FROM its very inception Scottish Jacobitism was an intrinsically international phenomenon. At its core lay a network of supporters at home who plotted and planned for the great day, but these men and women were always connected to an exterior network of overseas exiles who lobbied foreign governments and smuggled arms, money, and propaganda into Scotland to promote the cause. Between them they created a revolutionary underground movement dedicated to overthrowing the existing order.1
But Scotland was far from unique in this respect. There were Jacobite movements in the other kingdoms of the British Isles, and elsewhere in Europe (and beyond) there were similarly clandestine organizations violently opposing imperial states. Scottish Jacobitism is thus a striking example of a much larger phenomenon, and we can in consequence learn a great deal by studying it.2
First, however, we need to understand what it was. Scottish Jacobitism had its own particular structures, internal dynamics, identity, objectives, and potential. These shaped its history as a political movement, and in turn form the basis for understanding Scottish Jacobitism in a wider context.
The structure of Scottish Jacobitism reflected the structure of Scottish society. The leaders of the movement correspondingly came from the highland and lowland social elite. Noblemen like James Maule, Earl of Panmure, thus assumed a leading role in Forfarshire because he was the wealthiest, most respected Jacobite aristocrat in the region. In 1715 he accordingly instructed his tenants to join his regiment, selected suitable officers from heritor families tied to his house and marched off to war at the head of his men in a way that would not have been out of place four centuries earlier.3
Yet such instances of the social power of the Jacobite elite can be deceptive. Scotland’s noble and heritor dynasties (and their highland counterparts) certainly played a major role in mobilizing and directing Jacobite (and Whig) Scotland. But there was more to the Jacobite (and Whig) cause than imperious aristocrats and dumbly obedient commoners. Ideology and interest lay at the heart of the great majority of Jacobites’ commitment to the cause. Thus their best recruiting sergeant was the Episcopal Church. This, eighteenth-century Scotland’s most influential dissenting Protestant Church, drew the allegiance of approximately 30 per cent of the population for at least two generations after 1688, and its ministers regularly exhorted their congregations to be loyal to the Stuarts for nearly a century.4 The net effect was to make support for the Stuarts little less than a bounden religious duty for many Scots. The underground Catholic Church, too, had a strong commitment to the Stuarts because of the dynasty’s diehard Catholicism, and produced a similar effect on the tiny Catholic community. Both Churches acted as institutional engines producing generation upon generation of Jacobites until the late 1740s. Thereafter the grip of the Episcopal Church was broken by sustained persecution, and the Catholic Church in Scotland was obliged to desist when the Vatican formally abandoned the Stuarts in 1768.5
Yet religion was far from being the sole motivation for Scottish Jacobites. At least equally important in many cases was the conviction after 1707 that the Stuart cause was Scotland’s cause. Without doubt many Whigs were genuinely patriotic ‘North Britons’, but if you dreamed of re-establishing an independent Scotland, proudly free of English influence and values, you really had nowhere else to go than Jacobitism.6 The Union thus opened the way for the Jacobites to become the standard-bearers of the national cause. Indeed it is clear that many Jacobites saw themselves as patriotic Scots first and Stuart loyalists only second.7 Neither landlords nor ministers inspired the small party of plebeian Scots whom the English clergyman Robert Patten encountered in Northumberland making their way north in 1715. When he asked them what they were about, they boldly told him, ‘We are Scotsmen, going to our homes to join our countrymen that are in arms for King James.’8
There were also those who turned to Jacobitism for want of a better option. Asked why he had turned out to fight for Charles Edward Stuart in 1745, William Boyd, Earl of Kilmarnock, replied: ‘for the two kings and their rights, I cared not a farthing which prevailed; but I was starving, and, by God, if Mahommed had set up his standard in the Highlands I had been a good Mussulman for bread’.9 There were probably not many Jacobites as materialistic as Kilmarnock (the prospects were better on the Whig side), but his case drives home a central truth about the Scottish Jacobites: as well as being patriotic idealists and faithful believers they were just like other Scots in most respects, and in their ranks were to be found malcontents, chancers, bon vivants, and religious bigots of all kinds.10 Thus in 1715 crowds of humble Jacobites displayed their feelings about Catholicism by greeting the proclamation of King James in towns like Kelso with cries of: ‘No Hannoverian! No Popery! No Union!’ And in 1745 David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, specifically blamed Charles Edward’s Catholicism and the Catholic Irish officers who joined him for the failure of the rebellion.11 There was likewise a vein of anti-highlander feeling among the lowland Jacobites.12
The corollary of which is that despite the very real ideological division between Jacobites and Whigs, and its episodically vicious expression in events like the harrying of the Highlands after the ’45, the Jacobites never separated from the rest of Scottish society. Kinship, friendship, and business complicated political commitments on both sides, and intermarriage never ceased.13 Hence Jacobite and Whig merchants in Aberdeen regularly cooperated to further their commercial interests, and scions of Jacobite families secured lucrative posts policing and exploiting the British Empire courtesy of Whig patrons who well knew they would be ‘out’ as Jacobites if they had the opportunity to show their mettle. Likewise, Whig Scots who had connections in London worked hard to obtain pardons for friends, neighbours, and kinsmen in the aftermath of the ’15 and the ’45.14 It is not amiss to observe that the Jacobites probably would have done the same for them if the shoe had been on the other foot.
What lay at the root of these interconnections as much as the simple business of life was a low-key, shared Scottish identity. In 1716 an estimated one thousand primarily Presbyterian, Whig denizens of Edinburgh launched a bloody attack on a party of drunken Dutch soldiers who publicly bragged about killing a Jacobite highlander and cutting off his head. In the same vein, and despite the fact that she was either neutral or a Whig, Flora Macdonald famously helped Charles Edward escape in 1746.15 She was far from alone in stepping out of her way to help someone from the other side who was in trouble with the authorities, and, indeed, there are so many similar instances that they are clearly part of a pattern of mutual responses to the enduring connections between Scots of otherwise diametrically opposed political convictions.
The Jacobites, then, were and continued to be an integral part of Scottish society despite their theoretical exclusion from the new order. This gave the movement a deep resilience, such that it was able, by rebuilding within its core areas and exploiting enduring connections with the Scottish Whigs, to survive two catastrophic defeats before succumbing to a third. In the context of the Jacobite movement as a whole, this effectively turned the Scottish Jacobites into the vanguard of the Stuart cause. The Jacobite Irish were politically toxic in the rest of the British Isles because they were overwhelmingly Catholic in religion, and however much they promised the English Jacobites always proved faint hearts.16 The exiled monarchs’ only usable, and only willing, military asset in the British Isles lay in Scotland.
The lingering military traditions of clanship, the inaccessibility of large parts of the country, and the Protestant credentials of the great majority of Scottish Jacobites further cemented their military importance within the Jacobite underground. This is not to say that the military potential of the Scottish Jacobites was in reality more than skin deep. Most of the Scottish population, even in the Highlands, was completely unused to handling military-calibre weapons of any kind. Even if they had been, there were nowhere near enough such weapons in civilian hands properly to equip a rebel army, which is why Jacobite regiments like the Macgregors went into action at Prestonpans in September 1745 with the rank-and-file armed with nothing more than sharpened scythes.17 Their appreciation of the scale of this problem restrained the movement’s leaders from being as militant as they otherwise might have been, as did the memory of their defeats, but ultimately it did not stop them embracing the chance to fight for the cause. Hence when Charles Edward decided to sail from France for the British Isles in 1745, he did not consider landing in Yorkshire or Galway. He gambled that even if he turned up at Moidart without anything like adequate quantities of weapons (or troops, or money) enough local Jacobites would come out in arms to get the rebellion off the ground, and he was proven right.18
But there was another branch of Scottish Jacobitism that was directly relevant to the viability of the cause: the Scottish Jacobite diaspora in Europe. And it was there, in many ways, that the dream of a Stuart restoration and the rebirth of an independent Scotland were irretrievably damaged.
Long before there was Jacobitism there was a European Scottish diaspora. The Scottish Jacobite diaspora was thus only the latest surge in a long-running stream of human beings moving out of Scotland, and it directly benefited from the connections created by migrant communities long before it arrived, and often blended in with those same communities. In this the Jacobites were helped by the fact that migrants specifically driven to leave by Jacobitism probably only numbered four to five thousand. They were correspondingly only a small part of the mass migration of perhaps as many as two hundred thousand Scots over the same period.19
Where the Jacobite diaspora did stand out was in the status of the emigrants involved. Whereas most Scottish migrants tended to have quite humble origins, the Jacobites came disproportionately from the upper ranks of the social elite.20 Scots of such high status normally only travelled overseas for the purposes of education and tourism, the better to fit them to be urbane gentlemen at home. Instead they found themselves stranded abroad seemingly indefinitely.
This came as a shock, and one to which many proved incapable of adapting. There were two possible responses. One was to make the best of it and try to find a new life overseas. George Keith, Earl Marischal, took this route and was spectacularly successful. Marischal rose to high rank in Spanish and French service before becoming a trusted adviser to Frederick the Great of Prussia. In similar vein, James Drummond, the Jacobite Duke of Perth, became chamberlain for Queen Mary of Modena and dedicated himself to the service of the exiled dynasty.21
This subgroup of Scottish exiles could lose interest in the cause and instead turn their energies to fostering their new careers. Marischal took this path arguably before, and certainly after, the ’45. From being one of the key assets the Jacobite cause possessed, Marischal effectively became its enemy, discouraging others from becoming Jacobites and blocking Charles Edward’s attempts to engineer a new rising in the British Isles. In general, however, Scottish servants of the European great powers and the Stuart court in exile continued to be strongly activist and did their best to promote the Jacobite cause. During the ’45, for example, Scottish exiles in Sweden persuaded the Swedish government to send about six hundred Swedish officers and soldiers to Scotland to help provide the professional military expertise the Jacobites so desperately needed.22 The rebellion was defeated before they could get there, but it is a striking example of the positive impact the exile lobby could have. The second option for the Jacobite exiles was to focus all their efforts on getting home by any means possible. This was the option favoured by many Jacobite exiles and profoundly affected the vitality of the movement. Sometimes this was in obvious ways, as when John Erskine, Earl of Mar, deliberately betrayed Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and the leader of the English Jacobites, to the rising Whig minister Robert Walpole, in the hope of a pardon.23 Usually, however, the effect was more subtle but nearly as pernicious. In order to get home, exiles like George Lockhart of Carnwath had to ask their Whig kith and kin to intercede for them with the government. In London, Whig intercessors, such as James Graham, Duke of Montrose, and Archibald Campbell, Earl of Islay, would lobby English ministers and pledge their political credit that their Jacobite friends would henceforth behave themselves if allowed to come home. And in most cases the government at Westminster would eventually, grudgingly, grant them leave to do so. Once home, the former exiles were expected to stay out of Jacobite intrigues and give no further trouble. To breach these terms would have been dishonourable, and, in addition, would embarrass the Whig friends who had got them leave to return in the first place.24 When subsequently forced to choose between the Stuart cause and their obligations to Whig family and friends, some returned exiles, most famously Lord George Murray in 1745, disregarded their social commitments and took up arms again, but most did not and neither did their families. Thus the majority of the Scottish exiles who negotiated their way home became part of a great network of elite ex-Jacobites slipping insensibly, year by year, into the embrace of the Whig regime. When Charles Edward raised his standard in 1745, they were as a group definitely sympathetic. Yet they did nothing substantial to help him and those who did rally to the Stuart cause.25
The diaspora was, then, a mixed blessing for the Scottish Jacobite community. Those who made a new life overseas could provide vital support in a crisis, but could also become indifferent or even hostile as their careers abroad prospered. Those who found they could not cope with life in exile and asked their Whig kith and kin to find them a way home usually de facto neutralized themselves and their families. The net effect was the weakening of the Scottish movement as a whole.
Until the French Revolution of 1789, eighteenth-century Europe may not have been as turbulent as the two preceding centuries, but it nonetheless saw plenty of major political upheavals. Rebel movements defied the state from the Ukraine to Catalonia and each was, of course, peculiar to its time and place, so that prima facie their differences are more significant than their similarities. What, for example, could the Russian Orthodox communities of Cossack warriors of the Zaporozhian Sich have in common with the likes of the Earl of Panmure and Lord George Murray? Yet there are some striking affinities. To take just the Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Catalans, they were all trying, like the Scottish Jacobites, to preserve a traditional autonomy, guaranteed by the terms of their affiliation in times past with a more powerful state. In each case success would undoubtedly have preserved the power and authority of the native elite, but the appeal of the proto-national cause was still broad enough to inspire support among the common people. All three movements were opposed by elements within their own community, who for reasons ranging from their own patriotic take on the best course of action to personal cupidity, adhered to the imperial power. Finally, all the rebel groups tried to trade on their military–strategic usefulness in the epic wars of the era to solicit military support from the great powers. And, like the Jacobites, they were all comprehensively defeated.26
For reasons of space, one example must stand for many, and for the purposes of this essay it will be Habsburg Hungary. The Ottoman vassal state of Transylvania and Royal (Habsburg) Hungary were ethnically and historically part of the kingdom of Hungary, and both had long enjoyed semi-autonomy in consequence of being contested between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. By the late seventeenth century, though, the balance of power began to shift decisively in favour of the Habsburgs, as may be seen from the increasing pressure that the militantly Catholic dynasty began putting on the Hungarians (many of whom were Calvinist Protestants) to convert to Catholicism. The traditional Magyar response to such measures had always been rebellion, an appeal to their brethren in Transylvania and the Turks for support, and a war of raids up to the gates of Vienna, which usually persuaded the Habsburgs to back down.27
The Hungarians’ circumstances now, however, changed for the worse. In the late seventeenth century new, more effective Habsburg armies were deployed into the region and drove the Turks out of Royal Hungary and Transylvania, rolling back the Ottoman Empire as far as Serbia and Romania. The Hungarians were left with no natural allies, and when the Habsburgs recommenced their Catholicization drive (and the general extension of imperial authority that went with it) and Prince Ferenc Rákóczi rebelled in 1703 in the name of Hungarian liberties, the only ally he could find was Louis XIV. Louis cared nothing for Hungarian liberties, but he was interested in hampering the Habsburg war effort in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), so he despatched a few French officers to help direct the rebels’ efforts, and provided a small trickle of military supplies and money. This was never, though, on a scale to match the support that the Ottoman Empire had once been able to provide.28
Rákóczi, the dissident nobility, and the broad range of ethnic and social groups who cleaved to them nonetheless showed considerable resilience, at least in part inspired by the summary of their cause expressed on the banner that Rákóczi himself handed to the peasant rebels who persuaded him to come out of Polish exile to lead them against the Habsburgs: ‘cum Deo pro patria et libertate’ (‘with God, for the homeland and liberty’). His explicitly patriotic agenda included independence, religious toleration, and the emancipation of all serfs, and their families, who joined the rebel cause. It was to be expected that this latter would be unpopular with Hungary’s landowners; it is consequently interesting that to promote the cause many noblemen accepted the Rákóczi government’s increasingly broad programme of peasant emancipation. Those members of the nobility who would not join were rhetorically deracinated as unpatriotic and ‘German’.29 This platform generated widespread support for the rebellion, and gave it such a good start in terms of controlling territory that Rákóczi’s forces were able to survive eight years of largely unsuccessful warfare. By 1711, however, they had been so comprehensively defeated by a combination of Habsburg regulars and pro-Habsburg Hungarians that further resistance was no longer practical. Rákóczi was forced into exile, and eventually found a refuge in the Ottoman Empire. The final end came when his faithful follower Count Miklós Bercsényi tried raiding Hungary from there in 1717 and found no support for further resistance. Though serf culture in parts of Hungary had apparently developed a stubborn belief in Rákóczi’s imminent, redeeming return, the surviving rebels, both noble and serf, made the best peace they could and thereafter, like the negotiator of their surrender, Baron Sándor Károlyi, concentrated on working their way back with the Habsburgs.30
The Hungarian experience was both very different from, and tantalizingly similar to, that of the Scottish Jacobites, Ukrainians, and others. In effect, they were all radicalized by their circumstances (thus laying down a usable history for the nationalist future) and defeated by them.
There are many more examples of (unsuccessful) resistance to the centralizing drive of Europe’s great powers contemporaneous with the Scottish Jacobite movement. What makes the Scottish (and Irish) Jacobites stand out is that they were the outliers. Four decades after their peers were subdued the Jacobites were still resisting. Indeed, some at least of the Scottish Jacobites were still plotting another insurrection in the early 1750s, and the last French invasion attempt predicated upon coordination with a Jacobite uprising was set to go off in 1759.31 The deep resilience of the Scottish Jacobite movement probably lay at the heart of this long survival, but it is not a sufficient explanation. For that we must turn to the geopolitical strategy of the European great powers.
Early modern European great-power politics were spectacularly lethal. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there were approximately sixteen major powers; by the late eighteenth century there were about six (Britain, France, Spain, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, and Prussia). The others were either subsumed or broken and ended the period as, at best, minor players in the great power game. In a grand strategic sense, this was Scotland’s fate. For the aggressive English, then British, state, however, Scottish Jacobitism created a major extra complication. Scottish Jacobitism was dangerous because it had a powerful, patriotic purchase in Scotland. But just as importantly, because it was part of a broader movement touching all three kingdoms, Scottish Jacobite success held the potential to destabilize English/British control of Ireland and even open the way for civil war in England. Rebellions on such a scale had previously knocked great powers such as France, Spain, and Russia out of the game for some time, and in the case of Poland, so damaged one as to lead to its terminal decline.32 In contemporary geopolitical terms, if Jacobitism was a potential nuclear weapon with respect to the English/British polity, the Scottish Jacobites were the trigger. All that a rival great power needed to do to throw the English/British state into chaos was set off the Jacobite bomb.
This, of course, was more difficult than might appear at first sight. The Stuart court in exile was always looking for support from the great powers, and taking the period as a whole it showed energy and diligence in developing every possible opportunity. It was not, however, about to throw away its best asset, the Scottish Jacobite underground, for a mess of pottage. As the Stuarts’ faithful minister, Charles Middleton, Earl of Middleton, pointedly told a French government agent in 1705 they were: ‘l’unique ressource qui reste pour le Roy d’Angleterre [James III and VIII]’. Correspondingly, though they could occasionally be seized by over-optimism or desperation, the exiled Stuarts wanted concrete commitments by European great powers before they would ask their supporters to take the potentially fatal step of rebelling.33 The one occasion on which matters slipped out of the exiled dynasty’s control, the great Jacobite rebellion of 1715, was an object lesson in the need to make sure such a rising was coordinated with unequivocal support from a European great power. But even the ’15 was not a total loss, for it also demonstrated that the Scots could, as they had repeatedly promised, mobilize tens of thousands of men. And subsequently, when Sweden, Spain, Russia, France, and Prussia came into conflict with Britain, they all scouted the Jacobite option, and two, Spain and France, made serious attempts to exploit it.34
The dynamics of the working relationship between the great powers and their Jacobite clients, moreover, sheds considerable light on the strengths and weaknesses of Scottish Jacobitism in the international arena. Again, one example must stand for many, and the best for our purposes is France and the ’45.
To secure a revolution in the British Isles the Jacobites calculated that they needed an invasion by a regular armed force to provide professional military support for the Jacobite rebellion that would be the heart of the operation. But such an invasion was always liable to use a lot of resources and be militarily difficult. Which meant that Jacobite proposals were only likely to be taken up when they looked like the best, or least bad, strategic option. Thus the Jacobites had first to find a moment when France was in military trouble, then convince the French government that such an operation would best serve France’s needs, and furthermore maintain that conviction in the face of the multiplicity of other attractive targets that were bound to arise while the invasion was pending, expenses multiplied, and doubts developed. The first two of these came together in 1743 when Louis XV and his ministers seized on Jacobite suggestions that they invade England in the wake of French defeats in Germany. Decisions taken in such crises are, however, inherently volatile. Delays, or the easing of the crisis, tend to produce a rapid turn to more promising, or at least less risky, strategic prospects on the part of military institutions and their ministerial protagonists.35 And this was exactly how matters played out in 1743–4. The invasion of England and a rising in Scotland were systematically prepared. But then the English Jacobites (as usual) got cold feet and asked for more time to prepare, the weather turned foul, and the Royal Navy interposed itself between the French invasion ports and southern England. The French government was accordingly obliged to postpone the operation. Louis and his ministers then lost interest, the troops and materiel were redeployed to other theatres, and the whole project was shelved.36 That should have been the end of the affair, but the relationship between great powers and their clients was, and is, not straightforwardly utilitarian. Great-power decision-makers can be swayed by an emotional reaction to their clients’ conduct, and this was the case eighteen months later, in 1745, when, in effect, the Scottish Jacobites briefly took control of the French agenda.
Analyses of France’s part in the ’45 all acknowledge the unearned strategic gains it made as a result of the rebellion. The rebellion broke out virtually free of charge, as far as France was concerned, because Charles Edward Stuart raised his initial funding by tapping the Scottish and Irish Jacobite diasporas, and the first costs of the rising in Scotland were met primarily from Scottish, and then English, resources. The Jacobite victory at Prestonpans in September 1745 also cost France nothing, but prompted the withdrawal of the bulk of the British contingent from the Allied army in Flanders and thus guaranteed that the French army commanded by Maurice de Saxe would continue, and accelerate, its conquests in the region. By the time the British government felt able to despatch William, Duke of Cumberland, and his forces back to the Low Countries in 1746, the Allied position there was in a virtual state of collapse, and do what he could the militarily mediocre Cumberland was incapable of retrieving the situation. Given that France’s armies were doing badly in Italy and overseas, this was a lifeline. It is generally agreed that the War of the Austrian Succession ended in a draw stemming from the mutual exhaustion of the warring powers.37 In large part the reason France was able to extract itself even that successfully was owing to the Scottish distraction.
But the impact of the Scottish rebellion on the course of the war was not just a matter of cold realpolitik for Louis and his ministers. The Scottish Jacobites’ successes up to the spring of 1746 in effect tied the French king and his ministers to them emotionally. In all our cold, detached analyses of the military events of 1745–6 it is easy to lose sight of the way Charles Edward and the Scottish Jacobites dazzled contemporaries for the best part of a year. As a direct consequence Louis XV developed an almost chivalric inclination to back his bold allies to the best of his ability. Hence the piecemeal despatch of French regiments and military supplies direct to Scotland, where they significantly bolstered the shaky Jacobite state, and, far more importantly, Louis’s attempt in December 1745 to throw together another invasion of southern England to back up the Scots and rescue them from the threat posed by Cumberland’s army.38 The Scottish Jacobites were in effect shifting France’s strategic priorities, and it was fortunate that Louis had appointed a really good general like Maurice de Saxe to command in the southern Netherlands. Despite the fact that the Scottish Jacobite tail was busily wagging the French dog, and the consequent diversion of desperately needed troops from his forces, de Saxe was able to continue his conquest of the Austrian Netherlands.39
That the French response to the ’45 was, moreover, principally a response to the Scottish Jacobites rather than Charles Edward per se, is apparent from the aftermath of the rising. Many, if not most, of the Jacobite commanders who arrived in France on French ships specifically sent on Louis XV’s orders to save them and their prince did not consider the affair to be at an end. Nor did Louis XV. In December 1746 he offered to send the exiles and the newly arrived Charles Edward back to Scotland with a six thousand-strong invasion force, plus ample supplies of arms and money. When Charles Edward made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with such an expedition, and preposterously and unrealistically demanded eighteen to twenty thousand men for an invasion of England, a key group of Scottish exiles headed by Donald Cameron of Locheil attempted to take Louis up on his offer on their own account. The French were open to this idea, but still hoped for Charles Edward’s cooperation, and peace came before there was a break in the impasse.40 We can only speculate as to the consequences and outcome if the Scottish exiles had had their way.
The Scottish Jacobites were thus more than simply pawns in the great-power game. Their manifest ability to dislocate Britain’s strategic plans drew the great powers to them as a potentially useful tool, but it did not stop there. Their brave performance in the field could draw the admiration and, crucially, the emotional commitment, of powerful European statesmen. But only for short periods. For most of the Jacobite era it was hard-nosed geopolitics that dictated the conduct of the great powers towards the Scottish Jacobites. Even in that context, though, the potential threat they posed had useful consequences for the movement as a whole. In particular, it led to various great powers offering surreptitious encouragement and secret subventions. These kept the cause alive into the mid-eighteenth century and sustained the Jacobites’ hopes as late as the Seven Years War.41 It is not going too far to say that Britain’s great-power rivals thereby effectively (and at minimal cost to themselves) kept Jacobitism going—and Britain correspondingly constrained—far longer than might otherwise have been the case.
Scottish Jacobitism was inspired by a blend of dynastic loyalty and proto-nationalism, with the balance of power probably lying on the patriotic/nationalist side. Albeit that Dr Johnson had a good point when he described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, and that there were few greater scoundrels than Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, it is nonetheless significant that the old villain nonetheless died for the cause in 1747 quoting Horace: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘sweet and seemly it is to die for one’s country’). Scottish Jacobitism was also the most usable, though not necessarily the most powerful, component of the movement as a whole. Moreover, it was sufficiently alienated from the new order in Scotland to be able episodically to stand opposed to it for three generations, while at the same time sufficiently connected to Whig Scotland economically and socially to be able to survive the long years of peace. For in many ways keeping the faith when nothing was happening was just as important in sustaining the Jacobite cause as turning out to fight when the royal standard was raised at Kirkmichael or Glenfinnan. All these features of the Scottish Jacobite movement made it the vital component of the Jacobite movement. It is no coincidence that despite the raw power of the Irish Jacobites they could not sustain the cause alone. Once the Scots (and to a much lesser degree, the English) had fallen away, the Stuart cause was on a fast track to oblivion. Charles Edward’s degeneration into a violent, drunken brute in the 1750s implicitly stemmed from his despair as he helplessly witnessed this process unfolding.42
In terms of European power politics, the Scottish Jacobites in many respects began as just one of a number of ethnic, patriotic movements resisting the imperial drive of the European great powers. But they kept going far longer, and always posed a greater danger to their target polity, than their peers. Initially at least, the Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Catalans endorsed the status quo. Indeed, what they principally objected to were changes in the accustomed state of affairs. By contrast, the Scottish Jacobites always sought the overthrow of the entire post-Revolutionary order in the British Isles. They also had unchallengeable leaders (in that all Jacobites recognized the exiled Stuarts as their legitimate monarchs), resident safely beyond the frontiers of the British state and able to give their cause a respectability and resonance that the others simply could not match. Louis XIV and Cardinal Giulio Alberoni (in 1718, on behalf of Philip V of Spain) might pose as noble defenders of Hungarian liberties, but no one was under any illusion about their fundamental motivation for supporting Rákóczi and the rebel cause. By contrast, Louis XIV and Louis XV were far more sincere in taking up the legitimist, Catholic cause of the Stuarts. Likewise, by maintaining the image of legitimate monarchy at the exiled court, James II and VII and his son were able to put themselves in the position of being able to communicate as one monarch to another when dealing with princes such as Charles XII and Peter the Great.43
The Stuart court in exile also provided legitimation for everything its followers believed in and aspired to. Most Scottish Jacobites were loyalists as well as patriots. And therein they revealed a central truth about the Scottish Jacobite movement. It was a bipolar phenomenon, and hence a bridge between old and new ideologies of resistance to the imperial states of Europe. On the one hand it drew on ‘ancient’ traditions of Scottish dynastic fealty; on the other it looked to create a national political revolution in Scotland regardless of what the Stuarts wanted. We should correspondingly understand it as a Janus-like movement, one that drew strength from the past, but looked to a very different future. Scottish Jacobitism was not a modern nationalist movement, but it may have been on the verge of becoming one.
Black, Jeremy, Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud, 1990/2000).
Corp, Edward T., with Gregg, Edward, Erskine-Hill, Howard, and Scott, Geoffrey, A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge, 2004).
Duffy, Christopher, The ’45 (London, 2003).
Hopkins, Paul, Glencoe and the End of the Highland War, rev. repr. (Edinburgh, 1998).
McLynn, Frank, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981).
—— Charles Edward Stuart. A Tragedy in Many Acts (London, 1988).
Macinnes, Allan I., Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996).
Pittock, Murray, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994).
—— The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh, 2009).
Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994).
—— George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1681–1731: A Study in Jacobitism (East Linton, 2002).
—— 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (London, 2006).
Zimmerman, Doron, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke, 2003).