Scott, in a much-quoted comment to his friend J.B.S. Morritt, expressed a low opinion of the hero of his first novel. Edward Waverley, the author of Waverley declared, was ‘a sneaking piece of imbecility’.1 One of the more extraordinary aspects of Waverley’s imbecility is that – as far as one can make out from the account given in the narrative – he wanders through the battlefields of the great 1745 Rebellion offering as little danger to his English foe as a dormouse in a tiger’s cage. Take, for instance, the highpoint in Chapter 47 (‘The Conflict’), which describes the Battle of Prestonpans in which the Scottish forces (under whose flag Waverley now fights, although he is still technically an officer of the English crown) won a famous victory, suggesting that they might indeed overrun England and restore the Stuarts to the throne. For the English military, Prestonpans was a chilling reminder of how formidable highlanders were in hand-to-hand engagement. The English commanders fondly thought that the bare-legged barbarians would be so overwhelmed by the novelty of artillery, that they would turn tail in fear when the first shells and cannon-balls exploded among them. Instead, the Scots flanked their static English foe and fell on them with cold steel. As Burton’s History of Scotland records:

Waverley’s conduct on the field at Prestonpans is less than bloodthirsty. Observing among the mêlée an English officer ‘of high rank’, he is so struck by ‘his tall martial figure’ that he decides ‘to save him from instant destruction’ (Chapter 47), going so far as to turn the battle-axe of Dugald Mahoney, which is about to descend on Colonel Talbot’s head. Waverley, who evidently has a keen eye for insignia of rank, then perceives another English colonel in trouble. ‘To save this good and brave man became the instant object of Edward’s anxious exertions’. But try as he does, again apparently impeding his own sworn comrades from their business of killing Englishmen, he can only witness the death of his former commander Colonel Gardiner and suffer his withering et tu, Brute? look.

What on earth, one wonders, is Waverley doing on this battlefield, scurrying around trying to save enemy officers from being killed? The reader is not helped by Scott’s account of the battle which is remarkably patchy and vague (the event is ‘well known’, the narrator says by way of excuse: Chapter 47). Yet, we later learn, the Chevalier ‘paid [Edward] many compliments on his distinguished bravery’ (Ch. 50). After the battle Fergus informs Edward that ‘your behaviour is praised by every mortal, to the skies, and the Prince is eager to thank you in person; and all our beauties of the White Rose are pulling caps for you’. Captain Waverley is a Scottish hero – what does this mean but that he did great slaughter among the enemy? After the battle, we are told, the field is ‘cumbered with carcases’ (Ch. 48). Fergus, who is a fire-eater and a merciless warrior; would hardly praise Edward for saving his former English comrades from destruction. ‘You know how he fought’ (Ch. 52), Rose later reminds Flora. Would that we did.

From the lustre which attaches to him after the battle, we have to assume Edward did at least a fair share of killing. But Scott’s evasive narrative begs the question: did Waverley kill any Englishmen? Did his sword pierce and skewer English guts? Did he cut English throats or cave in English skulls? Did he so much as draw a drop of English blood? Soldiers on battlefields have only one mission – to kill the enemy. Either Edward Waverley is the most incompetent warrior who ever lived or – still bearing the English king’s commission – he killed the English king’s men.

Scott was clearly in a personal dilemma in this, all-important, aspect of his hero’s military exploits. The king’s commission which he himself held as a captain in the Edinburgh Light Cavalry was the most treasured possession of Scott’s manhood, more dear to him by far than his being laird of Abbotsford or ‘the author of Waverley’.3 When, a few months after his novel’s triumph, he visited Brussels and the field at Waterloo, it was in his cavalry officer’s uniform that Captain Scott chose to be presented to the Tsar of Russia (it led to an unfortunate misunderstanding when the potentate assumed the novelist had been wounded in the recent battle – Scott had, in fact, been lamed from childhood by polio). Scott, the serving officer, would have been nauseated by the idea of Edward’s killing fellow holders of the king’s commission – it would have been a treachery deeper than Judas’s. Other ranks – ‘erks’, ‘PBI (‘poor bloody infantry’), ‘grunts’: they have always attracted names testifying to their subhumanity – were something else altogether. What Scott intimates by highlighting Edward’s stout protection of his fellow (English-Hanoverian) officers in their extremities of danger on the battlefield is that his killing (for which he had his due of fame among the Stuart ladies) was reserved for the English other ranks – those uncommissioned, unregarded, private soldiers and NCOs who have always been treated by their commissioned betters as expendable battle-fodder. In Waverley they are of no more account than the horses who die on the battlefield or the crows who peck at the corpses. Yes, the perceptive reader apprehends, Waverley did indeed spill English blood and a lot of it – but it was not blue blood. Had it been, his head might well have joined Fergus’s on the pikes at Carlisle.

Notes

1. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (London, 1932–7), iii. 478–9.

2. John Hill Burton, The History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the Last Jacobite Insurrection, 1698–1748, 2 vols. (London, 1853), ii. 463.

3. See Chapter 7 of Lockhart’s Life of Scott.