The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘It was a small affair, over very quickly’
Why were the Jacobites so hopeless? Lewis Jones investigates
ITHE KING OVER THE WATER by Desmond Seward 384pp, Birlinn, £25, ebook £16.62
t sometimes feels as if the divisions of the English Civil War never really went away, but have simply resurfaced in new guises. In The King over the Water, Desmond Seward offers a fresh look at their longest recrudescence so far (perhaps Brexit will last even longer): the struggle to restore the Stuart monarchy after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
He begins traditionally, with James II creeping through a garden in Rochester and down to the Medway, where a boat was waiting to take him to France. But his perspective is avowedly Jacobite, so instead of ending the story with Culloden in 1746 he carries it on to the death of James’s grandson Henry in Italy in 1807. And he romantically writes of James III, Charles III and Henry IX, while George I is styled “Georg [sic] Ludwig, Elector of Hanover”. Seward strongly doubts the gloriousness of 1688, which he views as squalidly anti-Catholic (“the nearest modern parallel is Islamophobia”), but try as he might he finds little glory on the Jacobite side, beyond that of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
In March 1689, James landed in Ireland, later reinforced by 6,000 French infantry. But on July 1 1690, facing William at the Boyne, his nerve failed him and he rode back to Dublin, where he complained to the Duchess of Tyrconnell that his army had run away: “I see your Majesty has won the race.”
Three days later he sailed for France, deserting his followers, who fought on at Athlone,
Aughrim and Limerick, after which the Catholic ruling class was utterly destroyed. Also in 1689, Scotland’s first Jacobite rising began, ending in 1691. When James died 10 years later, Louis XIV proclaimed his son James III.
In 1707, by outright bribery, the Duke of Queensberry engineered the Act of Union: for 11 guineas Lord Banff not only voted for the Union, but turned Protestant. Soon afterwards the Duke’s “promising 10-year-old son and heir, the Earl of Drumlanrig, was found in the kitchens at Queensberry House eating a scullion whom he had
roasted alive on a spit. Instead of being counselled, the young lord was disinherited.” Seward does not explain how a 10-year-old might have managed such a thing, or whether counselling was then available for juvenile murderercannibals.
In 1708, “James III” attempted an invasion in 30 ships, led by the Comte de Forbin, who first missed the mouth of the Firth of Forth, then signalled to the wrong bank, missing the Jacobites on the opposite side, and finally fled the six ships of Admiral Sir George Byng to return James to Dunkirk.
Seward writes that “at least one historian… believes the Fifteen very nearly succeeded”, but it is hard to see how. On September 6 1715, the Earl of Mar, followed by barely 100 men, raised the standard of James VIII and III, and the gold ball on top of it fell off. On Sepember 19, a “well-conceived” attempt to take Edinburgh Castle failed. The battle of Sheriffmuir on November 13 was a fiasco. As a Lallans ballad had it:
In 1715, the Earl of Mar raised the standard of ‘James VIII and III’ – and the top fell off
We baith did fight, and baith were beat,
And baith did run awa…
On the same day at Preston in Lancashire, the Jacobite general Thomas Forster remained in bed with a bottle of sherry.
The Nineteen “was a small affair, over very quickly”; a rising was planned for the spring of 1722, but cancelled for want of funds; and in 1744 a French invasion was cancelled because of bad weather. On July 23 1745, though, the
Bonnie Prince landed with a small party on Eriskay, and set about rallying the clans. A model of grace
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and courtesy, he wore Highland dress, leading his men on foot, eating the same rations, sleeping on straw, and wading with them across rivers.
On September 18, his army of 2,400 Highlanders entered Edinburgh, without a shot fired. Three days later, they won a famous victory at Prestonpans, and on October 31 he set out with about 5,000 infantry and 450 cavalry, at least a third of them Lowlanders, to conquer England. On December 4, they reached Derby, four days’ march from London. But the chiefs had had enough, arguing that they “had never thought of putting a King upon the English throne by themselves”, and insisted on turning back, which they did on December 6.
“Rather than go back,” said the Prince, “I would wish to be 20ft under ground.”
At Culloden on April 16 1746, he faced the Duke of Cumberland with 5,400 infantry and 150 cavalry. Hungry, and with the wind and rain against them, his army fled, and for two months “Butcher” Cumberland remained in the Highlands, killing, raping, looting and burning.
Seward follows the Prince on the run that summer with Flora MacDonald, staying in verminous bothies, subsisting on porridge and blood pudding, dancing in the heather, and escaping to Skye as Flora’s maid, his skirts hitched scandalously high; one lady called him “an odd muckle trallop”.
By the end of September, he was back in France, where he was hailed as a hero by Voltaire. When the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stipulated that he and his father must leave France, he remained in Paris, disguised, among other things, as “a one-eyed abbé with an eyepatch and a false nose”.
In 1750, he spent five days in London, trying to plan another rising, and being received into the Church of England. But when the French fleet was destroyed by Admiral Hawke in Quiberon Bay in 1759, the Jacobite defeat was final.
Charles’s later years were in sad contrast to his dashing youth. At the Palazzo del Re in Rome, where he took up residence after his father’s death on New Year’s Day 1766, he became a chronic drunk. In 1772, he married the 19-year-old Princess Louise of StolbergGedern, who said that a woman should have an intellectual friend by day and a carnal one by night. He was neither, and she was “reduced to breeding rabbits”.
On his death in 1788, he was “succeeded” by his brother the Cardinal
Duke of York, Henry IX, who had spent his life in Italy and was, Seward concedes, “no more than the living ghost of the Honest Cause”.
He concludes his bracingly revisionist history with the news that the Duke of Cambridge, through his mother, will be the first British monarch since
Queen Anne to descend from James II, by way of his first wife Arabella Churchill, who had “exquisite” legs.