"Dunce the Second Reigns Like Dunce the First": The Gothic Bequest in the Dunciad

When the three-book Dunciad appeared in May 1728, Pope was about to turn forty. So, too, was the political cause that had come to life shortly after James II left England for the court of St. Germain in December 1688. Since Pope was a member of the Catholic minority as well as a critic of the Williamite “conquest,” it is scarcely surprising that he deplored James’s fate. Yet he never committed himself to the Jacobite cause, even though he was susceptible to the lingering spell of the Stuarts. On that score he was in tune with the culture of “emotional Jacobitism” prevalent in the first half of the eighteenth century. ¹ Emotional Jacobites came in a variety of shapes and sizes, but in the main they were Tory opponents of Hanover who supported hereditary monarchy but were not prepared to recognize the Pretender; they might toast the king over the water, but they had deep misgivings about a Catholic succession. So did Pope, who reconciled Jacobitism and revolution principles by way of devotion to the political moderation of Anne Stuart rather than the hereditary claim of James Stuart and his Catholic heirs. ² That would have been a difficult balancing act even in the best of times. But the span between the death of Anne in 1714 and the three-book Dunciad fourteen years later was far from that for Pope, who by 1728 — given the destruction of the political center after the Fifteen, the entrenchment of the Whigs in the 1720s, and the succession of George II in 1727 — had come to recognize his commitment to a losing if not an altogether lost cause. ³

With the appearance of the three-book Dunciad, Pope’s discontent had come to focus on the dual succession of dynasty and ministry, a double blow that gave every indication that the second George would not differ substantially from the first. If in the days following George I’s death Pope hoped that the new king would take his father’s advice and retain Sir Spencer Compton over Walpole, it took Sir Robert little more than a week to seize the moment with the promise of an inflated civil list. That was in June. By the time George II was crowned at Westminster in October, not only was the first minister secure, so, too, was the dynasty. City and Court were taken by the pomp and ceremony of the coronation, but of far greater significance than its visible success was the fact that it did not evoke riots like those that had erupted throughout London and the provinces following the coronation of George I. ⁴ Nor, in the weeks to come, did it rekindle the prospect of a Stuart restoration. There would be no Twenty-seven to echo the Fifteen.

Nevertheless, there were many who still held out for the Jacobite cause. For them, the accession of George II must have been an especially bitter pill to swallow for yet another reason: it marked the first time in over a century that the crown had descended directly to a Prince of Wales. Mindful of that, the monarchy did its best to promote the patina of descent, particularly in light of the fact that George I had leapt over fifty-seven more direct claimants en route to a parliamentary title. As much as that particular weighed on the political nation, it did not, however, prevent either George I or his son from drawing on the rhetoric of divine right to vindicate dynastic right. ⁵ Divine right was invoked, as in the past, to remind English men and women of their moral obligations. But as the idiom’s focus had shifted from monarch to monarchy after the death of Anne, it only served to underscore the genealogical fiction underpinning the new regime. Apologists for the crown were well aware of the dilemma, but in spite of it they were not without several cards to play, one of them an historical myth that had long been part of the English political vocabulary but that had found...