Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680?1820

Douglas J Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848934665
• eBook ISBN: 9781317318187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The essays in this collection examine religion, politics and commerce in Scotland during a time of crisis and turmoil. Contributors look at the effect of the Union on Scottish trade and commerce, the Scottish role in tobacco and sugar plantations, Robert Burns's early poetry on his planned emigration to Jamaica and Scottish anti-abolitionists.

1 JAMIE THE SOLDIER¹ AND THE JACOBITE MILITARY THREAT, 1706–27

Daniel Szechi

The Jacobite movement was always a fundamentally military phenomenon. Though there was a political wing operating in the English and Scots, and then British Parliaments, and courtier elements who at various times sought to work through high political intrigue, the common expectation among consenting Jacobites was that the exiled Stuarts would have to wage war to regain their thrones.² Thus the mass of Jacobites were always in a sense an army in waiting. One day, they hoped, the king would come and all those male Jacobites fit enough to fight would join him and march off to war.

This is the basis of our perception of the Jacobite threat to the post-Revolutionary order. The implicit question is not whether the Jacobites could raise enough men to form an army (they did that on multiple occasions), but whether that army could ever have overcome the military might of the English/British state.³ And even if one is sceptical about the military value of the popular support the new order enjoyed in parts of the British Isles, it is indisputable that there was always a glaring disparity between the initial military capability of the Jacobite movement when it rose in rebellion and that of the regular army commanded by the government at Westminster. A poorly armed rabble of English, Irish or Lowland Scots Jacobite civilians was no match for the government’s professional soldiers. The Jacobite Highland clans, who were effectively a light infantry militia with a lingering martial ethos, were much more formidable, but unlike Charles Edward Stuart even they never thought they could fight and defeat the new order’s military machine on their own.⁴ In the medium to long term the military capacity of, and hence the threat posed by, the Jacobite movement correspondingly depended on the speed with which its leaders could turn a mob of more or less enthusiastic recruits into passable soldiers and then those same leaders’ skill in commanding a conventional war against the English/British state.

The starting point for our understanding of Jacobite military capability, then, must be the military abilities of their leaders and in particular of the Jacobites’ commanders-in-chief: James VII & II, 1689–1701; James VIII & III, 1701–45; and Prince Charles Edward, 1745–59. James VII & II has been the subject of many biographies, and they have all devoted some time at least to describing and analysing James’s experiences as a soldier in French and Spanish service, his performance as an admiral in the 1660s and 1670s and his poor showing in the face of William of Orange’s invasion and the subsequent war in Ireland.⁵ Likewise, descriptions and analysis of the military abilities of James VII & II’s grandson, Charles Edward Stuart, have featured in every major biography of the prince and of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.⁶ There is thus little need, or indeed further basis, for any reassessment of their soldierly qualities.

But this is not the case with James VIII & III. By comparison with his son, Charles Edward, James has received very little attention from the biographers,⁷ and since the only Jacobite rebellion he personally commanded, the 1715–16 rising in Scotland, was moribund by the time he arrived and collapsed soon afterwards, he does not even feature prominently in histories of that campaign.⁸ This has left a major lacuna in our understanding of the Jacobite movement in its most potent phase, between the death of James VII & II and the spectacular arrival of Charles Edward in 1745. If James VIII & III was a military incompetent, then the Jacobite movement posed no real threat to the British state unless he succeeded in negotiating a massive invasion of the British Isles by a European great power. The European professionals could then do the fighting and dying while the Jacobites looked on and cheered. On the other hand, if James was a tolerably good soldier then the latent threat posed by the Jacobite movement, in the event it secured some military supplies and the support of a corps of expatriate Jacobite officers, was a good deal greater. This chapter will accordingly take a close look at James the soldier and military commander. For nearly thirty-nine years James was ipso facto the military commander-in-chief of the Jacobite movement; we need to know what he was capable of.

And lest Whiggish determinism raise its ugly head, it is well worth remembering that while some modern historians might have a problem grasping the role of contingency in human affairs, contemporary politicians in the British Isles and Queen Anne and her Hanoverian successors understood it very well.⁹ Contemporaries of all ranks who had grown up having witnessed the humbling of mighty Spain, the Revolution of 1688 and the fall of the seemingly invincible Swedish empire had good reason to be apprehensive as to how things might turn out. They well knew that the Jacobite king and his adherents could create ‘trouble’ at inconvenient moments, both in the British Isles and on the continent; at the very worst, they could unleash civil war in one or more of the three kingdoms and – unpredictable outcomes being intrinsic to the nature of war – who knew how such a civil war might end?

I

Contemporary assessment of James the soldier was, of course, politically driven and wildly disparate. His Whig enemies persistently presented him as a coward, and thus no kind of soldier.¹⁰ Describing the aftermath of the French rout at the battle of Oudenarde in 1708, for example, one pamphleteer referred to James’s ‘disgraces’ during the naval expedition and an old Whig soldier who was there stated in his memoirs that:

The Princes of the Blood and the duke of Vandome with their shattered troops, retired in the utmost confusion towards Ghent. The princes, with the Chevalier de St George [James’s nom de guerre], arrived there by 5 in the morning, the day after this memorable battel.¹¹

The implication that James and the French princes had preceded their shattered army in a fashion that indicated a lack of courage is plain, and soon become ‘truth’ for Whigs (even for old veterans, such as Captain Robert Parker, who was actually at the battle).¹² James’s conduct in his subsequent campaigns (dealt with below) somewhat subdued this line of attack, but it never entirely disappeared.¹³ Thus in early February 1716 when James left the Jacobite army, then in full retreat north from its former base at Perth, and took ship for France from Montrose, the charge re-emerged in full force. Rumours and reports on the government side already had James melancholy and weeping almost from the moment of his arrival in Scotland, the better, presumably, to unman him.¹⁴ News of James’s flight was correspondingly taken as fully vindicating the prejudices of diehard Whigs like Lord Justice Clerk Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, who told James Graham, first Duke of Montrose,

his affronting our great preparations, and not waitting our battering guns comeing up, yea runing away and weeping be that time we came within ten miles of him, ought never to be forgot by one man in the world.¹⁵

And James’s inglorious departure certainly soured some of his followers. When Colonel John Balfour of Fernie surrendered in early March he told his captors, ‘he had aneough of there yowng King’, and that, ‘after such a trick he showld never serve that King that he belived divell on[e] drop royall blood had in his vains’.¹⁶

Later in 1716 this Whig vision of James was further reinforced by the most influential account of the final days of the Jacobite rebellion, the True Account of the Proceedings at Perth, which presented James as demoralized, lethargic and, of course, cowardly.¹⁷ This has often been ascribed to the famously embittered ex-Jacobite veteran of the ’15, John Sinclair, Master of Sinclair, but bears little relation to his account of events.¹⁸ The likeliest author, according to the British Library, was Daniel Defoe, and if this attribution is correct the True Account needs to be added to his already formidable tally of anti-Jacobite screeds.

The Jacobites, of course, never accepted this version of their king. While the Whigs were delighted with a description of him as ‘a tall, lean, blak man, loukes half dead alredy, very thine long-faced and very ill cullored and melencholy’, the Jacobites saw him as ‘the hansomest man in the world, and the most metled; dos busenes to a wunder and understands evrey thing without being told’.¹⁹ John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, leader of the rebellion and subsequently premier minister to James also published an official Jacobite account of the last days of the rebellion which presented James as having to be dissuaded from fighting rather than (sensibly) retreating from Perth and only departing for France in order to spare Scotland and his faithful adherents further pointless bloodshed.²⁰ Predictably, neither side got the better of this debate at the time, as seems to be indicated by the fact that both pamphlets ran to multiple editions.

In the long term, however, there can be no doubt the True Account has had the better of the fight. It has profoundly influenced subsequent histories of the campaign and interpretations of James the soldier. Sir Walter Scott indicated that he believed the accounts of James’s copious tears when he noted that Prince Eugene of Savoy, one of the greatest generals of the age, upon hearing of James’s allegedly lachrymose departure observed that ‘weeping was not the way to conquer kingdoms’, and modern historians have often followed where Scott led. In his account of the rebellion, for example, the professional soldier John Baynes accepts that the True Account was probably ‘a fabrication’ by Defoe, but nonetheless relies on it for his narrative of the final weeks in Perth. Ragnhild Hatton straightforwardly based her brief description of events on the True Account and Edward Gregg, James’s most recent biographer, followed suit. The True Account may also underlie G. V. Bennett’s characterization of James as ‘a cold and deeply reserved man’, ‘cold, melancholy and meticulously correct’, and as a man prone to ‘indecision’.²¹

Following on from this low-key absorption of the True Account there has also been a foreshortening of our assessment of James as a soldier. Because the only time James commanded an army in the field was in the ’15 and it ended so dismally, the great majority of historians – including myself – have hitherto taken their consideration of his military career no further.²² No modern scholar who has looked at the evidence accepts the Whig characterization of James as a coward.²³ But there is more to military expertise and the command of armies than tenacity and physical courage, and where James’s abilities as a military commander are touched on at all our comments have tended to be slighting. John Owen’s observation that ‘A daring military leader might have transformed the Jacobite cause; none of even modest ability was forthcoming’, directly implies James was neither daring, nor of even modest ability. And the present writer has fallen into the same trap, commenting in 2006 that James had ‘some’ military experience, but that ‘he was no warrior prince’, thus downplaying the possibility that he had any substantive capacity as a commander.²⁴

The net effect has been a vision of James that silently detaches him from one of the most formative experiences of his life. For what we have not properly taken into account is the plain matter of James’s having served ‘with distinction’ in the armies of France between 1708 and 1711 and the significance of this for the subsequent history of the Jacobite movement.²⁵

II

Like all contemporary princes, James’s education had a strongly military bent. James VII & II died before his son was old enough properly to begin his military education, though his father prepared some instructions on the duties of general officers specifically for him.²⁶ At the age of twelve James is reputed to have accidentally faced a wild boar alone and shot it dead.²⁷ A neutral observer commented in 1701 that he had seen James,

who is a handsom, sprightly youth. He performs all his exercises to perfection, and is one of the best marksmen in France. He delights so much in shooting, that when he is abroad he will make shift with any sort of victuals, and eat on the grass without linnen, perhaps on a sheet of white paper. He bears fatigue so well that he tires all his attendants with walking.²⁸

This description chimes well with James’s response to beginning full-blown preparation for the role of soldier and general. This only began after Louis XIV took responsibility for his education in 1701, and was more directly supervised by Lieutenant-General Richard Hamilton, an experienced and well-respected professional soldier in French service.²⁹ James duly progressed through ‘the more manly exercises of life’, which is to say fencing, riding and shooting, as he grew older and stronger.³⁰ The Jacobite king was at this time also close to his half-brother James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, another professional soldier in French service, and liked to spend time with him and the soldiers he commanded. He took the opportunity to review Berwick’s (Irish) foot regiment on its march to Spain in 1703. He also attended reviews of the French guards and other ceremonial military occasions.³¹ The final stage of his pre-combat military education was completed when he formally learned to ride the great horse in 1706.³²

As soon as he came to his majority in June 1706, James began agitating to go on campaign with the French army, but was initially refused permission to do so by Louis XIV. This was on the grounds that James’s presence in the French army in Flanders would create a diplomatic problem for Maximilian II Emmanuel, the exiled Elector of Bavaria, at that time Governor of the Spanish Netherlands and thus a prominent official in the service of France’s only significant ally, who did not recognize James as king of England.³³ This excuse was, though, probably little more than obfuscation (it was eventually easily resolved by James serving under the nom de guerre ‘Chevalier de St George’). In reality Louis’s refusal to allow the young Jacobite king near the sharp end of war probably ste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Tables
• Introduction: Identity, Mobility and Competing Patriotisms
• 1 Jamie the Soldier and the Jacobite Military Threat, 1706–27
• 2 Simply a Jacobite Heroine? The Life Experience of Margaret, Lady Nairne (1673–1747)
• 3 Missionaries or Soldiers for the Jacobite Cause? The Conflict of Loyalties for Scottish Catholic Clergy
• 4 English Liturgy and Scottish Identity: The Case of James Greenshields
• 5 ‘Let Him be an Englishman’: Irish and Scottish Clergy in the Caribbean Church of England, 1610–1720
• 6 Scotland, the Dutch Republic and the Union: Commerce and Cosmopolitanism
• 7 Clearing the Smokescreen of Early Scottish Mercantile Identity: From Leeward Sugar Plantations to Scottish Country Estates c. 1680–1730
• 8 Union, Empire and Global Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist, 1707–53
• 9 John Drummond of Quarrel: East India Patronage and Jacobite Assimilation, 1720–80
• 10 William Playfair (1759–1823), Scottish Enlightenment from Below?
• 11 The Visionary Voyages of Robert Burns
• 12 ‘Defending the Colonies against Malicious Attacks of Philanthropy’: Scottish Campaigns against the Abolitions of the Slave Trade and Slavery
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index