In 1688, Prince William of Orange landed in England; the reigning king, James II, fled. William was crowned King of England the next year.
Between 1688 and 1750, those loyal to James II and his line — Jacobites — agitated for his restoration to the throne.
Their efforts ranged from plots and conspiracies to armed invasions.
To sustain their treasonous communities in the face of concerted and sophisticated state suppression, Jacobites mobilized a vast array of methods including songs, clubs and societies, material culture, clothing, and literature. To learn more about the manuscript literature of this culture, please see my article, “Seeing the King Over the Water, Two Ways.”
This project assays the vast amount of manuscript poetry dedicated to their cause.
Poems
The six hundred and four individual poems in this corpus span a considerable range of effects, sentiments, forms, even of dialects and languages. I include three of the more frequently-occurring here only to give a flavour of the corpus’s most dominant typologies and modes.
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I Love with all my heart The Loyall Party here
The Prince of Orange part Most hatefull does appear,
And for the Parliament I ever have deny’d
My Conscience gives consent To be of JAMES’s Side,
For Righteous is the Cause To fight for such a King
To Fight for Orange’s Laws Will England’s ruin bring
This is my mind and heart. In this opinion I
Tho’ none do take my part Resolve to Live and Dye.[1]
 [1] Osborn b. 111, 527. Volume presented to James II in exile at Saint-Germain.
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What Briton can survey that Heavenly Face
And doubt it being of ye Martyr’s race?
Ev’ry fine feature does his birth declare
The Monarch and the Saint are shining there.
His face the boldest Whigg would sure convince
It speaks at once the Stuart and the Prince.
O! Glorious Gentle, ’tis evidently plain
By thy Majestick Eyes thou’rt born to Reign.
My heart bleeds when I view thy noble Shade,
And grieves it cannot bring thee better aid.
I on no other terms a man wou’d be,
But to defend thy Glorious Cause and thee.
For both I should be proud my Life to loose,
But now can only Serve thee with my Muse.
O were my Pen a Sword, that I might fight
Instead of verse, I’d vindicate thy Right.[1]
 [1] Osborn fc 58 f3v.
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O Anna see the prelude is begun, }
Again they play the game of forty one }
And he’s the Traytor yt defends thy Throne }
Thus Laud, & thus thy Royal Grand-Sire dy’d,
Impeach’d by Clamour & by Faction try’d;
Hoadely is cry’d up, yt does thy Right oppose,
Because he crowns ye Mobb, & arms thy Foes;
Stop ye Portentous Omen e’re too late,
And view thy own in poor Sacheverells Fate:
Fatal Experience bids thee now be wise, }
Let one blest Martyr of thy Race suffice, }
At him they Stricke, but want yr Sacrifice.[1]
 [1] Osborn MSs File 17422. Description text goes here
FAQ
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I'm glad you asked. At heart, this project is a thick description, a sociology of a culture. The culture I describe here is in its protracted, vibrant death throes. The literature that its participants produced shows them attempting, over a half-century, to navigate an unfolding crisis of existential, even cosmological significance. A principle form those attempts took was writing literature - writing immensely burdened with significance and happening in secret - and, perhaps more unusually, circulating, reading, collecting, and redistributing that literature. The way that these people wrote spoke deeply and specifically to the reasons why they wrote.
These are the stakes of the project: what happens to a literary culture that spends so much energy addressing the circumstances under which it is written and read?, or, how does literature in English learn to talk about itself? How does a highly porous media shift like those which now saturate our lives - but here between manuscript and print - put its finger on those scales?
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The material record is fragmentary (in the sense Crystal Lake articulates in her Artifacts (JHU, 2020)) but in some ways remarkably coherent and richly detailed. Over the period 2009-2017 I visited libraries across the US and the UK, looking for the largely undocumented material traces that survive. I then chose then seven largest, most comprehensive, single volume manuscript collections, and indexed every poem they contained.
Those seven volumes -
I recorded the first line, last line, given title, and any other information I could find about every poem in those seven books. I found 604 poems in all.
The hard bit was that I consulted a raft of finding aids and union indexes, to see which other manuscripts known to the anglophone literary academy contained those poems. Then I'd visit those manuscripts and record every appearance of one of those 604 poems. As I got to know the poems better, I was able to record variants. I also opportunistically ransacked the manuscript finding aids of any library I happened to be working in to see what they might have. Three hundred and ten manuscripts made it into the Index; I do no know how many more did not.
I drew a lot of blanks. I found some gems. I read a huge amount of the stuff - letters, speeches, ballads, jokes, riddles, manifestos, family recipes (medical and otherwise), diaries, plays, sermons - that was interesting to those people, and interesting to me, but not "technically" (read: "actually") relevant. It took forever, or, about eight years. I loved it.
See below for more specific and technical information about the construction of the index of Jacobite poetry in manuscript.
Boxplot showing the dates of composition for poems within each manuscript.
One central question for scholars of Jacobitism is, when did Jacobitism recede from partly sincere political activism into an affective mode — what Daniel Szechi calls “emotional” Jacobitism — and when after that did it turn into a proxy for antiquarianism, aka “the Old Cause”?
This graph shows the enduring power of poems written during the peak period of plausibilty for the cause; 1688-1715. It also shows that larger manuscripts only started to be made after 1750, and that they employed the kind of logic of coverage familiar to designers of survey courses. Otherwise, the norm seems to be a core of poems from ‘89-’95, with a smattering of more recent works from outside that bracket, . It also suggests that concerns of simple material size were real and live right up to the 1720s — it is just harder to hide a bigger book.
This is actually quite an important suggestion — that even into the 1720s Jacobites were designing their manuscripts to fly under the state radar — because it means that at least for those individuals, Jacobitism really felt like a living cause long after the 1715 succession of George I. This is not an uncontraversial argument to make in the scholarly literature on the topic.
I’m also really struck by the persistence of the “canon” as it almost seems to be from ‘89-’15. It might be reasonable to expect the culture to glean whichever poems were most effective whenever they happened to be written. That persistence then, coupled with the persistently small MS sizes, suggests that though plausbility had not faded from Jacobites’ minds, something else had. What was it, then, about that period and the literature it produced that made it the canonical period of possibility, since possibility nonetheless endured beyond it?
This is what I love most about data visualisation. It doesn’t answer your questions, at least, almost never how you hope it will. It provokes you to ask newer, much more interesting questions than the ones you started out with. It helps you advance your research iteratively, dialectically, and in directions which otherwise might never have occurred to you.
Network graphs
My understanding of this project was driven throughout by an evolving set of network visualizations. The limitations of Squarespace mean I am unable to embed an interactive version on this page, but you can find one by following this link. I recommend that you click the small arrow on the center-left of the screen once you follow this link; it will allow you to customize the graph and help you interpret it.
You can also download the portable .gexf file here.
Graph showing connections among manuscripts; sized for number of poems per ms, coloured by suggested subcommunities of circulation.
Data
You will find here a folder with the simplest bibliographic information broken out into tables you can link together either in your preferred spreadsheet software or with another tool. These tables include: distributions of poems across manuscripts; authorship of poems, where knowable; estimated dates of composition for poems; if print publication is recorded in ESTC, Wing, or in David Foxon’s guide, what the relevant reference is; each manuscript’s shelfmark, library, and location.
If you would like more traditional and detailed bibliographic data regarding the 604 poems, you will find a more full index linked here. This includes a first line, last line, and title (where possible) for each poem, along with its assigned ID. The sheet also includes author information, speculated date of composition, if and where printed, a complete list of all the manuscripts containing the poem, significant figures mentioned, and other misc bibliographic information about format where possible. Caveat lector: this data is the dirtiest of the things I am sharing here. I am including my notes column, because while notes like “very sig vars” or “wild variations across the 8 mss” might be a little gnomic, I hope that the many notes like “firth and lansdowne are vars, might show descent and a stemmata” give researchers some useful next steps for research, as well as indicating the outer limit of what I have so far been able to do.
Lastly, I must be candid about this project’s shortcomings. Only fairly late in the day did I realise that I made some limiting decisions; on the other hand those decisions made the project possible in its early forms. I omitted to record: sequence of poems in MSs; any texts not in English, thus ignoring considerable amounts of French and Latin writing; or prose (speeches, letters, manifestos, etc).