SOURCE: Bowers, Toni. “Jacobite Difference and the Poetry of Jane Barker.” ELH 64, no. 4 (winter 1997): 857-69.

In the following essay, Bowers examines the poetry of Barker, a staunch Jacobite, to argue against the myth of Jacobite certainty, as the poet shows disappointment, uncertainty, and dark regret in her political choices despite her loyalty to the royalist cause.

The more I learn about the partisan politics of Augustan England, the more difficult it becomes to trust what once seemed stable points of demarcation among the categories of players, and especially between Jacobites and Tories. “Tory” and “Jacobite” once seemed clearly distinct alternatives. But recent scholarship has complicated this view by arguing that political identities and affiliations were less than exclusive or stable in the century following the fall of King James II in 1688.¹ Augustan English men and women, it turns out, were capable of moving between camps according to shifting...