Here's a link to B.C. Southam's "An Easy Step to Silence: Jane Austen and the Political Context, a 1998 article on JA's political affiliations, noting that her family were staunch Tories, both politically and culturally (the Loiterer), who used Tory channels of naval patronage through their connection with Warren Hastings. Her mother's family had been pro-Stuart, if not outright Jacobites. Her cousin Eliza Hancock lost her husband, the Comte de Feuillade, to the guillotine. Altogether a pretty conservative millieu.