‘The Abbotsford Family’ by Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841), painted in 1817. The painting sets Sir Walter Scott in the centre, with his daughter Sophia (1799-1837) to his right with a wooden pail balanced on her head, and other members of his family. The following year, on February 5th, 1818, Sir Walter took Sophia to Edinburgh Castle to view the Honours of Scotland, an experience which changed their relationship for the better and felt to Sophia like a coming of age. Two years later, in April 1820, Sophia married John Gibson Lockhart, who became Sir Walter’s biographer as well as his son-in-law.
Introduction
In 1817, the Prince Regent appointed a Commission to search the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle for records of Scotland’s crown jewels, unseen since the Act of Union in 1707. Sir Walter Scott had been a prime mover in the campaign and was one of the Commissioners, but not all his fellows felt the sacredness of their quest.
THE time now approached when a Commission to examine the Crown-room in the Castle of Edinburgh, which had sprung from one of Scott’s conversations with the Prince Regent in 1815, was at length to be acted upon; and the result was the discovery of the long-lost regalia of Scotland.* Of the official proceedings of the 4th Feb. 1818, the reader has a full and particular account in an Essay which Scott penned shortly afterwards;* but I may add a little incident of the 5th.
He and several of his brother Commissioners then revisited the Castle, accompanied by some of the ladies of their families. His daughter Sophia told me that her father’s conversation had worked her feelings up to such a pitch, that when the lid was again removed, she nearly fainted, and drew back from the circle. As she was retiring, she was startled by his voice exclaiming, in a tone of the deepest emotion, “something between anger and despair,” as she expressed it, “By G—, No!”
Everyone knew that Scotland’s crown jewels had been stowed away in the Crown Room of Edinburgh castle in 1707, after the two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, which Queen Anne had inherited from her great-grandfather James VI of Scotland and I of England, had been merged into one Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. What they did not know was whether the chest containing them was still there, and if it was, whether the crown, sceptre and sword were still inside it.
See The Honours of Scotland for an extract, and for Scott’s whole essay see ‘Description of the Regalia of Scotland’.
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