On 14 February 1716 at Ruthven in Badenoch, the remaining officers of the Jacobite army in Scotland gathered to decide their next move. They had turned out the previous autumn in high hopes of restoring the Stuart dynasty to the throne it had lost in 1689 and forcing an end to the union with England, but their confidence and enthusiasm had long since evaporated in the face of the defeat of the English rising at Preston and failure on their own part at Sherrifmuir. Their king and his chief minister had fled the country just after the army began its retreat from Perth. Now the weather had deteriorated, and desertion had reduced their once impressive force to a shadow of its former self. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the officers drafted a letter to the duke of Argyll, the commander of the British army in Scotland, asking for an indemnity and ordered their men to make their own way home. Then they themselves dispersed. It was the final act in the botched complex of conspiracies and uprisings that has gone down in history as the Jacobite Rising of 1715.

Reflecting on the consequences of the Jacobites' failure, the earl of Mar, by then the Old Pretender's secretary of state, sadly remarked: “I much doubt if ever a [rising] can be established there again.” It was a percipient observation. For over a generation, it was to prove extremely difficult to persuade most of the leaders of Scottish Jacobitism even to contemplate another uprising.

With the notable exception of Scotland, Queen Victoria was never very enthusiastic about her kingdoms of the “Celtic fringe.” During the sixty-four years of her reign, Victoria spent a healthy seven years in Scotland, a mere seven weeks in Ireland, and a paltry seven nights in Wales. Although there was little overt hostility, the nonconformist Welsh often felt neglected by the monarch and embittered by the queen's position as the head of the Church of England. Her Irish visits, however, were subject to more open opposition by stalwart republicans. Her visit to Dublin in 1900 was accompanied by embarrassing incidents and coercive measures to ensure the pleasant reception and safety of the monarch.

The reign of King Edward VII was notable for its warmer attitude toward Wales and Ireland, but this transformation in the relationship between the monarchy and the nations of the “Celtic fringe” reached its most clear expression with the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales during the reign of his son, King George V. The press considered the ceremony to be more important than any other royal visit to the Celtic nations and publicized it widely in the United Kingdom and British Empire. The organizers of the event erected telegraph offices at the site of the ceremony, and the railways established special express trains running from Caernarfon to London that were equipped with darkrooms in order to send stories and photographs of the event directly to the newspapers of Fleet Street.

We often associate visual modernism with cosmopolitan cities on the Continent, with pride of place going to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Munich. English visual modernism has been studied less frequently—the very phrase “English modernism” sounds like a contradiction in terms—but it too is usually linked to the cosmopolitan center of London, as well as to the notorious postimpressionist exhibitions staged there by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Fry coined the term “postimpressionism” to embrace the disparate styles of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and others that he introduced to a bewildered and skeptical public. Together with his Bloomsbury colleague Clive Bell, Fry defined the new art in formalist terms, arguing that works of visual art do not represent the world or depict a narrative but, rather, consist of “significant forms” that elicit “aesthetic emotions” from sensitive viewers. The two men deliberately sought to redefine art away from the moral and utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Fry and Bell intended to establish art as self-sufficient, independent from social utility or moral concerns. Fry at times expressed ambivalence about this formalist enterprise, but Bell had fewer hesitations in defining modern art as absolutely autonomous: as he stated in Art (1914), “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.