NEO-JACOBITISM: looking beyond the fringe
The reasons for the revival of Jacobitism in the late Victorian period are varied but not without explanation. The movement’s return to political consciousness arrived into what was arguably a less receptive world than had been the case in Georgian Britain. This revival came face-to-face with incredulity and no little sneering hostility as several newspaper and periodical editors looked to swat the movement to one side. Victoria had reigned for five decades, had become empress of India in 1877, and the success of her golden jubilee in 1887 banished thoughts of republican opposition, as it did the eighth and final attempt on her life in 1882, and exposed the realpolitik of placing an alternative monarch upon the imperial throne. Yet as Victoria’s long reign entered into its final decade, political Jacobitism returned, built on the cultural respectability the cause had garnered through the widespread adoption of tartan and sentimentality around the Jacobite story, to offer a God-given rationale for restoring the Stuarts to the throne and for breaking the union of 1707 in the process.
The revitalisation of the Jacobite cause capitalised upon the cult of Jacobitism that had ever more firmly framed the movement within the symbols of ‘Highlandism’. Walter Scott’s had been published in 1814 and a dramatisation of Jane Porter’s (1810) in Paris in 1819 was part of a wider Scottish vogue. Their writings were the highlights of a new genre, and Sarah Green’s (1824) also uncovered several pseudo-historical novels that linked the first phase of highland clearance to the tragedy of Jacobite failure. The physical appearance in Scotland of a Hanoverian monarch took place during August 1822, when George IV landed at Leith and engaged in what would be described as 21 ‘mad days’ of activity. With very short notice, Scott was given the task
