If the ‘adventurer’ Robert Watson of Elgin is remembered, it is as the secretary and biographer of Lord George Gordon; as an organizer in the London Corresponding Society; and as a negotiator in the sale of the Stuart Papers to the Crown in 1817. This chapter traces Watson's political career from Jacobite origins to Jacobite activism, and to exile in Paris and Rome. Finding documents and souvenirs in post-Jacobite and exilic circles, Watson preserved the material remains of multiple anti-Hanoverian movements – Jacobite, radical Whig, Jacobin – to create a genealogy of opposition for the post-Napoleonic age. This was not nostalgia, but radical antiquarianism.

The Strange Death of a ‘Hoary Patriot’

Returning to London from Boulogne in March 1838, Robert Watson lodged at the Blue Anchor, an old tavern near the Billingsgate fish market. A ‘little lame man’ of ‘very reserved habits’, on 19 November 1838 Watson was found dead in bed. His nightcap was pulled down over his face and his neck cloth had been twisted tight with the fire poker, which Watson ‘still held firmly clenched in both hands’. The coroner counted nineteen wounds on Watson's ninety-two-year-old corpse, none of them recent. The jury concluded that Watson had ‘destroyed himself in a state of temporary mental derangement’. In late spring Watson had been to Bath to deposit ‘a box of important papers’ with a relative.