The Bonnie Prince of Waverly

Charles Edward Stuart
(Bonnie Prince Charlie)
Painted by Allan Ramsay

In Waverly, our hero Edward is taken captive by English forces. His family name, family history, association with known Jacobites, some papers he has on his person, and his outraged demeanor all work against him. He is put on trial for treason and is hustled away towards Stirling Castle. This is where things get interesting. Edward will need to pick sides between the English loyalists and the Jacobites. His newly found Scottish friends, like Mac Ivor and even Donald Bean Lean are certainly behind the ambush of the English troops that secures Edward’s freedom. They bring Edward to Holyrood in Edinburgh (where we will be) which was acting as the center of Jacobite military and political power and the court (illegitimate court the English would say) of Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie). Bonnie Prince Charlie has recently joined the cause, coming from France undercover to help lead the forces to restore the Stuart royal line. When Mc Ivor, who meets Edward at Holyrood, introduces Edward to the “bonnie” prince, Edward is taken with him.
    Bonnie Prince Charlie, born in Rome, and educated in French courts, is a model of aristocratic manners and refinement. Scott describes him in Waverly as “A young man, wearing his own fair hair, distinguished by the dignity of his mien and noble expression of his well-formed and regular features” (213). The prince is likewise taken with Edward, noting that there would be “no master of ceremonies necessary to present a Waverly to a Stuart” (213). It seems the prince is familiar with Waverly’s family history, and so when the prince asks Edward to join the Jacobite cause, he quickly agrees. In his “Review Essay: Sir Walter Scott,” (Romanticism 16.1, 2010 page 94-99) Christopher MacLachlan states: “Scott’s story, of how the sensitive but naive young Englishman Edward Waverley finds himself caught up in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and carried by a mixture of personal affections and political manipulation to Edinburgh, a meeting with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and participation in Jacobite victory at the battle of Prestonpans, . . . is told with a sureness and vitality that lifted the novel as a form to a new height. . . . . His perception that history can be told through characters and personal relationships transformed the idea of the past and opened it up to Romantic understanding. Edward Waverley himself is like a time-traveller, a proto-Wordsworthian avid for nature and the sublime, mediating between the reader and the period of the novel at the same time as he assures us that a new sensibility will triumph over the divisiveness of the past” (99). Like Waverly, we are seduced by Bonnie Prince Charlie, but Scott may also be telling the reader that his aristocratic ideas, like the divine right of kings, are archaic. Scott suggests it is time to look at these old divisions between the Stuart and Hanover line with reason, after all (as we are continually reminded) it has been “sixty years since.” 

 Scott, Sir Walter. Waverly; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2015.