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

Figure 42 The Honours of Scotland, the discovery of the Regalia, by David Wilkie, 1822
From the individual objects themselves, through the events they witnessed, Scott
tells the story of Scotland until somehow, after eight centuries of proud resistance to the
forces of English oppression, the regalia, come to symbolise all that is best about the
union.
The feelings with which we now view these venerable national reliques are of a nature less
agitating than those of our forefathers…We, who now reap the slow but well-ripened fruits of the painful
sacrifice made at the union, can compare with calmer judgment, the certain blessings of equality of laws
and rights, extended commerce, improved agriculture, individual safety, and domestic peace, with the vain
though generous boast of a precarious national independence, subject to all the evils of domestic faction
and delegated oppression. With such feelings we look upon the Regalia of Scotland… blessing the wise
decrees of Providence, which, after a thousand years of bloodshed, have at length indissolubly united two
nations, who, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, and united by the same interest,
seem formed by God and nature to compose one people. 68
Three years later it seemed quite natural for Scott’s fat friend, now King, to make
the first journey north of the border by a reigning monarch since Charles I, an unfortunate
precedent with which it was important to avoid comparison. How Scott came to take
charge, at short notice, of the arrangements in the summer of 1822, and the story of the
visit itself are well-known. 69 It is worth emphasising, however, the importance of Scott’s
vision of history and specifically his antiquarianism in the success of what Lockhart, his
68 Scott, Description of the Regalia, p.34.
69 Prebble, The King’s Jaunt, gives a full account.
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