Awhile ago we saw Rob Roy (1995), and looking for something to read, I brought Scott's novel on the plane over to Paris. The thing about historical movies is that I always wonder if they're getting it wrong. In the case of this one, I was betting there was neither a sexual molestation of a servant girl or a rape in Scott's novel. In fact, the novel isn't really about Rob Roy at all. There is some basis for the movie, though much of it is invention. In his Introduction, Scott says that after Rob Roy, aka Rob MacGregor, lost the money the Duke of Montrose lent him:

He appears at this period first to have removed from his ordinary dwelling at Inversnaid, ten or twelve Scots miles (which is double the number of English) farther into the Highlands, and commenced the lawless sort of life which he afterwards followed. The Duke of Montrose, who conceived himself deceived and cheated by MacGregor's conduct, employed legal means to recover the money lent to him. Rob Roy's landed property was attached by the regular form of legal procedure, and his stock and furniture made the subject of arrest and sale.

It is said that this diligence of the law, as it is called in Scotland, which the English more bluntly term distress, was used in this case with uncommon severity, and that the legal satellites, not usually the gentlest persons in the world, had insulted MacGregor's wife, in a manner which would have aroused a milder man than he to thoughts of unbounded vengeance. She was a woman of fierce and haughty temper, and is not unlikely to have disturbed the officers in the execution of their duty, and thus to have incurred ill treatment, though, for the sake of humanity, it is to be hoped that the story sometimes told is a popular exaggeration. It is certain that she felt extreme anguish at being expelled from the banks of Loch Lomond, and gave vent to her feelings in a fine piece of pipe-music, still well known to amateurs by the name of "Rob Roy's Lament."

In Chapter Twenty-six, the magistrate or "Bailie" hints at something, saying of Rob's wife,

they say his wife was turned out o' the house to the hill-side, and sair misguided to the boot. Shamefu'! shamefu'!---I am a peacefu' man and a magistrate, but if ony ane had guided sae muckle as my servant quean, Mattie, as it's like they guided Rob's wife, I think it suld hae set the shabble that my father the deacon had at Bothwell brig a-walking again.

Yeah, the dialect is a little much. By the way, Mattie is one of 3 fairly strong-willed women, and though merely a servant, marries up. So much for the oppressed servant class that the movie wants to show us.

In Chapter Thirty, the narrator finally sees Roy's wife for the first time:

I have seldom seen a finer or more commanding form than this woman. She might be between the term of forty and fifty years, and had a countenance which must once have been of a masculine cast of beauty; though now, imprinted with deep lines by exposure to rough weather, and perhaps by the wasting influence of grief and passion, its features were only strong, harsh, and expressive. She wore her plaid, not drawn around her head and shoulders, as is the fashion of the women in Scotland, but disposed around her body as the Highland soldiers wear theirs. She had a man's bonnet, with a feather in it, an unsheathed sword in her hand, and a pair of pistols at her girdle.

"It's Helen Campbell, Rob's wife," said the Bailie, in a whisper of considerable alarm; "and there will be broken heads amang us or it's lang."

"What seek ye here?" she asked again of Captain Thornton, who had himself advanced to reconnoitre.

"We seek the outlaw, Rob Roy MacGregor Campbell," answered the officer, "and make no war on women; therefore offer no vain opposition to the king's troops, and assure yourself of civil treatment."

"Ay," retorted the Amazon, "I am no stranger to your tender mercies. Ye have left me neither name nor fame---my mother's bones will shrink aside in their grave when mine are laid beside them---Ye have left me neither house nor hold, blanket nor bedding, cattle to feed us, or flocks to clothe us--- Ye have taken from us all---all!---The very name of our ancestors have ye taken away, and now ye come for our lives."

Then in Chapter Thirty-two, the narrator quotes MacGregor on his wife:

'...my Helen's an incarnate devil when her bluid's up---puir thing, she has ower muckle reason," and "naebody will deny that Helen MacGregor has deep wrongs to avenge."

In Chapter Thirty-five, the narrator meets Helen MacGregor again, and she presents him with a token from Diana Vernon, the woman with whom he is in love:

"...It is not such hands as these," and she stretched forth her long, sinewy, and bare arm, "that are fitting to convey love-tokens, were the gift connected with aught but misery. Young man," she said, presenting me with a ring, which I well remembered as one of the few ornaments that Miss Vernon sometimes wore, "this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were---Let him forget me for ever."

"And can she," I said, almost without being conscious that I spoke, "suppose that is possible?"

"All may be forgotten," said the extraordinary female who addressed me,---"all---but the sense of dishonour, and the desire of vengeance."

Wow. What a tragic heroine; there's only a little of that in the movie, which tones it down to have a happier tone. By the way, the fact that Diana is yet another strong-willed woman shows that they existed even in the early 1800's, or at least that Scotty had a thing for them; I don't remember his other novels well enough to say if that's a fetish for him.

But after all that, I find, according to Alexander May,

It is said that Rob's wife Mary was raped and branded when the soldiers carried out the eviction.

And finally, on another note, I came across this curious argument from the World of books:

Having just finished a large book about the Victorians, I was struck by how extraordinarily Rob Roy predicts and foresees the whole tragedy of 19th-century capitalism...

Rob Roy and the Bailie are two completely real figures, but they are the embodiments, also, of two different ways of life. It is in Glasgow, so thoroughly the commercial capital of Scotland and so close to the wild lands of Argyll and the Western Isles, that the polarity is first felt. Scott with his sharp political antennae could see that commerce, trade, and the ideals of Adam Smith were going to change the world for ever.

He saw that this process had begun even before the industrial revolution, and that it would lead to an eternal conflict between the old "heroic" way of life, and the modern world in which the Market had no respect for kings, or for tradition...

When Frank encounters the behaviour of the rebels, however, and in particular when he witnesses the execution of Morris the spy, at the merciless behest of Helen Macgregor (Rob Roy's wife) his sympathies shift, and so do ours. Scott foresaw - to this extent you could say that Rob Roy was the first great 9/11 novel - that the "heroic" way of life, when threatened, very quickly turns to ugly violence.

It is because they are doomed that they turn to murder.

As this writer says, though the magistrate is something of a caricature, it's nice to see capitalists portrayed as decent people (what a concept!)

Miscellaneous notes: I suppose one could find a cad and a dad type in this novel; and Rob Roy may have been a traitor. I should point out that while never calling him a traitor Scott himself is ambivalent about Rob Roy's virtue.