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

We have agreed to say nothing of the precise day. It is possible we may have the fate of those sapient
persons who went to the vault at Clerkenwell to speak with the Cock Lane ghost, of whose expedition
Churchill has recorded
Silent, all three went in-about
All three turn’d, silent, and came out
On these occasions the fewer spectators the better. 63
Scott either could not contain himself or he elaborated afterwards for by his own
account, on 4 February 1818 when the chest was broken open, while there were no
spectators in the room, there was no mystery about what was going on. At the moment
the regalia were found ‘the royal flag was hoisted upon the castle, and greeted by the
shouts of a numerous crowd assembled on the hill, who took a deep interest in the
success of the researches’. 64 Scott’s Description of the Regalia of Scotland appeared the
following year to coincide with a public exhibition of the crown jewels in the room where
they had been found, now ‘handsomely fitted up’ for the purpose. 65 The Description
weaves Scotland’s history of noble independence seamlessly into the modern union. It
begins with the crown itself which, though sixteenth-century, contained within it Scott
explained, an older diadem. ‘Of its antiquity we can produce no precise evidence; but
many circumstances induce us to refer it to the glorious reign of Robert the Bruce.’ 66
Soon, by extension he is back at the coronation of Malcolm in 1057, from where he
sweeps on through the depredations of Edward I, ‘who took with him to England every
monument of Scottish independence’, through the regalia’s narrow and dramatic escape
from the Parliamentarian forces to their long slumber in the Castle and so to the present. 67
63
Scott to the Duke of Buccleuch, 16 January 1818, Letters, 5, p.60.
64
Scott, Description of the Regalia, p.30.
65
Scott, Description of the Regalia, p. 30.
66
Scott, Description of the Regalia, p. 5.
67
Scott, Description of the Regalia, p.6.
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