The King's Highway

England under William III, with the Jacobites plotting: a young man with a name he cannot use, a highwayman who is a gentleman, a smuggler's coast and a plot that reaches to the throne. James was Historiographer Royal to William IV and later British consul in Massachusetts, and wrote over a hundred novels — enough for Thackeray to parody him affectionately. The Jacobite politics here are exact. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Gainsborough to Munch follow the road, the path and the landscape that give this tale of highways and hidden loyalties its ground.