Loyalists did not simply breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of dangers averted and the attempted general rising increased the volume and stridency of loyalism. The events of April 1820 were immediately met with a number of sermons which were quickly published, and which laid out the case for political quiescence while continuing to couple this with an evangelical critique of irreligion among the higher classes of society. Volunteer and yeomanry regiments maintained a conspicuous and often contentious presence within local communities. Indeed, many of them were still being filled long after the rising: Boswell only managed to review his three companies of Kilmarnock volunteers in November of 1820.

Projects begun during the fraught winter of 1819–20 came to fruition after the eruption of the ‘Radical War’. The Clydesdale Journal, proposed by the Lanark printer, William Murray Borthwick, to the Lord Advocate in November 1819, was released at the end of April 1820 and ran to December 1821. As a defiantly loyalist weekly newspaper it incorporated considerable work from the anti-radical sheriff substitute of Lanarkshire, William Aiton, and in its prospectus left no doubt as to its principal target: