Three naked men I saw,
One to hang and one to draw,
One to feed the corbie’s maw.
— Midwinter
The nineteenth of August – exactly a week before John Buchan’s birthday – is remembered as the day the 1745 uprising began, when Charles Edward Stewart raised the Royal Standard for the Jacobite cause at Glenfinnan. Almost three centuries later, Glenfinnan is better known for its viaduct, the star of many a Harry Potter film. And that’s the way some Scots prefer it, regarding the Bonnie Prince as an embarrassment, best kept to tea towels.
Nonetheless, the Young Cavalier’s legacy still exerts a curious hold on the Scottish psyche. Invoked simplistically as Scotland versus England, Catholic versus Protestant, Highlands versus Lowlands, rural versus industrial, or Jacobite versus Hanoverian ascendancy, the ’45’s complexities are actually more a Zen than a Venn diagram. Writers have long tried to make narrative sense of the uprising’s emotional pull and political failure, from Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), via Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886), to Buchan’s Midwinter (1923). Yet while Waverley and Kidnapped remain literary touchstones, Midwinter feels like a misstep, struggling to reconcile the historical weight of the ’45 with the genre expectations of romantic adventure fiction. Why does Buchan struggle where Scott and Stevenson succeed?
Part of the answer may lie in Buchan himself. His biographer and granddaughter Ursula Buchan describes him as a ‘unionist-nationalist’,1 quoting the poem-preface to Midwinter that professes to loving:
... with equal mind
The southern sun, the northern wind,
The lilied lowland water-mead
And the grey hills that cradle Tweed.
That divided sensibility informs Midwinter and its hero, the doughty young Jacobite Alastair Maclean, latterly come o’er from France to rally Welsh and English sympathisers for the Prince’s advances on London. Alastair is strongly attracted to the naïve young Jacobite sympathiser Claudia Gravel, who runs away to marry Sir John Norreys, a secret government informant. Ultimately, Norreys is confounded with the aid of the historical figure James Oglethorpe, a Hanoverian General, who nonetheless recognises and reciprocates Alastair’s decency. Thus, Buchan deploys his favoured mix of friends who turn out to be enemies, and enemies who turn out to be friends.
Torn between his duty to the cause and protecting Claudia’s innocence, Alastair fatally delays exposing Norreys. Far too much of the novel is taken up with purple prose extolling Claudia’s virtues, and rehearsing Alastair’s inner conflict:
Claudia’s face again filled his vision, the one face that in all his life had brought love into his bustling soldierly moods and moved his heart to impulses which aforetime he would have thought incredible. Love had come to him and he had passed it by, but not without making sacrifice, for to the goddess he had offered his most cherished loyalties.
This is far from Buchan at his best. Equally unpersuasive is his portrayal of Samuel Johnson as Claudia’s tutor. This Johnson, a sentimental fatherly figure, is wholly unlike the acerbic observer we know from Boswell’s biography and from his own account of their 1773 trip to the Western Isles. Buchan’s unconvincing conceit is that he is accounting for Johnson’s supposed ‘missing years’. While this radical change of personality seems perverse, Buchan delights in deploying many of Johnson’s better known bonne-mots: ‘A man may be tired of the country, but when he is tired of London he is tired of life.’
Another favoured Buchan trope is succour born of reciprocity. Thus, the most interesting character by far is the eponymous Midwinter, a leader of the Naked Men, a fraternity of noble outsiders. At the start of the novel, Alastair rescues one of Midwinter’s young acolytes from a gamekeeper, earning the promise of aid in extremis. Thereafter, at several key points in the tale, the Naked Men ease Alistair out of a tight corner. Our anticipation of their intervention renders Alistair’s repeated jeopardy increasingly unconvincing.
At the novel’s end – spoiler alert – the Jacobites retreat north from Derby. The still-unsuspecting Claudia retires with the repentant Norreys to his estate, leaving Alastair and Johnson gripped by existential crises. Midwinter invites them to join the Naked Men:
You have been sore trampled on, sirs. One has lost a lady whom he loved as a father, and the other a mistress and a Cause. Naturally your hearts are sore. Will you that I help in the healing of them? Will you join me in Old England, which is the refuge of battered men?
Of course both refuse. Johnson, obliged by Oglethorpe to abandon an utterly implausible impulse to join the Jacobites, returns to London, and Alastair rejoins the doomed Prince.
I came to Midwinter long after devouring Buchan’s spy stories, and found myself disappointed. First published in 1923, Midwinter has none of the pace or excitement of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The bucolic English woodland settings, strongly influenced by Buchan’s estate at Elsfield in Oxfordshire, hardly lend themselves to the extended chase sequences that enliven the Hannay tales. But perhaps Alastair is not so unlike Richard Hannay: both are types of unchanging demeanour, driven by deep senses of trust, loyalty and duty, even when knowingly misplaced.
Much has been made of Buchan’s alleged anti-Semitism in The Thirty-Nine Steps, to which Ursula Buchan offers a detailed refutation. While no Jewish characters appear in Midwinter, Buchan is unrestrained in casting the duplicitous Ben the Gypsy in strongly stereotyped terms. Ben is almost the exact opposite of Midwinter: a cruel and cunning individualist, who manipulates Alastair towards a dark, watery doom. Ben’s increasingly crazed affect approaches that of Tolkien’s Gollum, coveting Alastair’s ring and referring to himself in the third person. Alastair is, of course, rescued by the Naked Men, and Ben is lost to the abyss.
In a strange plot device, Ben renders Alastair unconscious for nineteen days. This feels very much like Buchan playing catchup with his timeframe, torn between historical verisimilitude and finding enough things for his protagonists to do. Perhaps this is just as well; as it is, the characters spend far too much time telling each other the same things, much as in the novels of Buchan’s master Walter Scott: another Presbyterian Tory, perhaps even another unionist-nationalist.
Waverley, Scott’s novel of the ’45 – a colourful depiction of a superseded society that did much to restore a now-sanitised Scotland to wider British favour – makes an interesting contrast to Midwinter. Its hapless hero, Edward Waverley, has none of the driven derring-do of Midwinter’s Alastair Maclean. Rather, Edward bounces from Hanoverian to Jacobite allegiance, and back to Hanoverianism, as expediency takes him. Amongst Scott’s customary array of over-egged characters, Edward’s contrasting love interests, Rose and Flora, are both far more feisty than Alastair’s winsome Claudia.
In a plot thread that may foreshadow the relationship between Alastair and Oglethorpe in Midwinter, Edward, fighting for the Bonnie Prince at the Battle of Prestonpans, rescues the Hanoverian Colonel Talbot. When Edward is subsequently captured after the Jacobite defeat, Talbot gains him a pardon. And, in a contrasting plot thread, the Highland brigand, Donald Bean Lean, rescues Edward, but for a bribe rather than honour. I find this far more convincing than Midwinter’s disinterested aid to Alastair.
Overall, while the otiose verbiage is often tough going, Waverley’s pawky humour is far more appealing than Midwinter’s romantic soliloquies. For example, the intrigues in Donal Lean Bean’s cave increasingly resemble those of a New Town drawing room soiree. And, for all their predetermined personalities, Scott’s quirky characters are much more engaging than Buchan’s.
Stevenson’s Kidnapped, published almost slap between Waverley and Midwinter, arguably has a freshness and momentum that the other two novels lack. By setting Kidnapped in the aftermath of the ’45, Stevenson gains license to spin a good tale; the plot is framed by the backwash of the rebellion’s failure, rather than tragic, or indeed comic, anticipation of its success. The sole historical pivot is the 1752 murder in Appin of the Red Fox, Colin Campbell, an agent for the Hanoverian government.
At the start of the novel, Presbyterian prig David Balfour is kidnapped in Edinburgh by his uncle, jealous of his inheritance. Trafficked for indentured servitude on a ship bound for the Americas, David encounters the larger-than-life Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart. The subsequent mesalliance between David and Alan drives the rest of Kidnapped.
Alan Breck Stewart is a historic figure, who was long thought to have committed the Appin murder. Like Scott’s fictitious Edward Waverley, he originally enlisted in the Hanoverian army and changed sides, though after rather than before Prestonpans. Stevenson’s portrayal turns him from a thug into an attractive and engaging foil for David. After Alan is betrayed by the captain, he and David take control of the ship, which is promptly wrecked in a storm off Mull. As they make their back to Edinburgh, Alan and David witness the Appin murder, of which Alan, in Stevenson’s account, is unjustly accused. This renders them both outlaws, who must flee from the Redcoats across the wastes of central Scotland. Each now bitterly resents their dependence on the other: the headstrong Alan needs David to bear witness for him, and the ailing David needs Alan’s skills and connections to survive the harsh, unforgiving environment. Eventually, of course, they become firm friends. David is vindicated, and Alan escapes to France.
Like Midwinter, Kidnapped is light on interesting female characters, apart from the unnamed lass who, misled by Alan towards the end of the story, ferries David south back over the Forth. Still, Kidnapped, like Waverley, can be very funny. In a wonderful sequence that recalls Donald Bean Lean’s Highland fastness in Waverley, Alan and his clan enemy Robin Macgregor face off using bagpipes rather than swords. Alan, generous in defeat, concedes that: ‘Body of me! ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head!’
Stevenson untangles the ’45 through David’s first-person narrative, with his initial certainties increasingly challenged by the complexities of a chastened Scotland. This is highly effective in maintaining suspense and engagement compared with Scott’s and Buchan’s repetitive blocks of facts, however disguised as thoughts or conversations. Buchan deploys first person to equally good effect in unravelling the plots of the Hannay novels, so it is curious that he chose the authorial voice in Midwinter. Perhaps this is a nod to Scott.
I’ve recently re-read the Hannay stories, which, for all their dated attitudes, certainly stand the test of time as well as Stevenson. Midwinter, by contrast, feels like a heroic failure: a potentially strong story overburdened by the unfolding of history. Perhaps revisiting Kidnapped straight after Midwinter does Buchan a disservice. Nonetheless, even in its day Midwinter was only a modest success as a novel of the ’45, while Waverley, for all its flaws, was still widely read, as Kidnapped remains today.
