Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott`s Waverley novels, is a swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland, in the period infamous as the `killing time`. Its central character, Henry Morton, joins the rebels in order to fight Scotland`s royalist oppressors, little as he shares the Covenanters` extreme religious beliefs. He is torn between his love for a royalist`s granddaughter and his loyalty to his downtrodden countrymen.

As well as being a tale of divided loyalties, the novel is a crucial document in the cultural history of modern Scotland. Scott, himself a supporter of the union between Scotland and England, was trying to exorcise the violent past of a country uncomfortably coming to terms with its status as part of a modern United Kingdom. This novel is in itself a significant political document, in which Scott can be seen to be attempting to create a new centralist Scottish historiography, which is not the political consensus of his own time, the seventeenth century, or today.