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

antiquaries sought out the elderly. Sometimes of course they were innocently misled or
deliberately hoodwinked, or shown up by them. Oldbuck’s relationship with Edie
Ochiltree, the repository of real wisdom and debunker of Oldbuck’s more elaborate
theories, suggests the permutations of such relationships. In Waverley Scott was
therefore, as so often, making use in fiction of aspects of his practice as an antiquary and
later, during George IV’s visit to Scotland, he was to deploy his skills as a novelist in the
service of antiquarianism. In writing Waverley he did not make much attempt to check or
expand his memory of what he had heard by comparison with written sources, as Lingard
would have done. Indeed Scott’s stated intention was the opposite of Lingard’s. He
wanted to prove that the past was not a foreign country. That ‘Nature [is] the same
through a thousand editions, whether of black letter or wire-wove and hot-pressed’ was
the chief of those ‘moral lessons which I would willingly consider as the most important
part of my plan’. 56
Scott’s Scotland was thus a place where an Englishman could travel in perfect
safety, while enjoying the frisson of vicarious danger. There was a revealing instance of
the way this double-think worked in Scott’s own mind, and no doubt many others, when
the young Henry Fox visited him in Edinburgh in 1822, just five months before George
IV’s ‘jaunt’. Scott told Fox of his own, emotional, Jacobitism, adding that many Scots
felt the same to the point where ‘it would still be unsafe for Madame d’Albanie, [widow
of the Young Pretender], to come here’. 57 In fact the Comtesse, who had not been born at
the time of Culloden, had already been to Britain several years earlier, had dined with the
Prince Regent and Mrs Fitzherbert and gone home again without anyone turning a hair,
let alone fomenting a rebellion. With so much slippage between the facts of very recent
history and the feelings they evoked there was plenty of scope for intervention.
Apart from his writings, Scott’s two principal contributions to the nineteenthcentury
re-imagining of Scotland were the orchestration of George IV’s visit and, four
years before that, the equally self-conscious staging of the ‘discovery’ of the Scottish
56 Scott, Waverley, p.5.
57 Quoted in Prebble, The King’s Jaunt, p.19.
220