TYRANNY AND LIBERTY, RESISTANCE AND REGICIDE: POLITICAL ASSASSINATION IN JOHN GALT’S THE SPAEWIFE

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.