Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Ours is the age of the Jacobite restoration – not in dynastic terms, but in historical scholarship. Parliamentary Jacobitism in the period after 1710 has particularly attracted recent attention. While disagreement persists among historians as to the extent and seriousness of tory involvement with the Jacobite cause, few would deny that the issue is significant. By contrast, the influence of Jacobitism on politics under William III has been almost entirely neglected. Beyond the shadowy conspiracies that have long fascinated researchers, little is known of the role of Jacobite sentiment in the political life of England between 1688 and 1702. Not much has been added to Keith Feiling's sixty-year old assessment of the Jacobites as ‘that right wing of Toryism, in which the whole pre-Revolutionary sentiment survived’.
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