ELH

The more I learn about the partisan politics of Augustan England, the more difficult it becomes to trust what once seemed stable points of demarcation among the categories of players, and especially between Jacobites and Tories. “Tory” and “Jacobite” once seemed clearly distinct alternatives. But recent scholarship has complicated this view by arguing that political identities and affiliations were less than exclusive or stable in the century following the fall of King James II in 1688. ¹ Augustan English men and women, it turns out, were capable of moving between camps according to shifting circumstance, even of holding dissonant positions simultaneously. Toryism and Jacobitism tend now to be seen as shifting, relational functions rather than fixed identities. The revision is important: it forces us to more complicated and historically nuanced understandings of Augustan culture, and it challenges us to define our investments there.

Despite this advance, unexamined assumptions remain, especially when it comes to our understandings of Jacobitism. My purpose here is to contribute to current explorations into the varieties of sensibility within Jacobitism by drawing attention to one assumption that has remained largely unquestioned throughout the process of revision and by testing that assumption against the work of an important and neglected Jacobite writer, the poet and novelist Jane Barker (1652–1732).

To begin, it seems appropriate to offer some account of how I understand the much-contested terms under discussion. As traditionally understood, “Jacobites” were those who continued to support the monarchical claims of King James II and his male heirs even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, when the king went into exile and Parliament decided to replace him. Jacobites, in this view, are defined as those who accompanied the fallen king in his banishment or who actively plotted and fought for his reinstatement at home; they were uncompromising, unquestioningly loyal, and necessarily Roman Catholic. [End Page 857] It has recently been pointed out, however, that this way of defining “Jacobitism” may be unnecessarily rigid: it leaves us unable to recognize Jacobitism as part of the sensibility of the many English men and women who compromised with the new government but who nevertheless continued to feel sympathy and connection with the dethroned king, to regret late seventeenth-century political developments, or to consider their participation in the new regime provisional—those, in short, who withheld full ideological commitment, or whose commitment mutated over time. ²

And then we have Toryism, hardly a simpler category. Like Jacobites, Tories were royalists who found themselves out of sympathy with the prevailing directions of late seventeenth-century politics and uncomfortable with the implications of dethroning a reigning monarch. They too held staunchly traditionalist views: Tories tended, for instance, to share with Jacobites a belief in the sanctity of hereditary kingship and in the necessary subordination of subjects to the will of the monarch. But as a party, Tories have usually been distinguished from Jacobites by their personal hostility to James II and their commitment to the Anglican Church. Though loyal to the idea of divinely ordained, hereditary monarchy, Tories tended to be deeply distrustful of its particular personification in James—distrustful enough to lend support (however anxious and passive) to efforts that eventually dislodged the king in 1689, even though those efforts were profoundly at odds with Tory principles. Because of this, Tories have traditionally been distinguished from Jacobites not only by their religion and detestation of James, but also according to their willingness to compromise. I shall return to this idea in a moment.

Identifying particular individuals as Tory or Jacobite has proven to be a difficult enterprise, not only because people tended to cover their tracks and measure their language, but also because there were many more shades of difference within each category, and indeed within individuals over time, than such classificatory projects presume. Though vocal Tories often represented their party as the bastion of the Anglican Church, for instance, individual Tories were not, in fact, unanimously Anglican or even necessarily Protestant, any more than every Jacobite was Roman Catholic. ³ While it may be true that Tories as a group were revolted by James, it is demonstrably...