The “candour, which can feel for a foe”: Romanticizing the Jacobites in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Queen Victoria and Eliza Haywood are not often mentioned in the same breath, probably for good reason. Yet however dissimilar in almost every respect, they are linked in having been credited with what might appear, on the face of things, to be an improbable taste for romantic narratives about the fate of Charles Edward Stuart. Queen Victoria’s sentimental Jacobitism has attracted amused commentary almost from the moment of her death; an early twentieth-century biographer of the Scottish songwriter Lady John Scott, for example, demurely compared Scott to the Queen in the strength of her “Jacobite leanings.” Of course, Scottish Jacobitism had been thoroughly romanticized long before Victoria was born. As early as the mid-1780s, when Boswell published his account of Flora MacDonald and the other surviving Jacobites whom he met during his tour of the Hebrides, melancholic nostalgia, rather than political anxiety or triumphalism, had started to become the dominant tone for mainstream literary treatments of Jacobitism. Within a generation, the figure of the tragically misguided but appealing Jacobite had become a fixture in popular culture, thanks in large part to the phenomenon of the Waverley novels, and was to remain so for much of the nineteenth century. Yet matters were rather different when Eliza Haywood was briefly imprisoned early in 1750 for distributing a pamphlet sympathetic to Prince Charles. While it is very clear now that Jacobitism was dead as a political threat to Hanoverian Britain by the autumn of 1746, that would not have been as obvious to the London authorities just a little over three years later; given the date, any pamphleteering that could be construed as pro-Stuart would have an inescapably political edge. Even so, the pamphlet that landed Haywood in prison would probably not satisfy historians looking for traces of Jacobite political activity in immediately post-Culloden Britain, as it subordinates politics to romance and makes the Charles who appears in it far more implausibly heroic than Scott’s version in Waverley. Yet the pamphlet is far from unique in that respect, as there is an array of material from the later 1740s and early 1750s in which one sees representations of Charles Stuart that would fit comfortably into the sentimental historical fiction that delighted Victoria and the Victorians. Little read today, these ephemeral documents suggest not just the speed with which Jacobitism was transformed, in the popular imagination, from political threat to sentimental romance but also, and rather more interestingly, the complicated ways in which the mid-eighteenth-century debates about Jacobitism were implicated in shaping idealized concepts of Britishness in the literature of the day. The idea that by the end of the eighteenth century a number of mainly Scottish writers had started to absorb Jacobitism into Hanoverian cultural myth is familiar. More than two decades ago, Peter Womack demonstrated that Boswell’s sympathetic narratives of Jacobite survivors are central to his own self-construction as an exemplar of modern, and loyally Hanoverian, virtue. What these pamphlets show is that this is a process that began at least a generation before Boswell was writing; in addition, while many of the pamphlets are anonymous, most were printed in London, which suggests that it wasn’t strictly a Scottish phenomenon. Indeed, more or less melodramatic recreations of Charles Stuart’s escape started to appear in the English press almost as soon as the prince got on the boat to France, and while almost all of them, no matter how extravagant their details, insisted vigorously upon their meticulously researched accuracy, their appeal was not simply to those interested in gathering the latest news. These are works that used popular literary idioms in order …