In his essay “Chivalry,” written just prior to Ivanhoe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott shows that he has far fewer illusions about the romance of chivalry than generations of his readers. Because “every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded” by our animal passions, he argues, the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages stood little chance of fulfilling their lofty union of chastity and righteous militarism: “the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentious-ness, —their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, —their generosity and gallantry into harebrained madness and absurdity” (Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6, p. 166). Chivalry, in Ivanhoe, is a form of male self-love that draws its avatars into aggressively homo-social communities such as the Templar Knights or, in the individual case of Ivanhoe, renders him unable properly to love his family, his home, or (we can guess) his wife, preferring instead the wandering life with his fellow narcissist knights. As Wamba the jester is fond of saying, knightly valour is ever the companion of the fool. Even Ivanhoe’s fascination with Rebecca can be read as an extension of self-defeating chivalric desire, of his inability to settle down. The Crusades introduced the exotic, dark-complexioned heroine to the West, and the homeward-returning knights of Ivanhoe have still not left Palestine as a dreamland of desire. According to the orientalist logic of the chivalric romance, Rowena cannot but seem disappointing to Ivanhoe after the seductions of the East, hence the perfunctoriness of his pursuit of her. Rowena might be the blond queen of Ashby, but Rebecca, for both Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, is Jerusalem itself: the irresistible but unreachable goal of the chivalric quest for whom they end up fighting each other rather than the Saracens. It would be wrong to simply equate Ivanhoe with Bois-Guilbert, however. While Ivanhoe’s desperate ride to Templestowe reinforces his militant Christian identity, Bois-Guilbert effectively renounces his knighthood on the field there. He has attempted to break out of chivalric self-love through his passion for Rebecca, and her refusing him that exit forces a kind of libidinal implosion: “yonder girl hath wellnigh unmanned me” (pp. 401-402). To this extent then, it is Bois-Guilbert, not the hometown boy Wilfred, who most represents the condition of England, which, like a spurned suitor, is suffering under a king who does not return the violent love of his people.
King Richard’s reign is more than the setting of Ivanhoe. It is, in important respects, its subject. The early nineteenth century—with its museums and new academic formations—effectively invented History, and Scott was the first writer successfully to commercialize the new nostalgia. The great majority of his nearly thirty novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, are excursions into the Scottish, English, and European past, and his enormous popularity established the historical novel as a literary genre. For the reader, this places a special importance on understanding at least the basic lineaments of the period setting. The action of the novel takes place in the summer of 1194, with King Richard still a prisoner of Leopold, duke of Austria, his erstwhile ally on the failed Third Crusade. More than a century has passed since the Norman Conquest of Britain was secured at the Battle of Hastings, and the Saxons—in Scott’s time the great colonizers of the world—find themselves a colonial outpost of the Franco-Roman commonwealth of Europe. The thirty-year reign of the great Plantagenet king Henry II had brought stability and the rudiments of rule of law to the unconsolidated British Isles, but as a Frenchman, and the ruler of considerable domains in France and elsewhere, Henry spent less than a third of his reign in England. His son Richard, called Lion-Heart, is even less attached to his island dominion. The historical Richard spoke only French and spent but a few months of his ten-year reign on English soil. He joined the Third Crusade to Jerusalem almost immediately after his accession to the crown in 1189, and was ultimately killed a decade later in Belgium, fighting one of innumerable internecine skirmishes among the Plantagenet rulers of western Europe. His last thoughts were not of England, his neglected kingdom, but of the archer who had inadvertently killed him and whom he wished to pardon. This in a nutshell is Richard, for whom the rites of chivalry meant so much more than the duties of kingship. Even his death is a personal affair between warriors, not a matter of state. It is almost fitting that the unfortunate archer was flayed alive, to show how little the fantasies of chivalric beneficence extended into twelfth-century reality. Scott, of course, rehabilitates Richard to a great extent. He bestows on him at least the desire to be a better king, but this is no less a romantic fiction of Ivanhoe than his carousing with Friar Tuck or speaking fluent Saxon.
Richard’s prolonged absence from England in the 1190s created a vacuum of power and a return to the political instability of a half century before, when the first family of Norman kings had exhausted themselves fighting a two-front war against the local population and ambitious French barons. In Ivanhoe, the ambitious rival is Richard’s own brother, John, and the embers of Saxon resistance flare once more in the shape of Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, the arch-nostalgist who dreams of a return to Pre-Norman days and the renewal, through the union of his noble cousin Athelstane with Rowena, of the ancient line of King Alfred. But if Cedric thinks in terms of ancient blood, he lives in a modern world of money. The Norman barons—those for whom the Crusades were a folly—have shown, in the absence of the King, an insatiable appetite for taxes and the extra-legal appropriation of Saxon land. Their self-aggrandizement is further funded, in turn, by the Jewish moneylenders, represented in Scott’s novel by Rebecca’s father, Isaac. Almost everyone in the novel, from Ivanhoe to Robin Hood to Prince John himself, is indebted to Isaac, whose tense and ambivalent relationship with his clients is modeled on Shakespeare’s Shylock. Like Shylock, Isaac’s representation as a gross anti-Semitic stereotype is mitigated by Scott’s evident sympathy for his suffering at the hands of Christians and, more importantly, his deep love for his daughter. It is striking that the Jews of the novel fund both the hero’s appearance at the Ashby tournament (as well as John’s production of the event itself) and heal his wounds after it. Ivanhoe’s career, we must infer, is not self-sustaining, and the chivalric ethos of beneficence and charity no substitute for responsible government. England’s condition, as a leaderless state without standard currency or centralized system of credit, is, as Scott puts it, “sufficiently miserable” (p. 84). While the knights defend their honor and prose on about the purity of their souls, it is the Jews who hold the world of Ivanhoe together. We fear for England at the novel’s conclusion when Rebecca announces that she and her father are to leave the country. By sending Isaac and Rebecca away to Moorish Spain, Scott presages the disastrous expulsion of the Jews from England a century later.