Previous chapters have urged caution in discussions of Haywood's ‘Jacobitism’. We must now confront recent claims that have been made for Haywood as a Jacobite writer. Jacobite elements figure significantly in many of Haywood's texts, among them three discussed in this book, namely The Adventures of Eovaai, The Parrot and Epistles for the Ladies, but Haywood's attitude toward these materials is complex and ambivalent; ‘slippery’, as students of Haywood often say. Her moral imagination was certainly kindled by the so-called Jacobite virtues (constancy, loyalty, fidelity and so on) and there can be little doubt that the values she advances in her work, from seduction fictions to secret histories to political journalism, fall within a broadly ‘overarching Tory ideology’, or in congruence with a Tory-feminist world view. Stronger claims have also been made. Rachel Carnell devotes an entire chapter to Haywood's ‘Jacobite Ideology’. She believes Haywood to be a Jacobite but concedes that ‘support for the Stuart cause’, as she implicitly defines her Jacobitism, was not conspicuous in the early work. At the other end of the spectrum is Earla Wilputte, whose impatience with a misplaced preoccupation with Jacobitism surfaces in her dismissal of those ‘determined to affix a Tory – even Jacobite – label to her writings’. In the centre is Spedding who observes, unexceptionably, that her ‘opposition to Walpole was tinged with Jacobite sympathies’.

It is undeniable that Haywood's work exhibits significant Jacobite sympathies but it does not follow that she advocated or even desired a restoration of the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne.