In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army occupied Edinburgh but failed to take Edinburgh Castle, whose garrison held out under siege conditions for the duration of the Highland occupation of the city. The castle's imperviousness — it had never been taken by direct assault — made it a symbol of Hanoverian permanence against Jacobite uprising. Within decades of the rebellion's defeat, Edinburgh Castle became the focal point of a complex Scottish identity that was simultaneously Jacobite in sentiment and Unionist in political reality.

The 1745 rebellion and Edinburgh Castle's role in it shaped the imaginative landscape of Robert Burns, who was born nine years after Culloden and absorbed the ambiguous Jacobite sentiment of his culture. Burns wrote Jacobite songs including 'Charlie He's My Darling' that nostalgically celebrated the castle-centred world of the old Scottish monarchy. Later, Walter Scott orchestrated the discovery and display of the Scottish regalia in Edinburgh Castle in 1818, transforming it into a site of national literary and cultural memory.