Sir Walter Scott(1771–1832)

Walter Scott was born at College Wynd in Edinburgh on 15 August 1771, the son of a Writer to the Signet. Sent as a small child to his grandfather's farm at Sandyknowe in the Borders, he grew up on the ballads of the Border country and his grandfather's tales of the past. The Borders made him: he spent the rest of his life writing back what its people had been.

He returned to Edinburgh, took the High School and the University, and passed advocate in 1792, but his deep work was already elsewhere. He rode the hill country collecting the Border ballads that became Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802 and 1803, sitting with the ploughmen and shepherds who could still recite them from memory. The Minstrelsy made his name; The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) made him the most-read poet in English.

In the summer of 1814 Scott published, anonymously, a novel he had begun ten years earlier. Waverley told the story of an English officer caught up in the 1745 rising, and it reframed what a novel could be: characters set in a historical moment researched as closely as a legal record and dramatised with the depth of a play. It sold out in five weeks. The next thirteen years produced Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward and seventeen more. The Waverley Novels invented the historical novel as a form and shaped every nineteenth-century writer from Pushkin to Hugo to Tolstoy.

The Honours of Scotland, the medieval crown, sceptre and sword of the Scottish kings, had been walled up in Edinburgh Castle in 1707 at the Union and not seen by living eyes since. In 1818 Scott led the commission that broke the seals, found the Honours intact, and put them on the public display where they have remained ever since. In August 1822 he stage-managed the visit of George IV to Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch in Scotland for over a century and a half, and through three weeks of pageantry set the modern image of Highland Scotland.

When the Ballantyne printing house in which he was a partner went down in the financial crash of 1826, Scott was left personally liable for an enormous sum. He refused to declare bankruptcy. Instead, in the years he had left, he wrote: Woodstock, the nine-volume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Chronicles of the Canongate, The Fair Maid of Perth, the Tales of a Grandfather and more, and the whole debt was paid in full from the royalties. He died at Abbotsford on the Tweed on 21 September 1832, his creditors satisfied to the last penny by 1847. No name in Scottish letters did more in one lifetime: Walter Scott invented a literary form, gave Scotland back its crown jewels and its national image, and paid every debt he owed as a matter of honour. He is buried at Dryburgh Abbey.