Robin, like his chivalric counterparts, has a penchant for disguise: he is a “nameless man” who employs a quiverful of pseudonyms—Locksley, Bend-the-Bow—when venturing into the treacherous post-Conquest world of castles and tournaments. Under the canopy of Sherwood, however, he assumes the open and natural disposition of a benevolent king. His court is the great oak tree, overhanging his “throne of turf” (p. 317). Many versions of the legend represent Robin Hood as a dispossessed Saxon lord, not unlike Ivanhoe. But Scott deliberately reduces his rank to yeoman and idealizes the Sherwood gang as a community of equals over which Robin rules by consensus, not fiat. The nineteenth-century Ivanhoe spin-offs, on page and stage, mostly surrounded Rebecca. But she, along with Ivanhoe and even Richard the Lion-Heart, have virtually vanished from popular consciousness, leaving Robin Hood the most enduring character of Scott’s ensemble. If, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Ivanhoe represented to dispossessed southern planters an ideal of themselves that would never be historically realized, then Robin Hood, the depredations of Hollywood notwithstanding, remains for us a figure of muscular egalitarian democracy (robs from the rich; gives to the poor), which, combined with the environmentally friendly occupation of the greenwood by his merry men, stands as a model of human community the citizen of the twenty-first century can hope to find only on a movie screen, or in the pages of Ivanhoe.
But why does Robin Hood render up his liberty so readily to a Norman king, especially one who has done so little to deserve his loyalty? The answer brings us back to Scott’s theme of necessary mixture, but with a more conservative political inflection. It is a revealing irony that, as Scott was writing Ivanhoe, the political consensus surrounding English liberty that he evoked in the glades of twelfth-century Sherwood was under as great a threat as at any time in its history. The influx of returning soldiers to Britain in the aftermath of Waterloo, combined with years of bad harvests and crushing national debts, had brought the country to the brink. The summer of 1819 saw violent clashes between government militias and the growing urban working class concentrated in the north. Particularly notorious was the so-called Peterloo Massacre in August, in which a dozen unarmed protesters were slaughtered at the hands of the national guard. Scott interrupted his writing of the third volume to contribute a long editorial in defense of the government, and it is his often rabid conservatism in this period—as the self-appointed “laird” of his grand estate at Abbotsford—that explains his rehabilitation of King Richard in Ivanhoe, and why he places such emphasis on the automatic obeisance of Robin Hood and his men to the King. Robin’s homage to Richard drives a wedge between him and Cedric, as it does between Cedric and Ivanhoe, but Scott’s romantic inflation of the Sherwood scenes leaves no doubt as to his sympathies and the overall purpose of the novel.
In short, the key historical imperative under which Scott wrote Ivanhoe was national unity, and he imposes that unity in the novel, where all factions are brought together under the awesome figure of the king. By re-inventing Richard so regardless of the historical facts, Scott shows that his mind was as much on the standing of his own king as the reputation of the Lion-Heart. Scott had always viewed himself as descended from the lost tradition of minstrel courtiers, and it is not too much to say, in the words of his most recent biographer, that the entire “plot of Ivanhoe can be construed as an elegant compliment to the [Prince] Regent” (Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 228). Scott’s novel of King Richard’s reign was published on the eve of the first British coronation in sixty years. Mad King George III, as mentally absent from his kingdom as Richard had been in person, had finally died, and his son, heretofore Regent, belatedly assumed the throne. The new George was widely loathed for his vanity and extravagance, but Scott idolized him, and the scene in the greenwood where the homely English yeomen bend a knee to their fickle but glamorous monarch must have touched the dandy Regent’s heart. Ivanhoe, where monarchs are flawed but monarchy is the only salvation, became the new George IV’s favorite novel, and Britain’s as well. The King’s reward was fitting for one who had risen in his defense at a time of crisis. He awarded the famous novelist the first baronetcy of his reign. Thus it was that Scott, who had done so much to rescue the knights of yore from oblivion, himself became Sir Walter, a knight of the modern world, wielding a patriotic pen in place of a lance.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Australia, and came to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1992. He took his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000, and is now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of an historical novel, Hosack’s Folly (Other Press, 2005), and a cultural history of Romantic literature and art, The Shock of the Reaclass="underline" Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (Pal-grave, 2001), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart,
And often took leave,—but seem’d loth to depart!
PRIOR.
Author’s Introduction
The Author of the Waverly Novels had hitherto proceeded in an unabated course of popularity, and might, in his peculiar district of literature, have been termed l’enfant gâtéa of success. It was plain, however, that frequent publication must finally wear out the public favour, unless some mode could be devised to give an appearance of novelty to subsequent productions. Scottish manners, Scottish dialect, and Scottish characters of note, being those with which the Author was most intimately and familiarly acquainted, were the groundwork upon which he had hitherto relied for giving effect to his narrative. It was, however, obvious that this kind of interest must in the end occasion a degree of sameness and repetition, if exclusively resorted to, and that the reader was likely at length to adopt the language of Edwin, in Parnell’s Tale:1
‘Reverse the spell, ’ he cries,
‘And let it fairly now suffice,
The gambol has been shown. ’
Nothing can be more dangerous for the fame of a professor of the fine arts than to permit (if he can possibly prevent it) the character of a mannerist to be attached to him, or that he should be supposed capable of success only in a particular and limited style. The public are, in general, very ready to adopt the opinion that he who has pleased them in one peculiar mode of composition is, by means of that very talent, rendered incapable of venturing upon other subjects. The effect of this disinclination, on the part of the public, towards the artificers of their pleasures, when they attempt to enlarge their means of amusing, may be seen in the censures usually passed by vulgar criticism upon actors or artists who venture to change the character of their efforts, that, in so doing, they may enlarge the scale of their art.