Neo-Jacobite Revival
The movement was monarchist, and had the specific aim of replacing British parliamentary democracy with a restored monarch from the deposed House of Stuart.
He considered his decisions were not subject to 'interference' by either Parliament or the Church, a political view that would remain remarkably consistent among his Stuart successors.
Although Jacobite ideology was varied, it broadly held to four main tenets: The majority of Irish people supported James II due to his 1687 Declaration for the Liberty of Conscience, which granted religious freedom to all denominations in England and Scotland, and also due to James II's promise to the Irish Parliament of an eventual right to self-determination.
It drew in a large part of French military resources, but was never launched because the Royal Navy kept control of the mouth of the Channel.
Jacobite sympathisers moved underground, forming secret clubs and societies to discuss their ideas in private, especially in certain areas of the United Kingdom.
While these various interests gathered under the banner of restoring the House of Stuart, they also had a common streak against the scientific and secular democratic norms of the time.
Some even planned (but did not execute) a military overthrow of the Hanoverian monarchy, with the aim of putting Princess Maria Theresa on the British throne.
[7]However, the fact of Queen Victoria having actively contributed to the exhibition clearly indicates that she did not regard the Neo-Jacobites as significantly threatening her throne.
[15] The Order of the White Rose split in 1891, when Vivian, Erskine and Melville Henry Massue formed the Legitimist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland.
Vivian and Massue were leading members of the neo-Jacobite revival, while Erskine soon focused his political endeavours on the related cause of Scottish Nationalism.
Art dealer Charles Augustus Howell and journalist Sebastian Evans were members of the Order,[11] while poets W. B. Yeats[16] and Andrew Lang[11] were drawn to the cause.
In January 1893, the League attempted to lay a wreath at the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, but were thwarted by a "considerable detachment of police" sent on the personal order of Gladstone.
In 1891, Irish Nationalist Sir John Pope Hennessy, MP for North Kilkenny, attempted to extend Gladstone's Bill to remove limitations on Catholics to cover the Royal Family.
Theodore Napier, the Scottish secretary of the Jacobite League,[21] wrote a polemic titled "The Royal House of Stuart: A Plea for its Restoration.
[11] The revival largely came to an end with the advent of the First World War: by this time the heiress to the Jacobite claim was the elderly Queen of Bavaria and her son and heir-apparent, Crown Prince Rupprecht, was commanding German troops against the British on the Western Front.
