The British historical novel before Waverley (1814) is often seen as a minor and immature form. Measured against Scott, and presumed to be tediously antiquarian, works of historical fiction are deemed relative failures or, when more successful, re-categorised. This critical narrative is inaccurate – there are historical novels of considerable complexity and importance in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the work of Scott's predecessors historical tropes are exploited, recycled and distorted in a complex conversation about the problem of liberty. Worried about King George III's supposed absolutist tendencies, in the 1760s historical novelists began to re-examine the balance of parliamentary and monarchical authority. But their attempts to rethink the distribution of power were complicated: by a reluctance to undermine the parliamentary settlement achieved after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; by fears of abrupt change generated by the English Civil War; and by ancient constitutionalism, the key mode of thinking about legal and constitutional change in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historical novelists from Leland to Ann Radcliffe interrogated ancient constitutionalism, using the notion of a return to ancient liberty, first, to defend the prerogatives of the nobility against the Crown, and, later, to emphasise the prerogatives of the people. But their work made it evident that the myth of Anglo-Saxon liberty lacked flexibility. The fantasy of return to a pre-feudal past was inadequate in the face of the issues of national debt, inflation and taxation that emerged out of the American and French Revolutions.

A different way of imagining the unwritten constitution, of refiguring the relation of past to present, was urgently needed. Seeking such an alternative, historical novelists turned to stadial history. Understanding the past in terms of particular economic stages, accompanied by characteristic political and social forms, stadial history could allow for narratives of progress, of decline, and even of continuity. For Scottish stadial historian, William Robertson, for instance, the manners of the feudal past and the present were linked by the codes of chivalry. If the idea of an ancient constitution enshrining liberty was fragile, could the notion of ‘chivalry’ provide a benign civic imaginary, a way of understanding the respective roles – and prerogatives – of monarch, nobility and people past and present?