Jane Shore and the Jacobites: Nicholas Rowe, the Pretender, and the National She-tragedy

Nicholas Rowe had begun the process of developing the she-tragedy as a vehicle for promoting the cultural politics of sympathy with The Fair Penitent in 1703. But subsequent movements in political events and passions also led to a new attempt to associate the spectacle of the woman in pain with state politics, and in particular with the threat of Jacobitism to the welfare of the British nation. The apparent precariousness of the Protestant succession pushed Whig writers to confront a crisis that would put the whole nation at risk; they frequently responded by depicting that risk as sexed or sexual. On stage, the national crisis becomes the national she-tragedy in Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714).

Despite the fact that one of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht bound King Louis XIV "to give neither harbour nor assistance to the Pretender," and "acknowledged the Queen's title and the Protestant Succession," Whig partisans in the winter of 1713–1714 worried that a reconciliation between the two nations—arranged in no small part by highly placed Jacobite sympathizers like Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke—was but the first step in the Tory ministry's plan to bring the Stuarts back from across the water.¹ Between the fallout from the fiasco that was the Sacheverell trial and the successful conclusion of peace with France, the Whig party and Whig principles absorbed blow after blow.² Decades later, Bolingbroke looked back on the peace as "the period at which the millenary year of toryism should begin."³ Queen Anne's illness drove partisan anxieties even higher. Nicolas Tindal's history calls the winter of 1713–1714 a "dangerous situation" during which "the friends of the Pretender believed, that all things were preparing for his restoration."⁴ Jacobitism appeared to gather momentum, emblematized by the publication of a hefty new folio volume: The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England Asserted, replete with examples drawn from Treasurer Robert Harley's own extensive library.⁵

For their part, Whig partisans demonstrated a collective attitude of impending doom. According to John Oldmixon, during these gloomy years

the Whigs look'd on themselves as in a State of Impotence, incapable by any human Helps to prevent the subverting our free and Protestant Constitution; they began to despair of preserving the Protestant Succession, and indeed the Spirits of the Whigs were so sunk by the Power and Oppression of the Ministry, and the Engagements and Endearments between them and the French Court, that had not the Providence of God deliver'd them by the Demise of Queen Anne, they had been, in Effect, what the Tories call them, in Malice, the ruin'd Party. . . . Their Church, their Rights, and their Persons, had been at the Mercy of the French, into whose Lap the Utrecht Peace had thrown the Balance of all the Power in Europe.⁶

Oldmixon is worth quoting at length because of his sustained self-definition in the Memoirs of the Press as a man convinced of the necessity for a partisan press both to disseminate the principles of Whiggery and to "keep up a good Spirit in the Whigs, which [would check] the fervent one that possess'd the Tories." Oldmixon's business, as it were, was to gauge the public support for Whiggism, and he recalled becoming desperate: "[T]he Peril that Cause was in increasing daily, my Fears and my Zeal increas'd with it."⁷ Whigs faced a Tory-majority Parliament ever more restrictive of political dissent and particularly of suggestions that the recent Tory ministry was conspiring against British liberties. Figures of ruin, despair, and despondency multiplied in Whig writing. In December of 1713 Samuel Croxall borrowed the allegorical structure of Spenser's Faerie Queene to depict the martial maid Britomart stripped of her weaponry, bound by the staff-wielding wizardry of Archimago (Harley), and harassed by Sir Burbon (Louis XIV), Romania (the Catholic Church), and Sans Foy (the Pretender):

Ah warlike Maid! who sees thy sad Estate With Eyes that can from trickling Tears with-hold...