Sherlock Holmes and Cavalier Masculinity: The Curious Case of "The Musgrave Ritual"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never gained the preeminence in historical fiction to which he aspired, and curiously, his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, takes an approach to the past quite distinct from historical romance. Rather than mythologizing history, the Sherlock Holmes stories take the mythologizing of the past itself as a central topic, particularly in their engagements with 17^th-century tumult. For instance, "The Musgrave Ritual" (1893) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) feature Civil War and Restoration-era exploits and misdeeds re-emerging as mysteries in late Victorian England. In both narratives, Sherlock Holmes exposes a usurper who threatens a rightful heir descended from a Royalist family. In constructing these mysteries, Doyle draws on the legendary good, bad, and ugly of seventeenth-century aristocratic culture, from Cavalier wit and loyalty to libertine sexual violence. "The legendary" occupies a troubled place in these stories as well, as the cases unfold to reveal the dangers that arise when descendants of prominent or once-prominent families become too heavily invested in their own rituals and mythologies.

In the beginning of "The Musgrave Ritual," Sherlock Holmes is diverted from a rare attempt at tidying his rooms by a glimpse of a small chest containing "a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old discs of metal."¹ Watson, observing, asks, "'These relics have a history, then?,'" to which Holmes replies, "'So much so that they are history'" (606). In particular, they are metonyms of Stuart history. Holmes had recovered the objects in a case brought by his school acquaintance Reginald Musgrave, "a man of an exceedingly aristocratic type" and "a scion of one of the very oldest families in the kingdom" (607). Reginald comes to Holmes with a mystery originating at his family estate, Hurlstone. One night, unable to sleep, Reginald walks the halls of Hurlstone and sees a light on in the library. Fearing robbers, he grabs "a battle-axe" from a wall "decorated with trophies of old weapons" (610). But he stops short of recreating his ancestors' heroic exploits, as the disturbance turns out to be the family's butler, Brunton, examining the Musgrave family papers. Reginald dismisses Brunton for impertinence, but he is baffled by why the butler would bother to examine a paper which, according to Reginald, "was nothing of any importance at all, but simply a copy of the questions and answers in the singular old observance called the Musgrave Ritual … a ceremony peculiar to our family, which each Musgrave for centuries past has gone through on his coming of age" (610). Sherlock Holmes naturally comes to a different conclusion, telling Musgrave: "'to me it seems immensely practical, and I fancy that Brunton took the same view'" (614).

This peculiar set of questions and answers, penned "in the spelling of the middle of the seventeenth century" (614), reads:

"Whose was it?""He who is gone.""Who shall have it?""He who will come.""Where was the sun?""Over the oak.""Where was the shadow?""Under the elm.""How was it stepped?""North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.""What shall we give for it?""All that is ours.""Why should we give it?""For the sake of the trust."

(614)

Holmes works out, as had Brunton before him, that the ritual is a set of directions to the place where the Crown of Charles I, and an assortment of other Stuart treasures, lie buried, waiting for a Royalist victory that will never come. When Holmes and Musgrave locate the spot, they find a small cellar space containing the chest that made its appearance earlier in Baker Street, along with the dead body of Brunton. Brunton had been either intentionally or accidentally trapped in the cellar space by his accomplice Rachel, a Welsh maid whom the butler had romantically spurned. This discovery leads Holmes to cry, "'What smoldering fire of vengeance had suddenly...