The breaking image

On 5 November 1688, fifty years after the National Covenant had been signed in Edinburgh, William of Orange landed in England. His coming brought full circle Fortune's wheel which had deposed one Stuart through the fanaticism of the northern kingdom, and now evicted another by the fear and apathy of the southern realm.

Like so many patterns of recurrence, this description is too simple to stand as linear history. But to the Stuarts, and to this book which is an explanation of the poetry and ideology of their cause, such a reservation is redundant. For the Stuart cause (and on occasion, the ambition of its kings) was habitually expressed in a language of typology, with metaphors of prophecy and recurrence-salvation history, and not without its messianic force. This offered a profound and rich political analysis of the realms they had lost, won and lost again in the course of half a century. It was also a tongue which, increasingly after 1688, betokened the exclusion it lamented.