Rebellion and Savagery

The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire

Geoffrey Plank

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812207118
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

In the summer of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of England's King James II, landed on the western coast of Scotland intending to overthrow George II and restore the Stuart family to the throne. He gathered thousands of supporters, and the insurrection he led—the Jacobite Rising of 1745—was a crisis not only for Britain but for the entire British Empire. Rebellion and Savagery examines the 1745 rising and its aftermath on an imperial scale.Charles Edward gained support from the clans of the Scottish Highlands, communities that had long been derided as primitive. In 1745 the Jacobite Highlanders were denigrated both as rebels and as savages, and this double stigma helped provoke and legitimate the violence of the government's anti-Jacobite campaigns. Though the colonies stayed relatively peaceful in 1745, the rising inspired fear of a global conspiracy among Jacobites and other suspect groups, including North America's purported savages.The defeat of the rising transformed the leader of the army, the Duke of Cumberland, into a popular hero on both sides of the Atlantic. With unprecedented support for the maintenance of peacetime forces, Cumberland deployed new garrisons in the Scottish Highlands and also in the Mediterranean and North America. In all these places his troops were engaged in similar missions: demanding loyalty from all local inhabitants and advancing the cause of British civilization. The recent crisis gave a sense of urgency to their efforts. Confident that "a free people cannot oppress, " the leaders of the army became Britain's most powerful and uncompromising imperialists.Geoffrey Plank argues that the events of 1745 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the British Empire by creating a new political interest in favor of aggressive imperialism, and also by sparking discussion of how the British should promote market-based economic relations in order to integrate indigenous peoples within their empire. The spread of these new political ideas was facilitated by a large-scale migration of people involved in the rising from Britain to the colonies, beginning with hundreds of prisoners seized on the field of battle and continuing in subsequent years to include thousands of men, women and children. Some of the migrants were former Jacobites and others had stood against the insurrection. The event affected all the British domains.

Part I

The Response to the Crisis

Chapter 1

Rebellion: Criminal Prosecution and the Jacobite Soldiers

In the summer of 1745, after the government in Westminster learned of Charles Edward’s intention to come to Scotland, one of its first responses was to order him arrested. The Privy Council offered a reward of £30,000 to anyone who could take him into custody.¹ Upon learning of this, Charles Edward retaliated by declaring George II an outlaw and offering a reward for the apprehension of the king.² For the duration of the conflict, both the Jacobites and the government’s forces employed the mechanisms of criminal law in their campaigns against their opponents. Before the scale of the rising was clear, some of George II’s supporters hoped that ordinary law enforcement would bring the disturbance to an end. County sheriffs in Scotland prepared indictments against suspected Jacobites and sent deputies to effect arrests and prepare for trials.³ The Jacobites, for their part, could not hope to indict all the loyal subjects of George II, but they dreamed of trying the most active and powerful among them. In Scotland Charles Edward ordered the arrest of several high government officials, including Duncan Forbes, the president of the Scottish Court of Session.⁴

For the Jacobites, these appeals to criminal procedure were largely symbolic, but for George II and his ministers, defeating the rising through criminal proceedings seemed viable. The government’s decision to send regular army units against the Jacobites did not constitute an abandonment of the project of subjecting Charles Edward and his supporters to prosecution. Cumberland’s army marched against them with orders to conduct investigations, make arrests, and hold suspects in custody.⁵ Though no one ever managed to arrest Charles Edward, after defeating the rising the government jailed thousands of Jacobite soldiers and conducted hundreds of criminal trials. Dozens of those convicted were executed, and hundreds of others were transported to America after guilty pleas or convictions.⁶

It proved difficult, however, for Cumberland’s soldiers to comply with the requirements of criminal procedure. Part of the problem lay in the scale of their undertaking. The Jacobite army fluctuated in size. Estimates of the number of men under arms varied considerably at every moment of the conflict, but everyone knew, from early September 1745 on, that Charles Edward had recruited thousands of soldiers. They proved a surprisingly effective military force. More than eight months passed before they were defeated decisively, and in the meantime the forces of George II lost several important engagements with them on the battlefield.⁷ After the fighting ended the army held so many prisoners that simply identifying them proved difficult. Finding jail space, feeding them, and preparing evidence against them individually strained the government’s resources at every step of the criminal proceedings.

By temperament, training, and experience, the soldiers and officers of the British army were poorly prepared for the task of readying criminal trials. To the extent that they thought of their campaign as a punitive operation, they preferred to impose punishment on the scene of battle without detaining suspects, gathering evidence, or deferring to the judgments of courts. Eighteenth-century military culture was more likely to excuse massive killing on a battlefield than to sanction the systematic execution of prisoners. The killing of war captives was seen, not only by soldiers but by most other observers of military action in Europe, as a violation of the rules of war if not an indication of savagery.⁸ Nonetheless, in 1745 and 1746, Cumberland and his supporters insisted that rebellion was a capital offense and that the death penalty was what the Jacobite soldiers deserved. Therefore, government officials were at pains to declare that the rules of war did not apply in the context of the suppression of the rising. They asserted that the fighters Cumberland and his soldiers took into custody were criminal suspects rather than prisoners of war.

Though they referred to the Jacobites as criminals when they sought to justify suspending the conventional rules of war, the military men deployed against Charles Edward’s army often used force to achieve tactical advantages rather than targeting violence in order to serve the ends of justice. Conditional threats served their immediate purposes, and efficient military operations frequently required commanders to allow their opponents to slip away or to bargain with them for surrender. Cumberland engaged in these practices even as he expressed disapproval of all negotiations. In the end, only one group of war captives was granted prisoner-of-war status, and made the subject of formal diplomatic negotiations: French troops, including those of British and Irish ancestry who had been born overseas and fought under the French flag. Anxious to avoid provoking France into suspending the rules of war on the Continent, the ministry ordered a careful examination of all the prisoners taken from French units to determine where the men were born. Even Gaelic-speaking members of prominent Highland families were exempt from criminal prosecution if they could demonstrate that they had been born in France.⁹

The dilemmas that the government faced in the context of the suppression of the rising were common wherever an overt resort to military force was necessary to establish governmental authority. On the margins of the British Empire, where soldiers encountered diverse populations of uncertain loyalty, the application of justice in disputed regions often fell into the hands of military men who were ill educated or ignorant of the normal requirements of criminal procedure. British officers and soldiers in the Mediterranean, in North America, and elsewhere frequently had to distinguish between suspect groups and apply different codes of conduct in their actions against distinct segments of the local populations. Like the troops in Scotland, the men deployed to Britain’s overseas domains often operated in places where they did not trust the local judicial authorities or where civilian courts were altogether lacking. The army’s response to these problems in Scotland in the aftermath of the rising—arresting thousands of alleged rebels and arranging for individual trials in England—would have been impractical had it been attempted in the colonies. The trials of the Jacobite prisoners did not, therefore, set a specific precedent for the administration of marginal lands. Nonetheless, the army’s response to the rising, and specifically its treatment of the Jacobite soldiers, reveals much about the instincts of the officers and the ideas they took with them when they moved from the Scottish Highlands to patrol other parts of the world.

Charles Edward arrived on the western coast of Scotland in late July 1745 with only seven companions, but with a rapidity that surprised nearly all concerned, by September he had gathered a formidable fighting force. The Jacobites intended to establish their credentials as the legitimate governing authority in Britain. Their ability to enlist troops in an orderly and lawful fashion, they believed, was an attribute of their sovereignty. In the early weeks of the rising Jacobite commanders in various parts of northern Scotland instituted a system of conscription, in some regions ordering all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty to enlist.¹⁰ The recruiters drew heavily on the lowest ranks of the social order. Parishes were given quotas, and wealthy tenants paid cottars and servants to take their places in the ranks.¹¹ The Jacobites took advantage of the local social order as best as they understood it and ordered clan leaders to summon all the fighting-age men of their clans.¹² Throughout the Highlands, Jacobite recruiters emphasized traditional loyalties. They employed dramatic, ostensibly ancient rituals, such as carrying burning crosses as a call to arms.¹³

The hierarchical social structure of the Highlands often gave high-status women influence, and a few figured prominently in the mobilization effort. Charles Edward’s opponents derided the Jacobites for relying on female recruiters, for example by lampooning the efforts of a woman named Jenny Cameron, who enlisted 250 men “and marched at the head of them” to Charles Edward’s camp.¹⁴ Anti-Jacobite pamphleteers retold Cameron’s story elaborately, and with considerable creative license.¹⁵ The work of Anne MacKintosh, the wife of the laird of Clan Chattan near Inverness, is documented more reliably. Her husband supported George II, but she disagreed with him and rallied the clan to the Jacobites.¹⁶ Foot soldiers in Charles Edward’s army referred to MacKintosh, who was only twenty-three years old in the spring of 1746, as if she were a formal military commander, and they took it for granted that she controlled the disposition of troops.¹⁷

Some Jacobite officials, particularly on the eastern and southern fringes of the Highlands, threatened “military execution” against those who failed to comply with their conscription orders.¹⁸ That phrase was a familiar term of art, referring to a prerogative long claimed by the armies of Europe, to conduct punitive raids, usually involving the confiscation or destruction of property, against villages and regions where the inhabitants refused to provision troops or comply with military orders. Some who refused to cooperate with Jacobite recruitment efforts had their houses burned, while others had soldiers quartered in their homes.¹⁹ The Duke of Perth declared that any of his tenants who failed to enlist would be treated as “rebels to the [Stuart] King.” According to documents gathered after the rising ended, the punishments he inflicted on recalcitrants overstepped the traditional bounds of “military execution.” Perth was alleged to have authorized his recruiting agents to seize young men and carry them off if they refused to join the Jacobite army voluntarily.²⁰

While there is every reason to believe that many soldiers in the Jacobite army had been coerced into joining, there are also grounds for suspecting that the stories of intimidation and violence were exaggerated. Among supporters of George II, retelling violent accounts of the recruitment process was a way of demeaning Charles Edward’s army. Captured Jacobite soldiers also had reason to embellish such tales in order to excuse themselves from punishment for participating in the fight.²¹ Furthermore there were other reasons for young men to enlist. Many in the Highlands, particularly Catholics and Episcopalians, chose to join the army out of deep personal conviction in the justice of the Jacobite cause.²² They opposed the ruling regime and welcomed Charles Edward both as the son of their legitimate monarch and as the champion of their interests. A few prominent leaders in the Highlands viewed the rising as an opportunity to increase their fortunes through preferment if the operation succeeded. Similar calculations were made by the desperately poor, who saw enlistment as a chance to start a new life and erase past mistakes.²³ Others joined with the Jacobites to escape prosecution for larceny or murder.²⁴ More commonly, men enlisted simply for money. Times were hard in many parts of the country, and the economy deteriorated after the rising began.²⁵ These conditions affected communities outside the Highlands. As soon as Charles Edward marched south he was able to recruit men in the Lowlands of Scotland and in England as well.²⁶

Charles Edward believed that he could succeed in battle and win the loyalty of the people of Britain only if he led a restrained, conventional military force.²⁷ He ordered his recruits to procure uniforms, and as soon as he had gathered enough men to fill a parade ground, he began drilling them. Over the next several months he issued a variety of directives designed to maintain discipline, decorum, and morality within his ranks.²⁸ Despite thes...