Sir Walter Alva Scott was born on August 15, 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Scott created and popularized historical novels in a series called the Waverley Novels. In his novels Scott arranged the plots and characters so the reader enters into the lives of both great and ordinary people caught up in violent, dramatic changes in history.
Rob Roy is set against the backdrop of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, which aimed to restore the Stuart monarchy in the person of James Edward, the ‘Old Pretender’, son of the deposed James II. The tale is told in the first person by a young Englishman, Francis (‘Frank’) Osbaldistone. A would-be poet, Frank falls out with his father, William, due to his reluctance to enter the family business. Frank is sent north to Northumbria to stay with his Jacobite uncle, Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistone, and his place in William’s counting house goes to Sir Hildebrand’s scheming son Rashleigh. Frank falls in love with Sir Hildebrand’s niece, Diana Vernon who lives in Osbaldistone Hall. Her father Sir Frederick, a proscribed Jacobite, lives there too in the guise of a monk, Father Vaughan.
