Tom Jones and the Stuarts.

In his old age, in permanent exile in Italy, the land of his birth, Charles Edward Stuart, once known as the Young Pretender, forever romanticized as Bonni Prince Charlie, spent much of his time reading; among the works a recent biographer calls his "particular favourites," one title stands out--Tom Jones.(1) His choice of reading material is striking for anyone interested in either Fielding or Stuart history, both because Charles Stuart actually figures in the novel (much of which is set during the 1745 rebellion) and because the weight of available evidence suggests that Fielding despised the Stuarts and their Jacobite followers. What, then, did the now-aging Young Pretender find to like about Tom Jones? It is quite possible that the mere fact of his appearance in a widely-read and admired novel was gratifying to the Prince's vanity--bad publicity, even then, being better than no publicity at all, especially to a lonely exile. But was Fielding's novel only bad publicity? In this essay, I would like to look again at politics, especially the dynastic politics of Stuarts and Hanoverians, in Tom Jones. The fact of Charles's affection for the work of an old adversary like Fielding may never provide anything more than a tantalizing site of speculation, but it is also a good excuse to rethink what w thought we knew about Fielding and the Stuarts.

Our view of that issue has been shaped, understandably enough, by the novelist' abundant pronouncements on the subject in the extensive political journalism he published in the 1740s. In particular, scholars and critics can point to the anti-Jacobite pamphlets of 1745 and The True Patriot of 1745-46; both the pamphlets and the newspaper (largely written by Fielding) are responses to the rebellion, and indicate his alarm at the uprising, his contempt for the Stuart claim, and his ridicule of the Jacobites. Indeed, after the rebels were safely defeated, he insists that he would have been among "the first in the String of Loyalists, who would have had the Honour of being hanged had the Rebellion succeeded." Later, in 1747-48, he weighed in with The Jacobite's Journal, where he adopted a transparently ironic pose as an ardent Jacobite, John Trottplaid, Esq.(2) The ostensible inspiration for this new journal was a renewal of Jacobite activity, but the paper also served as a general organ of the Pelham administration.(3) Summarizing this body of work in his recent biography of the novelist, Martin Battestin speaks confidently of Fielding's "abhorrence, so often expressed in his writings, of the entire family of Stuarts."(4) Tom Jones was written more or less simultaneously with these journals, and those who have looked at dynastic politics in that novel have typically seen it confirming and extending the loyalties expressed in Fielding's journalism.(5) In this essay, m intention is not to overturn conventional wisdom, to find that Fielding, like Partridge, was a Jacobite in his heart; however, I do intend to complicate our sense of Fielding's political thought in Tom Jones. In particular, I hope to show that Fielding's use of Stuart materials is more central to his design than has been argued, and that his use of those materials is both more playful and more ambiguous than we had suspected. My focus, then, will be on the historical event of the '45 and the historical person of Charles Edward Stuart as they appear in Tom Jones, and I will largely bracket what Fielding has to say on those subjects outside the novel.

The first question to ask about their role in Tom Jones is both simple and crucial, and it concerns the matter of placement. Where are the references to the rebellion? The first mention of the '45 in the novel occurs rather late, in book 7, chapter 11. Tom, dismissed from Paradise Hall and on the road, meets a company of soldiers, who, it turns out, are on their way north to fight the rebels. The narrator notes, "By which the Reader may perceive (a Circumstance which we have not thought necessary to communicate before) that this was the very Time when the late Rebellion was at the highest; and indeed the Banditti were now marched into England, intending, as it was thought, to fight the King' Forces and to attempt pushing forward to the Metropolis."(6) While Fielding doe not give an exact date, the information given here puts the action sometime in late November, 1745.(7) The coy parenthetical comment attracts our attention at least as much as the information conveyed and raises the central question: why does Fielding introduce the fact of the '45 just here? Charles Stuart, after all, had landed in Scotland the previous summer and had enjoyed various militar and political successes throughout the autumn; he had crossed the Tweed and entered England on 6 November. Why has Fielding waited so long to introduce the subject?(8)

And if the sudden appearance of the soldiers in the novel's seventh book makes us wonder about Fielding's earlier silence, the abrupt disappearance of all Jacobite and Stuart references in book 12, after Tom and Partridge encounter th gypsies, is equally strange.(9) While we do not have to follow those who have mapped the plot of Tom Jones onto a calendar, with exact dates assigned to all events from the day that Tom leaves Allworthy's house, it is clear enough that if Tom meets the soldiers in late November, then the action in London takes place in December.(10) In other words, the last third of the novel begins to unfold at precisely the highwater mark of Charles Stuart's invasion (he reached Derby, about 100 miles from London, on 4 December, and began his long retreat two days later). Fielding himself spoke in The True Patriot of the rebels' effect on London as being "a Terror scarce to be credited."(11) Yet in the nove not one word passes anyone's lips about (depending on one's point of view) thes dire or hopeful occurrences.

The apparently casual way in which references to the '45 appear and disappear from the novel is, no doubt, one large reason why most critics have tended to downplay its importance in Tom Jones. A long time ago, Wilbur Cross said that the novel was "but loosely connected to the Jacobite rebellion," and few have questioned that judgment.(12) What seems more likely to me, instead, is that, far from being loosely connected to the novel or a matter that comes and goes i Fielding's field of attention, the '45 is an intrinsic part of the novel's design. And its importance comes into clearer focus when we notice just how precisely Fielding has placed his first and last references to the Stuart invasion. That is, we first hear of the crisis almost as soon as Tom is forced from Paradise Hall, and our awareness of it ceases with the gypsies, almost Tom's last encounter before he reaches London. In other words, Fielding's attention to the rebellion coincides almost exactly with the so-called "road" section of this famously symmetrical novel. Fielding's silence about the '45 in the first six books is balanced by an equal reticence in the last six. It is only in the middle of the narrative's tri-partite architecture--country\road\city--that the '45 is visible. But why the road, and what political significance does it have?

The answers to those questions are complex, but we can begin with a relatively simple point: the road creates a parallel between Fielding's hero, Tom Jones, and the central figure in the rebellion (and future novel-reader), Charles Edward Stuart. I should note at the outset, that this parallel is not so much a matter of personality or character. Charles Stuart was a depressive paranoid, hardly the way we think of Fielding's hero. Rather, Tom and the Young Pretender become interesting as doubles or analogues if we begin by examining what the Stuart prince represented. The Young Pretender comes to us, as indeed and crucially he came to most of his contemporaries, champions and detractors alike not as a historical figure with clear biographical contours, but as a legend, a fiction. He was not only the Young Pretender, he was Bonnie Prince Charlie, a youth both reckless and charming, and at least for the Jacobites, a figure nobl and courageously seeking to redress an old injustice, an exile sadly separated from his ancestral home. Now some of the ways in which Tom Jones partakes of this Jacobite matter are immediately clear. He may not be consciously seeking a inheritance on the road, but he has certainly lost one, and lost his home besides. Even more importantly, as we have seen, he is first figured as an exil at the same time that Charles Stuart first appears in the novel, thus enforcing some sense of a parallel fate. Here are not one, but two handsome, dispossessed and reckless young men traveling through the frost of late November, 1745.

This parallel has been noted by other critics, although there has been little sustained analysis. Michael McKeon, for example, almost as an aside remarks, "I the plot of Tom the bastard bears a subtle relation to the conservative career of the Young Pretender, wandering in search of his patrimony, it is less an imitation than a parody fueled by Fielding's anti-Jacobite contempt for the hereditary claims of the Stuarts."(13) McKeon speaks here as if the purpose of such a parody is self-evidently Hanoverian in its loyalties. But while parodies do generally work to degrade their object, they do not often achieve as a by-product any particular elevation of the parodic vehicle. Rope-dancing in Lilliput certainly lampoons the competition for office in early Georgian England, but it does nothing to make rope-dancing itself look more noble. In th same way, if Tom's wandering is a parody of Charles Stuart's (for the Pretender could hardly be parodying Tom), what do we do with the fact of our continuing affection for Fielding's foundling? McKeon asserts, but nowhere demonstrates, that the parallel works as an attack; why shouldn't it work to create a contagious sympathy for Charles, as our hearts open to the plight of all the dispossessed?(14)