Waverley

Edward Waverley

Edward Waverley is heir to Waverley-Honour, educated in dreams of chivalry but untested by anything real, and his first journey into Scotland leaves him charmed by Highland hospitality and flattered by Jacobite attention. His fatal gift is imagination: he mistakes the glamour of a cause for conviction, and lets a prince's courtesy and a chieftain's friendship sweep him past every prudential warning. His wavering is the engine of the early book, since every reader watches a decent, unformed young man drift toward a rebellion he never deliberately chose.

Fergus MacIvor

Fergus MacIvor, Vich Ian Vohr of Glennaquoich, is a Jacobite chieftain whose brain is a perpetual workshop of intrigue, and he treats Waverley's arrival as both a genuine friendship and a useful acquisition. He is brave, generous, and vain, willing to marry for alliance rather than affection and to press his sister into service as a political ornament. His restless ambition and his habit of treating people as pieces on a board give the rising its glamour and its unease, and his friendship is the thread that pulls Waverley deeper into the cause.

Flora MacIvor

Flora MacIvor is the ornament of her brother's house, admired for her beauty and her voice, and far more single-minded than either of her suitors. She loves the Stuart cause as a sacred duty rather than a career, and she will not let Waverley enlist on a moment's pique when she believes he has no real conviction to sustain him. Her refusal is the moral centre of the early romance: she is the one person who sees Edward clearly, and her honesty redirects his affections toward her gentler friend Rose.

Rose Bradwardine

Rose Bradwardine is the daughter of a scholarly, eccentric laird, and she takes a marked, unguarded interest in everything that affects Waverley, an attention he is too distracted to read. Where Flora is flame, Rose is domestic warmth, and the book quietly measures the two against each other as Edward's future. Her patient, unassuming affection matters because it represents the peaceful life Waverley keeps half-choosing and half-losing, and it gives the story its eventual emotional anchor.

Baron of Bradwardine

Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine of Tully-Veolan is an old-fashioned laird, half scholar and half soldier, whose learning is diffuse and whose loyalty to the exiled Stuarts is absolute. He is absurd in his antiquarian fussiness and touching in his honour, and his stubborn whim of settling his estate on a distant heir-male rather than his own daughter shapes Rose's prospects. He embodies the older Scotland the novel both mocks and mourns, and his household is the first place Waverley learns that hospitality and politics can be the same thing.

Sir Everard Waverley

Sir Everard Waverley is the bachelor baronet of Waverley-Honour, a man of honour and old-fashioned formality who dotes on his nephew and manages the family's Jacobite sympathies with cautious discretion. His friendship with the Baron of Bradwardine, sealed by a shared love of field sports and a shared politics, is what sends Edward north in the first place. He matters as the origin of Edward's education and the source of the family tradition that the young man will have to decide whether to honour or betray.