Tyranny and Liberty, Resistance and Regicide: Political Assassination in John Galt’s The Spaewife

Abstract

Abstract Though its use declined after the Middle Ages, the chronicle long remained the genre of choice for those unsatisfied with conventional histories. John Galt, a Scottish Romantic author currently enjoying renewed critical interest, demonstrates the political applications of the chronicle, in both form and content, as a means of harnessing Britain’s distant past to come to terms with the material and philosophical developments of the long eighteenth century. In particular, Galt’s adaptation of the chronicle offers an alternate reading of the past in which history is not something from which society must escape, nor something uniformly primitive, but rather something to be harnessed in buttressing political systems, an expression of trust in social institutions typical of Burkean conservatism. This line of argument reveals a committed Tory who fears the potential for violence – particularly political assassination and regicide – in the post-Revolutionary era. The Spaewife (1823) depicts a historical moment drawn from Scotland’s chronicle tradition using language linking it to political circumstances of the 1820s. Just as Galt’s earlier works question the purpose and efficacy of early century social unrest, so too does The Spaewife undermine the argument for political assassination even as it leaves open an understanding of the circumstances that (mistakenly) led parties to commit such acts. Unlike the novel’s proximal source text, Galt’s narrative locates political justice on the side of the murdered King James I, and in so doing resuscitates Scotland’s oldest textual tradition in opposition to theories of resistance that had been used to justify contemporary cases of political assassination.