13

I’ll Share the Fate of
My Prince: Jacobites

Jacobites wanted to reverse the settlement of 1689, placing religion above political expediency, and, over the next fifty-six years, endeavoured to restore to the throne James II and then his Catholic son and grandson (the Old and Young Pretenders) because it was theirs on account of divine, hereditary right. There were Jacobite insurrections in Scotland and Ireland in 1689, and in Scotland in 1715, 1719 and 1745. All were crushed, although historians have been mesmerised by what might have happened if they had achieved success. Such speculation is entertaining, but it overlooks the cold fact that the Jacobites always lacked recruits, and this deficit in manpower was never adequately made up by their Spanish or French allies. Nevertheless, and out of all proportion to their numbers, the Jacobites possessed a capacity to unnerve the politico-economic establishment of Hanoverian Britain.

The Jacobite leadership was confined to a tiny section of the Scottish aristocracy who, like its rank and file, were either Catholics, Episcopalians or High Church Anglicans who believed that the 1689 revolution had been inherently sinful. The English and Scottish Parliaments had usurped God’s prerogative to make kings and, after the Union of 1707, the British Parliament repeated this profanity by nominating a Lutheran prince, George, Elector of Hanover, as Queen’s Anne’s successor. His accession in 1714 was a signal for an outbreak of nominally Jacobite unrest. Analysis suggests that, then and later, those who took to the streets were Jacobites by adoption rather than conviction, and that their gripes were primarily about such domestic matters as high taxation.

In 1715 the Jacobites played their military hand, conjuring up phantom armies in Wales and the South-West and mustering a real one of fourteen thousand in Scotland and another of about a thousand from the Catholic gentry of Northumberland and Lancashire and their servants. A jittery Whig government feared that the restlessness in the remote and economically depressed periphery of the country might prove contagious. The Marquess of Tweeddale, Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian, was warned to keep an eye open for crypto-Jacobites among his militia officers. Only men with the ‘greatest and most known zeal’ for ‘the Protestant succession’ were to be trusted with commissions.¹

The loyalty of the Lothian volunteers was not tested, which was just as well, for Tweeddale judged them a feeble lot. Two inconclusive battles at Preston and Sheriffmuir near Stirling severely shook Jacobite morale and their forces disintegrated. Blame was laid at the door of the Jacobite commander in Scotland, John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, but a more plausible explanation was that his army was in a perpetual state of deliquescence with clansmen who had been press-ganged by their chiefs sneaking off to tend and harvest their crops.

Highlanders again deserted during the 1745–6 uprising. It was led by James II’s grandson, Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender and ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ of romantic legend. His cause may have thrilled skittish minds in later generations, but when he landed in Scotland, Highland lairds and chieftains had to use their customary clan and feudal authority to fill his army. A tenant of the seventy-five-year-old dowager Lady Nairne was warned that if he refused to take up arms, his livestock would be impounded. He later deserted, as did many others who been enlisted under physical and moral duress. Alan Cameron, an officer in Donald Cameron of Lochiel’s regiment, explained to an English jury that he had joined the uprising because ‘the right of [the superior] is always absolute’. So too were the ancient obligations of blood feud, which was why Camerons used the rebellion as an opportunity to sack and burn Campbell farms.² The events of 1745 revealed that, despite two hundred years of official sanctions, the residual bonds of clan kinship and feudal obligation remained strong in the Highlands. Without them, the Jacobite aristocracy and its allies would have been powerless.

Jacobite peers were outcasts. Defeats drove diehards into exile in France and a life of tedium, mulling over what might have been and dreaming of what might be. The third Earl of Balcarres, who had joined the Earl of Dundee’s failed rebellion in 1690, found émigré existence unbearable. After ten years of it, he returned home, lured by an annual pension of £500, and, in return, publicly declared that the revolution had been in ‘the interest of the country’.³ William Mackenzie, Lord Seaforth, was a hardier spirit. He raised three thousand clansmen in 1715, went into exile, returned to Scotland in 1719 for a brief uprising (backed by Spanish infantry) and again fled to France to continue his hand-to-mouth existence. His lands had been forfeit and his attempts to get cash secretly from his loyal tenants resulted in a corrective and predatory tour of his estates by General Wade’s redcoats in 1725. Rather than remain in penniless exile, Seaforth renounced Jacobitism in exchange for permission to reoccupy his lands.

Inducing Jacobite peers like Seaforth to rejoin political society was the best way of neutering the movement. This policy succeeded, for Seaforth’s heir Kenneth Mackenzie stayed loyal in 1745 and was rewarded with an earldom the following year. In 1771 he raised the 78th Regiment from his clansmen for service in the colonies. He was following the example of previous generations of Scottish peers who, after the Union, had increasingly gravitated towards London for pleasure, politicking and, most tempting of all, patronage. In 1733 the Jacobite-inclining Tory James Erskine grumbled that ‘our peerage . . . [have] fallen into universal contempt for their low and slavish compliances to whatever was in power’. The independent spirit of the Scottish peerage had withered and its typical, modern representative was ‘a giddy, prating fellow . . . [a] self seeker and faction monger’.⁴ But he was making his way in the world and getting richer, while Jacobites had only fantasies for nourishment.

Loyalty to the Crown gave Scottish peers what they craved: preferment and rewards. This was why the majority distanced themselves from Jacobitism and, in 1745, backed the government. On the eve of Prince Charles Edward’s return, the seventeenth Earl of Sutherland promised to have his servants ‘look out sharply’ for signs of a Franco-Jacobite landing on the Caithness coast. He also ran a voluntary intelligence network, which included two ‘gentlemen’ who used the pretext of visiting their kinsfolk to probe the sympathies of chieftain Donald Cameron of Lochiel, a suspected Jacobite. Sutherland’s agents augmented those employed by the Marquess of Tweeddale, now Secretary of State for Scotland. They included a spy who had once been employed by the Duke of Argyll and had a ‘great affection for our present happy establishment’. This supporter of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession was a mole in the household of the Jacobite Drummonds in Perth.⁵

Sutherland’s agents may have found Cameron of Lochiel a lukewarm Jacobite, but he was also the heir in spirit to the culture and customs of his forebears. When Prince Charles Edward landed, Cameron spoke with the authentic voice of a clan chieftain: ‘I’ll share the fate of my prince; and so shall every man over whom nature or fortune have given me any power.’ Ancient concepts of honour overrode political and strategic common sense and propelled Cameron into the Jacobite army. He joined exiled noblemen like James Drummond, self-styled Duke of Perth, Lord George Murray, William Murray, Earl of Tullibardine, and James Drummond, Viscount Strathallan. Like the Prince, they were snatching at a chance to recover titles, prestige and power.

What followed has often be written up as a romantic adventure. Rather, it was a desperate gamble undertaken by a band of filibusterers with delusions of hidden popular support. Prince Charles Edward’s army of four and a half thousand Highlanders and about two hundred Lancashire volunteers reached Derby and gave the government a nasty turn, but it had had a dusty reception during its advance southwards, was suffering chronic logistical problems, and was outnumbered by approaching royal forces. Two fluke victories at Prestonpans in September and Falkirk in January did not influence the outcome of a campaign which ended decisively at Culloden in April 1746. Artillery and the disciplined firepower of a modern army destroyed a feudal host of axe- and swordsmen who charged in the obsolete, heroic manner of the clan warrior.

His leaders suffered forfeiture and four peers were beheaded, the last aristocrats to suffer this punishment for treason. A government which now had fourteen thousand soldiers (including many Lowlanders) and a squadron of warships at its disposal systematically hammered the Highlands, using, paradoxically, that combination of fire and sword which had characterised ancient clan warfare. New laws finally completed the long-drawn-out process of cultural and political deracination which had been started by James VI. The clans were forcibly disarmed, Highland dress was outlawed and landowners were stripped for ever of their remaining military powers and private jurisdictions. Yet, ironically, the clan spirit of obligation survived and was profitably exploited by chieftains who proved their loyalty by raising regiments for the Crown.

These soldiers were clothed in a version of the traditional costume of clansmen and their feats on the battlefield were blended into a highly romantic, alternative version of the history of the Highlands and the Jacobite movement in general. Jacobitism may have won over few minds, but, thanks to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, it seduced many hearts. Among them were those of the Scottish noblemen and their wives who congregated in exotic, and often invented, varieties of Highland dress to greet George IV when he visited Edinburgh in 1822. Scott acted as master of ceremonies and devised a spectacle which simultaneously celebrated the patriotism of Scotland’s aristocracy and its picturesque and stirring past. He urged noblemen to parade in pseudo-feudal splendour with trains of armed clansmen in tartans often contrived for the occasion. The King entered into the mood of the pageant by wearing Highland dress with pink tights under his kilt and drinking tumblers of Glenlivet whisky, which he found much to his taste.

The old bogey of Jacobitism was a distant memory and lords and ladies whose ancestors had spurned the Stuart pretenders now masqueraded as the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had died in 1788, an alcoholic and wife-beater, unaware of his imminent metamorphosis. Thanks to Scott’s imagination, he and his followers had become central to a new self-image of the Scottish aristocracy, who were soon building mock Gothic castles, commissioning clan histories and wearing tartan fancy dress. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would be manic converts to the cult of the Highlands and Balmoral became one of its most impressive shrines.

Irish Jacobitism was never posthumously glamourised. It left sour memories which embittered the country’s history for the next two hundred years. In the spring of 1689 James had crossed from France to Dublin, where he called a parliament with which he hoped to undo the political and economic settlement established by Cromwell and Charles II. Down would come the Protestant ascendancy and up would go a Catholic one. Irish Protestants resisted, most famously holding out in Londonderry, and were rescued by an army led by William III. It decisively defeated James’s forces at the Boyne in July 1690, a victory which is still annually celebrated by Orange lodges in Ulster and parts of Scotland.

The Protestant ascendancy was then upheld and reinforced by an exclusively Protestant parliament, militia, judiciary and administration, prayed for by clergy of the Anglican Church of Ireland and defended by a garrison of twelve thousand royal troops distributed in over one hundred and fifty barracks. Catholic clergymen were virtually outlawed, and Catholic landowners were elbowed off their lands by laws framed to expedite their extinction. When one died, his estates had to be divided among all his sons, unless the eldest converted to Protestantism, which qualified him to enjoy the right of primogeniture that applied to landowners in England and Scotland. In 1703 Catholics had owned 14 per cent of the land, by the 1770s 5 per cent. One particularly spiteful statute left the Irish squireen worse mounted than his Protestant neighbour, for Catholics were banned from owning a horse worth more than five pounds. No wonder Catholics called the Glorious Revolution the ‘Woeful Revolution’.

Cultural, linguistic and religious barriers continued to divide the Anglo-Irish aristocracy from its tenantry. Irish peers were never tempted to dress up as Celtic chieftains, or entertain perceptions of themselves as inheritors of a Gaelic culture, genuine or fabricated. Distance provided a further gulf as an Anglocentric nobility copied its Scottish counterpart and headed for London. It was here that all the crucial decisions for Ireland’s future were made, for in 1720 the Irish Parliament was demoted by a Declaratory Act which placed ultimate authority over the island in Westminster.