Until recently, it was often assumed that Walter Scott was the first historical novelist. Moreover, it was accepted that, in writing a new form of fiction, Scott had chosen to make his heroes, caught up in large-scale historical events, relatively ineffectual. Yet when the work of the historical novelists (often women) who worked before and alongside Scott is taken into account, it becomes apparent that Scott’s decision regarding his heroes is a manoeuvre within a wider debate regarding the nature of heroism. Placing Scott’s heroes within a wider context, this essay examines how the Romantic historical novel first moderates, then reduces and reinvents the sublime figure of the heroic leader. My reading examines how, in The Scottish Chiefs (1810), Jane Porter invented a new model of sublime Christian heroism that could be extended beyond the upper ranks. It interrogates how Scott responded to Porter by minimising the potentially subversive elements of this paradigm, and it reveals how Jane Porter, in The Pastor’s Fireside (1817), proposed a form of heroic re-education. For these historical novelists, the difficulty, ultimately, was to imagine a variety of patriotic heroism that would safely function in commercial, peacetime Britain.