JACOBITES
‘Happy families are all alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
‘The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.’
Ted Hughes, ‘Hawk Roosting’
The suffering and misery of Scots at the hands of legendary hate figures like Edward I, Henry VIII or Oliver Cromwell are well documented, and scored into the hearts of many alive today. But in truth, there was no more appalling time for vast swathes of the population than during the famines of the late 1690s.
Less familiar and less well remembered that suffering may be, but it was terrible and terrifying just the same. From 1695 onwards, inclement weather caused one failed harvest after another. The death toll from the starvation and malnutrition of the ‘Ill Years’ will never be known but it is estimated to have been in the tens of thousands - and that from a total population numbering around a million. Perhaps those awful times have fallen from collective memory because there was no bogeyman to blame.
At the same time, despite the death and hardship, ordinary Scots began to reap another harvest altogether. In 1696 the Scots parliament passed the Act for Setting Schools. It was the natural progression from a foundation laid down by John Knox in his First Book of Discipline in 1560 - that all the people should be taught to read so they could help themselves to the enlightenment of the Word of God. In any case, by the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland would be home to the most literate society in Europe. There were libraries everywhere and records show books of all sorts being borrowed by men and women of every trade and class.
All of this - cruel hardship at home combined with access to the wider world through reading - made for a volatile mix. From the highest to the lowest, Scots were unconsciously preparing themselves to turn their backs on a troubled, limited past and look towards a limitless future. By the end of the seventeenth century they were among the hungriest folk on the face of the earth - for personal improvement as well as for food.
Ordinary Scots were therefore especially vulnerable to a grand scheme being touted by a mercurial businessman named William Paterson. Born in Dumfriesshire, he had made a career and a name for himself in London. He was instrumental in establishing the first Bank of England in 1695 and the first Bank of Scotland the following year. Many regarded him as a true visionary, and wherever he went people hung on his every word in hope of being shown the way to wealth and status.
The mass of his countrymen had grown disillusioned with the realities of being ruled by a king who lived in England and put English needs first. Scots merchants looked with envious eyes at the riches being scooped up by their opposite numbers south of the border. England had colonies in the Americas and rich trading links with Africa, India and the Far East. The English Navy protected English merchant ships en route and the Scots, like everyone else, were excluded from many of the rewards.
Entrepreneurial and adventurous Scots had been on the move during the half-century before the union. There were certainly thousands of them building new lives in Ulster, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the colonies of the eastern seaboard of North America, émigré Scots were an established presence. But these were still the exceptions. Scotland’s legendary impact on the New World still lay decades in the future.
Paterson’s dreams of Darien were therefore not as outlandish as we might imagine, in the last years of the seventeenth century. Determined to enjoy the spoils of international trade, Scots were persuaded to empty their purses and gamble their very futures on the success of Paterson’s plan. Together with East Lothian landowner Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, he encouraged thousands of Scots to buy shares in a public joint stock company. This was the audacious new business model already financing the interests of the Dutch and the English. It marked the start of practices - lending money in the present, in hopes of earning more from success in the future - that would lead directly to the global economic collapse now blighting the early twenty-first century. It was all fresh and new in the seventeenth century, though, and Scots, from the aristocracy to the middling sort, began elbowing one another aside in their desperation to get in on the ground floor of something that promised to be huge: a Scottish trading empire.
As soon as ‘The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’ was up and running, however, English merchants rose in furious indignation. Although William grudgingly approved the legislation required by the Scots, the protectionist tactics of English merchants and nobility meant the new company would remain blocked from establishing trade in all parts of the world under English control.
Bloodied but unbowed, Paterson ploughed ahead and carried Scotland along with him. Instead of participating in the English trade empire, they would go it alone. He had long been obsessed with the potential of the Darien Isthmus, a narrow strip of land in Panama separating the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic. To anyone who would listen he was describing the territory as ‘the key of the universe’; whoever controlled Darien, he said, could monopolise all trade between the eastern and western halves of the planet.
The resultant ‘Darien Company’ raised hundreds of thousands of pounds, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all the liquid capital in the land, as Scots found themselves swept along by a fervour. It was a fervour born of greed and fuelled by patriotism - determination to restore Scots honour in the face of English obstruction - and therefore another lethal cocktail. Between 1698 and 1700 the Darien Company attempted to establish its colony. It was the most desperate and doomed venture in the whole of Scottish history.
Unbeknown to the vast majority of stock-holders, the Isthmus of Darien was a fly-blown, fever-blighted swamp in the middle of a patch of Panama already claimed by mighty Spain. Among the laughable cargo taken by the first colonists - the trade goods with which they planned to woo the locals in this tropical hellhole - were powdered wigs, woollen hose and tartan plaid.
The two-year-long story of disease, persecution by Spain and disgruntled natives, and tropical rain-lashed misery is best kept short. King William was privately more interested in staying on good terms with the Spanish than in seeing the survival (far less the advancement) of his Scottish subjects, and so cut them adrift. Fever and climate took the main toll, however. The colonists’ clothes and shoes rotted from their bodies under the ceaseless onslaught of tropical rains. Their supplies rotted too and their crops failed. They died by the hundreds. Paterson was laid dangerously low by fever and his own wife died of it.
Finally the Spanish got their way and the 300 or so survivors (out of some 1,200) climbed aboard ship and limped home to a Scotland ruined. Every penny of the investment had been lost and the nation was bankrupt - and this at a time when so many folk were already severely weakened by the years of famine.
King William died in 1702 and his throne passed to his sister-in-law Anne, younger sister of his dead wife, Mary. Protestant Anne was a bona fide Stuart at least,’ but like William her over-riding concern was for the future of England. A Scotland wounded by economic collapse and blaming England for its woes was vulnerable to exploitation by England’s enemies, like France. For Anne and her government the priority was to find a way of dealing with the Scottish problem once and for all.
With mutual loathing dominating relations between the two supposedly united kingdoms, the English parliament took the step of passing the ‘Aliens Act’ of 1704. Its headline statements banned Scots from passing onto their heirs any territory they owned in England, and put a block on the import of Scots trading goods; but it was also an attempt to strong-arm the northern kingdom into accepting a union of parliaments. Only by allowing herself to be joined more completely to England could Scotland be freed from the strictures hobbling her present and future.
The hated Act was repealed two years later, but by then it had done its job. Influential Scots accepted that Scotland would remain poor and weak for as long as it held itself apart from England. Many of them imagined a kind of federal union - two independent nations joining forces to reap a combined harvest - but Anne’s England wanted nothing less than to swallow Scotland whole. The buzzword was incorporating union, a marriage by which the Scottish wife would be made wholly subservient to her English husband.
The Scots should have felt which way the wind was blowing long before, even as the Darien dream was dying. In 1700 the last of Princess Anne’s eighteen children had died as well, aged just eleven. With the passing of the little, luckless Duke of Gloucester, the direct line of descent was broken. The English parliament had faced a dilemma: either the prospect of Anne dying without further issue and the throne passing to the next in line, the Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart, son of King James VII and II - or finding a Protestant alternative while she was still alive.
So it was that in 1701, without even informing the Scots of their plans, the English parliament had passed the ‘Act of Settlement’. Under its terms they offered the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland to a lesser and distant branch of the Stuart tree. James VII and II ’s youngest daughter had been Elizabeth, the so-called ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia. Her one surviving descendant was her youngest daughter Sophia, Electress of Hanover. Sophia was in her seventies; but she was Protestant and, more to the point, she had a forty-something Protestant son called George. Anne could not actually bear the sight of her Bohemian relatives and never allowed them to set foot in any of her kingdoms while she lived but they happily accepted the offer of jam tomorrow.
Unsurprisingly, the Scots were livid. All of this had been done without so much as a by your leave, and for a while there was dark talk of breaking the union of crowns altogether and finding a separate king for Scotland. In reality there was no realistic alternative to what the English had set in train. Had they gone shopping for their own man, the Scots would have opened the door to Catholic James and his heirs; most Scots had no wish to reopen that particular can of religious worms.
And so there you had it: the English held the key to greater prosperity and had already decided the future of the thrones. The price of obtaining a copy of that key, and of maintaining the status quo of kingdoms united, was to snuggle up even closer to the Auld Enemy.
In 1705 the members of the Scots parliament agreed that plans for union should be drawn up. It is important to remember that while it was called a parliament, it had nothing to do with democracy. Its members were placemen, subservient to the king and well trained in the business of lying down and rolling over for their masters in London; they represented no one but themselves and the vast majority of Scots cared not a whit about them. Ever since James VI and I had crossed the border heading south, Scotland had been ruled by London and everybody knew it. For many, the choice had long been clear: continue to be ruled from London, but without access to English markets - or be ruled from London while growing fat on the proceeds of union.
By 1707 a joint Scots and English commission had drawn up a draft ‘Treaty of Union’. The Scots members of that commission had been Crown appointees - chosen for their support of Queen Anne’s desire for an incorporating union - and the document they now proposed to put before the Scots parliament was nothing more or less than a suicide note awaiting a signature.
By its terms the Scots parliament would cease to be. A tiny handful of Scots would be made members of the English - now British - Houses of Commons and of Lords. The Scottish Privy Council would be emasculated and every important decision about matters affecting both kingdoms would be made in London. It was even unclear what would happen to the Kirk, and the absence of any clear statements about Scotland’s religious future unsettled every Presbyterian.
Only the legal and educational systems would remain separate and independent from their southern counterparts, but these seemed like faint sweeteners. The main inducement came in the form of money - or at least the prospect of access to the places where money might be made. Under the terms of the treaty, Scots would be allowed in among England’s foreign markets. Money was also paid directly to Scotland’s nobles, some of it supposedly to compensate those hurt by the Darien disaster; but it was bribery by any other name.
On 16 January 1707, after months of bitter wrangling, Scotland’s parliament voted itself out of existence. There had been desperate and furious opposition from men like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a radical Whig and Paterson’s ally in the early days of the Company of Scotland. Like many Scots, Fletcher had wanted to change the nature of Scotland’s ties to its southern neighbour. He complained about the iniquity of Scots being taxed to the hilt to pay for England’s Continental wars - wars being fought against the very nations Scots wanted to trade with, like France. After all, England’s violent adventures in Europe had been part of the reason why Scots had had to turn their attentions away from the east and towards the west - towards a disaster like Darien - in the first place. But in the end Fletcher’s arguments and all the others had been overcome by the gift or the promise of English pounds. Even the Kirk had backed the treaty: they feared the prospect of Scotland going it alone and falling once more beneath the thrall of a Catholic monarch.
The main obstacle had been Article 22 of the treaty, by which the separate Scots parliament was to be abolished. It was pushed through by the single-minded determination of one man: John Dalrymple, responsible for the Massacre of Glencoe. Putting aside all sentiment, he simply argued that nations, like people, depended on money for their survival and growth. Accept the union, swallow the humiliation of a tiny minority of representatives in the new parliament, he argued, and enjoy the rewards of being allied with England. It was a simple argument and it carried the day.
On 28 April the Scots Privy Council formally and finally proclaimed the dissolution of Scotland’s parliament. The Lord Chancellor, James Ogilvy, 1st Earl of Seafield, is said to have taken the sceptre of the Scots regalia and touched the new Treaty of Union with it. ‘Now that’s the end of an auld sang,’ he said.
Many Scots, though, found they were still listening to the same old tune. Despite the prospect of wealth for some, there had been massive popular opposition to the proposed union: rioting in the streets of towns and cities the length and breadth of the country. Glasgow had been especially concerned, fearing that union would silence its independent political voice. Centuries of history had taught ordinary Scots the dangers of complying with the English. Independence and its defence had become a character trait of the nation that had not been watered down by the years of united crowns. And anyway, Scotland had been promised economic benefits and those certainly did not arrive overnight and not for a long time thereafter.
In the immediate aftermath of the treaty, in fact, the only people smiling were the Jacobites. From his gloomy lair in the Palace of St Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, nineteen-year-old James Francis Edward Stuart smelled Presbyterian and Whig blood for the first time. Here was yet another Stuart grown to manhood far from home. Unlike his predecessors, though, his birth had been followed for a while by claims he was not even the king’s son - that he was a ‘suppositious child’ bought from some hapless soul and smuggled into Queen Mary’s rooms in St James’s Palace in a warming pan. But as he had grown, all agreed that none could look into his face without admitting he was his father’s child.
James VII and II had died on 16 September 1701 and now James Francis Edward was ‘the Pretender’ (from the French prétendant, ‘claimant’). Louis XIV had speedily proclaimed him James VIII and III of Scotland, England and Ireland and he was as confident of one day sitting upon his throne as only a teenage boy could be.
With the ink still drying on the Treaty of Union, Jacobite agents had travelled from Scotland to the French court with a paper bearing the signatures of prominent Scots. The time was right, they said, for James to cross over to Scotland and claim his birthright. Thousands of Scottish Jacobites were apparently ready to rise to the fight and if James would just set foot in his homeland, the throne of Scotland was as good as his.
For the French king, this was a tempting proposition. He was years into the conflict with England known as the War of the Spanish Succession and desperately wanted leverage to force his enemy to back off. There was also the matter of the vast expense of maintaining the Stuarts in luxurious exile, which was soaking up money that ought more usefully to have been going into his war chest. All things considered, he jumped at the chance to kill both birds with one stone and furnished his guest with a fleet of French warships and privateers, together with a company of French troops.
The teenager who would be king arrived in the port of Dunkirk in March 1708, and was promptly laid low by a bout of measles. By the time he had recovered, much of the fire had gone out of French hearts at least. The French commanders of his fleet were convinced they faced certain defeat and Admiral John Byng was known to have brought British ships into position off the coast at Gravelines, south-west of Dunkirk, ready to intercept them.
No one talks much about James’s expedition of 1708 - it has been lost completely in the shadows cast by ‘The ’15’ and ‘The ’45’ and is described by some as a fiasco - and yet it strikes me as perhaps the most dangerous of all the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century.
The effort of 1708 was a case of striking while the iron was hot. No one was yet benefiting from the Hanoverian-backed union, least of all the Scots. National pride was severely hurt, in need of vengeance even, and memories of Glencoe were still sharp. As well as in Scotland, there was also untapped Jacobite sentiment in England. Altogether it added up to the perfect time for the Pretender to strike.
The plan was fairly modest, small-scale in its ambitions to be realistic: the undertaking, as outlined by the Jacobite agents who had contacted Louis, was to concentrate only on the Scottish throne. James was to land on the east coast and make for Stirling as quickly as possible. Once Scotland was reclaimed, a force could be sent into the north-east of England to take control of the Tyne-Tees coalfields. Starved of fuel, went the theory, Anne’s government might even have to sue for peace with France.
As in so much of life, it was luck that made the difference, and James Francis Edward Stuart did not have any. By the time the teenager’s spots had cleared up, the weather in the Channel and the North Sea had turned for the worse. The flotilla got under way but was so storm-tossed that James and most of the troopers were terribly seasick all the way over. To make matters worse, both the French naval commander Claude de Forbin and the military commander Count de Gace remained as faint-hearted about the mission as it was possible to be. Grey about the gills though they undoubtedly were, the would-be invaders made it into the Firth of Forth and dropped anchor near Burntisland. Jacobite forces were already gathering onshore, ready to mount the advance on Stirling, and the government commander would later report he had neither the men nor the equipment to do much to deter them.
With success within sight Forbin became aware that Admiral Byng was about to join him in the Forth. Unwilling to face the consequences of such a meeting, he pulled his ships away before James had a chance even to land in Scotland. They headed north instead, with the Pretender pleading desperately to be put ashore anywhere - even alone. Forbin refused and ran for his life, eventually circumnavigating the whole of the British Isles in order to make good his escape and return to France.
The British government had been lucky. It was not even the beginning of the end of the Jacobite problem, but the threat would never again be quite so well timed, so acutely dangerous, so full of unexplored potential.
Also in 1708 the Scots Privy Council was abolished - a last nail in the coffin of Scotland as an independent political force - and in 1709 the Whigs controlling the London parliament introduced Anglicanism to Edinburgh. It was the thin end of a wedge and in 1712 the ‘Act of Toleration’ gave equal rights to Scottish Episcopalians. The Kirk had avoided the return of a Catholic monarch but the next worst thing had arrived instead: the synagogue of Satan.
Displeasure with the nature of the union was growing and simmering in both Scotland and England. While Protestant Whigs were pushing all the while for greater religious tolerance, the attitude of a sizeable minority of their High Anglican Tory opponents hardened into a stance that looked steadily more like Jacobitism. Apart from anything else, Jacobite nobles remembered a world of the recent past in which the people below them had known their place. Like the hawk in Hughes’s poem, they believed they sat towards the top of nature’s hierarchy. God had made them what they were - and had once made kings his little gods, to rule over other men. For nobles who had lost power, who saw it being wielded instead by upstarts, memories of high-handed Catholic monarchs burned bright. These monarchs needed locally powerful nobles to do their bidding; maybe the past was a world that could be reclaimed and lorded over once more and for ever. As Hughes’s poem says, ‘I kill where I please because it is all mine.’
For a while after 1711 the Tories gained the upper hand in parliament, and even went so far as to suggest to James he might be welcomed back as King of Great Britain if he would only convert to Protestantism. He could not, or would not, and once again a chance brushed past the Pretender like a stranger in a crowd. (He was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t, of course: by staying true to his faith, he made himself an inspiring figurehead for Scots Catholics. In religious terms, he just could not win.)
In 1713 a Bill was put before parliament calling for an end to the union altogether. It was the work of Scots nobles including John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, James Ogilvy, 1st Earl of Seafield and John Campbell, 2nd Earl of Argyll - three of those who had been most committed to it in the first place. Only six years had passed since its historic signing and yet already the pulse of the thing was all but undetectable. Only a single vote kept it alive.
Queen Anne - tragic, unlovely Queen Anne, without heirs and with all her children in the ground before her - died in 1714. As arranged by the Act of Settlement of 1701, her passing opened the door to Hanoverian George. He spoke barely any English and if he knew of Scotland’s existence at all, that was about the limit of his knowledge of the place. For those of the Scots nobility who depended on the king for cash and position, the ending of the ‘auld sang’ had signalled a scramble for seats in the toughest ever round of musical chairs. And when Anne died everyone had to stand up again and circle nervously until George invited them to sit.
Mar - they called him ‘Bobbing John’ on account of his backing for the union one minute, followed by bitter opposition to it the next - grimly held on. He had hoped for rewards for his sometime public support of all things Whig and Hanoverian, but he was to be disappointed. Formerly the Secretary of State for Scotland, he was nothing now and saw no alternative but to hang around George hoping to be gifted one of the remaining seats of power. The last straw was laid across his back in the summer of 1715. Mar arrived at a royal function and walked towards the king, only for George blatantly to turn his back on him in the most public and humiliating of snubs.
He had been shown his own future and in London, at the Hanoverian court, it was an utterly empty one. He returned ‘home’ to Scotland immediately, where he had estates both in the Lowlands and Highlands, and soon made his way to Braemar where he raised James’s royal standard on 6 September 1715. He had gathered other disgruntled or vacillating nobles around him - he had dressed the day up as a hunting party - and with stirrup cups in hand they toasted the king over the water and crossed the Rubicon.
When reading about the Jacobites in the context of a history of Scotland it is easy to be tricked into thinking Jacobitism was itself Scottish. This is far from the truth. From the moment James VII and II arrived in Ireland in the aftermath of William’s revolution, to lead an army with Frenchmen within its ranks, it was and would remain an international, or at least a pan-European, phenomenon.
After his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 James sought exile in Catholic France. But there was noisy support for his cause in Austria, Italy and Spain as well. Jacobitism was not a Catholic project either. Depending upon where they were looking for - and obtaining - support, Jacobite agents would sometimes claim it was not about religion at all. This is also false. There were Protestant Jacobites and there were Catholics and Episcopalians who sided with the Hanoverian government, but religion was an always potent ingredient in the mix just the same. (In Scotland, in fact, it was from within the ranks of Episcopalians, particularly in the north-east, that James and then his son Charles would draw their most ardent supporters.)
The Jacobite story can sometimes seem like the most complicated and confusing in all of Scotland’s history. In some ways it is; but it helps to remember it had its deepest roots in something quite simple. From the moment William and Mary first ascended their thrones, those nobles and landowners who voiced support for the new regime ought to have felt their faces flush red as their claret with the hypocrisy of it all. As a species, they depended upon the rights of primogeniture, the rights of the firstborn. They had received their lands and titles from their fathers for no other reason than that ancient laws demanded it.
William and Mary, and then Mary’s sister Anne, were fruit from a junior branch of the Stuart tree. They were therefore usurpers, sitting in the rightful place of their elder, superior, Catholic relatives. This simple wrong was the elephant in the Williamite and then again in the Hanoverian room; it was the embarrassment it engendered that had provoked the ludicrous suggestion that James Francis Edward was a changeling. And so in many ways the Jacobite rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the squabbles of an unhappy family. This simple fact was soon lost in a swirling fog of competing priorities as one European party after another found it had something to gain from exploiting the Jacobite dream. But that is how it started just the same. The most colourful moments tended to be played out in the kingdoms of Scotland and England for very straightforward reasons as well.
England was by far the richest territory within the Stuart demesne, and the only one powerful enough to force a primogeniture-defying Protestant succession onto the others. And Scotland, of course, was the birthplace of the Stuart line, of the very name Stewart. The first of them had been Robert II, son of the hereditary Steward of Scotland. He had inherited his throne from his mother Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce, and Stuarts of one sort or another had sat upon it ever since. But Scotland and the Scots were there to be exploited by any English or European monarch who found a use for them: to open a door on England or close it for ever; to stir up trouble for the Protestant faith; to distract the British from European schemes and force them to sort out their own house.
The single most important contributory factor to the success or failure of any and every Jacobite adventure was the attitude of France. Only France had the clout, the cash and the will to gamble on returning a Catholic Stuart to the British thrones.
James’s 1708 attempt to claim his thrones had happened while England and France were locked in the international bloodletting of the War of the Spanish Succession. The Habsburg Charles II of Spain had been weak both physically and mentally - almost certainly a result of his family’s fondness for letting first cousins marry - and had died without producing an heir. His death in 1700 had been no surprise to anyone; indeed, the nations of Europe had prepared for its aftermath for years before it actually happened, and with good reason: the Habsburg Spanish empire he would leave behind was vast, with concerns throughout Europe and in the Americas.
Were the whole huge dynastic inheritance to pass to any one ruler it would have created a power bloc so great as to unbalance the continent. The English, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I - all had been conducting negotiations and signing partition treaties aimed at breaking up the whole of it into less weighty chunks.
The fear shared by most was the prospect of Bourbon France inheriting the empire, a possibility created by a knot of marriage alliances that also gave Emperor Leopold a valid claim. King Louis XIV had originally waived his own rights, but when Charles II died his will revealed he had left everything to Louis’s grandson - who became Philip V of Spain. This was close to the nightmare scenario for the rest of Europe and war its inevitable consequence.
The Emperor, the Dutch and the English joined together in a Grand Alliance against Louis. In the end it proved too much for the acquisitive Frenchman. Luminous English victories like Blenheim, in 1704, under the command of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, had gradually eroded both Louis’s will and his cash reserves. By 1713 he had had enough and the Peace of Utrecht brought the fighting to an end. Under its terms he was required, among many other things, to recognise the Protestant succession in England and expel the Stuart Pretender from his kingdom. He met the terms and James had to vacate his grand residence at St Germain -en-Laye for more modest accommodation in the independent Duchy of Lorraine.
What Louis might say in public, under the weight of treaty negotiations, however, was one thing; what he thought privately was often quite another. For as long as he lived he would value the gaming piece that was the exiled Stuart king and his support was of huge significance to Jacobite hopes. While he was inconvenienced by Utrecht, he passed the Jacobite baton to his grandson, Philip V of Spain, who duly promised to back James. But on 15 September 1715 Louis XIV died and at once the Jacobite world was a different place.
In fundamental ways, the world of nort-west Europe had lately changed too. By the Peace of Utrecht the key powers north of the Alps accepted that peace depended, to some extent, upon ‘the balance of power’. This was an innovation in the eighteenth century and tied up with another fact of life: the time of great dynasties was coming to an end. If not actually ceasing to exist, they were at least old-fashioned, with less of a part to play in shaping national policy. The Stuarts - and their offspring the Jacobites - were part of the old world; nations mattered more now than great houses and their great names. It is also interesting to note that the map of north-west Europe in 1713 was much the same as that of today. There was no consolidated Italy, and Belgium was yet to be born; but by and large the blocks on the map have been the same for the best part of 300 years.
The shape and style of this new world was never going to appeal to Jacobites. And ironically, while national politics became the international language in parts of Continental Europe, Jacobitism reached a new high point in Britain as a whole and in Scotland in particular.
Everyone knew ‘Bobbing John’, the Earl of Mar, was a politician who blew in the wind, but his timing happened to be perfect. By the time he raised James’s standard in 1715, other men of more confirmed will found they too had been pushed as far as they were prepared to go by vulgar Whigs and their notions of change. This time the great and the good flocked to his side as well, in stark contrast to Bonnie Dundee’s experience in 1689 when they had stayed away in droves.
From far and wide, great names and their warriors answered the call: Camerons of Lochiel, Campbells of Breadalbane and Glenlyon, Frasers, Gordons, MacDonalds of Clanranald, MacKenzies, MacLeans, MacLeods. The town of Inverness, too, rose in support of the Pretender. There were also many clans, Presbyterians like Gunn, MacKay, Munro, Ross, that stayed away, and the rising in the north-west was not uniform by any means. Support for Mar was strongest in the Episcopalian north-east: Aberdeen declared for the Jacobites along with all the burghs north of the River Tay. In Brechin, James Maule, 4th Earl of Panmure summoned the populace in support of James VIII and III. James Carnegie, 5th Earl of Southesk rose too, as did James Ogilvy, soon to be Earl of Airlie, John Lyon, 5th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and George Keith, 10th Earl Marischal of Scotland.
In that special way of civil wars, families were split across the Jacobite blade. John Murray, 1st Duke of Atholl and chief of Clan Murray, was a Hanoverian to the marrow of his bones. But three of his sons, Charles, George and William, declared for James and rallied an Atholl Brigade ready to fight alongside Mar. (George Murray - Lord George Murray - would later command the Jacobite army of the Young Pretender in 1745-6.)
Even when considering family loyalties - or the lack of them - there is room for confusing ‘what ifs’: wily chieftains were not above betting on both horses, and in some cases sons were commanded to fight on the opposite side from their fathers. By this strategy, the family estates would be retained by whoever ended up backing the winner.
With the sound of all these proud Scottish names ringing in the ears, it is all too seductive to imagine their only inspiration was patriotism. In truth, it was naked self-interest that drove many of the chiefs. The Camerons of Lochiel, like the MacLeods and the MacDonalds of Glencoe, had been unhappy since 1688. Having prospered under James VII and II, they had been cold-shouldered for more than a generation. Power had grown increasingly distant, centralised in far-off London. The return of the king meant the chance to reclaim past glory and influence.
The job of turning back the Jacobite tide fell to John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll and Scotland’s commander-in-chief. He was a military realist and realised that, while Mar was riding at the head of an army 10,000-strong, he himself had no hopes of gathering anything as great in the time available to him. The rising had also taken the Hanoverian government by surprise - in no small part because the disbanding of the Scots Privy Council had cost them their eyes and ears north of the Border.
Fortunately for Argyll, Mar vacillated as a general just as he had done as a politician. Though he was in command of a far greater force than that which would rise for Bonnie Prince Charlie thirty years later, though Episcopalian preachers were occupying Presbyterian pulpits and preaching rebellion, and despite the fact that Jacobites in the north of England were cheering him on - still he managed to make a mess of the whole affair.
Argyll had earned his spurs fighting for Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession and knew by training as well as by instinct what needed to be done. Stirling had always been the pinch-point through which any large force had to pass en route to the north or the south of Scotland. Wallace had exploited the fact in 1297, as had the Bruce in 1314. Argyll knew it too and while Mar hesitated at Perth he marched his force into position at Sheriffmuir, near Dunblane and close by Stirling itself.
On 13 November 1715, one day before government troops would mop up the remains of the English rising at Preston, Mar finally confronted his foe. Argyll was outnumbered by at least two to one but he was a soldier against a dilettante. As it turned out, the battle itself was inconclusive, but it was Argyll who held the field at the close of play. Mar fled back to Perth.
Perhaps Mar’s initial indecision had stemmed from uncertainty about what the French would or would not do to back him. Since the death of Louis XIV France had been ruled by Phillipe duc d’Orléans, regent and great-uncle of the young Louis XV. Since he was conniving to have himself recognised as an heir to his nephew’s throne, Orléans had as much to gain but arguably more to lose through overt support of the Pretender. In the end he sent nothing and no one to aid Mar.
In late December, around the time when James himself was en route from Dunkirk to the port of Peterhead in belated support of his own rebellion, Philip of Spain put a fortune in gold aboard a ship bound for Scotland. The bad luck that was ever James’s travelling companion saw to it that the vessel was wrecked off St Andrews, its precious cargo soon to be scooped from the surf by jubilant Hanoverian soldiers.
James made landfall on 22 December but by then it was all over bar the shouting. For a few weeks he presided over a court of sorts at Scone, and by February was reduced to sending begging letters to Orléans, in hope of help that would never be sent. On the 26th of the month he boarded a ship at Montrose, along with Mar, and returned once more into exile.
In hindsight, the failure of it all seems astonishing. Had Mar been gifted with the merest sense of how to fight a campaign rather than just lead a parade, he could easily have moved past Argyll to link up with English Jacobites and Catholics in the north of England. The resultant momentum might well have brushed the Hanoverians from power, ready for James’s triumphant arrival. Instead, the government had been blessed by luck once more and the last real chance of Jacobite victory had passed.
The view from the twenty-first century is all very well but the fact is that in the aftermath of ‘The ’15’, the men of the British Establishment were badly rattled. They knew how close their regime had come to being overthrown, how big a part good fortune had had to play. But while they fretted about what James might do next, other forces - almost undetectable and probably unrecognisable as such to all but the most visionary - were starting to undermine the Jacobite cause in its very heartland, in Scotland herself. These were intellectual inquiry and the seeds of free market economy.
Just four years after the débâcle at Sheriffmuir, James would be drawn into another attempt to foment rebellion in the land of his fathers. This time the Pretender, Scotland and the Jacobites were mere pawns in a bigger game involving such disparate players as Spain, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Turkey and Italy.
This exploitation of Scotland, by far greater powers, was as cynical as it was half-hearted. Spain wanted to reclaim control of parts of Italy lost in the War of the Spanish Succession, but found herself opposed by Austria and Britain. As part of a plan of almost Byzantine complexity, Spain sought the self-interested collusion of the Russians and the Turks as well as the military might of crack Swedish troops led by their tactically brilliant King Charles XII.
It was really only Scotland’s geographical location facing Sweden across the North Sea that had brought her to the attention of the Spanish in the first place. Swedish ships were patrolling the water, prowling around after Hanoverian vessels. Since a Jacobite rising would be a useful irritant to throw in the face of an already preoccupied British government, opportunistic plans were duly laid. They culminated in James Francis Edward arriving in Spain in hopes of leading a venture as quixotic as anything ever attempted by the Man of La Mancha.
As things turned out, Spain was as far as he got. A combined Spanish-Jacobite force made a nuisance of itself in his name. Eilean Donan Castle was briefly garrisoned by Spaniards before being pounded to rubble by the guns of the British Navy. Spain had made noises about Jacobites rising in their tens of thousands, of wholesale rebellion, but it was cynical and empty talk. As could have been predicted, the whole dreamy fiasco arrived at a dead end - this time in a battle in the steep-sided valley of Glenshiel, on 10 June 1719.
All the assembled Highlanders could do was fight bravely, standing up to artillery and well-drilled Hanoverian musketry as well as any regular army could have done. But, as ever, it was not enough - could never have been enough - and Jacobite dreams blew away on the Highland breeze. James had never even put in an appearance and had stayed in Spain until advised by his hosts that his presence was no longer welcome.
His only success of 1719, and even that was qualified, was marriage to a woman who would bear him heirs. Maria Clementina Sobieski was the 17-year-old granddaughter of King John III Sobieski of Poland. Not only did she offer the prospect of producing more Stuart boys to continue the family line, she also brought a huge dowry including millions of French francs and a famous collection of family jewellery, the Sobieski Rubies. For a court in exile, therefore, she mattered every bit as much for her money as for her breeding capacity.
The marriage was an unhappy one and James a faithless husband, but it did deliver an heir. On 31 December 1720 Clementina gave birth to Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria and, on 11 March 1725, Henry Benedict. Whatever other failings he might have had, whatever bad luck, James at least upheld that most notable tradition of Stuart men - the ability to make more of their kind. But while the Jacobite adventure was far from over, James Francis Edward would never again contemplate travelling to Scotland. As a wedding present from the Pope the couple had received a palace in Rome and it was there they stayed, where their boys were born and where the pale shadow of the Stuart court now took ineffectual root, a dynastic tumbleweed in search of moisture.
Of greater significance than the strength of James’s appetite for continuing the fight, however, was the advent of better times in Scotland. Far away from his baleful, backward-facing influence, Scots had begun to see at last the benefits of union with England.
It was true to say that for a decade and more after 1707 the promised economic miracle had failed to materialise. Protective tariffs, which had enabled traditional domestic products like beer, linen, paper and wool to turn modest profits, had been swept away under the terms of the treaty. Hardship only increased for many.
Taxes increased significantly as well and in 1725 the Westminster parliament committed the unpardonable sin of hitting Scots where they would really feel it. A heavy new tax on malt - vital to the production of beer and whisky - provoked the kind of response any Scotsman could have warned them about. There were wholesale riots in Glasgow and throughout the burghs as the locals realised the price of booze was going up. Viewed in the longer term, however, these were no more than the pains of labour, and what was being born north of the Border was a new understanding.
In January 1776, in a pamphlet he called Common Sense, Thomas Paine would inspire revolution in the hearts of Americans. Among many other memorable phrases contained within its few pages is the statement ‘That government is best which governs least’ - and it is a truth self-evident that Scotland’s physical distance from the lawmakers of Westminster was to make all the difference.
What gradually began to dawn on many Scots was the realisation that they were too far away from the London-centric government to attract much of its attention. This delivered what might be called a double whammy. Rabble-rousing by a few Jacobites notwithstanding, Scotland in the late 1720s began to enjoy the kind of peace and stability that is felt only in the shadow of a strong state. And at the same time Scots were so forgotten by that state they were free to shape their own independent identity.
The desperate hardships caused by the famines of the late 1690s began to slip from memory as agriculture recovered and food shortages turned to surpluses. International markets were opened to Scots merchants and soon the smell of imported tobacco became familiar in the docks of Glasgow. There were other luxurious foreign products as well - cotton, molasses, sugar, tea - and Aberdeen, Ayr, Edinburgh, Greenock and Paisley began to reap the benefits.
It was among the landowning nobility that livings were most obviously improved at first, but as the second decade of the eighteenth century drew to a close all of Scotland began to be enriched to a greater or lesser extent by exposure to the wider world. Life began to get better for the many as well as for the few.
There had been a severe adjustment to be made by many nobles. Since 1707 only a few had held seats in parliament, and for those now spending a great deal of time in London there was much to get used to. For a start they needed money to maintain themselves in suitable style in the capital and this would fundamentally alter the way they regarded their estates back home, and the folk living on them. Scots chiefs with careers and homes in London began to see their clans as tenants and sources of income rather than as people for whom they bore any kind of paternal responsibility. For those formerly great names left behind by Westminster, there were also decisions to be made - about whether it was best to trust to the regime of the present or to look over their shoulders, and over the water, at the regimes of the past.
Two of Scotland’s universities began to modernise as tutors opened students’ eyes and minds to emergent subjects like law, mathematics and medicine. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the teaching of theology - for so long the root of the rod used to beat Scots - became less certain and more questioning, perhaps more optimistic as well. As more modern, more liberal ideas travelled north, theological thought began freeing itself from the fire and brimstone of Calvinist dogma and to embrace ideas like ‘Latitudinarianism’, in which tolerance was a key virtue. As a by-product, support for Hanoverian union began to grow in those cities. (Aberdeen University, deep in Episcopalian country, remained a hotbed of Jacobitism.)
This new Scotland was very much the achievement of the remarkable post-union politician Archibald Campbell, Lord Islay, later the 3rd Duke of Argyll and leader of the mighty Campbell clan. His grandfather had led the Scottish end of the abortive Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and his father had been the Argyll who denied Mar at Sheriffmuir. This younger Argyll was a politician rather than a warrior.
Entering the Westminster stage in 1722, a year after Robert Walpole became Prime Minister, Lord Islay would spend the next forty years exerting a powerful and positive influence over his homeland. From the point of view of some, he was the King of Scotland in all but name. He championed improvements in the linen industry, which enriched himself; but also sought to drive Scotland as a whole towards an industrious and profitable future. When Glasgow rioted about the Malt Tax in 1725 it was Lord Islay, Lord Chief Justice by then, who was sent north to pacify the city, and the country.
Lord Islay also understood very clearly that the universities were key and he was able to use his huge influence to place men of whom he approved into key positions in Edinburgh and in Glasgow. Among his most notable recruits was Francis Hutcheson. Lord Islay saw to it that Hutcheson was given the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, where he established himself as a founding father of what would become the Scottish Enlightenment.
Hutcheson, a preacher and a preacher’s son, believed all human beings understood the difference between right and wrong without having to be told. He also championed personal liberty and taught that every man had the right to ‘exert his power, according to his own judgement and inclination, for these purposes, in all such industry, labour or amusements, as are not hurtful to others in their persons or goods’. That such sentiments were coming from the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University - and that all of this was practically within living memory of the Killing Times - is a measure of how time had moved on.
Hutcheson was a true liberal, who believed happiness was deserved by all beings, that it was to be sought out and that it was always the reward for helping others and advancing society. As Scotland progressed through the eighteenth century, so the desire of her people for free, productive, happy lives moved forward too.
Looming in the background all the while was the spectre of Jacobitism, and the Hanoverian government was at pains to try and exorcise it once and for all. Ironically, but inevitably, the same philosophical advances that sought to increase and protect the rights of all individuals protected some of the rights of Jacobites too.
Government attempts to seize the estates and property of those who had risen in 1715 and 1719 were often thwarted by the courts. ‘Forfeiture’ was standard practice by governments across Europe when faced with rebellious nobles, yet in Scotland it came up against staunch and intelligent opposition. Lawyers and judges who were themselves landowners or even lairds were hardly likely to collude with politicians seeking to strip landed property from any other individuals - even Jacobites. Landowners are usually conservative by nature and those employed in the legal profession baulked at the mere suggestion of giving governments such draconian powers, powers that might one day be used against themselves and their families. Time and time again attempts at forfeiture were stymied.
Also unsuccessful was the ‘Disarming Act’ of 1716. The logic of it had been simple enough: demand the surrender of all swords, shields, muskets, dirks and pistols and the rebels will have nothing to fight with. But in practice it was only Whig clans loyal to the government that actually gave up their weapons, while those with Jacobite tendencies offered only broken relics, many of which had been imported cheaply from the Continent for the very purpose of fooling the government’s agents.
Simon Fraser of Lovat, who had helped recapture Inverness from the rebels during ‘The ’15’, suggested the Highlands might be made more manageable if there were better roads and bridges for government armies to march along. In 1725 Major-General George Wade, commander-in-chief, was duly dispatched to build them, along with a series of forts, barracks and other strong points.
For the next fifteen years he set to with a will and a workforce and the 250-mile network he constructed was an impressive achievement. His greatest single stretch was the 80 miles linking Inverness to Dunkeld and today everyone in Scotland knows it was General Wade who laid the first all-weather roads across the country. But the crushing irony was that the only armies ever to use them in a time of war were those raised for the last Jacobite rebellion, in 1745.
Long before Charles Edward Stuart thought about leading a rebellion, Jacobitism had become more the stuff of legend and fantasy than anything functioning in the real world. There were still in Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, those who enjoyed the thrill of considering themselves Jacobite. But for most of them it was a daring affectation, a claim to be made among friends after one too many drinks. Instead of bearing arms and raising standards, Jacobites in Scotland in the 1730s and 1740s collected wine glasses inscribed with rebellious slogans and used them for ostentatious toasts to ‘the king over the water’. There was even a custom of placing a bowl of water on the table so that the Pretender’s right to the throne might be invoked in public by silently raising one’s glass above it when drinking the health of ‘the King’.
There was something of the legend of King Arthur about it all. Jacobites hoped their rightful king might return because he was needed, because his time had come - but without them having actually to risk anything to make it happen. After all, the Stuarts had returned once before, in 1660; was it wrong to hope they might do the same again? But the truth of that matter was that Charles II had only been granted leave to return and claim his headless father’s thrones because there had been no one else available. Now a new ruling house was established in London and showing no signs whatever of backing down in the face of any claimant, however rightful. George II had replaced his father on the throne in 1727 and the Hanoverian succession - a highly improbable long shot thirty years before - began to look secure.
The last throw of the Stuart dice was occasioned by yet another pan-European war. Just as the War of the Spanish Succession had provided the greater backdrop for Jacobite mischief in 1708, so the War of the Austrian Succession would disturb the same old ghosts in 1745.
From Britain’s point of view, it all started with a pickled ear. Richard Jenkins was the master of a brig of Glasgow called the Rebecca, which had been trading with Spanish territories in the Carribean. Ever since the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 British ships had been entitled to conduct a certain amount of business in the Spanish colonies. But Spain had grown increasingly tired of the incomers and had been accused of high-handed behaviour towards legitimate vessels and their crews.
In 1739 Jenkins turned up in front of a parliamentary committee in London claiming Spanish coastguards had boarded his ship in 1731. He said a Spanish captain had attacked him with a knife and cut off his ear. He then showed the committee members his mutilated skull and even produced the ear, preserved in a jar of brine.
By some accounts Jenkins was little more than a privateer at best and a common criminal at worst. The Spanish were certainly of the opinion that they were dealing with the latter. It made no difference in London. There was instant uproar and on 19 October 1739 Walpole declared war on Spain. There were some early naval successes for Britain, but nothing conclusive. So when Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Austria and Hungary the following year - to dispute the inheritance of Empress Maria Theresa, which had been settled by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht - Spain joined France in supporting him. Britain backed Austria and her empress and all at once Jenkins’s Ear was deafened by something altogether louder.
Jacobites in Scotland celebrated the news that two of their favourite supporters - France and Spain - were once more ready to take up the cudgels against Hanoverian Britain. Strictly speaking, France and Britain had not actually declared war on one another. Their armies would turn up on battlefields - the Hanoverian forces in support of Austria, the French in support of Spain - but each would insist they were only there in the capacity of ‘auxiliaries’.
It was farcical; and after George II led a combined force of British, Hanoverian and Austrian troops to victory over a French force at the Battle of Dettingen, in south-west Germany, on 27 June 1743, it was clear to Louis XV that he had to come up with a diversion to get Britain off his back. As kings of France invariably did in the eighteenth century, when they needed breathing space for their own objectives, Louis promptly approached James Francis Edward Stuart.
James was too old and too bored of the whole tiresome, sordid exercise to get involved directly, but on 23 December 1743 he passed the buck and made his eldest son, Charles Edward, Prince Regent. This handsome, personable twenty-three-year-old, who had never seen Scotland nor ever led men into battle, was now the figurehead of an entire movement. Like all the other Jacobite rebellions Charles’s campaign would be fought in the hope of putting his father on the throne, but his was the name that would be remembered best at the end of it all.
France offered up thousands of fighting men and the ships and boats to transport them. The excited talk was of a full-scale invasion and was loud enough to carry all the way across the Channel. By the time the boats left Dunkirk in February 1744, with Charles himself aboard one of them, the British Navy was ready for them. Before the ships of the line had to engage them, however, a storm got the job done. French boats were sunk, scores of lives were lost and the surviving transports, including Charles’s, had no option but to limp back to France.
It should all have ended there. So many lives might have been spared if Charles had listened more and talked less. But he was headstrong, and the son of the son of a king. Despite Louis insisting there would be no more French invasions, that the soldiers who had survived the abortive crossing would now be committed to fighting George’s troops on land, Charles set out to lead an invasion of his very own.
By early 1745 the Young Pretender had begged and borrowed enough French money to arm and equip two ships, an 18-gun brig Le du Teillay and a much larger, 64-gun frigate called L’Elisabeth. Much of his fighting fund had been raised by pawning the fabled Sobieski Rubies and with some of the proceeds he bought muskets, broadswords, a few artillery pieces and the services of several hundred fighting men. He sent word to Jacobites in Scotland that he planned to lead them in revolt - causing disbelief among all those made privy to the escapade - and then climbed aboard Le du Teillay.
Alarm bells started ringing as soon as the ships left Belle Île, but Charles was not listening. A British man-o’-war, HMS Lyon, was onto them almost at once and so badly damaged L’Elisabeth it had to turn back. At a stroke Charles had lost almost all his fighting men and the bulk of his armaments. Somehow undeterred, he ordered Le du Teillay to sail on, finally reaching the tiny island of Eriskay, between South Uist and Barra, in the Western Isles of Scotland, on 23 July 1745.
Legend has it that as he stepped onto the island and took his first steps in the land of his forefathers, he pulled from his pocket a cotton handkerchief. Seeds of a flower called pink sea bindweed had been trapped in its folds and fell then among the sand and grasses of a point known today as Coilleag a Phrionnsa, or the Prince’s Strand. The flower was foreign to the islands, just as Charles was. The blooms would remain, but he would not.
He was met first by Alexander MacDonald of Boisdale, who simply told him to go home. Charles famously replied, ‘I am come home.’ Boisdale stuck out his chin and refused to have anything more to do with the mad enterprise - and said Norman MacLeod of MacLeod and Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, the two great chiefs of Skye, would tell him the same. Charles simply climbed back aboard Le du Teillay and sailed across to mainland Scotland, down Loch nan Uamh between Arisaig and Moidart. According to more of the legend, the locals looked up from their fields and saw the prince and seven supporters aboard the ship. So pleased were these folk that they began at once to dance - a dance known ever after as ‘The Seven Men of Moidart’.
Charles stayed aboard ship while a succession of local worthies was rowed out to meet him and give their reactions to his plans. Chiefs like MacDonald of Glencoe and MacDonnell of Keppoch were bellicose enough, but lacked the strength in numbers Charles required; more importantly, they lacked the gravitas as well. It fell to young Donald Cameron of Lochiel, remembered as ‘the gentle Lochiel’, to make or break the prince’s dreams. He alone had the clout to make something happen.
No one knows what was said, what arguments Charles rehearsed and what replies he received, but it is tempting to speculate. He would certainly have reminded them all that the House of Hanover had paid scant attention recently to the defence of Scotland. Despite all General Wade’s commendable endeavour - the roads, the fortresses of Augustus, Bernera, William and Ruthven Barracks - King George had never added the fighting men. More concerned about fighting in France, he had emptied the Highland forts and ferried the troops across the Channel. Taking the kingdom by little more than a determined show of bravado, Charles said, was at least a possibility.
He might also have known that gentle Lochiel, for all his surface grandeur, was living in reduced circumstances. The horrors of famine and want were close at hand in the Highlands in the 1740s and the ghosts of the 1690s stalked the land. Despite poor harvests, the descent into the abyss was eventually avoided but in 1745 people were struggling. Lochiel’s coffers, like those of many of his peers, would have been all but empty as tenants avoided the rent and no one had the money to buy cattle, a mainstay of the Highland economy.
It seems to me that in Scotland, away from the tortured intrigues of Europe, the driving force of rebellion was simple. What it came down to - what ‘The ’45’ was about and what every Jacobite rebellion after 1708 had been about - was singling out the have-nots and promising they could get it all back, whatever it was.
Long before 1745 Scotland was splitting - in fact had split - into two societies. There were those on the road to becoming ‘North Britons’, who had tasted the fruits of union and found them to their liking. During the Glasgow riot against the Malt Tax, the home of Daniel Campbell of Shawfield had been razed to the ground. He was one of the first of that legendary cadre of Glasgow merchants who would become known as the ‘Tobacco Lords’ on account of the scarcely believable fortunes they reaped from imports from Virginia. Men like Campbell - and there were plenty more in cities and towns like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr and Aberdeen - were hardly likely to back any movement pledged to disrupt the status quo, especially when it proved intent on destroying their property. They might not all be enjoying the stellar wealth of a Tobacco Lord, but they were making good livings on the back of English trading links and had no time for the bad old days.
On the other side, prey for the Jacobite salesmen, were those left behind. Those who knew how power and prestige might trickle down to them and their ilk from the courts of autocratic kings. They still held the fates and lives of their tenants in their clenched fists and so could compel their obedience to any cause, on pain of eviction or death. It was a central plank of ‘The ’15’ and ‘The ’45’ that a restored Stuart monarchy would do away with the union once and for all; indeed, ‘No Union’ became a battle cry. Jacobitism versus the champions and products of Hanoverian union was a war of worlds, of past and future.
Shortly after the Jacobite standard was finally raised at Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Shiel on 19 August 1745, Lochiel came in with his men. Some of the usual suspects were there as well - MacDonald of Morar, Clanranald, MacDonnell of Keppoch - but there were not and never would be anything like enough. By the time Charles began to head south, he had no more than 2,500 Highlanders alongside him. The lesson of previous risings was that there was nothing to be gained from delay, from hanging around in the Highlands waiting for the French to make any kind of move. So they began to march. The real miracle of ‘The ’45’ was that so much was accomplished by so few.
Those who joined him were also the victims of a kind of confidence trick. Before he arrived in the Highlands, Charles had promised he would be accompanied by thousands of French soldiers and the ships and money to support them. It was plain to even the most dewy-eyed Jacobite chief that none of that had materialised. Charles was convinced French help would come once he had demonstrated the successful potential of his rising - and it seems he sold this delusion to the men now pledged to fight and die for him.
Against all the odds, he even managed to deliver some astonishing successes. Within a month his motley mob had captured Edinburgh and Charles was taking time out to look at the portraits of his ancestors hanging in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The government garrison had abandoned the castle in advance of the Jacobites’ arrival, but it was as out of date as the Highlanders, with obselete guns and no use at all for defending the capital.
The luckless government commander tasked with dealing with the problem was General Sir John Cope, but he had fewer than 4,000 men with whom to mount the defence of the whole country. On 21 September 1745 a surprise attack by howling Highlanders completely routed Cope’s force at the Battle of Prestonpans and sent them running for their lives.
It had been a victory for the Highland charge, for nerve, and for the military skills of Lord George Murray, Charles’s supremely talented and brave commander. But for the government it had been a defeat brought about by inaction and absent-mindedness. If George and his government ministers had torn their attentions from France for just a moment, the whole affair might never have got under way in the first place and would never reached as far south as Edinburgh. But all that analysis depended upon the benefits of hindsight. Now Charles had control of the kingdom of Scotland. The wiser heads in this inner circle counselled the wisdom of consolidating their stunning gains. Wait in Edinburgh, they said, dig in and call upon the French to put their money and men where their mouths had once been.
The Young Pretender, though, would not be deterred from the chance of the ultimate prize - of marching into London and making his victory complete - and used all his powers of persuasion to carry the decision by a single vote. With a combined infantry and cavalry force now numbering just over 5,000, Charles crossed the Border. Apparently his Highlanders stopped on the English side and turned as one, without need of a command to do so, and saluted their homeland. It was the last time any of them would have sight of the place while there was still hope in their hearts.
Everyone knows the Jacobites got as far as Derby before grinding to a halt. They were within a hundred miles of London but it might as well have been a thousand. Wide awake and angry now, the Hanoverian government had spent the past few weeks recalling thousands of hardened fighting men from the Continent. Vastly superior forces would shortly be brought to bear upon the rebels and suddenly it was harsh reality that punctured the Jacobite dream.
Charles was furious, driven to tears of frustration and disappointment, but older heads successfully argued for a wholesale withdrawal back towards Scotland. The return trip was a miserable nightmare for all concerned. The soldiers had not been above using force to take what food and other supplies they had needed on the way down. Communities that had been roughly used by the Jacobites just weeks before therefore had no sympathy whatever for the dejected lines that trooped past their doors now. In Glasgow the populace raised a militia to defy the Young Pretender; they would later join up with the pro-government forces that soon retook Edinburgh for the Hanoverian crown.
Charles and his men made it all the way to Falkirk before the pursuit of a government army under Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley forced them to turn and fight on 17 January 1746. And fight they did. Hawley - known as ‘Hanging Hawley’ for his merciless discipline - was soundly thrashed. The rout and slaughter of his men might have been total, but a fog descended and enabled the survivors to make a run for it.
Success on Falkirk Muir was the last hurrah for the Jacobites of ‘The ’45’. Charles then pulled back all the way to Inverness, a Jacobite stronghold that had to be defended at all costs, and prepared to deal with whatever was coming. It duly arrived in the corpulent form of William, Duke of Cumberland, youngest son of George II, and more than 9,000 foot and horse.
If you wanted to compose a disaster for a Jacobite army stiffened by Highlanders in the middle years of the eighteenth century, you could not do better than think up the circumstances of Drummossie Moor, by Culloden on 16 April 1746.
On the night of 15 April the Jacobites had attempted a surprise attack on Cumberland’s camp outside nearby Nairn. It had been a dismal failure but it had utterly exhausted Charles’s men just the same. On the morning of 16 April, against all the advice of Lord George Murray and other experienced soldiers, Charles had ordered his wearied men (those who had bothered to rouse themselves from sleep, that is) to line up across a patch of flat, boggy land.
Since the days of Colkitto and Montrose a century before, it had been understood that the legendary and lethal Highland charge worked when deployed by surprise, or downhill, or both. Yet there they were, at one end of a lumpy, sodden field, watching while a modern military machine ground towards them, its every move co-ordinated by the beat of drums. Asked what he thought the prospects were of forthcoming events, Lord George Murray said, ‘We are putting an end to a bad affair.’
The proceedings were got under way with an artillery bombardment by well drilled and trained government guns. Experts argue to this day about just how long the Jacobites stood in the face of the round shot and grape, but after something between a few moments and an hour they charged towards their tormentors. Some of them made it in amongst the government ranks and managed vengeful butchery with broadswords and dirk, but it was hopeless.
The government soldiers had been taught a new technique for handling charging Highlanders, namely to attack the man to the right instead of the man directly in front. If whole ranks maintained this discipline - ramming fixed bayonets into men’s sides in the moment they were exposed by upraised sword arms - then the charge could be utterly galled. And so it was.
Cumberland’s victory was as complete as his persecution of the rebels in the aftermath was merciless. Despite the scale and the nature of the defeat, still the surviving Jacobites had refused to go away. Regrouping at Ruthven Barracks, they were even prepared to counter-attack until word came in from the prince himself, telling them to preserve their lives by going home.
Cumberland planted a whole army in the Highlands and spent the next months burning, pillaging and killing. Clearly the Highland clans were the backbone of rebellion and had to be broken and destroyed to prevent any survival of Stuart hopes. There was a renewal of the Disarming Act and punitive measures like the banning of the plaid and even the Gaelic language itself. However practical the means, the objective was the final destruction of the Gaelic culture. The Highlands had always been ‘different’ and in that difference were presumed to be the very roots of Jacobitism. Nothing must be allowed to remain that might enable any regrowth.
After months on the run, the Young Pretender stepped aboard a ship bound for France in September 1746. He would never see Scotland again, nor give it much thought either. He lived a largely dissolute and aimless life, pleasing neither himself nor his family for most of the time. He died in Rome on 30 January 1788, in the same palace in which he had been born.
The fact was that time and progress had overtaken the Jacobite dinosaur long before Cumberland and his ilk set about savaging the clans. In the Lowlands, across the central belt and southwards towards England itself, support for the Jacobite cause had been desperately thin; it was an anachronistic fairy tale that few believed in any more. English Jacobites, who had been full of bravado before the rising, had utterly failed to replace words with action when the musket balls started flying.
What Wade had begun in 1725 was now completed. By 1767 there were over 1,000 miles of roads penetrating deep into the Highlands. Cumberland had slaked his appetite for bloodletting and headed south long before, towards an impressive military career. He left behind his nickname of ‘Bloody Butcher’ and, by the time he arrived in London, found it replaced by calls of ‘Sweet William’. In his place was Cumberland’s personal friend William Anne, 2nd Earl of Albemarle. Years later Albemarle would yet be lamenting the fact that Jacobite attitudes still festered and spread pointlessly through the old heartlands, and even into the central and southern Highlands. In practical terms, though, Jacobitism was a spent force and everyone knew it.
As well as out-and-out brutality, the Crown returned to the practice of confiscating the estates and property of known rebels. They were more successful in this regard than they had been after 1715, but the heart had anyway largely been torn out of the Jacobite nobility.
There was some success in encouraging the voices of proper Protestant ministers to drown out those of the Episcopalian rabble-rousers of old. All across the land, Presbyterian ministers were in full flood, demonising Charles as an Italian from Rome, the very home of Popery, and his supporters as acolytes of the devil. And what state-sponsored religion could not accomplish, surely the offer of material gain through honest labour would ?
A new merchant class in Glasgow and throughout the southern towns and burghs was uninterested in Jacobitism. Only those with nothing to lose had rallied to the royal standard of the Stuarts, and the wind of change had blown too strong and too cold through their patched cloaks and darned stockings.
It was not all horror and punishment in the Highlands. During the 1750s there would be concerted, government-sponsored initiatives to stimulate the economy of the region. ‘Improvement’ became a watchword of landowners, and not just those north of the Highland line. All across the country there were attempts to improve and modernise the techniques of agriculture - upon which the bulk of the population still depended for employment and for life itself. Some of it worked, but some did not - hampered in part by a not always constructive desire to tidy the place up a bit. In the Highlands, the push towards crofting was an often unwelcome intrusion and disruption of ancient practices.
The government was more uniformly successful in harnessing and redirecting the warrior mentality of the Highland men. After Culloden, the fighting men who had once been so feared and hated by the House of Hanover became its most effective weapons. Now fighting on the government side, the Highland regiments would become legendary and would carve their names indelibly into the story of the British Empire.
The future had arrived in Scotland, a future made of union and trade and of pounds, shillings and pence. For Jacobitism - for Scotland herself - what had mattered in the end was what always makes the difference: the bottom line.