The Jacobites

Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 2nd edition

Daniel Szechi

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526123190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi's popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe. Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest. This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English colonial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.

1

Introduction

Jacobitism is a fertile source of some of the great ‘what-ifs’ of British history. What if William of Orange had been killed at the battle of the Boyne in 1690? What if John Erskine, Earl of Mar, had crushed John Campbell, Duke of Argyll’s, little army at the battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715? Most potent of all, what if Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) had not turned back at Derby in 1745? Of course we can never know the answers to any of these questions because history is not an experiment where one can adjust the variables and repeat the procedure. All historians can do is interpret the maddeningly imprecise data that has survived the vicissitudes of time. Nevertheless, Jacobitism’s power to generate ‘what-ifs’ is thought-provoking. The subject is one on which many other events in British history, such as the creation of a stable polity, the union of Scotland and England, the onset of the industrial revolution, the rise of the first British empire, and so on, have been argued to hinge. This tantalising sense that Jacobitism had the potential to make the history of Britain turn out very differently has consequently resulted in some major divisions among historians of the eighteenth century. For the purposes of this introduction those whose work has been most significant for the historiography of Jacobitism will be grouped under three headings: optimists, pessimists and rejectionists.

None of these labels should be taken as any reflection on the scholarship or theoretical methodology of the historians concerned. The sheer erudition of both Paul Hopkins’s and Paul Langford’s work, for example, was awesome, despite the fact that they were poles apart in their interpretation of Jacobitism; and Marxisant historians like Frank McLynn can be found comfortably aligned on many historiographical issues with more conservative scholars such as Eveline Cruickshanks.¹ What follows is thus an attempt to create a shorthand categorisation of modern historians with respect to their attitude to the Jacobite phenomenon that students will find useful. It is worth noting here, too, that many other scholars have dealt with aspects of Jacobitism in their work – among others, Tim Harris, Geoffrey Holmes and Christopher Whatley² – and the historians cited below as representative of the optimist, pessimist and rejectionist schools of interpretation are simply my idiosyncratic choice of voices from a lively, and continuing, debate.³

The optimists

‘Optimism’, in the sense used below, refers specifically to this school of historiography’s attitude towards the seriousness of the Jacobite threat, not to a belief that anything especially beneficial to mankind might have come out of Jacobitism per se. In a sense, this school is directly descended from the romantic tradition of Jacobitism created by Sir Walter Scott at the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁴ By then real Jacobitism was long dead, the monstrous caricatures of Hanoverian black propaganda thankfully forgotten, and from the vantage point of post-Napoleonic Britain it could safely be regarded sentimentally, even fondly, by the ruling elite of the new, industrial Britain.⁵

From the mid-nineteenth century on there was an efflorescence of publishing on the subject of Jacobitism, most of it arguing strenuously for this or that event as the crucial turning point, but always with the underlying conviction that but for ‘x’ or ‘y’ happening, Charles Edward would have regained the throne of his ancestors. The only enduring contribution made to the field by this explosion of interest came in the form of the publication of a great many original documents by semi-antiquarian scholars, among whom Alastair and Henrietta Tayler stand out for the cool empiricism and quality of their editing.⁶ Nonetheless, this renaissance of interest in Jacobitism did give rise to one fully coherent statement of the optimist case – in the work of Sir Charles Petrie. Petrie was a devout Roman Catholic, which undoubtedly coloured his judgement on occasion. Nevertheless, he argued powerfully in a series of articles and books that Jacobitism was a genuine political movement (in a twentieth-century sense), with a mass following, and that on several occasions it came within an ace of overthrowing the post-Revolutionary political order in the British Isles.⁷

Petrie’s enthusiasm, however, sometimes overcame his scholarship,⁸ and as a result the optimist school of thought – associated by Petrie with Cavalier reaction and paternalism – was increasingly marginalised after the Second World War as more and more professional historians turned to social history and cliometricism in various forms. By its very nature, Jacobitism, believed at the time to be an almost wholly elite movement, went against the zeitgeist of the historical community of the 1940s and 1950s. The optimist interpretation accordingly remained in the doldrums until 1970. In that year, the History of Parliament Trust brought out two volumes on the House of Commons 1715–54, which included an analysis of the Tory party’s politics in that period primarily written by the then assistant editor Eveline Cruickshanks (later one of the editors of the 1689–1715 volumes). These made a strong case for the Tory party’s deep involvement in active Jacobitism, suggested that in 1743–5 the Tories were certainly ready to rise had a French invasion arrived and that they came within a whisker of doing so as Charles Edward marched south.⁹ In 1979 Dr Cruickshanks backed up her argument with a book on the 1743–4 conspiracy which was primarily based on previously underused or overlooked French archival sources.¹⁰

Her case was reinforced in 1981 by Frank McLynn’s book on the French response to the Jacobite rising of 1745–6, generally known as the ’45, in which he proved that the French did their level best to assemble an invasion force for southern England designed to link up with Charles Edward’s army on its way south, and only missed him by a narrow margin.¹¹ In the mid-1980s Paul Hopkins added to the weight of the optimists’ gathering reassessment of the Jacobite phenomenon by conclusively proving that the Highland War of 1689–91 was not the unimportant little episode most historians had previously considered it to be, but rather a crippling civil war that bankrupted the post-Revolutionary Scottish state morally and financially.¹² To round off an exciting decade for the optimist school, Paul Monod’s unsurpassable study of the social history of Jacobitism in England strongly suggested there was a lot of popular support for the Jacobite cause among the lower as well as the upper orders of English society, and that its ideology enjoyed widespread acceptance at all levels.¹³

Since then further work on specific aspects of Jacobitism has implicitly reinforced the optimist case. In 1995, and still more strongly in 2009, Murray Pittock demonstrated that the Jacobite army in 1745 was no ragtag collection of wild Highlanders, but rather a national army (in the sense that it drew recruits from every social constituency in Scotland) and was by the time of the battle of Culloden well on the way to becoming a regular military force fully capable of defeating the British army.¹⁴ In the same vein, following through on the re-evaluation of the cultural influence of Jacobitism on Irish-language poetry (and the poetic form known as the aisling in particular) by the great Irish literary scholar Breandán Ó Buachalla,¹⁵ David Dickson, Vincent Morley and Éamonn Ó Ciardha have shown that the Irish Catholic community was strongly emotionally and ideologically committed to the exiled Stuarts until at least the 1760s, and thus constituted a continuing, and very real, threat to the security of the English empire in the British Isles.¹⁶ And one of my own books, Britain’s Lost Revolution?, argued in 2015 that the abortive Franco-Jacobite invasion attempt of 1708 probably came within hours of plunging the British Isles into a fullfledged civil war that potentially could have seen Scotland break away from the British state created in 1707.¹⁷ Without doubt the optimist school can now advance a stronger case for the importance of Jacobitism than previously, but the pessimist school nonetheless remains the more influential of the two streams of interpretation.

The pessimists

The pessimist school of Jacobite historiography takes a reserved position about the seriousness of the Jacobite threat. In general, they do not deny the importance of Jacobitism in the development of the British polity, nor of its long-term impact on European international relations. The crucial point on which they consistently differ with the optimists is in their evaluation of the power of inertia, the Revolution Settlement and the British state to hold the Jacobites at bay and ultimately to defeat them. The most wide-ranging, empirical statement of the pessimist case to date was published by George Hilton Jones in 1954. Jones considered the subject from a mainly diplomatic perspective, and put forward an interpretation that viewed the Jacobites as self-deluding tools of their erswhile backers with little agency and correspondingly little prospect of success.¹⁸ As far as many academic historians were concerned, Jones completely superseded Petrie and was considered to have written the last word on the subject.

Consequently, little further work was done on Jacobitism by historians of the pessimist school until the early 1970s, when Edward Gregg began publishing articles that challenged long-held assumptions on various subjects relating to Jacobitism, most notably that Queen Anne was sympathetic to the idea of a second restoration. In one devastating article, later backed up at length in a full dress biographical reassessment of the queen, Gregg conclusively killed the notion that she ever wished to restore her half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart (James III and VIII in the Jacobite line of succession; ‘the Old Pretender’ of Whig propaganda).¹⁹ Gregg’s revitalisation of the pessimist interpretation was trenchantly reinforced in the mid-1970s by Paul Fritz’s careful dissection of the way Walpole manipulated the political nation’s fear of Jacobitism to serve his own political ends, and the late Gareth Bennett’s reassessment of the career and motivation of one of the most notorious of Jacobite plotters: Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester.²⁰ More agnostic, but overall still pessimist, analyses by Bruce Lenman of the nature of Scottish Jacobitism, Nicholas Rogers of popular Jacobitism in the early Hanoverian period and the present writer on Jacobite parliamentary politics in the last years of Queen Anne, which appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s, created some middle ground between the two schools of historiography but did not reconcile them, thus leaving ample room for future debate.²¹

Since 1993 two historians outwith the field of Jacobite studies have intervened powerfully to boost the pessimist argument. John Childs, one of the most important military historians of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, dissected the great Franco-Jacobite invasion force designed to land in England in 1692 and found it to be smaller than previously thought and unlikely to have drawn sufficient local support to offset its military disadvantages; in other words a disaster in the making. In her highly influential book, Britons, Linda Colley strongly suggested that by the early eighteenth century Jacobitism had become more of a cultural than a political phenomenon, and that even in Scotland most Jacobites were quietly accepting the new order. And Stuart Reid, the author of a series of works on the ’45, has argued that only in their dreams did the Jacobites ever really stand a chance of overcoming the British army and the British fiscal-military state.²²

The rejectionists

Even in the eighteenth century there was always a school of proestablishment thought that found it difficult to believe that any but the most stupid or most desperate individuals would actively support the exiled dynasty.²³ Indeed, some Jacobites, such as James Barry, Earl of Barrymore, made very effecti...