We are told that the Glenallans are a Catholic family, that the present earl has for many years lived a life of withdrawn and melancholy devotion to his religion, and that he had a younger brother called Edward, now dead.

He invites him to Monkbarns, the Oldbuck family home, and the uproarious household there show the gloomy earl its best hospitality, though Glenallan follows his usual practice of eating with penitential sparingness.

Glenallan raises a body of troops from his vast Lowland and Highland estates and leads them in person to Fairport, where he meets a cavalry officer called Major Neville, who has been sent with the news that the invasion is a false alarm.

His character is dominated by his sense of loss over the disappearance of his son, and by the all-consuming Catholic guilt he feels over his supposedly incestuous marriage, which leads him to a life of despondent penitence and which he has come to self-destructively embrace.

Though the finding of his son is the only redemption he can aspire to, he is emotionally incapacitated from taking any positive action toward that end, and when he finally recognizes Major Neville he cannot hope to resume any real life, but can only wait for death.

[11] On the other hand, the Radical critic William Hazlitt some years later was thoroughly pleased by “that striking picture of the effects of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride”,[12] while Scott's biographer J. G. Lockhart thought that his “highest art, that of skilful contrast” was nowhere better exemplified than in his setting off of the Glenallan story against the Oldbuck one.

[17] A. N. Wilson thought the whole Glenallan strand unconvincing, its Gothic nature being incompatible with the rest of the novel,[1] while David Daiches believed that it gives “a sense of depth and implication to the action” without altering its essential atmosphere.