Abstract
The exiled Stuart court has tended to invite derision, neglect, or both. It could be viewed as the locus of romantic loyalty to a preposterous claim to the throne, a post-revolutionary playground for kow-towers and toast-makers. While historians might legitimately pay attention to the courts of James I, Charles I, Charles II and James II, focusing on those of their successors could be interpreted as gazing at the navel-gazers—pretend monarchs in pretend courts, going through the motions of the courtly activities of has-beens, never-weres, and never-going-to-bes. This Whiggish interpretation of the Stuart court in Italy is challenged by Edward Corp in this sequel to his A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (2004; rev. ante, cxix [2004], 1347–9). The exiled Stuart court in Italy is, he claims, ‘one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented aspects of British history in the early modern period’ (p. 1). We have apparently been gulled by Hanoverian propaganda and Whiggish historiography, which presented the exiled court as tedious, destitute, reactionary, bigoted, deluded, and ultimately irrelevant.
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