Waiting in the wings? Sir Archibald Roylance, Bart, DSO, MP
Philip Harrison
I gave Hannay certain companions ... and Sir Archibald Roylance, airman, ornithologist and Scots laird. It was huge fun playing with my puppets and to me they soon became very real flesh and blood. (Buchan 1940b, 195)
I am interested to note how Sir Archibald Roylance slowly aged in his creator's hands, how he behaved, how he developed, and how Buchan kept a constant eye on a character realised in shreds and patches over half-a-dozen novels: in Mr Standfast (1919), Huntingtower (1922), The Three Hostages (1924), John Macnab (1925), The Courts of the Morning (1929), and The House of the Four Winds (1935); and in brief references in The Island of Sheep (1936) and Sick Heart River (1941).
In no novel is Roylance a protagonist, but usually, and less and less reluctantly, drawn into the affairs of others. Apart from Dougal and Jaikie of the Gorbals Diehards he is younger by a dozen years or more than all Buchan's paladins, a d'Artagnan among the Musketeers, and mostly they deal with him in avuncular fashion, but, ignored, mocked, overruled, he has their respect as well as their affection. Although he never attains their stature we are aware of achievement and potential. Buchan seems determined not to lose sight of Archie Roylance and returns to him repeatedly, dropping stitches which he will later pick up, so that he appears a character recollected rather than invented.
If The Courts of the Morning is Arbuthnot's book, and The House of the Four Winds belongs to Jaikie Galt, then perhaps John Macnab, where Roylance's home, Crask, becomes the base for the emulators of Jim Tarras and which is the novel in which he finds a wife, is his book. Certainly it fills out earlier ideas of an oddly engaging character.
A wealthy sporting baronet, he is a somewhat surprisingly attractive figure. Leithen, dying in the High Arctic, remembers his compelling charm, and how he had irrupted (that good ornithological word!) into their society, and pictures him on the windblown thymy moors of the west of Scotland (Buchan 1940a). Clearly Roylance has Buchan in thrall too, as many deft touches illustrates how his interests increase, how vigorously he seeks new challenges, how his injured leg fares, how his political life advances, even how his reading matter appears to change its nature.
originally published in JBJ21 / Autumn 1999
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