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

oyal regalia. It was only in the loosest sense a discovery, for the regalia were found
exactly where they were known to have been left in March 1707 after the Act of Union
deprived Scotland of its sovereign status. Despite which Scott had ‘never been more
pleased since the battle of Waterloo than with this discovery’. 58 Not indeed since then
had he had his hands on objects of such significance in national history. The sixteenthcentury
crown, sceptre and sword of state were known to have been deposited in a chest
in the Crown-Room of Edinburgh Castle. The chest was still there, but there had been
persistent rumours that the regalia had been spirited away to England. At a meeting with
the Prince Regent in 1815 Scott asked for permission to search for them and, as his
published account described it: ‘In October 1817 his royal highness … was pleased to
give directions for removing the mystery which had so long hung upon the existence of
the Scottish regalia.’ 59 Less respectfully he wrote to John Morritt on 14 January 1818,
‘Our fat friend’s curiosity… goes to the point at once authorising and enjoining an
express search for the regalia so my fingers long to be up and doing’. 60
Scott’s successive descriptions of the discovery gained in solemnity and drama as
time went on. By 1826, in the Provincial Antiquities it was practically a short story. ‘The
dust of a century was upon the floor; the ashes of the last fire remained still in the
chimney’, after a vain search for keys a smith was sent for and at first it appeared that it
was too late for ‘the chest seemed to return a hollow and empty sound to the strokes of
the hammer’. 61 The event was conceived from the beginning as dramatic, indeeed
scripted, to conform to the conventions of antiquarian enterprises. Writing to the Duke of
Buccleuch, who was one of those charged along with Scott with the investigation, Scott
promised to do it on a mutually convenient date: ‘The drama of the Iron Chest will
certainly be postponed until your Grace can be one of the dramatis personae.’ 62 It was
important, though, that the show should not flop. Scott explained to the Duke that
58
Scott in a letter to William Dundas, 14 February 1818, quoted in Todd and Bowden, Scott a
Bibliographical History p. 488.
59
Scott, Description of the Regalia, p. 29.
60
Scott to John Morritt, 13 January 1818, Letters, 5, p.50.
61
Scott, Provincial Antiquities, p. xxxviii.
62
Scott to the Duke of Buccleuch, 16 January 1818, Letters, 5, p.59.
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