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

and its contents. He began work on what became Reliquiae Trotcosienses in 1830, after the first
of a series of strokes which led up to his death two years later. It was never finished and the full
text remained unpublished until 2004. It offers another portrait of the figure of the antiquary in
literature and life, its main subject, however, is the house and the objects within it. These now, as
Scott contemplated the end of his life, began to take on lives of their own. By different means he
appears to come to the same end as the Sobieski Stuarts, perceiving himself as a construction of
his own romantic interior. It is also possible that in his elaborate title he nodded deliberately
towards the brothers and their dubious productions.
Reliquiae Trotcosienses or the gabions of the late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq of Monkbarns,
is premised on Scott’s familiar ironising of antiquarian method. The title, which means, ‘of the
relics of Trotcosey’, refers back to Oldbuck’s home on the lands that once belonged to the Abbey
of Trotcosey. This was already a joke. A ‘trotcosey’ being a modern Scottish word for a hooded
cape in which the wearer could trot, cosily, through the cold like a monk in a habit. The term
‘gabions’ derives from Henry Adamson’s poem of 1638, The Muses Threnodie, whose place in
the literary ancestry of the antiquary was discussed earlier. Scott amuses himself with mockscholarly
attempts to define the word which he uses, in effect, to mean ‘curiosities’ of little or no
intrinsic value. Just a year earlier, in 1829, in the letter to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, in which
Scott tried, unsuccessfully, to urge caution towards the Sobieski Stuarts, he pointed out that the
manuscript they claimed had been given to their father by Charles Stuart, and on which they
claimed to have based the Vestiarium Scoticum, had a title in ‘false Latin I should think not
likely to occur to a Scotsman of Buchanan’s age’. 65 In choosing false Latin for his own Reliquiae
was Scott perhaps parodying their pretensions? It is possible and if so adds a certain reciprocity,
or symbiosis to a relationship in which the Sobieski Stuarts are otherwise parasites. It is certainly
the case that Scott’s title places another layer of playful distance between author and subject,
another nod to the reader not to take what follows literally.
In the Introduction to the published version of Reliquiae David Hewitt draws attention to
Scott’s distancing techniques, the delicate irony on which the Sobieski Stuarts played. Hewitt
suggests that the various parts of the book therefore ‘both are, and are not about Scott and his
65 Scott to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Letters, 11, p. 201.
185