Queen Victoria’s visit to Abbotsford in 1867

It was Queen Victoria who really began the Royal Family’s love affair with Scotland. Though it was the visit of her uncle, George IV, in 1822 that served as the pathfinder, it was Victoria who forged the bond that remains strong today.

Sir Walter Scott is in no small part responsible for adding fuel to the fire of this enduring relationship between monarch and country. In 1822 he had been a major part of the planning of the King’s visit, the first by a reigning British Monarch since Charles II in 1651. Scott had attended George’s spectacular coronation the previous year, and having experienced the king’s taste for pageantry and the theatrical, was well placed to deliver the goods in terms of stage management. The result was a triumph in tartan, not a Scotland created by Scott, but curated by him. Scott knew exactly who he was dealing with, and provided the king with highlanders and pipes aplenty. He chose to place emphasis on a romanticised version of a Scotland, noble and sentimental, tinged with the trappings of Jacobean chivalry from a generation or more before. In short, a Scotland more akin to that found in his historical fiction. The famous portrait of the king in highland dress is perhaps the marker of Scott’s success.

It was this Scotland, Scott’s romanticised highland Scotland, that so enticed Queen Victoria. Her own journal mentions the works of Scott that she is reading, ‘Rokeby, a beautiful poem by Sir Walter Scott’, in 1836 and, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor, the first novel I have ever read’, in 1838. On her first visit to Scotland in 1842, she used Scott’s work as a proto-guidebook for her tour, reading The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Lady of the Lake and Marmion over the course of her time here. Scott’s work shaped her view of Scotland, and it was this version of Scotland that she most wished to see.

Those she visited indulged her, and tartan, pipes and highland pageantry were prevalent wherever she went. Her first piper, Angus Mackay, was engaged by the Royal Household in July 1845 and the trip to Scotland became an annual affair from 1847. It was the following year that the family first stayed at Balmoral, before purchasing the property outright in 1852 and commencing work on a new castle on the site, inspired by the Scottish Baronial style that Walter Scott had pioneered at Abbotsford.

 From the 1850s, they initiated a programme of plantations just as Scott had done in the Scottish Borders. Balmoral was to be a treasured second home for the Royal family, and remains so into the modern era.

Given the Queen’s affinity with the Wizard of the North, and the regularity of her excursions north of the border, it is perhaps surprising that it was not until 1867, thirty-five years after Scott’s death that she chose to visit Abbotsford. She took the opportunity for a brief detour to the Borders on her way to Balmoral, and travelled by train, the great arterial network that had opened Scotland to travellers from across the country. She stayed at Floors Castle, the home of her friend and Lady in Waiting, Susanna, Duchess of Roxburghe, and arrived to great ceremony in Kelso on the afternoon of 21^st August, the Queen’s journal gives great detail on proceedings.

‘The little town of Kelso is very picturesque & there were triumphal arches & no end of pretty mottos. A beautiful morning, & very mild. On the Market Place, the carriage stopped for on Address to be presented & a little girl was held up to give me an enormous bouquet. There were immense & cheering Crowds up to the very Park gates, where the old Sheriff aged 85 was presented.’

Having spent the night at Floors Castle, the Royal party arrived at Abbotsford, in the company of the Dukes of Buccleuch and Roxburghe and having visited Melrose Abbey on the way, on the afternoon of 22^nd August. In her journal, she quotes The Lay of the Last Minstrel when she tells of standing by the tomb of Alexander II at the Abbey, "They sat them down on a marble stone, A Scottish monarch slept below".

She begins her brief section on the Abbotsford visit with mentioning that her host, James Hope-Scott, had lost his wife, the only surviving grandchild of Walter Scott. She met the only surviving descendant of the great man, the 15 year old Mary Monica, whom she describes as ‘a pretty girl of 11’.

She then goes on to describe the rest of her visit.

‘They only showed us the part of the house in which Sir Walter lived. In the Drawing room there is still the same furniture & carpet. In the Library we saw his M. S. of "Ivanhoe", several others of his Novels & Poems, all written in a beautiful handwriting, with hardly any erasures, & also the relics which Sir Walter had himself collected. His study, is a small dark room with a little turret, in which is a bronze bust done from a cast taken after death. There we saw his Journal, into which Mr Hope Scott asked me to write my name, which I thought hardly right. Went through same passages & into 2 or 3 rooms, where were collected fine pieces of old armour, &c & where in a glass case, are preserved Sir Walter's last clothes. We ended by going into the Dining room, in which he died, where a formal long table, was set out with tea.’

The Journal of James Hope-Scott adds the detail that the tea taken by the Queen in the Dining Room at Abbotsford included her nibbling on a Selkirk Bannock, which was a great Royal endorsement of the bakers of the Borders!

This visit was the culmination of the Queen’s relationship with the work of Sir Walter Scott, a relationship which has had great ramifications for the Royal family’s affinity for Scotland though not, perhaps, for the humble Selkirk Bannock!