dust” historians, and even provides a fictional source for his tale, an Anglo-Norman manuscript belonging to Sir Arthur Wardour, himself a character in one of Scott’s earlier novels. As far as literal historical truth in the novel is concerned, we should take Scott’s prefatory follies to heart, and take an expansive, “romantic” view.
But this is not to say we should not take the historical lessons of Ivanhoe seriously. Scott’s most acute critic, Gyorgy Lukacs, extends the argument of Scott’s preface to challenge all those readings of the novel that equate its historical pastiche with shallow theatricality or, in the common phrase of contempt invented for Scott, mere “tushery.” “Scott’s greatness,” declares Lukacs in his seminal work The Historical Novel, “lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types… [his] way of presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of history” (p. 35). Scott’s choice of historical subject is never accidental, far less ornamental. Heroes such as Ivanhoe or Edward Waverley might think of themselves romantically, but they are not themselves romanticized. Both are examples, says Lukacs, of Scott’s distinctly modern “middling” heroes, whose imaginations far outstrip their real achievements. After his flirtation with the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Waverley retreats to his safe English estate and the bland anonymity of an English gentleman. Ivanhoe likewise has his day of glory at Ashby, only to recede thereafter into pale ineffectuality. His behavior during the battle for Torquilstone—where, from his sickbed, he encourages Rebecca’s lurid commentary on the fighting—is particularly pathetic, like a rabid sports fan shouting at the television. Then, when his spirit finally revives for the showdown with Bois-Guilbert at Templestowe, Scott denies his hero the crowning chivalric deed he so desperately desires. Ivanhoe does not so much as scratch his Templar foe: Bois-Guilbert merely self- destructs.
For Lukacs, Ivanhoe’s chivalric failures should not be confused with a literary failure by the novelist. Scott’s cool description of King Richard as “brilliant, but useless” could apply equally to Ivanhoe, and typifies the realism of his treatment of individual characters. It is this ironic detachment that appears “modern” to us when reading Ivanhoe. Scott reserves his romantic nostalgia not for people but for periods, for “the ruination of past social formations” (p. 55). In other words, Scott de-emphasizes his hero in Ivanhoe in order to bring into clearer focus his true subject: the transformation of medieval Saxon society as expressed in popular life, through its living participants. Scott’s famous detail-work-the clothes, the food, the scenery—is thus more than simply “color,” more than a mere screen of dubious authenticity: It is the raw material of a fully realized historical scene through which his thinking, feeling characters move, and though they rarely appear to us as real in the modern, psychologically detailed sense (Bois-Guilbert is the notable exception), they fulfill Scott’s purpose as vivid social beings, as genuine spirits of the age.
The novel opens amidst the ruins of one social formation, Saxon feudalism, and observes the embattled progress of its Anglo-Norman successor. Neither Cedric, with his fixation on Athelstane and Saxon restoration, nor the rapacious French barons and their scheming leader, Prince John, come off well. Front de-Boeuf, the blackest Norman villain, is both a serial rapist and a parricide, and the death-chant of his aged Saxon concubine, Urfried, is the most graphic indictment of Norman brutality in the novel (as well as its most unreadable scene: Scott’s melodramatic staging of the fall of Torquilstone has not aged well). With both the established Saxon and Norman orders subject to stringent critique, Scott reserves his considerable romantic sympathies for a third, marginal group, who live literally in the shadow of the greater Saxon-Norman struggle, in the arboreal gloom of Sherwood. Scott never fails to describe Sherwood—the quintessential English redoubt, the fabled greenwood of Shakespeare—with real poetry. It is a place, both symbolic and real, over which neither Saxon lord nor French knight can claim dominion: “The travellers had now reached the verge of the wooded country, and were about to plunge into its recesses, held dangerous at that time from the number of outlaws whom oppression and poverty had driven to despair, and who occupied the forests in such large bands as could easily bid defiance to the feeble police of the period” (p. 191). The chief outlaw is, of course, Robin Hood. Borrowed from folk legend, the merry men of Sherwood serve multiple trans-historical functions. Their stable self-government is designed to express a primordial English form of natural justice, while their undemonstrative decency and industry look forward to the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. Robin’s Sherwood is a primeval world, a fantasy of yeoman England that is the most romantic and least historical aspect of the novel. But in its idealization of Robin of Locksley, Ivanhoe adheres to, and in fact did much to sustain, the grand historical narrative of English liberalism, which traces its roots from the Magna Carta of 1215, to the creation of a uniquely British “mixed monarchy” in the bloodless revolution of 1688, to the Reform Bill of 1832. Robin Hood, so the story runs, is the reason England never needed a French Revolution. The outlaws of the greenwood will prevail over the course of the centuries, subtly subduing the hot blood of French tyranny and breeding the soul of English liberty in its stead. As such, the merry men’s disciplined performance during the attack on Torquilstone Castle speaks more to England’s recent triumph over the French on the field of Waterloo than to any realistic evocation of the rude Saxon-Norman struggles of the Middle Ages. The band of outlaws comports itself like a modern professional army. As Front-de-Boeuf tells his skeptical fellow Norman, Maurice de Bracy, when he shows contempt for the force advancing on Torquilstone, “Were they black Turks or Moors, Sir Templar… but these are English yeomen, over whom we shall have no advantage” (p. 243). Once Norman fanaticism has exhausted itself, Scott implies, it is these steady outlaws who will inherit England as its sensible and fair-minded middle class, and provide its sons as soldiers for her defense.
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).
