Homecoming, Return and Journey's

Conclusion Homecoming, Return and Journey’s End In 1822, a year after his coronation, George iv visited Scotland, the first reigning English monarch to do so since Charles ii. The visit served two immediate pur- poses: diverting King George’s intention to engage in international diplomacy at the Congress of Verona, and addressing a groundswell of Scottish radicalism in the wake of the Radical War (or the Scottish Insurrection) of 1820. Scott, having been actively involved in attempts to quell that rioting across Scotland and now engaged to oversee his monarch’s visit, saw a means of countering the rebellious spirit seeping across Scotland. Ambitiously, in arranging the royal visit—some contemporaries, including Macauley, saw it more as an engineering—Scott sought also to effect the historical rehabilitation of the Stuart monarchy and to reinforce the then-current legitimacy of the Hanove- rian monarchy. His doing so took place against two potent historico-political backdrops: the disrepute associated with George iv’s sovereignty and the dom- inance of Whig historiography. Although George iv has ascended the throne a bare year before the proposed visit to Scotland, he had ruled over Britain in the capacity of Prince Regent for some ten years as the result of George iii’s precarious mental health. This period had seen the Prince Regent metamorphose from a handsome, romantic and popular royal figure to an obese, wildly unpopular bigamist whose poor treatment of his wife, acrimonious divorce proceedings, and gross pecuniary and sexual indecorum had alienated swathes of his subjects. At the same time, Scott had been writing his politico-historical literature against a backdrop of assertively Whig historiography. Since the publication of Hume’s History of England (1754–61)—widely although not universally considered Tory in per- spective—Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) defined the historical literary landscape, together with Whig histories such as George Brodie’s History of the British Empire from the Accession of Charles i to the Restoration (1822), which were followed some years later by Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History of England (1827) and William Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–8).1 That is to say, the royal visit occurred at a time when the interpretation of history was dominated by the Whig premise that the Glorious 1 The following scholarly works, among others, provide useful insight into the nature of Whig and Tory historiographies of that time: Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931); Jenifer Hart’s ‘Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: a Tory © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi �0.��63/978900435�780_008 <UN> 184 Conclusion Revolution heralded, in fact was, the exordium to British modern history, from which time the country had continued in progress towards measured constitutional monarchical reform and socio-political enlightenment. This historiographical presumption rested upon the idea that the period immediately prior, that of the Stuart monarchy, was one of political and civil oppression at the hands of the monarchy—what Thomas Babington Macaulay was later to term “a state of ignominious vassalage”—from which Britain had been freed only by the Whig-enabled parliamentary monarchy of William and Mary of Orange.2 Against this background, Scott was able to position the royal visit as a con- servative historiographical discourse that conflated Whig notions of historiography with Tory ones through his careful reinterpretation of George iv’s bloodline to establish his legitimacy as a Stuart king while incorporating his Hanoverian lineage. While the artificiality of such constructs horrified the (primarily) Highland purists of Scottish descent, the wider context of Scott’s recreation of Scotland in his role of the father of the historical novel (and thus, by definition, a creator of fictions around and about Scotland) defied and de- fies much of the criticism—then and since. As Anne Frey points out, “Scott simultaneously plays the roles of Scottish antiquarian and British patriot: he employs local knowledge both to celebrate Scottish history and to serve the British government”.3 It is fascinating to see Scott’s use of the King’s natural body to ameliorate radicalized aversion to his body politic, and his body politic to mitigate the damage to the sovereignty by the monarch’s natural body. Further, as Stuart Kelly notes, the interwoven nature of the monarch’s natural body and body politic encompassed the interrelations between the two dynas- ties, especially as The Fortunes of Nigel was published at the time of George iv coming to Scotland (thereby notionally completing the journey commenced by James vi in that novel).4 It is, therefore, through the topoi of homecoming, return and journey’s end that Scott enacts the historical rehabilitation of the Stuart monarchy and the espousal of the then-contemporary Hanoverian monarchy’s legitimacy. To that end, as Gottlieb points out, in organizing the ‘King’s Jaunt’ Scott was faced with the challenge of “construct[ing] a British identity, [and] also the dilemma of Interpretation of History,’ Past & Present, 31 (1965), 39–61; and Ernst Mayr’s ‘When is Histori- ography Whiggish?,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 301–9. 2 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James ii, Vol 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 1. 3 Anne Frey, British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 88. 4 Stuart Kelly, Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010), 228. <UN>.

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