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At the end of a characteristically brilliant tour deforce on heraldic terminology in Windsor-Forest, Pat Rogers concludes that his reading 'reinforce[s] the interpretation [of it] as aJacobite poem'; that Pope has contrived 'a sort of heraldic eirenicon; a peaceful ensign, painted with Stuart deeds and confirming their entitlement to their inheritance Windsor, and by transference England'.' He is not the only critic to have suspected Jacobitism in the poem, and even Maynard Mack in his role as cautious, or at least not overspeculative, biographer allows Pope to have more than a streak of Jacobite sympathy in him in the crucial period between 171 o and 1714. 2 My intention in the present essay is not to try to overgo Rogers and those others who have concluded with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm that Pope's georgic is rooted in fertile Stuart soil, but to complement their findings with an alchemical reading that suggests that the poem ends, more or less, with a vision of a kingdom transferred by Anne and fate to 'James III'. As I see them, the heraldic hues of the forest are also colours from the alchemical spectrum, and the forest's greenness which is celebrated with such understandable insistence ('green Retreats' (1. i), 'verdant Isles' (1. 28), 'verdant Limits' (1. 182), etc.) embodies the greenness of a fertile new world perceived as the alchemical benedicta viriditas whose function it is to be
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