Walter Scott 
Old Mortality 

Perhaps the finest and certainly the most readable of Scott’s Waverley novels, Old Mortality is a swift-moving historical romance that pits an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland – the period notorious as "the killing time." Its central character, Henry Morton, finds himself torn between his love for a royalist’s granddaughter and his loyalty to his oppressed countrymen. (Goodreads)