Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

These verses, as Scott employed them, were to poetry what the new face of Heloise was
to Lenoir’s tomb, a grafting of the present onto history in order to create emotional effect and
this process characterised quite explicitly all of Scott’s account of Waterloo. Trivial as the
ballads were, he wrote in Paul’s Letters, imagine how interesting it would be if such fragments
had survived from Crécy or from Agincourt. In ‘The Field of Waterloo’, the poem he himself
wrote about the battle, Scott went further towards fusing past and present. The narrative of the
verse might be said to mirror the military victory on a literary and antiquarian level,
overwhelming the French narrative with the forces of Scottish myth and history. It opens on the
night before Waterloo, an echo surely of Richard III’s dream before Bosworth, with ‘grey Allan’
lying sleepless waiting for the dawn.
There are sounds in Allan’s ear
Patrol nor sentinel may hear,
And sights before his eye aghast
Invisible to them have pass’d
When down the destined plain,
’Twixt Britain and the bands of France,
Strange phantoms wheel’d a revel dance,
And doom’d the future slain-
Such forms were seen, such sounds were heard,
When Scotland’s James his march prepared
For Flodden’s fatal plain 56
Allan is killed in the battle and buried at Waterloo, ‘far from his Highland heath’, but it
might equally be said that he has brought the Scottish heath with him and implanted it forever on
the battlefield. Twenty-five years later, when Scott’s novels had taken the French reading public
by storm, replacing the classical myths as subjects for French artists, Thackeray wrote, as he
looked at the Paris Salon of 1840 with its many Waverley-inspired paintings that: ‘Walter Scott
from his Castle of Abbotsford, sent out a troop of gallant young Scotch adventurers, merry
outlaws, valiant knights, and savage Highlanders who… did challenge, combat and overcome the
56 Scott, Complete Poetical and Dramatic Works, p.534.
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