Seeing the King over the Water, Two Ways

While studies of Jacobite culture have proliferated in recent years, this article is the first to undertake a systematic investigation of the large culture of Jacobite poetry in manuscript. This culture thrived from about 1688 to 1745, after which time it became chiefly antiquarian. The study encompasses at 329 manuscripts in libraries in the US and the UK, and offers two ways to “see” the King over the water, just as recent studies of Jacobitism have suggested that the possibility for double vision was itself a central trope of the culture. Beginning with a series of network graphs of the culture’s poems and manuscripts, I determine the most significant poems in the corpus and confirm those findings with statistical analyses. I then offer a detailed reading of the corpus’s most popular poem, “The Ambodexter”, in order to suggest some of the key characteristics of Jacobite poetry in manuscript as a whole.