Midwinter

In the winter of 1745 the Highland army of Prince Charles Edward is driving south into England, and Alastair Maclean — a young Highland gentleman soldiering for the exiled Stuarts — slips across the country as a secret agent, carrying messages to rally the English Jacobites to the Prince’s standard. His errand is perilous from the start, and it grows darker still: there is a traitor in the Prince’s own circle, a man selling the cause to the Hanoverian government, and Alastair must unmask him before the rising breaks — while his heart is drawn to Claudia, the runaway wife of the faithless Sir John Norreys.

On the road Alastair stumbles into another England altogether. Out of the winter woods comes Amos Midwinter, a wandering fiddler and philosopher, and behind him the Spoonbills — a secret brotherhood of innkeepers, shepherds, and common folk who keep the old tracks and the old loyalties beneath the official map of the kingdom. They serve neither King George nor King James, but an “Old England” older than any throne, and they aid Alastair when the visible world has failed him. Threaded through the intrigue is one of the strangest cameos in English fiction: a stout, shambling, half-blind scholar, lately a tutor and as yet a nobody, whom history will know as Dr Samuel Johnson — here given, by Buchan’s bold fancy, the missing months of his life that no biographer could ever account for.

Midwinter is John Buchan at his most atmospheric: a chase across a snowbound midland England, lit by lanterns in dark forests and fires in lonely inns, and shadowed by the elegiac knowledge that the Stuart cause is already doomed. Beneath the adventure runs the theme that gives the book its lasting hold — the romance of the byways, of a hidden, enduring England loyal to nothing but itself, set above the noisy loyalties of crown and party.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s place in Buchan’s work, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.