Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites: What did they really want?
The political positions of those who rebelled in 1745 are not as simple as popular history makes us think, writes Murray Pittock
The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and its leader remain prominent in Scottish imagination and memory, as well as in fictional recreations like Outlander. People are passionate on both sides of a question resolved long ago.
Jacobitism and the Stuarts are not like the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War or even the Wars of Independence: 250-300 years on, people care. Every Orange Walk is a statement of victory by the forces of King William over the Jacobite army in Ireland in 1689-91, most centrally at the Boyne (12 July 1690).
These marches are statements of relief as well as triumph: for Jacobitism was the most fundamental internal threat to the emerging British polity for a lifetime after James VII and II was deposed from the thrones of England (1688), Scotland (1689) and Ireland (1691).
And yet there is still a great deal of confusion over who the Jacobites were and what they wanted.
A popular view remains that these supporters of the Stuart dynasty wished simply to restore their favoured line of kings and with them Catholicism and autocracy, while their opponents supported a more democratic, enlightened state.
But although this is a very plausible set of binary options, it suffers from an overriding problem: it isn’t really the case.
In Ireland, Jacobitism was associated with Catholic rights, possible French or Spanish deliverance from English rule and the overturning of the Protestant Ascendancy, but the Stuart dynasty itself was often a matter of secondary interest.
In England, Jacobites tended to be high Anglicans and Catholics both, opponents of financial innovation, overseas wars and the low church Lutheranism of the Hanoverian dynasty: they disliked foreigners and were strongly xenophobic.
Politically unfocused, the Stuarts were for them a bit like Brexit, a way of accessing an imagined past they felt they had lost. In Scotland, most Jacobites were Episcopalians rather than Catholics (Episcopalians were much more likely to fight in both 1715 and 1745, and there were many more of them then than now) and Jacobite support (which peaked at 22,000 in arms in 1715, 70 per cent of Scotland’s available manpower) ballooned after the Union.
Repeal of the Union was typically the top political priority of Scottish Jacobites, followed by the disestablishment of the Presbyterian Kirk. Many associated these goals with support for their ancient royal house, but many Jacobites in Scotland (or in exile on the Continent) were virtual republicans, and many more could hardly be described as Royalists.
The Stuarts were, however, the perceived guarantors of a “British” monarchy, a looser multi-kingdom arrangement to put in place of the British centralism, which was already making itself felt by 1700, although in the Jacobite era there were almost as many people living in Scotland (1.5 million) and Ireland (3 million) combined as in England (5 million).
The Jacobites in Scotland wanted a Scottish state, but one with ties to England and Ireland: what we would now call a confederal system.
Although only three-fifths as many soldiers were recruited to the Jacobite cause in Scotland in 1745 as fought in 1715, the ’45 has always been perceived as the Rising that came closest to success.
Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, was a major
factor in this – although his main commander Lord George Murray was a better tactician, Charles had strategic insight. He focused relentlessly on reaching London, probably recognising the failure to do so as a fatal mistake of his greatgrandfather Charles I’s in 1642-44.
This was not because he was a devotee of London, but because the British military-financial system had almost inexhaustible ability to borrow more money on the financial markets to supply more troops, and therefore any Jacobite Rising which attempted to secure Ireland or parts of Great Britain alone was doomed in the long run.
Charles’s Scottish commanders were less easy to persuade (and some Scottish nationalists still criticise him for crossing the Border), and they finally ran out of patience at Derby, when only 1,500 men stood between them and the capital, though there were large armies not far from their route.
Should they have marched on? Had they known what lay ahead after Culloden, they might well have changed their minds. Would they have won? The Jacobites would have reached London: after that everything depends on morale, the London mob and the response to any French landing.
The French thought that by using Irish and Scottish troops in the French service they would overcome the hatred of foreigners and foreign armies. They were wrong. On balance, Charles would probably have lost. But the Jacobites certainly lost by retreating. l Professor Murray Pittock works at the University of Glasgow. He is a leading historian of the Jacobites, and is currently writing a study of the British Army in Scotland, 1746-60.