was produced, and more specifically the ruin that struck Scott’s finances during its writing. So: Scott originally contracted with Archibald Constable (his publisher) and James Ballantyne (his printer) for Woodstock all the way back in March 1823 — the contract stipulated an edition of 10,000 copies for which the author was to receive £3,750, with what we nowadays call an ‘advance’ of £2,500 to be paid immediately. But Walter didn’t get down to writing straight away, instead working on Redgauntlet (1824) and then his four-vol ‘crusader’ project, The Betrothed (1825) and The Talisman (1825). He finally made a start on Woodstock late October 1825 and seems to have written the first volume, of three, easily enough. The rest was harder work: the second volume was not finished until 11 February 1826 and the final volume was squeezed out by 26 March — slow, for Scott (the novel itself was finally published April 1826). There were reasons for the slow down. His wife was ill — indeed, she was dying, and expired on the 11th May 1826. As this was going on Scott lost all his money and abruptly found himself in profundities of debt.
The catastrophic, UK wide financial crisis of 1825 brought down some 60 banks and a vast number of business houses. On 14 January 1826, Constable’s London agents, Hurst Robinson & Coy, were forced to stop payment. Archibald Constable and Company and James Ballantyne and Company, linked to them and to each other by debts secured through bills of exchange, were also brought down through their inability to pay. As the sole financing partner in Ballantynes by this time, Scott was liable for huge debts and in due course entered into a trust deed for his creditor … Scott’s personal and business responsibility for debts amounted to £120,899, over and above which a recently completed mortgage of £1000 also existed [Sam McKinstry and Marie Fletcher, ‘The Personal Account Books of Sir Walter Scott’, The Accounting Historians Journal 29:2 (2002), 84]
Honourably, or perhaps stupidly, Scott refused offers of charitable donation (the Prince of Wales was among many wealthy people who were willing to gift him money), and he also repudiated suggestions he avail himself of the newly passed Bankruptcy Act. Instead, he insisted, he would earn the money with his pen and pay off all creditors. And he tried hard to do this, with prodigies of application and energy, publishing another five novels in short order, writing many non-fiction works (such as his nine-volume biography of Napoleon), editing other works and all-in-all pushing himself into ill-health, multiple strokes and eventually an early death in 1832. When he died he had paid off roughly £50,000 of his debt, although the remainder was soon cleared by his estate, and the continuing, vast sales of his books.
It has long been an argument amongst critics that Woodstock in some sense reflects this change in Scott’s monetary circumstances. Perhaps this ‘explains’ the weird shift the novel takes in its halfway point, although it’s a little hard to see what the second half narrative of multiple attempted seductions, and Cromwellian threat, have to do with financial insolvency. And in fact Scott had already written himself round the corner, as it were, of the novel’s oddly bent shape before disaster struck: by late January, when the implications of the disaster became clear, he was within shouting distance of the novel’s finishing line.
A better approach, I think, is the one advanced by Fiona Price — in Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) — and others, that Woodstock first setting-up an intriguing Gothic-style mystery and abruptly withdrawing from that mystery into a pantomime of disguise, sexual threat and eventual monarchical restoration functions, precisely, as a critique of the Gothic.
The difficulties that the low-status, feminized, sentimental and even ‘sickly’ gothic form represented for Scott have been explored, notably by Fiona Robertson and Michael Gamer. In this context, Woodstock’s use of the explained supernatural is significant. In revealing how gothic is deployed politically, the novel also suggests what is at stake in the genre’s denigration. Gothic terror emerges as a frequently deployed form of political violence — and one Scott himself is willing to invoke … Woodstock’s exposure of the political re-appropriation of gothic tropes [and] its cruel practical jokes … suggest that violence has not been foreclosed. On the contrary, for Scott, the vitriol and fear generated by an extended post-French Revolution debate has irrevocably harmed the British political future. [Fiona Price, ‘The Politics of Fear: Gothic Histories, the English Civil War and Walter Scott’s Woodstock’ Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017), 111]
This makes more sense than the ‘bankruptcy’ reading although by the same token, if this is what Woodstock is doing one might perhaps expect it to make more of the actual Scooby Doo stuff — I mean, the pulling the ghost-disguise off the janitor, the deflating of the supposedly-supernatural by the merely mundane. In fact Woodstock hurries past this part, barely mentioning it. (This plot-twist was not original to Scott, of course: it is what critics sometimes call ‘Female Gothic’, to distinguish it from the actual-supernatural blather of ‘Male Gothic’: Anne Radcliffe was the queen of this particular sort of story).
So what is going on? We could put it this way: Woodstock starts as a ghost story set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. According to this initial story, a noble and ancient house, Woodstock, a relict of the age of royal power, finds itself in a new era: the king has been decapitated, Cromwell and Parliament are duking it out over who should rule. The house is haunted by poltergeists who harass specifically the Puritans and who leave the Royalists alone. If this were the main thrust of the novel we might be tempted to say: these ghosts — real or feigned — represent the dead hand of the past still grasping at the world of the living. That is, they figure royalism, the feudal logic of the past. The ghosts, in other words, would slot into Lukács’ influential reading of Scott (in The Historical Novel, 1937) as a writer who intuitively grasped the fundamentally dialectical (indeed, dialectical materialist) logic of history as such: in Waverley the thesis is the dying but romantic feudal world of the Highlanders, and the antithesis is the hard-nosed bourgeois logic of the Hanoverian succession, with the novel positing Edward Waverley, who as per his surname havers between the two worlds, as the start of something synthetic, retaining his love for the glamorous past as he moves on. In terms of Woodstock the old royalists are the dying feudal past, the excessively severe and buttoned-down Puritans their antithesis, and it is Everard — who follows the Parliamentary cause on principle but who won’t betray young Charles and who ends marrying the royalist daughter of the novel’s titular Cavalier, who synthesises the two forces that clash. In such a reading the ghosts dramatize the way the past, though defeated and even buried, won’t let go of the present.
But this reading doesn’t really match the novel that Woodstock actually is. To repeat myself, having built-up the mystery of the myriad hauntings, and described the terrors of the Parliamentary commissioners, Scott then downplays the ‘solution’ to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it level: one paragraph making a passing reference to how Rochecliffe recruited Joliffe and others to blunder about the secret passageways and attics of Woodstock Palace to scare the interlopers, and that’s pretty much it. The novel is thin to the point of vacuum on the specifics of this. More to the point, though Cromwell’s clownish underlings are terrified by all this palaver, Cromwell himself sees straight through it — as soon as he breaks into Woodstock at the end of the story, he comprehends everything instantly:
His acute and observing eye detected, with a sneering smile, the cordage and machinery by which the bed of poor Desborough had been inverted, and several remains of the various disguises, as well as private modes of access, by which Desborough, Bletson, and Harrison [the Parliamentary commissioners], had been previously imposed upon. He pointed them out to Pearson [his second-in-command], with no farther comment than was implied in the exclamation, “The simple fools!” [ch 34]
It’s not that the ghosts turn out to be mere tricks and impostures, although of course they do; it’s that they are hardly mentioned in the second part of the novel at all. The trajectory of Woodstock’s ghost story is not from supernatural-scares to natural-explanation; it is something stranger — from one kind of story about ghosts to a completely different story about sex and gunpowder. The first half of the novel invites the reader to consider the mystery of the ghostly haunting, but in the place where such considerations would be elaborated, confirmed or denied by the book, it instead offers us two elaborate and variously alarming attempted seductions, attempts by men — one cavalier and one roundhead, to violate the sanctity of two women. These scenes lead into the novel’s climax, in which the sanctity of Woodstock itself is violated by Cromwell and his men, bursting in with multiple petards and gunpowder detonations.
We can see that Scott is saying something here about rapine, about the violence men (always men) offer the passive and resistant, and therefore something about the war and its place in history. Woodstock is a novel about loyalty — cavalier loyalty to the king, Puritan loyalty to their religious cause, Alice’s loyalty to her grumpy father, Everard’s delf-denying loyalty to Alice — and therefore about love, because each of these loyalties is an iteration of love. But love is not simple, for Scott. Something haunts Woodstock (and Woodstock) but it is not the past, for as King Charles’s self-serving justification for his attempted seduction of Alice shows, things have always been like this, and as his current activities, and Tomkins’ cruder version of the same thing, show, things continue to be like this. Woodstock is a novel less about the past haunting the present and more about something haunting love.
The ostensible logic of the set-up in this novel is to have readers asking the question: is this true? That is, ‘are these ghosts and demons actual supernatural apparitions, or only a performance, a hoax?’ The answer to this question, of course, is: the latter. But arguably the real point of Woodstock is in addressing a profounder question: is loyalty true? Which is to say, is love true?
Sir Henry Lee’s loyalty to the king goes beyond simple affiliation, or politics, or self-interest. It is a deeper and more intense love. Having helped Charles escape, as Cromwell’s men close in, Sir Henry addresses his son:
“You are right, boy,” he said. “They lie, the roundheaded traitors, that call him dissolute and worthless! He hath feelings worthy the son of the blessed Martyr. You saw, even in the extremity of danger, he would have perilled his safety rather than take Alice’s guidance when the silly wench seemed in doubt about going. Profligacy is intensely selfish, and thinks not of the feelings of others … Joy — joy, only joy, Albert — I cannot allow a thought of doubt to cross my breast. There was a tear in his eye as he took leave of me — I am sure of it. Wouldst not die for him, boy?” [ch. 32]
There is an obvious irony here, since the real reason (unknown to Sir Henry) Alice was reluctant to guide Charles out of the estate was her previous experience of being alone with him, when he harrassed and pressed himself sexually upon her — that is, Charles is precisely as profligate and selfish as Sir Henry says he is not. But Henry’s tearful declaration that he would die for Charles is lover’s talk, just as I cannot allow a thought of doubt to cross my breast speaks to a tacit comprehension, which must be suppressed, and to which many lovers would secretly accede about their own inamoratas, that Charles is not truly worth such love.
Adam Phillips talks about the way Freud found, in analysis, ‘truth’ and ‘love’ to be at odds with one another. From a starting point in which ‘it is assumed that we know, or think we can recognise, two discrete phenomena, truth and fiction, and that we can tell the difference between them’ Freud comes to understand that ‘in psychoanalysis’ we ‘may not need to, or be able to.’
Our criteria for telling them apart may lead us in the wrong direction … as though truth or some notion of truth, or some criterion that distinguishes truth from fiction, distorts or disrupts or interferes with something essential about psychoanalysis. … Once, say, you start trying to work out whether fantasies or desires or feelings are true, you lose too much (the quest for evidence displaces the feelings that are felt, in all their indeterminateness, or inarticulacy, or wishfulness); that methods for the pursuit of truth can be strangely impoverishing, as though the pursuit of truth — of seething called truth in religion, or philosophy, or science — could be merely a form of oversimplification. [Phillips, On Getting Better (Penguin 2021), 84–5]
Phillips’s repeated self-interruptions and qualifications here point to a writer disinclined to give up ‘truth’ altogether — for obvious reasons — and yet the passage as a whole is pointing at something else, not just at the ‘print the legend’ reality of love as it manifests, but its desirability as such a thing: the psychological health, actually, of this state of affairs. It is, he is suggesting, a false step to invest too heavily in ferreting out ‘the truth’. Not that it doesn’t exist, since it does, but that it isn’t as elucidating or accessible as we perhaps think. ‘There is truth in the unconscious,’ says Phillips, ‘but not for us.’
This, it seems to me, makes sense of the double-structure of Woodstock as a novel, of the way the first half sets up one mystery, only in order to frame a second, larger mystery that doesn’t address the first. In both cases the ‘truth’ is, in effect, touched upon, but in both cases the novel invites us, through its formal patterning as well the specifics of its storytelling, not to dwell too much upon that. The ‘truth’ of the Woodstock hauntings is: a royalist sympathiser orchestrating some quasi-theatrical goings-on to scare away some parliamentarian commissioners. But, says the novel, that truth is not the most important thing about these hauntings. Concentrate instead upon the effectiveness of them, and what they tell us about the fears and desires of the various people involved. Then, having set that up, Scott’s novel moves to a larger question. Royalists follow the king because they believe hierarchical aristocracy represents a better model of human being-in-the-world and behaviour, something elevated, noble, courteous and chivalrous. And Puritans follow their cause because they believe religion and fidelity to God’s word represents a better way of living, and of structuring society, than the corrupt and luxurious self-indulgences of the old feudal system. In both cases Scott gives us scenes to dramatize the quote-unquote ‘truth’ behind these belief systems: Charles is not a higher, more noble and more beautiful figure, but is in truth an ugly, randy, duplicitous and self-serving individual, representative of a selfish and sexually licentious order. Tomkins, for all his seizing of the pulpit and preaching in church, is not a ‘purer’ embodiment of religious devotion, not actually an architect of the New Jerusalem. He is a hypocrite, hiding his Ranting greed and lust behind the whited sepulchre of Puritanical discourse. These, we might say, are the ‘truths’ of the two sides in the Civil War — Charles is the ‘truth’ of Royalism, the Ranters are the ‘truth’ of Puritanism — and yet, Scott, says, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the love, the devotion, the (in psychoanalytic terms) fantasy of what these two sides stand for. The novel is saying that sexual exploitation and gratification is the ‘truth’ of love, and yet nonetheless is telling a love-story, plotting out a narrative of devotion, honour and selfless love eventually rewarded. There are explosions, as at the novel’s climax, but by the novel’s end the key characters have lived through all that.
One of the quirks of Scott’s Sir Henry is that he is mad for Shakespeare, always reading and quoting the bard. Indeed, Scott indulges his character’s Shakespe-he-rian love to a rather tiresome degree, but never mind about that for a moment. I’m interested in a particular scene where, after fighting a duel with Charles (not realising who he really is) to defend Alice’s honour, Everard looks as thought he will be reconciled to his uncle Sir Henry after all. The old man quotes Shakespeare, and Everard quotes a bit of his favourite verse:
‘O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings,
And thou unblemish’d form of Chastity!
I see ye visibly, and now believe
That he the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glistering guardian, if need were,
To keep my life and honour unassail’d. —
Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud.
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?’ [ch. 25]
Sir Henry is impressed by this verse, which he doesn’t recognise: ‘Sir Henry Lee, who had expected some effusion very different from those classical and beautiful lines, soon changed the scornful expression of his countenance, relaxed his contorted upper lip, and, stroking down his beard with his left hand, rested the forefinger of the right upon his eyebrow, in sign of profound attention. He then spoke in a gentler manner than formerly. “Cousin Markham,” he said, “these verses flow sweetly, and sound in my ears like the well-touched warbling of a lute.”’ But then the twist: Everard is forced to confess that the lines are by John Milton.
“John Milton!” exclaimed Sir Henry in astonishment — “What! John Milton, the blasphemous and bloody-minded author of the Defensio Populi Anglicani! — the advocate of the infernal High Court of Fiends; the creature and parasite of that grand impostor, that loathsome hypocrite, that detestable monster, that prodigy of the universe, that disgrace of mankind, that landscape of iniquity, that sink of sin, and that compendium of baseness, Oliver Cromwell! … Markham Everard,” said the old knight, “I will never forgive thee — never, never. Thou hast made me speak words of praise respecting one whose offal should fatten the region-kites. Speak not to me, sir, but begone!”
And so Everard’s hopes of marrying Alice sink once more into the depths.
This scene is funny, in a sharp-edged sort of way, but I wonder if something else is going on here. ‘Woodstock’ is the name of the novel because Woodstock is an actual place; but Scott does interesting thematic work with the forestland that surrounds the palace, through which characters pass, which shapes the lives and lives of many, and into which, like Robin Hood, Charles the Second disguises himself and disappears. Wood is timber, and ‘stock’ — from Old English stocc, and Proto-West Germanic *stokk (“tree-trunk”) — means the same thing: either the trunk of a tree, or the base from which something grows or branches, and by extension lineage, family and ancestry. Both these things, clearly, are relevant to this novel. But I also wonder if Scott doesn’t want us to think of Milton’s famous sonnet ‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont’ (1655), the poem that laments the slaughtered Protestant ‘saints’, whose ‘bones/Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’:
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones.
Milton means that there were people who upheld the ‘true’ faith even back when England itself was Catholic. But the sonnet might be less ferocious than it is sometimes thought to be. Just as Scott’s sympathies remain with the old romantic feudal past, even as he records its inevitable passing into modernity, perhaps this woody ‘stock’ worship was not altogether bad in the logic of this novel. Tom Shippey, in his critical account of J R R Tolkien, notes how the phrase ‘stock and stone’ goes back before Catholic Britain into pagan England (it appears in Pearl, ‘we meten so selden by stok other ston’, and in various Old English and Old Norse texts too). Shippey thinks Tolkien, as a Catholic himself, must have considered Milton’s sonnet ‘wrong’ (‘its ferocity, its equation of God’s truth with Protestantism, most especially its contempt for “our fathers” before they were converted’) but adds:
Yet poetry which uses old phrases is not always bound down to its creator’s intention. Reading that line, and adding to it his memories of Finn and Fróda, of Beowulf and Hróthgár and the other pagan heroes from the darkness before the English dawn, Tolkien may have felt that Milton was more accurate than he knew. Perhaps “our fathers” did worship “stocks and stones”. But perhaps they were not so very bad in doing so. After all if they had not Christ to worship, there were worse things, many worse things for them to reverence than “stocks and stones”, rocks and trees, ‘merry Middle-earth’ itself.
This might seem a long way from Scott, and yet there is, I think, a parallel here. For him, in this novel, the ‘truth’ of the object of worship is not so important as the worship itself. It is about love, however imperfectly that love manifests itself in the world.
