Leith Davis, Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. ix + 307, £75.00, ISBN: 978 1316510810

Abstract

known, wheedling money from Louis XIV was something of a national pastime’, with numerous oppositional MPs in receipt of ‘French backhanders’ [109]). Charles II’s having negotiated, on the eve of the 1681 Oxford Parliament, a new deal with Louis XIV so that he would no longer have to depend on parliamentary subsidies is seen as a winning move: ‘another high card : : :with this knowledge he could face a new assembly with confidence’ (269). Charles’s failure to pardon those condemned for the Plot is seen as strategic: he ‘shrewdly avoided further inflaming the situation’ which only would have ‘delighted’ Shaftesbury (139). The king’s continued prosecution of recusants, even when belief in the Plot was waning, was a political necessity: ‘tightening the screws on English Catholics aided King Charles in his increasingly determined effort to counter Shaftesbury’ (210). But if Stater is at a loss to explain the king’s ready acquiescence to the death of the Catholic primate Oliver Plunkett in July 1681 (‘Charles was not by nature a persecutor’ [274]), contemporaries knew the court was keen to dispatch Plunkett’s fellow-sufferer Edward Fitzharris, a double agent hired by Charles II’s favourite mistress to plant a seditious libel on his political enemies, to prevent him from making damaging revelations in Parliament. There is a happy ending, of sorts: Shaftesbury, after plotting ‘overt treason’, flees to the Netherlands where he dies soon afterwards. The merry monarch, ‘after checkmating the Whigs’, ‘ruled a one-party state’ and ‘reverted to his former state of charismatic indolence’ (278). The judicial murders of Catholics were followed by executions for the Rye House Plot and then the infamous Bloody Assizes under James II, whose short reign ended with the Revolution of 1688. This is a glossy and gory narrative that will appeal to generalists and should attract a new generation of readers to late Stuart history and its surprising, and alarming, relevance to our own conspiratorial age. In this Victor Stater has done a service to scholars, as well as the broader popular audience targeted by this book.