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cimoreneThis duology by the author of Waverley and Ivanhoe was published in 1820 and concerns the progress of the Protestant reformation in Scotland:
The Protestant Reformation famously, along with the destruction of the political power and wealth of the Catholic church as an institution, produced the physical destruction of numerous beautiful buildings and works of art: in many churches this took the form of removing statues, destroying carvings and stained glass windows, and painting over the wall paintings. But there were also many buildings that were torn down, burned, etc. This mob-violence aspect of the Reformation is presented in both novels in a way that is quite interesting, and succeeds in showing the issue's complexity, I think.
The introduction to The Monastery already warns the reader that Scott approaches the whole project from a perspective of hating Catholicism. Reading this, though, did not exactly prepare me for the prejudices of these novels. Hating the medeival Catholic church, the corrupt institution whose power had a stranglehold on Europe (and indeed much of the world) at the time of the Protestant reformation seemed like a reasonable middle-of-the-road position to me. I wasn't prepared for Scott apparently hating Catholicism:
Don't mistake me: he doesn't hate Catholic people or make them villains. But he views the entire project of struggling for Catholic control of a country to be inherently corrupt and evil, and all the people sincerely engaged in these projects are sadly deluded, or laughably illogical, if sincere. The monks in The Monastery couldn't present a more stark contrast to the monks in the Brother Cadfael novels: he has set two sincerely religious and moral, intelligent, admirable men among them, and the others, however sympathetic, are lazy, cowardly, intellectually negligble social parasites (the monastery is a feudal landowner and its monks are supported by the labor of indentured peasants, until the Protestant troops reposess its lands at the end of the first book).
- The Monastery is set in the 1550s and centers on the takeover by Protestants of the lands of Melrose Abbey (a 12th c. monastery) and the conversion to Protestantism of a fictional noble family. The family's guardian spirit, a sprite called the White Lady who speaks entirely in rhyme, interferes chaotically and helps bring about the happy ending of a romance, the conversion of the young couple and their vindication and installation in a Castle, and the downfall of the abbey. There is a lot of comedy of manners and minor adventures in this novel which I greatly enjoyed and will likely reread sometime; but the surrounding political violence is too real and chilling to go over lightly, so the mood felt uneven.
- The Abbey is a sequel about a young man adopted (sort of) and raised (for about ten years) by the couple who were united in The Monastery: a Protestant knight close in the service of the bastard half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots who was instrumental in deposing her in favor of her infant son, and his wife, the scion of the ancient and noble house of Avenel whose castle they inhabit. The book is about this youth recovering from two sets of very bad parenting and outgrowing the violence, impulsivity, pride, and petulance which resulted from them... by being sent as a representative of BOTH the Protestant government AND the Catholic conspiracy in support of Mary, Queen of Scots to Castle Lochleven where she is being imprisoned. He falls in love with the Queen's handmaiden and grows into real sympathy with the Queen, but the influence of his fosterers saves him from retribution when he assists her escape (to England, where Queen Elizabeth put her in jail and eventually executed her, but not within the scope of this novel).
Roland is a purely fictional character, but the surrounding history is real, and it's pretty good; but the fact that so much of the interest is the real people makes the protagonist feel pastede on. In short, I think there was a better book hiding in there that was simply a novelization about Mary Queen of Scots at Lochleven without an invented protagonist and definitely without the ties to the other book.
Roland is raised until about age ten by his grandmother, an authoritarian, fanatical Catholic, who doesn't tell him who his parents were for no comprehensible reason and raises him his whole life with the intention of grooming him to take part in a Catholic plot to reconquer Scotland, perhaps at the expense of his life. The book seems to realize that this was inadequate parenting but feel that she did her best and did really love him, so eh. She teaches him to be a secret Catholic as part of this training-from-infancy-for-revolution, so she is able to take advantage of the Lady of Avenel (a Protestant) wanting to adopt him ("take him on as her page"). And that's the other thing. The Lady accepts him as a young servant at an age at which it is normal to train up servants in a large noble household. But all the other boys of similar age are pages in training to be squires and knights, to fight under the banner of her husband, the knight. She's lonely and childless and he's cute, so she decides to just have him be a "page", which is odd, as pages are usually found in much grander and larger households, but is simply her excuse. And neither she and her husband nor Walter Scott seem to fully realize that this is adopting him, essentially. The other young pages in her husband's service have living quarters together and their time is fully occupied in training, but she doesn't bother to find anything for him to do or dictate his education and instead mostly treats him like a lapdog. She spoils him when he is present, but she also just sends for him and then sends him away randomly, consigning him the rest of the time to the care of servants who are jealous of his special treatment and therefore set up a system of institutionalized bullying from the time he's ten until she throws him out - and he doesn't tell her about this, conceiving that it would be tattling, which shows that he had no reason to trust she would listen to and protect him. Which she wouldn't. Her husband, meanwhile, sees all of this and does see it as abuse and bad parenting, knowing the whole time that it is going to shape his whole personality for the worst, and doesn't intervene at all because he... conceives it his wife's right to do what she wants because she's of higher nobility than him and the castle is really hers! This provides his motive for swooping in at the end and saving Roland, who is reconciled with him (and is never mad at his foster mother at all, even when she throws him out of the castle at age 17 for fighting). Saying 'for fighting' is minimizing what happens here: he's been physically bullied so intensively for so long that at age 17 he is pugnacious and quick to violence, and after picking a fight with a lower servant who doesn't have the authority to resist him he draws a dagger on the senior servant who raises fists to him in ethically correct protection of his underling. He later tries two more times to stab people in fights (in which he's wholly in the wrong) and is only saved from becoming a murderer by chance. This is a very severe character flaw! But also, I think, totally believable. In fact, the unbelievable part is that his anger management problem is curbed so completely by six months in prison with Mary Queen of Scots.
The Protestant Reformation famously, along with the destruction of the political power and wealth of the Catholic church as an institution, produced the physical destruction of numerous beautiful buildings and works of art: in many churches this took the form of removing statues, destroying carvings and stained glass windows, and painting over the wall paintings. But there were also many buildings that were torn down, burned, etc. This mob-violence aspect of the Reformation is presented in both novels in a way that is quite interesting, and succeeds in showing the issue's complexity, I think.
The introduction to The Monastery already warns the reader that Scott approaches the whole project from a perspective of hating Catholicism. Reading this, though, did not exactly prepare me for the prejudices of these novels. Hating the medeival Catholic church, the corrupt institution whose power had a stranglehold on Europe (and indeed much of the world) at the time of the Protestant reformation seemed like a reasonable middle-of-the-road position to me. I wasn't prepared for Scott apparently hating Catholicism:
the Catholic, defending a religion which afforded little interest to the feelings, had, in his devotion to the cause he espoused, more of the head than of the heart,
—The Monastery
Don't mistake me: he doesn't hate Catholic people or make them villains. But he views the entire project of struggling for Catholic control of a country to be inherently corrupt and evil, and all the people sincerely engaged in these projects are sadly deluded, or laughably illogical, if sincere. The monks in The Monastery couldn't present a more stark contrast to the monks in the Brother Cadfael novels: he has set two sincerely religious and moral, intelligent, admirable men among them, and the others, however sympathetic, are lazy, cowardly, intellectually negligble social parasites (the monastery is a feudal landowner and its monks are supported by the labor of indentured peasants, until the Protestant troops reposess its lands at the end of the first book).
