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The Abbot

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In Renaissance Scotland, Reformation ideas went to work right away in 1517 through ideas of Martin Luther. The death of vigorously anti-heretical Stuart King James V in December 1542 accelerated the rise of the Protestant (by then increasingly, however, Calvinist rather than Lutheran) cause in Scotland.

In 1820 two consciously linked novels by Sir Walter Scott were published: THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT. Between them they covered a time from the first serious challenge by Protestant Reformers to the established Catholic Church of Scotland till the unquestioned political and popular triumph of the Presbyterians. The years covered are from 1547 to 1567. The unifying theme is the growing destruction and ultimate fall of the Benedictine Monastery of St Mary's in Melrose, near Abbotsford, the country estate Walter Scott built for himself and family.

There are two particularly vivid passages in these two novels.

The first is an image of thousands of reformers tormenting a dying whale (the Roman Catholic Church).

"That ancient system ... [lay] floating like some huge Leviathan, into which ten thousand reforming fishers were darting their harpoons. The Roman Church of Scotland, in particular, was at her last gasp, actually blowing blood and water, yet still with unremitted, though animal exertions, maintaining the conflict with the assailants, who on every side were plunging their weapons into her bulky body ..." [THE MONASTERY, Ch. 31]

The second memorable passage occurs in THE ABBOT, Chapter 14, when local rowdies invade Melrose Abbey on the day its last Roman Catholic abbot is being installed. The Abbot of Unreason, whose semi-pagan role is hundreds of years old, leads in a throng of newly Presbyterian men, women and children to play unwelcome mind games with the new Abbot. They masquerade as a dragon, Saint George, a horse, a bear, a wolf and other wild animals, as Robin Hood, Little John and others.

The legitimate abbot and the Abbot of Unreason hold a dispute in which the Catholic comes close to winning over the hearts of the masqueraders (onetime secular subjects of the abbey) and making them ashamed of their blasphemies. But then a half-mad Catholic prophetess, grandmother of Roland Graeme, the novel's hero, chastises the revelers. The Abbot of Unreason moves to duck her in a pond. Her grandson sticks the crowd's leader harmlessly with a dagger through his false, padded belly. The real abbot's Protestant brother, high in the counsels of the new rulers of Scotland, arrives and restores order.

THE ABBOT then moves to successful efforts of Catholics to liberate the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots from captivity and her final ten days of freedom in Scotland before her forces are defeated by those of her half-brother, acting as Regent for Mary's infant son King James VI. Queen Mary then flees to her cousin Elizabeth I of England for sanctuary, not the wisest of moves. Elizabeth eventually had her beheaded.

The real events behind these two linked novels occurred more than two centuries before Walter Scott's life. He was therefore forced, as in IVANHOE, ANNE OF GEIRSTEIN, THE TALISMAN and other novels and poems set in the distant past to rely for his facts entirely on written records and oral traditions.

Scott's principal source on monks and nuns, now recently reprinted, was Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke, BRITISH MONACHISM or MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MONKS AND NUNS OF ENGLAND. This "antiquarian" approach forced on Scott contrasts with the more face-to-face factual basis of a good number of his historical novels beginning with WAVERLEY, when men were still living who had been participants in events, e.g. the 1745 rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and shared their recollections with young Scott.

THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT are magnificent fictional introductions to more detailed and factual histories of the coming of the Reformation to Scotland. Sir Walter Scott's characters show what it was like for people, both ordinary and noble, to be caught up in unending, bloody turmoil and their temptations, both theological and secular, to maintain or shift religious loyalties.

Read these two novels in their correct sequence. -OOO-