Writing in an uncertain age of revolution, historical novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries struggled with both the meaning of history and the shape of the future. Even following Scott's creation of a tradition of transformation in the Waverley Novels, the motif of breakage and the apparent triumph of commerce remained disquieting. Although Thomas Carlyle argues that a healthy approach to the past is possible, in The French Revolution (1837) he offers a troubled reading of history as fundamentally pessimistic: ‘the Event, the thing which can be spoken of, is it not in all cases, some disruption, some solution of continuity?’ Carlyle's dramatisation of history as tragedy is of course a product of the French Revolution itself but, as his allusion here to Edmund Burke suggests, it also reflects long-standing British anxieties about the management and desirability (or otherwise) of political change – for Burke, the aim of the 1701 Act of Settlement was to disguise any ‘[dis]solution of continuity’; but by 1837 it seemed to Carlyle that, at least within the discourse of history, such camouflage was impossible.

Carlyle continues by suggesting that even ‘a glad event’ ‘involves change, involves loss’, but adds that glad events rarely form part of the narrative of history, which concerns itself with what ‘befell’, rather than what was ‘done’. Yet even as Carlyle imagines history as tragedy and breakage, the sheer number of occurrences suggests a more moderate model, that of gradual political change. Here the historical novel performed significant work. From the 1760s historical novels questioned the Stuart motif of return and interrogated the idea of ancient constitutionalism. The idea of a return to ancient rights could be used not only by the aristocracy against the monarchy but by more radical thinkers against an increasingly oligarchical parliament. As radicals probed the limits of the model and more conservative thinkers, like Reeve, struggled to contain its subversive potential, doubts about the effectiveness of the ‘gothic’ past as political standard grew. The fantasy of tradition in the form of static repetition was unsatisfactory. The alternative, a space outside the existing political order, the experiment of America, although repeatedly canvassed, seemed equally flawed. Burke's use of the rhetoric of chivalry in Reflections points to a third alternative.