Feast of Saint Catherine of Sienna

"For Heaven's sake, blaspheme not!" said the girl, with an expression of fear.--"God pardon us both! I meant no harm. I speak of our blessed Saint Catherine of Sienna!--may God forgive me that I spoke so lightly, and made you do a great sin and a great blasphemy. This was her nunnery, in which there were twelve nuns and an abbess. My aunt was the abbess, till the heretics turned all adrift.

It is surely good advice not to blaspheme, as the girl in Sir Walter Scott’s “The Abbot” cautions, especially on the Feast of Saint Catherine of Sienna. Catherine is a Doctor of Unity in the Catholic faith, having helped to bring the Papacy back to Rome, after a century in France.  Catherine died at the young age of 33, on March 29, 1380.

Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg had much more influence on a later poet, William Blake, than on Walter Scott.  Scott's references to Swedenborg are virtually nil.  The author of "Heaven and Hell", and numerous other works died on March 29, 1772; a few months after Scott was born.

One reference Scott makes compares Swedenborg and a female religious figure of his own time to a French counterpart.  The woman Scott mentions is Joanna Southcott, who professed herself a prophetess.  Ms. Southcott at one point announced that she was pregnant (aged in her 60's) with the Messiah.  Scott's letterwriter Paul seems unimpressed with the lot of them, in "Paul's Letters to his Kinfolk":

'If the French have no strong sense of religion or its precepts, they are not without a share of superstition; and an impostor is at present practising among them, who, by all accounts, is as successful as Joanna Southcote herself. This lady, a woman, I am assured, of rank and information, pretends, like Baron Swedenborg, to an immediate intercourse with the spiritual world, and takes her ecstatic trances for the astonishment of parties of good fashion, to whom, on her return to her senses, she recounts the particulars of her visit to the spiritual world, and whom she treats with explanations of their past lives, and predictions of the future. It's said her art has attracted the attention of some men of high rank in the armies of our allies.'

Battle of Towton

"...We must not tarry," said Margaret; " let us part here — you for Dijon

— I to Aix, my abode of unrest in Provence. Furewell — we may meet in a better hour—yet how can I hope it? Thus I said on the morning before the fight of St. Albans — thus on the dark dawning of Towton — thus on the yet more bloody field of Tewkesbury — and what was the event? Yet hope is a plant which cannot be rooted out of a noble breast, till the last heart-string crack as it is pulled away..."

From Scott's "Anne of Geierstein".

The Battle of Towton occurred on March 29, 1461.  The Yorkists, under King Edward IV won the battle decisively, giving the Lancastrians a crushing blow.  Edward had claimed the throne on March 4, 1460 soon after the death of his father Richard.  Edward held the throne until 1470, when Lancastrian King Henry IV was restored to power.  Henry's second reign ended the next year, with the Battle of Tewkesbury, after which Edward was himself restored to the throne.