THE JACOBITE CAUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 3, 14 July 1939, Page 41

THE JACOBITE CAUSE

THE STUART PAPERS AT WIND.SOR. By Alistair and Henrietta Tayler. John Murray, London. p.p. 290-N.Z. price, 18/6. This is a book that will especially interest those with a romantic affection for the Jacobite cause. It is a selection, made with scholarly care, from a considerable mass of Jacobite papers. preserved at Windsor. The Napoleonic Wars interrupted their quiet transit. British agents suffered imprisonment in their attempts to pass them on a little further, and an attractive miscellany of rogues and scholars exploited and plundered the collection. The motive force that was all the time moving the papers on, abandoned for years in the leaky attics of an Italian palace, or hidden from friend and foe in the home of a jealous guardian in Leghorn, was the extreme interest taken in them by the Hanoverian family, who could not resist the strong appeal of the exciting though ineffectual Stuarts. Royal interest in the Stuart papers was strong even so late as the reign of Queen Victoria, who ordered the removal of a letter from the collection. The Taylers show us the unlucky Stuarts in their more domestic postures, though there is plenty too of matters of state. The Old Pretewder appears as a figure of becoming dignity, precise, correcting his Scottish secretary’s " wills" to "shalls," lecturing his high-flying son on the necessity of being polite to the French, and caring for a multitude of dependents with a truly royal solicitude. We get also a clear impression of his sons, the one impulsive, without his father’s sense of kingship, but with a vitality his father lacked, the other a religious fanatic. The book, in spite of its interesting illustrations, does not concede enough to the ordinary reader. But it is pleasant to be reminded that in the Eighteenth Century educated people could not spell, and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s version of clique -‘ click ""--seems an amusing anéicipation of a modern idiom.