Loyalism, legitimism, and the neo-Jacobite challenge to the Anglo-Scottish Union

ABSTRACT Those who continued with its cause into the late Victorian age, framed loyalism as a principled challenge to the constitutional settlement that culminated in the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. The case for restoring the House of Stuart, the focal point of their efforts, had become a distinctive strand within British loyalism but in many respects remained tangential to the movement for home rule in Scotland. Restoration of the Stuarts necessitated the acts of Settlement and Union be set aside and thus represented a more fundamental challenge to the Imperial parliament than the constitutional reform sought by home rulers. The article examines those late Victorian loyalists who recast the home rule cause to advance the tenets of loyalism as their forebears in revolutionary America had done – within the day's foremost democratic debate on rights, freedoms, and the limits of governmental power.

Debate within the House of Commons during the final quarter of the nineteenth century was interrupted as it was agitated by the question of home rule for Ireland.Without ever commanding commensurate levels of attention, proposals devised to bring greater selfgovernment to Scotland, and address a perceived neglect in the administration and governance of that nation, were also articulated with vigour and disruptive intent, albeit primarily through letters published in the press and the distribution of pamphlets and handbills that aimed to reform not break the bonds of imperial Britishness. 1 Working first as a pressure group within the broad church of Liberalism, the campaigning work of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) came in response to Gladstone's Irish home rule Bill of 1886. 2 Their plans to reform Scotland's misgovernment were framed in terms spanning a local national parliament, home rule, home rule all round, and independence within a federal British or imperial structure. 3Reformist rather than revolutionary, each scheme left untouched the acts of Settlement (1701) and Union (1707) for the stability they gave to the crown in parliament.
This home rule period in British politics illustrates the principle and practice of loyalism as it emerged from the "age of the democratic revolution" in the 1760-1800 period, surviving nationalist uprisings and the fall of royal houses throughout Europe in the century that followed. 4These principles and practices, inevitably recast from the nowdistant American revolution, helped defend the place of monarchy within schemes that offered the redistribution of powers within the imperial parliamentin which the crown liesbut, crucially, and conversely, loyalists sought to change upon whose head the crown sat.Popular royalism in the 1890s took on many forms that reflected the protection as much as the projection of individual rights, freedoms, and limits in the reach of state power: the creed that was counter-revolutionary a century earlier.Within this ideology, loyalists maintained a commitment to constitutional monarchy that objected, and offered alternatives, to the growth of republicanism and democracy.Although subsumed within other political identities across the British Atlantic world, this iteration of loyalism was based first on allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy, integrating North Britons into a new imperial structure, before breaking down at the edges to embrace Catholicism and Legitimacy within its challenge to the Protestant state. 5he loyalism generated in Britain during final decades of the nineteenth century was carried not by troops or governing elites but was mobilized through associational and ceremonial activity to propose a radical constitutional realignment that was nothing short of revolutionary.It remained a cause that would never emerge from the margins of political debate, nor achieve its aims.Yet the form of loyalism articulated in Scotland by activists such as Theodore Napierinfluential in his own right for his tireless campaigning in the name of home rule and pre-revolutionary Jacobitismdraws attention to the interplay of parliamentary and monarchical reform in the decades when home rule governments were first mooted.The focus of this article, rooted in the historical development of loyalism across the British Atlantic world explored elsewhere in this collection, sheds light on those loyalists who sought the better governing and stability of this world by returning the House of Stuart to the throne, risking as collateral damage the very permanency of state and monarchical rule to which they subscribed.

Loyalism, legitimism, and home rule
The greater weight of research into home rule has focused on the Irish case and the imperial context, drawing on evidence from pressure groups that sought to persuade, and political groupings acting within, the parliamentary system.Pamphleteering was the chosen means of persuasion in London and Dublin by Isaac Butt, just as federalism was its predominate path to a unionist solution for, not rejection of, British rule in Ireland. 6In Scotland the campaign for home rule cleaved the SHRA to its obvious carrier the Liberal party, a relationship strained once Gladstone prioritized the needs of Ireland to then leave none too promising prospects for Scots, and Scottish legislation, in the recalibration of the imperial parliament. 7By wrapping its own proposals for constitutional reforms within the ideology of Unionist-nationalism, the SHRA differentiated itself from Gladstonian liberalism while securing the moral high ground of constitutional loyalty which, they claimed, was markedly absent from the movement in Ireland. 8The case for independence was plainly not lacking in these decades, and home rule came as a Unionist response to Daniel O'Connell's push in the 1840s to end the union of 1800, as well as from the dissatisfaction of unionists and nationalists alike with the religious and constitutional arrangements in the 1880s and 1890s. 9Nor was British imperialism exempt from the hostility of advocates of either constitutional position, with conflict between Butt and Parnell continuing after the latter sought in 1877 to hold up the South African Confederation Bill. 10 Yet of the many strands of home rule campaigning and proposals that historians have given most attention, from the local to the federal to the imperial, and the case for independence, depth and insight comes most from proposals that reformed parliamentary structure within which power was retained by the Imperial parliament, leaving the Hanoverian monarchy in situ, if not always cherished.
The relative neglect of the monarchy in these analyses is unhelpful given the constitutional theorist A.V. Dicey's observation at the time of the first home rule Bill for Ireland that "federation would dislocate every English constitutional arrangement" to leave the monarchy, as Kendle later puts it, to become the one single unifying power within a system of divided authority once the British parliament was left to govern in compromise with its federated partners. 11Dicey insisted that for any form of home rule to be tolerable to England the supremacy of the British parliament had to be accepted, yet still he feared federalism would prove more revolutionary than the "abolition of the House of Lords, disestablishment of the Church and the abolition of the monarchy." 12This was more scaremongering than probability, and what loomed perilously over constitutional reconstruction was not abolition of the monarchy, but removal of the monarch herself.Concurrent with the cause of home rule were attempts to solve a misfiring constitution made by a coterie of campaigners who politicized loyalism under the banner of "legitimacy" and sought to strike down the constitutional certainties underpinning unionism by repealing the Act of Settlement. 13With similar fears that the state's democratic legitimacy was atrophying before their eyes, the issue of monarchical legitimacy was flagged both symbolically and politically in the loyalist contribution to this debate.Here internal and external pressure was directed at the Imperial Parliament by those who rejected the constitutional configuration irrespective of any devolutionary or home rule reform; by those who argued that the unions of 1707 and 1800 had been predicated upon, and confirmed by, the removal of hereditary right from the nexus of Parliament and Crown.While also bemoaning ineffective government, and fearing anarchists, republicans and revolutionaries whom they characterized as the rising threats to world order, legitimists sought government by a higher authority than a parliamentary monarch whom they claimed had been installed by command of "a mere paper that can be ripped to shreds at any moment" [The Act of Settlement]. 14With Britain's might undoubted, legitimist proponents called for a return to government headed by the Stuarts, the line that had been interrupted by the acts of Settlement and the Anglo-Scottish Union.Built on loyalist conceptions of allegiance and chivalric actions of oldby giving vitality and unity to "a people once prepared to die for their monarch," as ongoing loyalist resistance to republicans during and following America's revolutionary period had shown 15 legitimists sought a form of government with hereditary rights at its core.In time they would be accused of being unpatriotic for foregrounding a "grotesque" version of loyalism which emphasized family lineage over "national ties of blood and race and the claims of liberty and human progress." 16Yet while it was clear that birthplace was not essential to this pan-British, and loosely international, movement, birthright was unequivocal; and this meant their objectives could not be achieved without fundamentaland treasonableconstitutional change.
Because the legitimist movement failed to capture either the nationalist or home rule agenda, or mesh with the constitutional concerns of the electorate in the twentieth century, helps explains its lacunae in the historiography.Scholarship has instead looked to pinpoint when the nascent nationalist movement shed its cultural fripperies and unstructured grandstanding in advance of its political breakthrough in the 1960s. 17In consequence, the legitimist movement has been by-passed or dismissed as a phase cast off, and rejected, before the growth of a mass movement on democratic principles. 18Framed by the tercentenary of the Union, scholarship has instead focused on the mobilization of the electorate through the franchise and civil society, 19 and upon a fundamental reassessments of the 1707 Union itself. 20Yet the constitutional challenge to the crown posed by the legitimists was not without some impact or lasting influence.Its support was first mobilized in England, before a specifically Scottish home rule agenda was added.Beyond anything the home rulers would countenance, the legitimists attacked the religious and dynastic underpinnings of the British constitution.While the Scottish Home Rule Association argued for the Union's reform, legitimists demanded its removal.Whereas government by devolved national parliament or federated national parliaments would be the outcome of a redistribution of competencies, restoration of the Stuart line implied, and in most iterations of the argument required, dismantling the British constitution.

Legitimism and neo-Jacobitism
The challenge faced by late Victorian loyalists and nationalists alike was the entrenchment of the Hanoverian dynasty embodied in the physically small frame of Victoria, and her profound hold over the symbols of Scotland in the years since her uncle had crossed the border in 1822. 21On that occasion, a gathering of Highland clans of the like not seen since the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746 was envisioned through a lens of military Highlandism to propel a British-wide loyalism coloured by tartanry and cultural Jacobitism that showed the extent to which political and constitutional loyalty had been transferred to the Protestant House of Hanover. 22The king had also come to lay the foundation stone of the National Monument on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, the "splendid addition to the architectural riches of the Empire," to commemorate the Scots' contribution to Britain's successful denouement of the Napoleonic wars. 23Before choreographing the royal visit, when writing to his son in August of the previous year, Walter Scott revealed his inspiration for the spectacle: "Your letter found me in London where I witnessed the Coronation certainly one of the most brilliant spectacles which the british [sic] eye could witnessthe splendour was far beyond anything I could have conceived." 24Scott's joy for the monarch's celebration was characteristically ebullient, but perhaps unjustified given the disorganization of the day; its pomp blotted and interrupted by the blocked entrance of the King's estranged wife Caroline, the most serious of several ceremonial missteps. 25What Scott was witnessing in ceremonial form were the fundamentals of Britishness fixed by the continuation of the Hanoverian line that was reaffirmed in the Union settlement.In conjunction with the Succession to the Crown Act 1707, crafted to ensure a Protestant succession to Queen Anne and to stop suggestions of, and campaigns for, an alternative line, and the Treason Act 1708, which effectively, although not entirely, standardized the law of high treason between England and Scotland, this ritual ensured the line was fixed, and done so on penalty of death. 26oming after the publication of Waverley (1814), Scott's analysis of the Coronation envisaged a similar rapprochement of Whig and Jacobite loyalism around the de jure king. 27his optimism proved misplaced, and where Scott found splendour later generations of loyalists saw a usurping "Parliamentary dynasty" more deeply rooted and more injurious to the crown.Towards promoting this version of loyalism, the Legitimist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1891 by Herbert Vivian (1865-1940), the Hon Stuart Erskine (1869-1960), and Melville Henry Massue, the Marquis de Ruvigny  and Raineval (1868-1921).The League mobilized public opinion around the claims of the elder branch of the royal house of the realms, revoking the Hanoverian claim made through Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of James VI and I, while there still existed hereditary claims through Charles I. 28 Their intentions were framed in an international context: to support Legitimist principles in the UK and overseas; to oppose the spread of republicanism and anarchism; to teach the true history since 1599, of how Royal Houses were exiled by the force of the Dutch and Germans; to gather support for the elder and exiled branch, to repeal the "so called" Act of Settlement, and to repeal the "so called" Acts of Union between England and Scotland and Scotland and Great Britain and Ireland. 29ose who joined one of the seventeen branches who subscribed to the Legitimist Jacobite League could then associate with loyalist advocates across Britain, including members of the White Cockade Club of Hunts (1890); the Order of St Germain (1893); the Society of King Charles the Martyr (1894); the Flora Macdonald Club (1894); the Royal Oak Society (1898); and those of 'gentle birth' who comprised the Forget-Me-Not Roylist Club (1901). 30These groups marked a distinct phase of associational neo-Jacobitism, but they were not without antecedents.The Order of the White Rose could claim Robert Burns (1759-1796) as a former member; 31 the League of Scotland first gathered in 1872; and the Thames Valley Legitimist Club, founded in 1878, had existed in a nonconstituted form four years previously.Similarly, the Royal Oak Society in Edinburgh, reconstituted by Theodore Napier in 1898 and destined over the next decade to become "the centre of more real Jacobitism than Scotland had witnessed since the '45,'" claimed a pedigree back to the eighteenth century. 32English links to the Stuart cause included a meeting in 1846 held in the back room of a Jacobite club in London marking the centenary of the battle of Culloden, and the "Morning Bush Tavern" which was best known in Jacobite circles for hosting those mourning the death of Charles I in 1649. 33To rouse and engage their membership, and to spread their campaign, Vivian, Erskine and Massue repeatedly published letters in the newspapers and in journals.Amongst those periodicals established to promote the legitimist cause were The Royalist (1895), The Fiery Cross (1901-1912), The Jacobite (which in 1904 changed its name to St Germain's Magazine), and The White Cockade (1926-1929). 34The New Zealand periodical The Jacobite was published every quarter from 1919 until 1952; with the name now used by the 1745 Association for its title.Elsewhere there were legitimist publications in America, Italy, and in Spain where over sixty legitimist supporting papers existed. 35he associational and publishing activities of legitimists could and did benefit from a contemporary cultural milieu around the House of Stuart that was rich and varied.In verse, song and prose, in the works of Robert Burns, Jane Porter, Carolina Oliphant, as well as Scott, portrayals of Jacobite personalities and events helped blend together an historical context that underpinned the legitimist cause. 36Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne (1766-1845), reworked what were once seditious or risqué verse into lines of longing and maudlin elegiac in a way that brought the Stuart cause into popular culture and drew contrasts to the Hanoverian dynasty. 37The Oliphant family's Stuart credentials were impeccable, both confirmed by the confiscation of land in the aftermath of Culloden and Carolina's father, Oliphant of Gask, having met with Burns at a Jacobite gathering in 1787. 38Carolina herself was named after the exiled Charles (Carolinus) and her songs propagated longing for the return of the prince from over the water that appealed to sentiments of unfair loss. 39The cultural sway of the legitimist cause was also made by those who fabricated their own Jacobite lineage, most notably through the claims of John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart and Charles Sobieski Edward Stuart (the Allen brothers) who mixed reality and myth-making into new popular forms of the Stuart cult. 40Despite being of doubtful authenticity, their work, and their dress, caught the spirit of the Stuart claim, building upon the impactful orchestration of the clans by Scott and Stewart of Garth that met George IV in 1822.The Allen brothers furthered the ongoing invention of the Highland dress and the Highland way of life as the preeminent marker of national identity in loyalist and Jacobite circles alike. 41n his plea for the restoration of the House of Stuart published in 1898, Theodore Napier credited the importance of Jacobite songs for having "done more than perhaps anything else during the century to foster feelings of sympathy and affection for 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' and his misfortunes." 42The cultural substance to which the movement clung provided various points of impetus for the neo-Jacobite movement to normalize its claims within wider society.A highpoint of this revival was the exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart held in London's New Gallery of Regent Street in 1889. 43The exhibition's catalogue enjoyed royal approval, featuring François Clouet's painting of Mary, Queen of Scots taken from the Royal Collection at Windsor on its front cover. 44ver 1100 artefacts had been gathered, with a heavy emphasis on portraiture, private letters, and coins.Stuart memorabilia was frequently then to be found for sale at auction houses and would continue to be promoted into the 1920s. 45Napier himself owned several Jacobite drinking glasses but had been outbid in his attempts to acquire the Queen Mary Harp in 1904. 46It is noticeable, though, this was not just a movement for the political or titled elites.Daniel Hendry was a seller of such memorabilia who looked to the Athenaeum to advertise the sale of his collection of Jacobite coins in silver and gold along with around 60 medals at Chapman & Son's Edinburgh auction house. 47endry was a merchant who lived in a mock Tudor Jacobean villa built on his lands at Forth Park in the unfashionable Fife town of Kirkcaldy. 48By 1892, such was the growth of demand for these artefacts amongst all manner of people, that reports of a local industry in forged historic manuscripts, manufactured autographs, and literary frauds coming out of Edinburgh, was "long known" to the police as it was to antiquarians.The chief outputs of this trade featured Burns and Scott, Jacobite letters, and autographed epistles from Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell. 49Showing the appeal to local historians and antiquarians, letters associated with the Jacobite army as it marched through Nottingham, Manchester, Darlington and York, the originals owned by William Gibbons Welch of Lancaster, were transcribed and published in The Antiquary. 50In 1890, the newly formed Scottish History Society (1886) published Lord Rosebery's list of the dramatis personae from the side of the rebellion and London's MacMillan publishers issued William Gibb's illustrated account of the House of Stuart drawn from forty colour plates representing the family's relics. 51Further interest was piqued by publication of Henry Paton's collection of papers from the uprisings of 1715 and 1745 (1893) and, of lasting significance, Bishop Robert Forbes' monumental collection of manuscript material originating from 1745 to 1775, The Lyon in Mourning (1895-1896, 3 vols). 52These examples were signs of a mature and British-wide sympathy for the Stuarts' fate upon which legitimists sought to promote and politicize their cause. 53s a political movement, legitimism had a presence amongst Conservatives in England before it gained backing in Scotland.Momentum began in St Ives in Huntingdonshire in October 1891, with a gathering billed as the "first public meeting held in England or Scotland since 1745 in furtherance of the Stuart cause." 54Explanations of what he termed the disastrous consequences of the revolution of 1688, with options outlined for repealing the 1707 Union, came from Rev. Robert Charles Fillingham, rector of the Hertfordshire village of Hexton since 1891 and chairman of the London Executive Committee of the Legitimist Jacobite League. 55Fillingham took the principled stance that, first and foremost, the Stuart line was the directly descended line of the throne. 56onsensus that Scotland was experiencing misgovernment came from the participation of the Celtic nationalist the Hon Stuart Erskine, but otherwise the home rule and independence debate was absent from this initial politicization of the cause. 57nstead, the focus was on the monarchy, and so with mischievous optimism proposals were put to the Hanoverian royal princes that "all would be forgiven and forgotten" if their "repentance" was announced. 58Being dependent on opportunism of this kind reflects the legitimists' lack of specific proposals through which they could impose their hereditary candidate or a means of making this change without opening the door to republicanism.Yet such hesitancy was not found amongst opponents who attempted to undermine the movement before it gained impetus, with the delegates at St Ives described in the Glasgow Herald as "a small group of old women in men's clothing" whose constitutional challenge had long been lost.Indeed, "If Britain was not a free country … the Legitimist Jacobite League might be called a treasonable organization," harrumphed the newspaper. 59he League's claim to a membership of 7000 people is unsubstantiated, 60 but it attracted support by echoing strands of Conservatism current across Britain that combined pre-democratic homage to hereditary rule with concerns about a growing threat to existing institutions from the rise of populism.This construction of neo-Jacobitism is important to explaining its appeal in England.In The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings (1896), J. Neville Figgis, theologian and historian, dated the attraction of hereditary rule in English constitutionalism as first a religion of resistance in the sixteenth century, a resistance against foreign aggression in the seventeenth century, before becoming "a thing of the past" in the eighteenth century, but one where the main interest lay in its aesthetic. 61And it was loyalism that legitimist writer W. B. Blaikie recalled in 1901 with the observation that divine right had become a "religion for patriotic Englishmen."He maintained that the benefit of monarchical succession was "independent of Pope or council; it came from God alone; and thus the theory of Divine right became a living belief." 62For presbyterian Scotland in the half century after the Church of Scotland had split on the principle of the divine appointment of minsters to the parish in 1843, such arguments had some appeal although the question in the parishes remained one of self-government through the presbyteries. 63Fundamentally, and when framed patriotically, divine rule offered protection from versions of republicanism in thrall to democracy: The tendency of the age is towards democracy, and the tendency of democracy towards harm.The Legitimist is, above all things, a king's man, and in his eyes democracy is an accursed condition, to be prevented at all costs. 64 realize the principle of their cause, legitimists did not accept the abdication of James VII and thus the male line of the Stuarts only came to an end when, styled with the titles they would have held, Charles III (Charles Edward Stuart) died without legitimate issue and his brother, Henry IX, the Cardinal of York, died in 1807, again without issue.The legitimist line then transferred to Maria Beatrice of Savoy, styled Mary III and II.She married her mother's brother, Francis IV, and their son, Francis V duke of Modena, succeeded to the claim as Francis I. On his death in 1875 the line passed to his niece Maria Theresa (Mary IV and III) and her son Rupprecht (1869-1955), his name anglicised as Rupert, and styled the future Robert I and IV.Yet this line was complicated by Maria Beatrice having married her uncle which, under English law, forfeited the inheritance of her descendants. 65To side-step this issue, although the prominent legitimist groups ignored this and maintained the more direct line of descent, a claim was made through Maria Beatrice's sister, who had married the duke of Parma, to her grandson Roberto (1848-1907): he was also to be styled Robert I of England and IV of Scotland. 66s supportive as the contemporary cultural context was to popular notions of Jacobite romance, the legitimist movement was rarely without challenge.The coverage it engendered fell between the dismissive and the enraged.Critics maintained that any campaign to overthrow the House of Hanover would in all likelihood achieve little than to favour republicans; or by its own hand abolish the monarchy in its entirety. 67If the legitimists had lived in the time of the Stuarts, argued the Liverpool Mercury in 1891, they might have lost their heads; but now "the laugh comes before the axe." 68 The Glasgow Herald could not countenance the "ridiculous treason of these belated Divine-Right men"; 69 a charge accompanied by the rider that only the magnanimity of Victoria and her advisors allowed them to speak out in the first place.The Scotsman described it as a feeble movement "strong in genealogy and bold in prophecy" but one divorced from "present facts." 70nd with some justification, William MacPherson explained that the legitimist principle itself was undermined by how the Stuarts had come to the throne via the line of Bruce, when the true hereditary principle would have taken the line through Baliol. 71illingham returned to Huntingdonshire in December 1891 to present the constituents of North Hunts with the candidature of Walter Clifford Mellor, of Hyde Park in London.Mellor's submission was approved; he was styled the Jacobite and Revisionist candidate and professed himself in favour of home rule for Scotland and Ireland and determined to campaign for a state pension as part of several social initiatives.Contesting a general election that was so strongly focused on finding a solution for Ireland's constitutional travails, 72 helps explain why nothing from the debate in Huntingdonshire concerned the immediate replacement of the House of Hanover, and also suggests some cognisance had been taken of the hostility that had arisen. 73The League was belittled for the lack of public recognition enjoyed by any of its executive council, for its leader being removed from mainstream politics, and for the tenuous English connections of the Marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval, other than, it was pointed out, in an earlier form when that family name was found on the Williamite side of the Glorious Revolution.
Yet across the Irish Sea a more serious concern was raised, one that sees closer intellectual ties to the home rule cause.In this example, the League was characterized as part of a movement which "menaces the Throne and Constitution of the United Kingdom; and does this openly, soliciting funds to carry out its nefarious work." 74The implications that might follow if this movement secured success on the back of the home rule movement were noticed.The Belfast Newsletter wanted to make plain to the League and its supporters, while raising the spectre of Irish home rule to its readership, that there was no royal house with claims to the throne of the UK and the British Empire because all other branches had been set aside "by the wise Act of Parliament, which caused the succession to devolve upon the Electress Sophia of Hanover."The Newsletter maintained that the events that produced the Glorious Revolution completed "a decision taken for specific reasons, whose force has not expired."As well as the fate that befell the House of Stuart, the Catholic royal houses passed over included the Royal House of Savoy, in France and Spain, as well as those of Orleans, Lorraine, Salm, Ursel, Bourbon, Conty, Maine, and Modena.The force of the argument against the legitimists was unbending: the Jacobites "are excluded by law, excluded by religion, and excluded by the virtues and legitimate possession of the Queen and her family," and to argue otherwise was sedition.To the League's attempts to put forward the claim of Rupert of Bavaria, the view from the north of Ireland was that: One Revolution got rid of an unworthy Stuart; and we do not want another revolution to turn the Bill of Rights into wrongs, and unsettle the Settlement under which the British Empire has grown to the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful that ever was in the world.The Stuarts would have reduced England, Scotland and Ireland to provinces of France; the Prince of Orange made them three great kingdoms.Now they form the United Kingdom, ruled by a Sovereign who lawfully and rightfully occupies the throne.The exiled Royal branches may remain as they are.Parliament ignored them, when it was determined to adhere to the doctrines of the Reformation, secured by the triumphs of the Revolution, out of which sprang "this Protestant kingdom." 75e more sensitive constitutional ear in Belfast had picked up on the potential implications of the challenge presented by the legitimists, contemplating an endgame that the political classes in and around London had refused to take beyond the level of cursory dismissal.
The new year saw a new phase of activity with the first issue of the League's newspaper, The Jacobite (30 January 1893).Again, it was over the Irish Sea where the greatest concern was voiced.Its publication was enough for William Johnston, Ulster representative for Ballykilbeg (Conservative), and a man "devoted to memories of the Battle of the Boyne," to bring to the attention of the home secretary Henry Asquith, and MP for East Fife, that "the wife of Prince Louis of Bavaria" was being styled Mary IV and England's rightful queen. 76When asked by Johnston for his view on the aims of this "treasonable society, which evidently had sympathizers amongst supporters of the Government," the home secretary, to the sound of ministerial cheers and laughter, replied that "the Government do not propose to give factitious importance to a foolish and ephemeral craze." 77A radical Orangeman and polemicist, described as an upholder of the reigning dynasty and a denouncer of Jacobite treason, 78 Johnston was nevertheless surprised at the derisive cheers he met from nationalists and Liberals alike. 79squith did not think the movement viable.The underpinning romanticism from earlier in the century was now damned as youthful imagination. 80Andrew Laing mocked the League for its immaturity, suggesting the suffrage would need to be extended to women, including schoolgirls under the age of fifteen, if it hoped to obtain substantial support in England. 81For many the legitimists were a perplexing organization: treasonous to its opponents, loyalist in its claims, but ultimately "harmless." 82Judy magazine even made fun of Reginald Stewart Meade's attempts to sing in public when promoting the aims of the League. 83Meade was damningly characterized as one of the worst kinds of middle-class men, an "enthusiast." 84et it is not without significance that the League's campaigning and awareness-raising activities were reported with such scorn, and to a level that paralleled the opprobrium that regularly came to those active in the home rule movement. 85Barely concealed glee accompanied reports of the society's sorry attempts to lay a wreath of lilies on the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots at Westminster Abbey in 1892.The occasion was stymied by the Dean and Chapter who closed the tomb, drew across a curtain, and left the League's members with no obvious direction to follow; while the crowd, attracted by public advertisements, looked on with a mix of humour and sympathy. 86The wreath was eventually attached to the gates of the locked tomb, but remained only temporarily. 87In a similar scene, the decoration of London's statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square on the anniversary day, 30 January 1892, had the solemnity of the occasion interrupted by a policeman in partnership with a "loyal, though inebriated washerwoman." 88ermission to present the wreath had been granted by Gladstone, but only at the last moment and having reversed his opposition to a similar request the previous year. 89here was, though, little to disrupt the next anniversary of Charles's execution when a solemn evensong and wreath-laying took place at the Church of St Margaret Patterns, Rood Lane in London.In attendance with the Legitimist Jacobite League was the Thames Valley Jacobite Club, the Order of the White Rose, the Order of St Germain, the Jacobite Restoration Club, and the White Cockade Club of St Ives. 90But a review of this evidence indicates that the reputation of the legitimists was persistently characterized as awkward and out of step with mainstream norms.
The movement's failure to push the more radical implications of such commemorative moments can perhaps be explained, at least in part, by its internal tensions.On 24 March 1892 Fillingham, seconded by Massue, moved a motion at an extraordinary meeting of the Order of the White Rose critical of the Order's leadership for its hostility to the Legitimist Jacobite League which had been made, they claimed, with the intention of undermining the Jacobite cause. 91In May 1893 Stewart Meade successfully sued fellow member of the League and Order of the White Rose, Richard Duncombe Jewell, for libel over a letter sent to various newspapers which remarked negatively on the former's character, with a 40s fine being issuedalthough such reports of discord were dismissed by the parties concerned as fabrications. 92But of greater challenge was awareness of the difficulties that arose with attempting to change the monarch, and the consequences this would have for the Church of England.Following on from Lord Salisbury's electioneering visit to Bradford in 1895, Meade faced accusations that he wished to "fetch a foreigner to reign over us from some minor German principality"; 93 and Colonel Samuel Dewé White argued against designating Charles I "the martyred saint" at a ceremony on 30 January 1896.In response to letters appearing in the London press commemorating the "gallant loyalists" who fought for Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden, and quoting Bishop Ryle's "Perilous Times," the staunchly low church Dewé White raised the spectre that many might now live to see a "Papist on the throne of England, or the Pope being allowed to celebrate Mass at St Paul's, or Popery re-established as the dominant Church." 94or was there a charismatic and powerful figurehead to carry the cause against such criticism.When the legitimists' favoured claimant visited London in 1897, Rupert came not to supplant Victoria but to join with those celebrating her Diamond Jubilee.Such limited intentions failed to daunt Lady Clifford Mellor who welcomed him as the representative of the de jure sovereign of these realms come to congratulate the de facto sovereign on having reigned for so long. 95Each day during his stay legitimists sent white roses to his hotel as encouragement, but it failed to result in Rupert making public his or his mother's claim. 96And with rumours of the Jacobite League attending the Jubilee having reached the satirical pages of Punch, the movement was stymied by having to balance a return of the Stuart line while remaining publicly loyal to Victoria. 97Undaunted, and looking to take a positive from their predicament, Massue and Cranstoun Metcalfe used the attention to compare the progress of legitimism in England with that of France and Spain, all the while explaining how their movement was compatible with unimpeachable loyalty for Victoria. 98They framed their cause in step with the restoration of Don Carlos, brother of Fernando VII (died 1833), who claimed the throne in place of Fernando's daughter Isabella.This positioned the movement as stemming from the "faith of Legitimism," with its members being "the English branch of a Catholic or universal party." 99In England, they argued, Jacobites might better characterize themselves as Carlists who were simply steadfast believers in legitimism. 100But the accusation that they were promulgating a pro-Catholic cause was a pernicious label for the movement's wider appeal, not least when accompanied by accusations that the Vatican was simultaneously attempting to increase its influence in British and Irish society. 101While it is likely that the majority of the League's members were not Roman Catholics, the logic of legitimism required repeal of the Act of Settlement and to break the centrality of Protestantism in the constitution, whatever salutations were made publicly for Victoria. 102espite the enormity of the challenge of returning the Stuart line to the throne, by explaining that the existing constitutional alignment was not inviolate added a further set of arguments to the home rule debate.In attempting to convince the public that a parliamentary title was a poor substitute for the legitimacy of primogeniture, legitimists stressed how flimsy was the democratic action that had secured the acts of Settlement and Abjuration; each passed by only one vote. 103Yet the difficulty of integrating legitimism with democratic crises was both subtle and intractable: the home rulers wanted democracy to spread in order to rebuild political legitimacy, whereas legitimists longed for democratic processes to implode in order to recast monarchical rule.For the British Federalist political legitimacy would come with a Scottish parliament, ideally within a federal Britain. 104For the legitimists, democracy was deemed fickle and a harbinger of social upheaval, the inevitable result of the "transference of power from the ruler to the ruled." 105Massue and Metcalfe warned that the Hanoverian line might be swapped away by the people upon the death of Victoria, or of her successor, and in such a case democratic government would take over.If that were to happen, then it was hoped it would be but for a short period before the nation looked once again to restore the monarchy and thus the Stuarts. 106mmediately following the death of Victoria on 22 January 1901, printed notices were attached to the gates of both St James's Place and Guildhall proclaiming Mary IV and III, not Edward VII, as her true successor. 107In the Commons, the Irish nationalist politician and devout Catholic William Redmond asked the first commissioner of works Aretas Akers-Douglas why the wreath of the Legitimist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland had not been placed on the statue of King Charles I in Trafalgar Square on 30 January as it had done for the last eight years.That the wreath was left off for good taste while the queen lay dead did not shame Redmond from demanding it be there the next year, anticipating Edward VII not being encumbered with his royal duties for long. 108This confidence reflected belief within the movement that a strong undercurrent of sympathy lay with their cause, but that it had yet to take a more "practical form." 109One notable indication of wider support came five months later on the field of Bannockburn in Stirling, when the Scottish Patriotic Association declared its own opposition to Edward being styled the seventh British monarch to take that name because there had been no Scottish monarchs so-called.Theodore Napier let it be known that he would resist the Edwardian nomenclature at the coronation and put himself forward to take on "the King's champion in mortal combat." 110These complaints continued to be articulated, and when a petition of 50,000 signatures was raised in 1902 to protest the king's title, then at least one practical outcome had been achieved. 111

Loyalism and Scottish nationalism
The most cogent agitation for legitimism, birthright, and restricted conceptions of democracy combined with ideological support for home rule in Scotland came from the tireless campaigning of Theodore Napier. 112Born in Melbourne in 1845 to a Scottish-born father, educated in both countries but raised in Australia, Napier arrived in Edinburgh in February 1893 to attend the Bannockburn memorial later in June; it would become the start of a constant round of memorializing throughout the next two decades. 113Napier was at Culloden to lay wreaths to fallen Jacobite soldiers at the anniversary event in April 1896 and would continue to attend until 1912. 114Representatives from both the Legitimist Jacobite League and the Order of St German joined him at the battlefield in 1898, with Napier representing the newly formed Scottish Anniversary and Historical Society. 115Napier was the leading legitimist north of the border, and likely it was he who placed an advert in the front page of the Glasgow Herald seeking gentlemen to assist the formation of Scottish branches of the League.At this point, his analysis of the constitutional malaise was in step with the campaigning of Charles Waddie and William Mitchell, respectively secretary and treasurer of the SHRA.Napier proposed a version of federalism within Empire which, given his personal history in Australia and of his father in Scotland, flagged the birthright of free-born citizens. 116He argued that federalism was needed to avoid the colonies drifting away from their British ties while they remained subjects of Victoria. 117In response, Charles Waddie sent his compliments to Napier along with a signed copy of The Federation of Greater Britain.In this pamphlet, Waddie proposed the equality of the constituent nations of Greater Britain under a system of federalism where each of the states of Empire would give up equally a portion of their natural rights to govern. 118He argued that without this recalibration between Britain and its colonies, the latter would inevitably and soon "assert their manhood and claim to be factors in the history of nations [because the] subordinate position of Colony will become intolerable to them." 119On these points, the two nationalists saw common cause.Napier then contributed to the Waddie family's letter-writing campaign that followed the refusal of the English liberal association, and its leader the earl of Rosebery in his speech on 27 March 1896 in Huddersfield, to support home rule for Scotland. 120Rosebery had long been criticized for conceiving of home rule as little more than a version of local government, proposing that federalism be constrained within such limited terms. 121Yet in 1898 Charles Waddie had refused an invitation to join Napier in commemorating Wallace at Robroyston after the two disagreed whether Wallace and Bruce brought Scotland and England together as equals into Union, or whether the Union should be replaced by a Scottish Parliament.In the press Waddie called out his erstwhile collaborator as a "pronounced type." 122Writing for the Glasgow Herald, Rosebery asserted that the memory of Wallace was too important to be "endangered by Napierian antics and Scottish Home Rule fallacies." 123But Waddie and Napier would regain common cause in the months after Victoria's death, with the latter praising Waddie's efforts on behalf of Scotland and maintaining no ill will towards the people of England, where "Scottish Federalists are the only true Unionists." 124apier continued to draw the English legitimists into the Stuart cause by acts of historical commemoration, with Massue persuaded to send a wreath to the commemoration of Culloden on behalf of English supporters in April 1902. 125In so doing, and with his support for the SHRA and the Scottish Patriotic Association, Napier triangulated home rule all round, imperial federalism, and legitimism into a single cause.The challenge of birthright to Unionism had been brought into the nationalist movement in Scotland through Napier's periodical, The Fiery Cross.His objectives were made clear in an advert published in The Jacobite where the Fiery Cross (Crois Tara) was described as "the only independent Loyalist and Scottish Nationalist courier issued in Scotland." 126irst published in the month of Victoria's death, the periodical campaigned to recover the rights of the nation lost in 1689.Repeated at the start of each issue was a list of its objectives which included the standard home rule complaints over the use of the Royal Arms and British coinage, the nomenclature used to describe England, Scotland and Britain, and a demand for the restoration of the clan system. 127Nor was Napier, for all his Jacobite sympathies, averse to using the iconic medieval "man of the people" William Wallace to ask his readers: "has it come to this?" 128 Indeed, Napier's analysis could easily slip into a democratic tone when he thought social and economic progress had been hindered by the "humiliation of centralisation in all walks of life." 129But despite such overlap in aims, Napier held views that would not always sit comfortably with the liberal underpinnings of the home rule movement.He was an active proponent of the Australian government's policy of granting rights of settlement only to white people.He bemoaned that that country, as he did for New Zealand, supported women gaining the franchise: "should the franchise be given to a woman?We cry certainly not!" Instead, he advocated that married men should have two votes to honour the married state and reflect the higher tax burden they carried over single men. 130apier would slowly move away from the legitimist cause in England and its increasingly Carlist agenda to concentrate on his work in Scotland.His contributions to The Jacobite end in 1903 around the same time as adverts in that magazine for The Fiery Cross stopped.His name is not amongst those who celebrated the annual legitimists' dinner in St Ives in that year. 131The Fiery Cross continued to report on legitimist anniversaries but increasingly the activities of the Scottish Patriotic Association were promoted, such as its campaign for teaching more Scottish history in the schools, and the call went out for a Scottish Parnell "to deliver Scotland from political serfdom." 132In August 1902 Napier had dramatized his mix of legitimism and home rule by addressing the Scottish Patriotic Association's rally at Bannockburn, raising his dirk upwards, kissing it, and declaring "I swear that I will never own allegiance to any Edward the Seventh of Great Britain." 133he double usurpation of an "illegitimate monarch and unjust title" was key to Napier's motivation, later protesting to the Lord Lyon on the matter; but to his chagrin finding no encouragement from that office. 134Legitimism would not disappear as a cause, but after 1904 English neo-Jacobitism existed only weakly, and only occasionally was it prominent over the next decade. 135The Fiery Cross maintained a consistent level of output until it suspended, and ultimately stopped publication following the July issue of 1912.That was the year when Napier readied himself to settle back in Australia with no confirmation of when he might, if ever, return to Scotland. 136He left Stuart Erskine to continue the cause by shaping the arguments further along pro-Celtic lines; marking a different pan-Celtic federalism of a kind that Napier himself had increasingly toyed with. 137e are left, in this analysis, with Napier's justification for breaking the Union.Before he became involved in the legitimist cause his support for imperial federalism gave him traction within the home rule movement.These proposals gained some of the widest attention, with the Manchester liberal federation's Edwin Guthrie insisting that there was no reason why the two principles of home rule and federation could not be adaptable to the British Empire. 138B. D. Mackenzie, vice president of the SHRA, was another who focused on the potential imperial gains of a better working, federal, Union. 139For home rulers, the issue was clear: separate nationalities were compatible with "United Sovereignty" within the British Isles; as it was within Empire: "For the British Empire the issue is nothing less than FEDERATION or SEPARATION." 140et as he spent more time in Britain, and is influenced by the legitimist movement in England, Napier restated his argument to clarify that his loyalty, above all else, was to the "rightful and legitimate monarch of one's country." 141Federalism would be a welcome outcome, but was not the primary goal of legitimism. 142Each version of Napier's home rule position claimed patriotism for Britain, greater loyalty, and greater legitimacy, even if the result was independence. 143By merging the values of Jacobitism and home rule into a single cause, Napier attains an important place in the historical development of the nationalist movement.It is not in dispute that the dominant political trajectory of nationalism lay elsewhere, primarily through the mobilization of pre-Union patriots Wallace and Bruce within the constitutional structures of Union. 144Coinciding with the home rule cause in Scotland and Ireland going through something of a lull at the decade's end, the evidence directs us to examine neo-Jacobitism for the challenge posed not solely for the monarchy, but also for the Anglo-Scottish Union.Symbolic of this conclusion is Napier's adoption of the kilt as everyday wear, with the chosen version that of the Highlander before the revolution of 1688.Here, through the cause of legitimism, Napier was making a direct challenge to the Union: it was the revolution settlement and its results in the Union that was the origin of Scotland's ills. 145In these arguments, loyalism would best continue its challenge to republicanism if the legitimacy of the Crown was re-established on hereditary not parliamentary terms.It was a high risk, indeed revolutionary way forward.The likely consequence of unpicking the settlement of 1707 on these grounds would not be confined to advancing home rule for Scotland but would potentially and with greater consequence underpin an overwhelming rush for republicanism.Those who persisted with its cause into the late Victorian democratic age, marginalized politically as they were, confirmed the practice and principle of loyalism would continue to offer and to face challenge.