Rob Roy (1671-1734)

13 Jan 2017 SB6 Comments

A famous man is Robin Hood,
The English ballad-singer’s joy!
And Scotland has a thief as good,
An outlaw of as daring mood;
She has her brave ROB ROY!
Then clear the weeds from off his Grave,
And let us chant a passing stave,
In honour of that Hero brave!

The Life of Rob Roy

Each country of what now comprises the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has its famous outlaw-cum-folk hero: England has Robin Hood (sup. fl. 12^th-13^th centuries), the legendary noble robber who stole from the rich and gave to the poor; Wales boasts of Twm Sion Cati (fl. c. 1550); Ireland has the famous ‘rapparee’ Éamonn an Chnoic (sup. fl. 1670-1724). The subject of today’s blog post is the celebrated Scottish outlaw, Robert Roy MacGregor.[i]

The MacGregors were part of an ancient Scottish family, but although they were minor gentry, they began to experience financial hardship in the late seventeenth century. This was not helped by the fact that the family joined in the Jacobite Rebellion against the government in 1689, after which the family was disgraced. In order to offset some of their money troubles, during the 1690s members of the family began to extort protection money from farmers. It is for their somewhat dubious activities that criminal biographers in the eighteenth century endeavoured to present the family’s history as nothing but a history of crime and depravity:

They were not more Antient, than Infamous, for from time immemorial, they have been shun’d and detested for the Outrages they daily committed. They liv’d by Rapine, and made Murder their Diversion; and, in a Word, they seem’d emulous to monopolize all that was Wicked.[ii]

During the late 1690s and into the eighteenth century, Rob appears to have ceased his illegal activities and, under the assumed name of Campbell, bought some land and ‘thrived modestly’ trading in livestock, according to his biographer.

rob-roy-1723-main-pic — Illustration from: Walter Scott, *Rob Roy* ed. by A. Lang (London, 1829; repr. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2005).

However, the early eighteenth century was a time of Jacobite intrigue: in 1688 the Stuart King, James II was ousted from the thrones of England and Scotland because of his Catholic faith and he was replaced with the Dutch King William and his wife Mary, James’ daughter. In effect, this was a coup d’état, and there was significant opposition, especially in Scotland, to this new foreign King, in spite of the fact that Mary was related to James. At his time, Rob took to smuggling arms which alarmed the authorities because his loyalty to the new regime had never been rock solid. Yet there was nothing to link him directly, at this early period, to the Jacobite cause (Jacobite is the name given to those in the 17^th and 18^th centuries who actively fought for the restoration of the Stuarts).

It was also during the early eighteenth century when Rob’s business hit a slump, and in 1708 he was forced to take out loans from a number of local tradesmen. But a few months later when repayment was due, Rob had not got enough cash to meet the demands of his creditors. He was subsequently declared bankrupt by the Marquess of Montrose and his lands were seized. Rob, in order to escape his creditors (a debtors’ prison would likely have been Rob’s punishment), he along with some of his men retreated to the remote areas of the highlands. Although later stories attempt to attribute his downfall to one of Rob’s men absconding with his fortune:

Rob Roy’s fall was a matter of business failure, and the later tradition that it was due to a drover absconding with his money is implausible in view of the evidence that he knew months in advance that he was in trouble, and that he never himself used this as an explanation. His flight to the remote highlands, Montrose’s determination to bring him to justice, and Rob’s passionate belief that he had been wronged, however, converted an everyday bankruptcy into an epic story.[iii]

In 1713 he sought the protection of the Duke of Atholl (one of Montrose’s rivals) who granted him protection and even allowed him to continue trading on a limited scale in order to earn back some of the money he had lost through bad investments.

When George I acceded to the throne of the newly-forged Kingdom of Great Britain (previously, England and Scotland had been separate states), Rob, a nominal Jacobite, saw this as a chance to strike back against Montrose, who was a supporter of the Hanoverians. Although the Jacobites never officially welcomed Rob with open arms into their cause, but they did allow him to carry out raids on the lands of Hanoverian supporters, and no doubt he welcomed the chance to carry out raids on Montrose’s lands in revenge for his bankruptcy.

In 1715, the Jacobites began seriously plotting the downfall of the Hanoverian regime. James II had fled to France after 1688 and raised his youngest sons there. The Jacobites in France, having been in contact with their supporters in Scotland, plotted the invasion of Stuart forces. Once landed, it was hoped that the Scottish and English people would rise up in support of the Stuarts, oust the Hanoverians, and place James Stuart (James II’s son) on the throne.

rob-roy-1723 — *The Highland Rogue*. 1723. (c) ECCO

But a restoration of the Stuarts was not to be: Rob himself witnessed the crushing defeat of the Jacobite cause in 1715 at the Battle of Glen Shiel, for he had been co-opted to serve in the Jacobite forces.

As we have seen, Rob was never a loyal Jacobite, and only joined the cause as a means of getting revenge on his former antagonist, Montrose. After the battle he returned to his life of banditry, although the authorities did not concern themselves with even trying to arrest him. Rob’s lands had been forfeited to the government because he had, by allying with the Jacobites, committed treason. Montrose had, through the government’s seizure, been repaid and so no longer dedicated any effort to capture Rob.

He was pardoned in 1725 after writing a letter swearing allegiance to the House of Hanover. He then became a farmer and died peacefully in his sleep in 1734.

The Legend of Rob Roy

The incidents recorded in the life of the historic Rob Roy are pretty mundane. The details of his life are neither more nor less interesting than the various lives of contemporary criminals which circulated in print during the period that he lived. One such biography, which has been cited above, is The Highland Rogue: or, The Memorable Actions of the Celebrated Robert Mac-Gregor, Commonly called Rob Roy (1723) published while Rob was still at large.

The celebrated poet, William Wordsworth, was inspired to author a poem about Rob after he visited a grave which he presumed to have been the famous outlaw’s:

Heaven gave Rob Roy a dauntless heart

And wondrous length and strength of arm

Nor craved he more to quell his foes,

Or keep his friends from harm.

Yet was Rob Roy as wise as brave;

Forgive me if the phrase be strong;–

A Poet worthy of Rob Roy

Must scorn a timid song.[iv]

rob-roy-title-page — Title Page: Walter Scott, *Rob Roy* 1st Edn. (Edinburgh, 1818). Personal Collection.

However, perhaps the most famous reincarnation of Rob Roy was Walter Scott’s novel, Rob Roy (1818). Here the highland outlaw is a heavily romanticised outlaw: noble, brave, chivalrous, strong. The novel was phenomenally popular, with a ship leaving Leith for London containing nothing but boxes of Scott’s novel:

It is an event unprecedented in the annals either of literature or of the custom-house that the entire cargo of a packet, or smack, bound from Leith to London, should be the impression of a novel.[v]

Rob Roy was also the main protagonist in a number of Victorian and Edwardian penny dreadfuls. Modern audiences will likely be familiar with Rob Roy though the eponymous film starring Liam Neeson in 1995. Although it is not based upon Scott’s novel, the movie is, like Scott’s portrayal, a heavily romanticised account of Rob’s life: he falls victim to the scheming of an English aristocrat, his lands are confiscated, his wife is raped, and he is outlawed. Eventually, however, he kills his antagonist in a fight to the death at the end of the film.

Like so many criminals-turned-folk heroes, it is his ‘literary afterlife’ which has ensured that his story lives on, more than anything he ever actually did while he was alive.

rob-roy-pd — Aldine *Rob Roy Library* (c.1900)

References

[i] For a full biography see: David Stevenson, ‘MacGregor , Robert [Rob Roy] (bap. 1671, d. 1734)’ in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Online Edn. May 2006) [Internet <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17524> Accessed 13 Jan 2017]

[ii] The Highland Rogue: or, The Memorable Actions of the Celebrated Robert Mac-Gregor, Commonly called Rob Roy (London: J. Billingsley, 1723), p.x.

[iii] Stevenson, ‘MacGregor , Robert [Rob Roy] (bap. 1671, d. 1734)’

[iv] The Complete Poetical Works by William Wordsworth ed. by John Morley (London: MacMillan, 1888) [Internet <http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww242.html> Accessed 13 January 2017].

[v] Walter Scott, Rob Roy ed. by Andrew Lang (1829; repr. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 2010), p.69.

Walter Scott’s Influence Upon 19th-Century Medieval Scholarship

26 Nov 201526 Nov 2015 SB2 Comments

Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795) is one of the most important works in the entire history of the legend. But even more important, arguably, is Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), which is one of the major novels of the nineteenth century. The novel tells the story of how the conquered Anglo-Saxons and their conquerors, the Normans, came together in the 1190s and formed the English nation. One of the major characters in the novel is an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter named Robin of Locksley, or as you may know him, Robin Hood. In the novel Locksley embodies the free and generous spirit of Old England. But that is only fiction; there is nothing in historical scholarship to suggest that Robin Hood was a Saxon freedom fighter, or that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans were in conflict with each other after 1066, much less by the 1190s when Ivanhoe is set. Here I will examine how Scott’s fictional interpretation of the Middle Ages, in particular the notion that Robin Hood was a Saxon yeoman, influenced historical scholarship in the early-to-mid nineteenth century.

Ivanhoe Frontispiece 1830 — Frontispiece to *Ivanhoe* (1830 edition)

In 1819 when Ivanhoe was published, British society was divided. The immediate post-Napoleonic War years had brought economic depression, unemployment, rising crime, and popular political agitation for parliamentary reform. The novel itself was written in the run-up to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester where the local militia was unleashed on to a crowd of 80,000 peaceful protesters who had gathered together to campaign for political reform, killing 15 people and injuring 700 more. Scott’s purpose in writing Ivanhoe was to create a sense of shared history for his readers. It was a message for people living in the early nineteenth century which read that society did not have to be divided if everyone worked together. This is why Scott begins his novel by showing that society was racially divided:

A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of the nobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose from the consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat. The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility, by the event of the battle of Hastings, and it had been used, as our histories assure us, with no moderate hand. [1]

The eponymous character, Ivanhoe, symbolises the best of both worlds. He respects his Saxon lineage, but accepts the fact that the best future for the Anglo-Saxons will come about if the acrimony between the Saxons and the Normans is laid aside and they work together. This eventually happens in the novel, as gradually the Norman King, Richard I, works with the outlawed Saxon yeoman, Robin Hood, and the Saxon Franklin, Cedric, to reclaim his lands from the machinations of Richard’s brother, Prince John. In effect, Scott is telling readers that society does not have to be divided; everyone can and should work together; the nation came together in the past and the English can do so again.

It is fairly undisputed that, in the whole of the later Robin Hood tradition, Walter Scott’s name looms large. When the second edition of Joseph Ritson’s 1795 publication Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads was published in 1820, it was dedicated ‘To His Grace, Walter Francis Montagu Douglas Scott’. [2] The preface to this second edition makes a further reference to Scott, saying that ‘this little volume will prove peculiarly acceptable at the moment, in consequence of the hero, and his merry companions, having been recently portrayed in the most lively colours by the masterly hand of the author of Ivanhoe’. [3] By 1820 the original 1795 edition of Ritson’s work had become ‘exceedingly scarce and expensive’. [4] In effect it is Scott who rejuvenated historical interest in the old ballads of Robin Hood, for Ivanhoe initiated a reprinting of Ritson’s work, which was in reality an obscure little two-volume work for serious antiquaries.

Sir_Henry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott — Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Novels which were published later in the nineteenth century also utilise the Saxon versus Norman theme. All of these novels include an historical note as to where the authors obtained the sources for their stories, thereby trying to assert their credentials as serious novelists, no doubt. The preface to Pierce Egan the Younger’s penny serial Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, published in weekly numbers between 1838 and 1840, with a single volume edition appearing later, states in its preface that:

[Robin Hood] was the last Saxon who made a positive stand against the dominancy of the Normans […] in fact, his predatory attacks upon them were but the national efforts of one who endeavoured to remove the proud foot of a conqueror from the neck of his countrymen […] and must have been a source of constant alarm and harass to the Normans within his three counties, as well as of much uneasiness to the Governments under which he lived. [5]

The French author Alexandre Dumas in his novel The Prince of Thieves (1873), similarly states in his preface that ‘Robin Hood was the last Saxon who tried to seriously resist the Norman rule’. [6]

Not long after Egan was writing, John Mathew Gutch published another collection entitled A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode in 1847. This collection was published as an ‘attempt to throw some new light on the life and actions of this celebrated hero of English serfs, the poor and obscure of the Anglo-Saxon race’. [7] It was not only British historians, however, who believed that Robin was a Saxon hero. Gutch quotes at length from the French historian Augustin Thierry. In Thierry’s History of the Norman Conquest (1825), in a passage which is obviously inspired by Scott (of whom he was a fan), he wrote how:

The forest of Sherwood was at that time [the 1190s] a terror to the Normans; it was the last remnant of the bands of armed Saxons, who, still denying the conquest, voluntarily persisted in living out of the law of the descendants of foreigners […] About that time that this heroic prince [Richard I], the pride of the Norman barons, visited the forest of Sherwood, there dwelt under the shade of that celebrated wood a man who was the hero of the Anglo-Saxon race […] the famous brigand Robin Hood. [8]

Linking Robin Hood with the Saxons even more explicitly, Thierry goes on to state that:

It can hardly be doubted that Robert, or more vulgarly, Robin Hood, was of Saxon birth […] Hood is a Saxon name. [9]

In conclusion, it is best to reiterate the point that by the 1190s, at least, there was no enmity between the Normans and Saxons in Britain. Eighteenth-century historians make no reference to the Saxons in connection with Robin Hood. The Saxons appear nowhere, for instance, in any of the criminal biographies of the early period, and neither are they referenced in Ritson’s afore-mentioned collection of Robin Hood ballads in 1795. It is clear, then, that historians such as Gutch and Thierry have taken Scott’s interpretation of the middle ages and applied it to their own research. This speaks to Scott’s power as a novelist. When people were reading Ivanhoe in 1819, they assumed that they were getting a relatively true-to-life depiction of what life was like during the Middle Ages. The novel is littered with footnotes of various kinds directing the reader, should he like to know more upon a subject, to various manuscripts held within the Bodleian Library, or Cambridge University’s Library. Even the framing narrative which Scott deploys in Ivanhoe, his ‘Dedicatory Epistle’, is written as a quite believable debate between two antiquaries, Sir Lawrence Templeton and Dr. Dryasdust. Thus it is clear that Scott had an enduring influence, not only upon nineteenth-century fiction, but upon historical scholarship in the period also.

References

[1] Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance (3 Vols. Edinburgh: Bannatyne, 1819 repr. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1871), 3.
[2] Anon. ‘Dedication’ in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw Ed. Joseph Ritson (2 Vols. London: T. Egerton, 1795 repr. 1 Vol. London: Longman, 1820), v.
[3] Anon. ‘Preface’ in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw Ed. Joseph Ritson (2 Vols. London: T. Egerton, 1795 repr. 1 Vol. London: Longman, 1820), vii.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Pierce Egan, Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London: W. S. Johnson, 1840), i.
[6] Alexandre Dumas, The Prince of Thieves Trans. Alfred Mallinson (Paris: M. Levy, 1873 repr. London: Methuen, 1890), 1.
[7] John Mathew Gutch, ‘Preface’ in A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode with other Ancient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to this Celebrated Yeoman Ed. John Mathew Gutch (2 Vols. London: Longman, 1847), 1: iii.
[8] Augustin Thierry, ‘History of the Norman Conquest’, cited in Gutch (ed.) A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, 1: 101.
[9] Ibid.

Waverley Novel Illustrations: The Antiquary (1816)

18 May 2015 SB1 Comment

The Waverley Novels were a series of novels written by the great Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Amongst this series of novels were many which people today might recognise: Waverley (1814), The Antiquary (1816), Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819), and Woodstock (1826) to name but a few.

The images in this post have been scanned from the 1871 edition of The Antiquary. It is, in my humble opinion, one of Scott’s best.

Edinburgh University Walter Scott Digital Archive recounts the plot briefly as:

The hero, known as Major Neville, is believed to be the illegitimate son of Edward Neville, brother to the Earl of Glenallan. He meets and falls in love with Isabella Wardour in England, who, mindful of her father’s hatred of illegitimacy, rejects his suit. Under the assumed name of Lovel, he follows her home to Fairport, Scotland, meeting en route Jonathan Oldbuck, Laird of Monkbarns, a neighbour of Isabella’s father, Sir Arthur Wardour. Oldbuck, the antiquary of the title, takes an interest in Lovel who is a sympathetic listener to his learned discourses and whose misfortunes in love remind him of his own. As a young man Oldbuck had been hopelessly attached to Eveline Neville, now wife to the Earl of Glenallan. Lovel saves Sir Arthur and Isabella from drowning when surprised by the tide but is forced to leave Fairport after wounding Oldbuck’s nephew Captain Hector M’Intyre, a rival for Isabella’s hand, in a duel. In his absence Lovel distinguishes himself as a soldier and secretly rescues Sir Arthur from the financial ruin to which his reliance on his unscrupulous German agent Dousterswivel would have led him. Lovel finally returns to Fairport and is unexpectedly revealed to be the son and heir of the Earl of Glenallan (and of Oldbuck’s unrequited love Eveline). In this new guise, he wins Isabella’s hand.

It’s a decent synopsis, but doesn’t take account of the humour in Scott’s text; the antiquary, Mr. Oldbuck, a retired lawyer, is one of the most cantankerous (yet friendly) men you’ve ever met; and frequently engaging in intellectual debates with people in which he is always right. He also refers to all women as “womankind”. I sometimes think he was modeled upon Joseph Ritson, whom Scott was in contact with, and who was also a lawyer and cantankerous antiquary.