Hamilton's "Abdication," Boswell's Jacobitism and the Myth of Mary Queen of Scots

Figure 1.

Gavin Hamilton, “The Abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots.” Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

1776 might be a memorable year in many annals, but it is surely not one in those of Jacobite political history, which by most practical reckoning ended at Culloden in 1745. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1776 the Royal Academy exhibited a singular canvas, one whose iconography placed it squarely within the moribund, if not defunct, symbology of the Jacobite cause. Commissioned by James Boswell and executed by the Scottish neoclassical artist Gavin Hamilton, “The Abdication of Mary Queen of Scots” (figure one) depicted the matriarch of the Stuart line at a point of crisis that, for supporters of her eighteenth-century descendants, meant more even than her beheading, the catastrophe that has dominated her legend in more recent times.

In essence, Hamilton had captured the moment, in 1567, at which Catholic Mary, Queen of Scotland virtually since her birth, had been forced by her Protestant subjects to give up her crown. Shortly thereafter Mary had fled her own country for England, whose throne, many felt, she was also owed and where nineteen years of house arrest courtesy of her English rival Elizabeth Tudor would end with Mary’s execution in the winter of 1587. In light of the fates of so many of the Queen of Scots’s descendants—the at last headless Charles I, the deposed James II, the exiled James Francis and Charles Edward—the surrender of her crown is archetypal, if not prototypical. Indeed, it would seem to provide a primal scene in the Stuart romance, or, at the very least, a founding moment in a family history whose unique affinity for the anti-progressivist, even atemporal, ambitions of myth and moving image has been documented recently by both Paul Monod and Murray Pittock. ¹

Hamilton’s representation of what eighteenth-century Britons were most likely to term the resignation of Mary’s crown is striking for several reasons. Besides being the work of an artist noted otherwise almost wholly for his classical subjects (most spectacularly the death of Lucretia and Achilles’s lament for Patroclus), this scene from Anglo-Scottish history conspicuously resurrected a charged complex of Jacobite symbolism at a time when Jacobite feeling and the historical images that tended to elicit it were presumably well on their way to the sort of toothless, clawless nostalgia apotheosized in Scott’s Waverley (1815). ² Yet for all that Hamilton had copied his Mary directly from a miniature portrait of the Queen of Scots on loan from James Francis’s own principal secretary, Andrew Lumisden, his painting’s Jacobite subtext seems to have been ignored by the arbiters of taste who flocked to its London debut. Instead, “The Abdication” was found wanting in ways that had little to do with politics. Although for decades painters and novelists would revisit the episode that Hamilton was the first to put down in paint, its awkward juxtapositions and unusually strained rendering of the Queen of Scots left the likes of Joshua Reynolds “not pleased with it.” ³ Even Boswell, the man who had sponsored “The Abdication,” had to admit that he was “disappointed” in what nearly ten years’ labor in a Roman studio had wrought. ⁴

It may seem perverse to worry about an aesthetically unfortunate image whose relevance to the Jacobites seems belated at best. But in what follows I hope to suggest that the failures which beset Hamilton’s historical canvas can in fact speak to us if we seek to understand what became of at least one strain of Jacobite sentiment in the breach between Culloden and the full-blooming of historical romance some sixty years later. Scott’s highly representative reconstructions of the Scottish past certainly exploit the wistful sense of the bygone that at one time bolstered Jacobite feeling, famously assimilating that sense to the highly narratable progressivism that still passes as the Whig model of history. ⁵ Nonetheless, the idiosyncracies of Hamilton’s canvas suggest that...