Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott's
Waverley novels, is a swift-moving historical romance that places an
anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in
seventeenth-century Scotland, in the period infamous as the `killing
time'. Its central character, Henry Morton, joins the rebels in order to
fight Scotland's royalist oppressors, little as he shares the
Covenanters' extreme religious beliefs. He is torn between his love for
a royalist's granddaughter and his loyalty to his downtrodden
countrymen.
As well as being a tale of divided loyalties, the novel is a crucial
document in the cultural history of modern Scotland. Scott, himself a
supporter of the union between Scotland and England, was trying to
exorcise the violent past of a country uncomfortably coming to terms
with its status as part of a modern United Kingdom. This novel is in
itself a significant political document, in which Scott can be seen to
be attempting to create a new centralist Scottish historiography, which
is not the political consensus of his own time, the seventeenth century,
or today.
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