By WALLACE BRUCE.
“Woodstock” closed with the return of Charles the Second from long exile,
and his hearty reception _en route_ from the cliffs of Dover to London.
“Peveril of the Peak” opens with a mixed assembly of Presbyterians
and Cavaliers convened at Martindale Castle in honor of “The Blessed
Restoration of His most Sacred Majesty.”
As might be premised, the gathering is not entirely harmonious. By wise
foresight they are constrained to enter the castle by different gates,
and to take their repast in different rooms. In this prologue to the
story the reader notes the art with which Scott illustrates history.
“By different routes, and forming each a sort of a procession, as if
the adherents of each party were desirous of exhibiting its strength
and numbers, the two several factions approached the castle; and so
distinct did they appear in dress, aspect and manners, that it seemed as
if the revelers of a bridal party, and the sad attendants upon a funeral
solemnity, were moving toward the same point from different quarters. The
Puritan party consisted chiefly of the middling gentry, with others whom
industry or successful speculations in commerce or in mining had raised
into eminence—the persons who feel most umbrage from the over-shadowing
aristocracy, and are usually the most vehement in defense of what they
hold to be their rights. Their dress was in general studiously simple
and unostentatious, or only remarkable by the contradictory affectation
of extreme simplicity or carelessness. The dark color of their cloaks,
varying from absolute black to what was called sad-colored, their
steeple-crowned hats, with their broad shadowy brims, their long swords,
suspended by a simple strap around the loins, without shoulder-belt,
sword-knot, plate, buckles, or any of the other decorations with which
the Cavaliers loved to adorn their trusty rapiers—the shortness of their
hair, which made their ears appear of disproportioned size—above all the
stern and gloomy gravity of their looks, announced their belonging to
that class of enthusiasts, who, resolute and undismayed, had cast down
the former fabric of government, and who now regarded with somewhat more
than suspicion that which had been so unexpectedly substituted in its
stead.”
The paragraph in which Scott portrays the Cavalier is none the less
graphic: “If the Puritan was affectedly plain in his dress, and
ridiculously precise in his manners, the Cavalier often carried his
love of ornament into tawdry finery, and his contempt of hypocricy into
licentious profligacy. Gay, gallant fellows, young and old, thronged
together toward the ancient castle. Feathers waved, lace glittered,
spears jingled, steeds caracoled; and here and there a petronel or pistol
was fired off by some one, who found his own natural talents for making
a noise inadequate to the dignity of the occasion. Boys halloo’d and
whooped, ‘Down with the Rump,’ and ‘Fie upon Oliver!’ The revelry of the
Cavaliers may be easily conceived, since it had the usual accompaniments
of singing, jesting, quaffing of healths, and playing of tunes, which
have in almost every age and quarter of the world been the accompaniments
of festive cheer. The enjoyments of the Puritans were of a different and
less noisy character. They neither sung, jested, heard music, nor drank
healths; and yet they seemed none the less, in their own phrase, to enjoy
the creature-comforts which the frailty of humanity rendered grateful to
their outward man.”
It seems almost marvelous that Scott, who loved rank and ancestral
dignity, could lay aside his prejudices and speak so eloquently and
fairly of the Puritan. His history of Napoleon is generally regarded
unfair and distorted; and it could hardly have been otherwise following
so closely upon the great triumph of Wellington; but we, as Americans and
descendants of those who gave up home and comfort to establish a free
government, have reason to feel grateful that the greatest novelist, or,
if that is objected to by any of our readers, the greatest historical
novelist that Britain has produced, was born and reared with an
unprejudiced mind.
It may seem strange to the reader of history to find the Cavalier and
the strict Presbyterian, so different in principle, now hand in hand in
policy; but the reader must remember that the party which brought Charles
to the block consisted of two factors, styled by the haughty Countess of
Derby with indignant sarcasm: “Varieties of the same monster, for the
Presbyterians hallooed while the others hunted, and bound the victims
whom the Independents massacred.” Misery according to Shakspere makes a
person acquainted with strange bedfellows; and the politics of those days
made England acquainted with strange coalitions. One choice only remained
to that distracted nation—Charles the Second or the rule of the army;
and to the common sense of discordant factions a solid government seemed
preferable to anarchy. To the sensible Presbyterian the divine right
of kings was better than the less divine right of petty leaders. The
Independents, so powerful under Cromwell, were weak under the government
of his son Richard. The people demanded a free Parliament, and a free
Parliament meant the restoration of the Stuarts. As Macaulay tersely puts
it: “A united army had long kept down a divided nation; but the nation
was now united and the army was divided.”
Scott, also, in passing, refers to the ejection of the Presbyterian
clergy, which took place on St. Bartholomew’s day, when two thousand
Presbyterian pastors were displaced and silenced throughout England;
even in church matters the rule held good—that the spoils belonged to
the victors: the great Baxter, Reynolds and Calamy refused bishoprics,
and many ministers declined deaneries, preferring starvation and a clear
conscience to the wealth and flattery of a corrupt court.
Five years pass by and we are transported with Julian Peveril, son of
the old knight, from the peaks of northern Derbyshire, which form the
water-shed of central England, to the picturesque island of Man, the
origin of whose name is still a mystery, whose ruins carry the visitor
back beyond the legends of King Arthur and the dominion of the Romans to
the dim twilight days of the Druids. To this strong sea-girded fortress
the brave Countess of Derby fled after the execution of her husband at
Bolton le Moor, and she has left in history a character for courage and
hardihood allied to cruelty, in the execution of Edward Christian, who
in her absence had yielded up the island to the Parliament forces. It is
here that the young Peveril dreams away his boyhood, sharing his studies
and recreations with the son of the Countess.
In this story of diverse characters, the two pillars, which might be said
to uphold the arch, under which the long procession of the narrative
passes, are the elder Peveril and his wealthy neighbor Bridgenorth.
Alice Bridgenorth was reared under the same roof with young Peveril;
and strange to say, in the difference arising between the elder Peveril
and Bridgenorth, she also is transported to the home of relatives in a
romantic glen of the island of Man. But the course of true love was not
destined even in this little island to run entirely smooth; for the old
spirit of Bridgenorth is awakened to restore England to the greatness
of the days of Cromwell. He endeavors to arouse the same zeal in young
Peveril; he had just returned from the south of France, and had many
stories to tell of the French Huguenots, who already began to sustain
those vexations, which a few years afterward were summed up by the
revocation of the edict of Nantz. He had been in Hungary, and spoke from
personal knowledge of the leaders of the great Protestant insurrection.
He talked also of Savoy, where those of the reformed religion still
suffered a cruel persecution. He had even visited America, more
especially he said: “The country of New England, into which our land has
shaken from her lap, as a drunkard flings from him his treasures, so much
that is precious in the eyes of God and of his children. There thousands
of our best and most godly men—such whose righteousness might come
between the Almighty and his wrath, and prevent the ruin of cities—are
content to be the inhabitants of the desert, rather encountering the
unenlightened savages, than stooping to extinguish, under the oppression
practiced in Britain, the light that is within their own minds. There I
remained for a time, during the wars which the colonies maintained with
Philip, a great Indian chief, or sachem as they were called, who seemed
a messenger sent from Satan to buffet them. His cruelty was great—his
dissimulation profound; and the skill and promptitude with which he
maintained a destructive and desultory warfare inflicted many dreadful
calamities on the settlement. I was by chance at a small village in
the woods, more than thirty miles from Boston, and in its situation
exceedingly lonely, and surrounded with thickets. It was on a Sabbath
morning, when we had assembled to take sweet counsel together in the
Lord’s house. Our temple was but constructed of wooden logs; but when
shall the chant of trained hirelings, or the sounding of tin and brass
tubes amid the aisles of a minster, arise so sweetly to heaven, as did
the psalm in which we united at once our voices and our hearts! An
excellent worthy, long the companion of my pilgrimage, had just begun to
wrestle in prayer, when a woman, with disordered looks and disheveled
hair, entered our chapel in a distracted manner, screaming incessantly,
‘The Indians! the Indians!’ In that land no man dares separate himself
from his means of defense, and whether in the city or in the field, in
the ploughed land or the forest, men keep beside them their weapons, as
did the Jews at the re-building of the temple. So we sallied forth with
our guns and our pikes, and heard the whoop of these incarnate devils
already in possession of a part of the town. It was pitiful to hear the
screams of women and children amid the report of guns and the whistling
of bullets, mixed with the ferocious yells of these savages. Several
houses in the upper part of the village were soon on fire. The smoke
which the wind drove against us gave great advantage to the enemy, who
fought, as it were invisible, and under cover, whilst we fell fast by
their unerring fire. In this state of confusion, and while we were about
to adopt the desperate project of evacuating the village, and, placing
the women and children in the center, of attempting a retreat to the
nearest settlement, it pleased heaven to send us unexpected assistance.
A tall man of a reverend appearance, whom no one of us had ever seen
before, suddenly was in the midst of us. His garments were of the skin
of the elk, and he wore sword and carried gun; I never saw anything more
august than his features, overshadowed by locks of gray hair, which
mingled with a long beard of the same color. ‘Men and brethren,’ he
said in a voice like that which turns back the flight, ‘why sink your
hearts? and why are you thus disquieted? Follow me, and you shall see
this day that there is a captain in Israel!’ He uttered a few brief but
distinct orders, in the tone of one who was accustomed to command; and
such was the influence of his appearance, his mien, his language, and
his presence of mind, that he was implicitly obeyed by men who had never
seen him until that moment. We were hastily divided into two bodies;
one of which maintained the defense of the village with more courage
than ever; while, under cover of the smoke, the stranger sallied forth
from the town, at the head of the other division of New England men, and
fetching a circuit, attacked the red warriors in the rear. The heathens
fled in confusion, abandoning the half-won village, and leaving behind
them such a number of the warriors, that the tribe hath never recovered
its loss. Never shall I forget the figure of our venerable leader,
when our men, and women and children of the village, rescued from the
tomahawk and scalping knife, stood crowded around him. ‘Not unto me be
the glory,’ he said, ‘I am but an implement, frail as yourselves, in the
hand of Him who is strong to deliver.’ I was nearest to him as he spoke;
we exchanged glances; it seemed to me that I recognized a noble friend
whom I had long since deemed in glory; but he gave me no time to speak,
had speech been prudent. Sinking on his knees, and signing us to obey
him, he poured forth a strong and energetic thanksgiving for the turning
back of the battle, which, pronounced with a voice loud and clear as a
war trumpet, thrilled through the joints and marrows of the hearers. I
have heard many an act of devotion in my life; but such a prayer as this,
uttered amid the dead and the dying, with a rich tone of mingled triumph
and adoration, was beyond them all—it was like the song of the inspired
prophetess who dwelt beneath the palm-tree between Ramah and Bethel. He
was silent; and for a brief space we remained with our faces bent to the
earth—no man daring to lift his head. At length we looked up, but our
deliverer was no longer amongst us, nor was he ever again seen in the
land which he had rescued.”
This beautiful story, true to fact, and so dramatically told, comes upon
the reader with a pleasant surprise, and I have quoted it at length not
only for its intrinsic beauty, but also as it commemorates a fact in the
early history of our country. That venerable man was Richard Whalley, one
of the great soldiers of England under Cromwell, and one of the judges
who condemned Charles to the block. After the restoration he fled to
Massachusetts, and was secreted in the house of the Rev. Mr. Russel at
Hadley. It will be remembered that three of the regicides fled to this
country—Dixwell, Goffe and Whalley. Dixwell is buried in New Haven in
the rear of Center church. Goffe and Whalley are buried in Hadley. It
is claimed by some that it was Goffe instead of Whalley who came to the
rescue of the village. Scott in his notes assigns the honor to Whalley.
Returning to our story we find that affairs of great moment on the part
of the Countess call the young Peveril to London. He finds his father and
mother arrested for supposed complicity in a Romish plot. We see the city
in great excitement, heated and inflamed by the villain Oates—an episode
which Scott weaves gracefully and naturally into the warp and woof of
his story. He draws a picture of Colonel Blood, who made the well-known
attempt on the crown-jewels, a bold, resolute man, who strange to say,
after many acts of violence, lived to enjoy a pension from the king. We
see the gay Rochester, still remembered for his celebrated epigrammatic
epitaph on Charles the Second, composed at the king’s request, but too
pungent, and too true to be relished.
“Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”
We see the Duchess of Portsmouth, and many another lady of rank, who had
more regard for ancient titles than for ancestral virtues; we see George
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, a man of princely fortune and excellent
talents, tossed about in a whirlpool of frivolous pleasures, whose
character the great Dryden embalmed in vigorous lines:
“A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome;
Stiff in opinions—always in the wrong—
Was everything by starts, but nothing long;
Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”
Through the imprisonment of Julian Peveril we are made acquainted with
the Tower and Newgate—a sad picture, but somewhat relieved by Scott’s
humor in the portrait that he gives us of the well-known doughty
dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson; we see London given over to monopolies, to
stock-jobbing, and South Sea speculations; we attend a conventicle held
in a secret hall of the city, and trace a conspiracy designed to place
the Duke of Buckingham upon the throne; until our story, one of the
longest and most carefully prepared of the Waverley series, concludes
with a court scene in Whitehall, where the faithful love of Edith
Bridgenorth and Julian Peveril is announced to the satisfaction at least
of two individuals.
“Old Mortality,” our next volume, deals directly with the Covenanters
of Scotland. It will be remembered that Charles the Second, on a former
expedition into Scotland, before his restoration, had deliberately sworn
to support the Solemn League and Covenant. The Presbyterian Church, alive
to its own interests, sent an agent to General Monk, who had declared for
a free Parliament, and was on his way to London, holding as it were in
his hand the destiny of Britain. The agent sent by the Scottish Church
was James Sharpe, a man well educated, logical in mind and commanding in
character; but, false to his trust, he bartered his principles for power,
and received as the price of his infamy the title and office of Lord
Bishop of Saint Andrews, and Primate of Scotland. “The great stain” says
Scott, in his Miscellaneous Prose Works, “will always remain, that Sharpe
deserted and probably betrayed a cause which his brethren entrusted to
him. When he returned to Scotland, he pressed the acceptance of the See
of Saint Andrews upon Mr. Robert Douglas, affecting himself no ambition
for the prelacy. The stern Presbyterian saw into his secret soul, and,
when he had given his own positive rejection, demanded of Sharpe what
he would do if the offer was made to him? He hesitated. ‘I perceive,’
said Douglas, ‘you are clear—you will engage—you will be Primate of
Scotland; take it then,’ he added, laying his hand on his shoulder, ‘and
take the curse of God along with it.’ The subject would suit a painter.”
Subsequent history shows that the curse was fulfilled.
In the general joy attendant upon the restoration of Charles, the
Parliament thought that the people would submit to almost any indignity
or inconvenience. By a single sweeping resolution they annulled and
rescinded every statute and ordinance which had been made by those
holding supreme authority in Scotland since the commencement of the civil
wars; the whole Presbyterian Church government was destroyed, and the
Episcopal institutions, to which the nation had shown itself averse, were
rashly and precipitately established. Thousands of ministers, who, for
conscience sake, could not sign the Act of Conformity, were driven from
their pulpits. Mere boys and dissolute young men were hastily summoned
from schools and colleges to administer spiritual comfort to an indignant
people. The solemn league and covenant, which had been solemnly sworn to
by nobility, clergy and people, with weeping eyes and uplifted hands, ay,
sworn to by the King himself, was burned at the cross of Edinburgh by an
edict of Parliament. The Episcopal court severely punished all who left
their own parish church to attend private meetings known as conventicles.
A persecution like that of the early Christians at Rome was brought home
to the descendants of Knox and of Calvin. As the earlier Christians were
compelled to hold their meetings in caves and catacombs, so a persecuted
people, in the bright dawn of the Reformation, were compelled to fly to
the hills and heaths for a refuge, to lift up their banner in solitary
and mountain places in order to foil
“A tyrant’s and a bigot’s laws.”
Such was the state of the country at the opening of our story in May,
1679. The west of Scotland is aroused. Archbishop Sharpe is murdered in
his carriage, by a party of men, of whom Balfour of Burley is the leader.
The battle of Loudon Hill is won by the Covenanters, who increase daily
in power until a force of six thousand men are assembled at Bothwell
Bridge. Engaged in discussing church polemics, they entirely neglect
the discipline necessary for success. Without leaders or guidance they
are routed by the Duke of Monmouth. Four hundred men are killed. Twelve
hundred prisoners are marched to Edinburgh, and imprisoned “like cattle
in a fold” in the Greyfriar’s churchyard. Several ministers are tortured
and executed, and many prisoners sent as slaves to the plantations. Henry
Morton, one of their leaders, as seen in the story, is exiled. Edith
Bellenden, one of the royal party, remains true to him. He returns, after
long years of absence and military honor, and readers of fiction can
readily guess how the story terminates without reading the postscript by
the author.
Such is the rude draft of this great romance, which Coleridge pronounces
the grandest of Scott’s novels. It is, in fact, a novel that can not
be well analyzed. We could speak of Lady Margaret Bellenden, who never
forgot that Charles the Second took breakfast with her on his way to meet
Cromwell at the field of Worcester; we could speak of the good natured
Major, brave, noble, and generous; of Cuddie and his mother; ay, of Guse
Gibbie, unfortunate in all fitting regimentals; of the miserly uncle of
Henry Morton; of the cannie waiting-maid of Edith, who felt safe in the
triumph of either side, as she had a lover in both armies. The reader
will laugh and weep at these characters as he meets them in the pages
of “Old Mortality.” But it is for us to refer merely to the historical
features about which these characters are grouped; to note the ruggedness
of Scotch character, destined to triumph at last, and bring victory
out of defeat; a character which, perhaps, “shows most to advantage in
adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills,
which scorns to be biased in its mode of growth, even by the influence of
the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in
every direction, shows no weather side to the storm, and may be broken,
but can never be bended.”
In considering the motives, the ambition, the enthusiasm, or fanaticism
of these men, we might stir up controversy. We know it was their
lofty purpose to convert all England to the Presbyterian faith; and,
whenever they were lifted to power, they were quite as arbitrary as the
Episcopacy. It was true of both parties that they suffered persecution
without learning mercy. Each side felt that, in pushing its own creed,
it was doing the Lord’s work; but in this we all delight to-day, that
both sides produced brave men, tenacious of their own rights, who
struggled on until in our own generation the opposing forces have been
adjusted, and out of chaos and confusion the different systems of faith
or theology move serenely and calmly in their own spheres around one
central and enduring light—the Creator and Father of all.
The Covenanters were indeed the connecting link between the two great
revolutions, which beheaded Charles the First and exiled James the
Second; and, whatever our prejudices, or “whatever may be thought of
the extravagance or narrow-minded bigotry of many of their tenets, it
is impossible to deny the praise of devoted courage to a few hundred
peasants, who, without leaders, without money, without any fixed plan of
action, and almost without arms, borne out only by their innate zeal, and
a detestation of the oppression of their rulers, ventured to declare open
war against an established government, supported by a regular army and
the whole force of three kingdoms.”
It is sometimes claimed that Scott is over partial to Claverhouse—that
he paints the man as a hero. If so he has poorly succeeded, for I have
yet to meet a reader of “Old Mortality” who is fascinated with the
portraiture of that cruel man. Scott makes him what history declares
him to be, a cool and calculating soldier, bitter and unrelenting, a
man without faith, and with no ambition save worldly glory. It rather
seems to me on the contrary, that Scott for the time lays aside his own
traditional sentiments as he reports the burning words of these Covenant
preachers, as they paint the desolation of the Church, describing her
“like Hagar watching the waning life of her infant amid the fountainless
desert.” His poetic nature seems moved by brave men repairing “to worship
the God of nature amid the fortresses of nature’s own construction.”
There are two dramatic scenes in the volume, which can not be overlooked
or forgotten: Burley in the cave, with his clasped Bible in one hand, and
his drawn sword in the other. “His figure, dimly ruddied by the light
of the red charcoal seems that of a fiend in the lurid atmosphere of
Pandemonium striving with an imaginary demon.” The other scene reveals
Henry Morton, overpowered, disarmed, bound hand and foot, facing a clock
which, at the hour of twelve, was to strike his doom. “Among pale-eyed
and ferocious zealots, whose hardened brows were soon to be bent, not
merely with indifference, but with triumph upon his execution—without
a friend to speak a kindly word, or give a look of either sympathy or
encouragement—awaiting till the sword destined to slay him crept out
of the scabbard gradually, as it were by straw-breadths, and condemned
to drink the bitterness of death drop by drop. His executioners, as he
gazed around him, seemed to alter their forms and features, like specters
in a feverish dream their figures became larger, and their faces more
disturbed; the walls seemed to drop with blood, and the light tick of
the clock thrilled on his ear with such loud, painful distinctness, as
if each sound were the prick of a bodkin inflicted on the naked nerve
of the organ.” The maniac preacher, in an attitude of frenzy, springs
upon a chair to push forward the fatal index; the party make ready their
weapons for immediate execution, when a noise like the rushing of a brook
over the pebbles, or the soughing of wind among the branches stays the
executioners; it was the galloping of horse, the door is burst open, and
Henry Morton is saved.
* * * * *
Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength—of the
former they believe much more than they should; of the latter much less.
Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to drink out of his own
cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn and labor truly to
get his living, and carefully to expend the good things committed to his
trust.—_Bacon._