Several years ago, political science professor Greg Weiner surveyed our political landscape and asked, “What space is left for prudence?” It’s a good question: at a time marked by major political division, when neither political party can garner an enduring majority, and after a summer punctuated by two plots on a former president’s life, the ancient virtue of prudence seems impracticable. To many Americans, it may be known less as a virtue than as a punchline from Dana Carvey’s impression of President George H. W. Bush. Would we even know it when we see it?

　　A useful literary guide to prudence is Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet, published 200 years ago. Set in the mid-eighteenth century, Scott’s nineteenth novel depicts the fictional final throes of the Jacobites and the vindication of a civilized regime based on the rule of law. Whereas many of Scott’s novels feature famous scenes of duels or battles, this one is notably subdued in its action, in large part because it shows how an established regime can instill order and peace in a pluralistic society fraught with tension. Scott shows us that while prudence can be used as an excuse for cowardice and inaction, it can also be an important tool for establishing credibility among diverse groups and demonstrating confident power.

　　Prudence, as Aristotle famously described it, is being “able to deliberate nobly about things good and advantageous for himself, not in a partial way … but about the sorts of things conducive to living well in general.” It is “bound up with action, accompanied by reason, and concerned with things good and bad for a human being.” Or, as Thomas Aquinas put it more succinctly, prudence is “right reason applied to practice.” Edmund Burke praised it as “the first of all virtues” and “the god of his lower world.” Although it is not a uniquely political virtue, a good statesman has it in abundance. Russell Kirk contrasted “prudential politics” with “ideological politics.” Whereas the ideologue “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature,” the former recognizes the limits of what government can do: “To be ‘prudent’ means to be judicious, cautious, sagacious. … A prudent statesman is one who looks before he leaps; who takes long views; who knows that politics is the art of the possible.” Unlike an ideologue, who makes “political compromise impossible,” a prudential politician “is well aware that the primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace. This can be achieved only by maintaining a tolerable balance among great interests in society.”

　　The tolerable balance among interests is crucial to Redgauntlet, which like many of Scott’s novels is set at a time of great social change and political tension—although, unlike most of them, its action revolves around a historical event that never happened. Scott takes us to lowland Scotland during the 1760s, as the nation moves on from the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 and becomes more commercial, more peaceful, and more integrated into the United Kingdom. While this setting would not qualify as diverse under a modern DEI regime, it teemed with conflicting perspectives: Jacobites and Hanoverians; Catholics, Presbyterians, and Quakers; Whigs and Tories; outlaws and bootleggers. The novel’s main character is Darsie Latimer, a romantic young man of mysterious origins who, having received a large inheritance, abandons plans for a legal career and instead travels “for exercise and amusement.” The novel begins as a series of letters between Darsie and his good friend Alan Fairford, who unlike Darsie has decided to pursue the law. In the initial letters, the two men tease each other playfully about their respective habits, inclinations, and tastes in women. But the exchanges become serious when Darsie relates his encounters with a stern and mysterious man known alternately as Herries of Birrenswork and Ingoldsby. “Alan,” writes Darsie, “there is something terrible about this man.” He’s right. Herries is in fact Redgauntlet, a notorious fugitive of the ’45 Jacobite Uprising who is plotting another attempt to return the Stuarts to the throne. He also knows a secret about Darsie’s past that could make the young man a valuable tool in his Jacobite plot, so he kidnaps him. Alan learns of his friend’s danger and, risking his own legal career, leaves Edinburgh to rescue Darsie.

　　As that sketch makes clear, Redgauntlet himself does not exercise prudence. He is angry, impulsive, and doomed. Not only does he kidnap Darsie, he also leads a riot against rival fishermen. Nor, for that matter, can Darsie be described as prudent: his recklessness during his travels makes him vulnerable to the title character’s scheming. Imprudence is also personified in the comic figure of Peter Peebles. A litigious man who pursues a doomed lawsuit for decades, Peebles represents a non-violent, bourgeois version of Redgauntlet’s unyielding purpose. But the novel is more than a demonstration of prudence’s absence. Scott shows how prudence can be exercised—or evaded—through a series of scenes involving representatives of the government deliberating how to handle the tensions caused by competing political interests.

　　In the first of these scenes, Darsie pleads before a magistrate to escape the grip of Redgauntlet; but this magistrate, Justice Foxley, exhibits what Burke called “a false, reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear.” Neighbors with Redgauntlet (whom he knows by the name of Ingoldsby), Foxley is sympathetic to his claim that he is the young man’s legal guardian; Darsie has no hope for a fair hearing. The situation changes, however, when Foxley learns that his neighbor is actually a notorious Jacobite, and that there is an arrest warrant for his involvement in a recent riot. Redgauntlet argues that it would be foolish to have the government, “at the distance of so many years … should trouble [itself] about the unfortunate relics of a ruined cause.” After all, it was widely known that he was “living at large,” yet “no English magistrate has been ungenerous enough to trouble a gentleman under misfortune, on account of political opinions and disputes which have been long ended by the success of the reigning powers.” In response, Foxley acknowledges that in social contexts, “it was … neither my business nor my wish … to inquire into and dispel the mysteries which hung about you.” The problem, though, is that the warrant for Redgauntlet relates not the uprising of ’45, but (as he puts it in his characteristically halting manner) “with—ahem—taking advantage of modern broils and heart-burnings to renew our civil disturbances.” That new violence changes the calculation of prudence and Foxley resolves, “I must—ahem—do my duty” by arresting Redgauntlet.

　　As his awkward elocution indicates, Foxley is uncomfortable exercising his authority against his neighbor, and Redgauntlet gives him a convenient way out by—how else?—throwing the warrant into the fire. As far as Foxley is concerned, without a warrant there’s no cause to arrest Redgauntlet. “Judiciously resolved,” the Jacobite ironically lauds. Foxley’s resolution evinces the fine line separating prudence from cowardice. As long as even a former rebel like Redgauntlet acted peacefully, it was prudent for the state to overlook his former sins, as many other Britons shared his opinions. As Greg Weiner puts it, “Prudence involves a carefully choreographed dance between principle and circumstance.” But in light of Redgauntlet’s more recent unruliness, it was cowardice, not prudence, to look the other way.

　　Scott’s novels often depict the fading of old prejudices and barbaric habits, and vindicate the civilizing tendencies that replace them.

　　A compelling contrast to Foxley appears several chapters later, when Darsie’s friend Alan encounters a prudent magistrate named Crosbie. A supporter of King George III but married to a Jacobite, Crosbie understands the conflicting political opinions within his jurisdiction, and he navigates them skillfully: he has been named provost three times because he administers justice so impartially that “nobody could ever find out whether his is Whig or Tory.” During a conversation with Alan about the threats posed by remnant Jacobites, Crosbie doubts the wisdom of prohibiting them from holding certain positions; he prefers instead “a tenderness of conscience” that recognizes room for competing beliefs. Crosbie explains that in a divided society, the majority must not assume it will never be the minority lest it one day “be sair put to the wall” itself. The prudent magistrate understands that, in a pluralistic society, political circumstances can reverse suddenly; the Golden Rule applies. Crosbie explains, “One may love the kirk, and yet not ride on the rigging of it; and one may love the king, and yet not be cramming him eternally down the throat of the unhappy folk that may chance to like another king better. I have friends and connexions among them … they are flesh and blood like ourselves, these poor Jacobite bodies—sons of Adam and Eve, after all.” Prudence demands the accommodation of differences.

　　According to Adam Roberts, through Crosbie, “Scott shows how the actual business of running [Crosbie’s jurisdiction] requires a series of compromises and elisions, such that Whig and Jacobite citizens can rub along together.” Not every community member appreciates this: a Jacobite character complains about “the prudence of Mr Provost, who refuses to ken where his friends are concealed during adversity, lest, perchance, he should be asked to contribute to their relief.” From this perspective, there’s a slyness or cowardliness to the provost’s prudence—something we saw in Foxley. Yet where Foxley confirmed his cowardice by finding an excuse to offer Darsie no relief from his captor, Crosbie gives Alan advice that helps him escape danger later. Crosbie’s prudence exhibits both caution and strength.

　　The fullest display of prudence arrives in the novel’s final pages. (Warning: spoilers abound.) Redgauntlet—left un-arrested by Foxley—has organized a meeting between a handful of remnant Jacobite lords and Charles Edward Stuart himself, who has been hiding in Scotland disguised as a Catholic priest. The Young Pretender’s own imprudence has dampened the enthusiasm of his erstwhile supporters: he has been having an affair with a woman who has close connections with George III’s court, and they fear that this recklessness endangers their cause. As they deliberate their next move, they are surprised by the sudden arrival of General Colin Campbell representing King George III. Campbell dissuades them from pursuing their plot and relays the king’s message: “I will … deserve the confidence of my subjects by reposing my security in the fidelity of the millions who acknowledge my title—in the good sense and prudence of the few who continue, from the errors of education, to disown it.” There’s a double-dose of prudence here: the king’s own, and his trust in the prudence of the would-be revolutionaries, whom he believes have too much to lose to start “a civil war, which must be fatal to their families and themselves, besides spreading bloodshed and ruin through a peaceful land.” The king exercises a light touch, demanding only that Redgauntlet and the Pretender depart for French shores. Even the Jacobite leaders recognize the role of prudence here. Bonnie Prince Charlie acknowledges his erstwhile supporters are motivated by a “zeal [that] was mingled with prudence,” and Redgauntlet sees that his failure stems from his “having been too little scrupulous.” The novel’s preoccupation with prudence explains why Redgauntlet, as John Buchan observes, “ends, as all great drama must end, in peace; in an anticlimax which is more moving than any climax.” The king’s prudence prevents drama.

　　The essayist William Hazlitt once explained that his Romantic-era contemporaries enjoyed Walter Scott’s historical novels because they “carry us back to” the merciless and savage manners “of a barbarous age and people.” That distant setting permitted readers to “throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity” and lose themselves in a time when “the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbor.” Hazlitt, an especially perceptive reader of Scott, was being half-serious. Part of the allure of Scott’s historical fiction is indeed that it presents the customs and manners of an often violent past. Yet Scott’s novels also often depict the fading of old prejudices and barbaric habits, and vindicate the civilizing tendencies that replace them. This isn’t to say the novel lacks characters who take bold action in the name of just causes. Alan abandons a court case mid-argument when he learns of the danger Darsie is in; and he defends his father’s humdrum legal career against Darsie’s teasing by appealing to what he calls “civil courage,” which is “courage enough to defend a righteous cause with hand and purse … without fear of the consequences to himself.” Compared to this kind of bravery, Alan contends, “It is of little consequence to most men in this age and country whether they ever possess military courage or no.” Prudence plays a similar role in Redgauntlet. The ancient virtue establishes peace and order in a pluralistic nation, helps Scotland integrate into Britain, and, eventually, ushers in the civilized century of Scott’s readers.