This book was perfect, because it skimmed lightly over things I already know a lot about (the course of the '45, and the Highland clans and their relationship to Jacobitism), and focused on things I didn't. Here's a summary of parts I found interesting (ask if you want more on anything).
It starts with a brief summary of the historiography and various positions different historians have taken. There's a general bit about British society, then an account of the 1688 revolution and the war in Scotland and Ireland. I didn't know much about the war in Ireland, so that was interesting. It looks like James II did not make the most of his Irish Catholic support there. More than anything else the failure of the Jacobite army in 1690–1 is ascribable to a failure of political will. James II and VII does not seem to have taken to his Old Irish subjects.³⁸ They, in turn, were soon disillusioned with him and his inner coterie of advisers, none of whom were Old Irish.³⁹ Also he was not great as a military commander.
It then goes into how the Jacobites communicated within themselves (slooowly and uncertainly, because of the large distances, which made it hard to plot), and the various factions and internal ideological struggles within Jacobitism, and what the formal declarations of the Stuarts actually said. This is the main new thing I learned from the book, and it's very interesting! ...it is interesting to observe in this context the gathering radicalism of the Jacobites’ political agenda. For all the traditionalist evocation of rightful monarchy at the exiled court and the innate social and political conservatism of many of its hard-core supporters in the British Isles, as a political movement Jacobitism was impelled towards greater and greater political radicalism as time went on (see documents 3, 4, 15).
Which makes sense! There's always a struggle over power between the monarch and the parliament (and other power bases), and if the king is actually in exile and not on the throne, he's in a uniquely bad bargaining position. He's dependent on his supporters to get the throne back, and pretty much has to agree to what they want.
This shift begins already in the 1690's. James II's first communications are uncompromising. The Irish Parliament he called in 1689 basically wanted the Catholic majority to be in charge of the country, but they were to lose out in 1693 when the English Protestant faction among the Jacobites won out over the English Catholic one: Parliament was assigned a constitutional position very similar to that already prevailing in England in the 1690s, the religious settlement was to be left virtually untouched (specifically, the privileged position of the Church of England was to be maintained) and there was to be a complete indemnity for all supporters of the Revolution and their heirs. James also found himself caught between the English Jacobite and Irish Jacobite agendas, in that he had to agree to leave the settlement of Ireland to the tender mercies of the first post-restoration English Parliament (see document 3).¹³ In sum, the Jacobite government-in-exile committed itself to leaving the new, post-Revolution political, religious and social order in England (and English ascendancy in the British Isles) virtually intact in the event of a restoration.¹⁴ Must have been bitter for James II...
Then, in 1708, we get the much more radical proclamation of James III, as a consequence of what the Scottish Jacobites wanted. James III promised such things as three-year terms for parliament, all ministers and judges appointed by parliament, religious toleration (but no Catholics in office), the king could not set foreign policy on his own, etc. And they agreed that if the king broke these agreements, then parliament could kick him out. No doubt if any of these kings had actually ended up on the throne, they would've tried to get power back, like William III did after the Glorious Revolution, disappointing the radical Whigs, but they'd be starting from a bad bargaining position.
The exiled Stuarts’ identification with the Scottish national cause and their acceptance of the Juncto’s radical agenda, moreover, boosted the trend towards the adoption of more and more radical commitments by the exiled Stuarts. Their natural allies were the politically alienated and dispossessed, and so they accumulated more and more commitments to alter the status quo in the event of a restoration. The most important and momentous of these was the pledge by the Jacobite government-in-exile (repeated again and again in public statements and propaganda) that as soon as the exiled dynasty was restored it would hold a ‘Free Parliament’. This had been a radical nostrum since the 1650s, produced political revolutions in 1660 and 1688, and was bound to appeal to anyone who felt they had been unjustly treated by the existing order.²⁵ Likewise the Stuarts’ promise from 1715 onwards to institute a complete religious toleration (including full civil rights for religious minorities) augured no less a political and social earthquake.²⁶ To appreciate the potential upset implicit within this proposal it is only necessary to reflect that this was an issue very, very few conventional politicians would touch before the 1770s, that it convulsed British politics in 1780, 1799–1800 and 1825–9, and brought down at least two governments before it was finally passed. In the same vein, from the mid-1720s James promised to roll back the systematic disfranchisement of plebeian Londoners by Walpolean legislation designed to boost the powers of the oligarchical court of Aldermen. This would in effect have given back control of the city to ordinary Londoners and transformed the politics of the English/British capital. And London’s politics were nothing less than crucial on a national scale. The denouement of this process came in the 1750s, when Charles Edward added to these commitments pledges to institute biennial or triennial Parliaments, disband the standing army, cut the number of placemen in Parliament to no more than fifty, and enact legal guarantees of the liberty of the press and the right of the people to resist tyrannical governments (see document 15). It was an agenda a great many late eighteenth-century radicals and revolutionaries would have enthusiastically endorsed.
I also note that "document 15", written by BPC, also mentions his conversion to the Anglican Church, so that's another primary source for that.
Then the book goes through the various attempts at coups and up until the '15, as well as shifts of opinion within England and Scotland. It goes into the '15 in some detail, which makes sense as the author has written a separate book on that. It seems it wasn't as spontaneous as I'd thought before, since it was preceded by plotting between James III, Tory conspirators in England and Jacobites in Scotland. James III explicitly promised to break the 1707 union. The reason the rebellion failed seems the same one I've read before: that Mar was a very bad military commander, and that the English Jacobites didn't rise. But actually he never claimed to be one, he was waiting on James and Berwick (an Irish military commander in French service) to arrive and take over. But the French government forbade Berwick to take part, and James arrived too late to make a difference to the outcome.
I'd thought the government's punishments after the '15 were milder than after the '45, and it seems that they were to the extent that ordinary soldiers in Scotland were not punished. But in other respects they were as harsh. There was plenty of executions of the leaders, the confiscation of estates for all involved, and systematic looting and burning in the Highlands with no separation of guilty and innocent (says nothing about outright killing as after the '45, though). The confiscation of estates did sort of fail in that the Scots Whigs were alienated by the harshness of the treatment of the Highlands, and the whole judiciary establishment in Scotland obstructed the confiscation of estates. The government took 1,000 prisoners in Preston and the majority of the ordinary soldiers were to be transported to the Caribbean, which was basically a death sentence. But that too went awry since most of them were skilled workers and the entrepreneurs who bought the prisoners from the government instead sold them to North America since that paid better.
Then we get developments in England, Scotland and Ireland after the '15, and what the Jacobite court was up to. The most interesting bit for me here was Ireland. Ireland never rose after the 1690's, but that was not for lack of Jacobitism. Even if they'd been disillusioned by James II back then, they really had nowhere else to turn. England was very aware of their discontent, since the Gaelic and Catholic majority basically had no power, and all the power was held by the Protestant and English minority. Because of that awareness, there were plenty of garrisons to keep them down and they were not allowed to have arms. But Ireland contributed in another way: the "Wild Geese" who followed James to the continent in the 1690's formed Irish brigades in France and in Spain that evolved into crack military units. The effect of this on Irish Jacobite morale at home was great: there was a whole culture of songs and stories about it, relating the exploits of these soldiers to old mythical heroes, and illegal recruiting networks that ensured that the units actually remained Irish over time. Also, the commanders of these units had the ears of the kings/ministers in the respective countries. Jacobitism actually clung on the longest in Ireland, into the 1780's, and the transition to Jacobinism seems to have been pretty easy in the sense that both these movements were about trying to get help from the continent to overthrow their English Protestant overlords.
Skipping over the '45, nothing new. Then we get an interesting chapter first motivating why the Jacobites were so tempting to other countries: it gives examples of other countries being taken out of commission by civil wars and how great a way it was of breaking the military deadlock. He goes through various countries one by one and their diplomatic contacts with the Jacobites over time and reasons for why the countries acted as they did. Then there's a last chapter on the Jacobite diaspora.
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Write-up of "The Jacobites", by Daniel Szechi (2019)
Date: 2021-11-20 03:29 pm (UTC)It starts with a brief summary of the historiography and various positions different historians have taken. There's a general bit about British society, then an account of the 1688 revolution and the war in Scotland and Ireland. I didn't know much about the war in Ireland, so that was interesting. It looks like James II did not make the most of his Irish Catholic support there. More than anything else the failure of the Jacobite army in 1690–1 is ascribable to a failure of political will. James II and VII does not seem to have taken to his Old Irish subjects.³⁸ They, in turn, were soon disillusioned with him and his inner coterie of advisers, none of whom were Old Irish.³⁹ Also he was not great as a military commander.
It then goes into how the Jacobites communicated within themselves (slooowly and uncertainly, because of the large distances, which made it hard to plot), and the various factions and internal ideological struggles within Jacobitism, and what the formal declarations of the Stuarts actually said. This is the main new thing I learned from the book, and it's very interesting! ...it is interesting to observe in this context the gathering radicalism of the Jacobites’ political agenda. For all the traditionalist evocation of rightful monarchy at the exiled court and the innate social and political conservatism of many of its hard-core supporters in the British Isles, as a political movement Jacobitism was impelled towards greater and greater political radicalism as time went on (see documents 3, 4, 15).
Which makes sense! There's always a struggle over power between the monarch and the parliament (and other power bases), and if the king is actually in exile and not on the throne, he's in a uniquely bad bargaining position. He's dependent on his supporters to get the throne back, and pretty much has to agree to what they want.
This shift begins already in the 1690's. James II's first communications are uncompromising. The Irish Parliament he called in 1689 basically wanted the Catholic majority to be in charge of the country, but they were to lose out in 1693 when the English Protestant faction among the Jacobites won out over the English Catholic one: Parliament was assigned a constitutional position very similar to that already prevailing in England in the 1690s, the religious settlement was to be left virtually untouched (specifically, the privileged position of the Church of England was to be maintained) and there was to be a complete indemnity for all supporters of the Revolution and their heirs. James also found himself caught between the English Jacobite and Irish Jacobite agendas, in that he had to agree to leave the settlement of Ireland to the tender mercies of the first post-restoration English Parliament (see document 3).¹³ In sum, the Jacobite government-in-exile committed itself to leaving the new, post-Revolution political, religious and social order in England (and English ascendancy in the British Isles) virtually intact in the event of a restoration.¹⁴ Must have been bitter for James II...
Then, in 1708, we get the much more radical proclamation of James III, as a consequence of what the Scottish Jacobites wanted. James III promised such things as three-year terms for parliament, all ministers and judges appointed by parliament, religious toleration (but no Catholics in office), the king could not set foreign policy on his own, etc. And they agreed that if the king broke these agreements, then parliament could kick him out. No doubt if any of these kings had actually ended up on the throne, they would've tried to get power back, like William III did after the Glorious Revolution, disappointing the radical Whigs, but they'd be starting from a bad bargaining position.
The exiled Stuarts’ identification with the Scottish national cause and their acceptance of the Juncto’s radical agenda, moreover, boosted the trend towards the adoption of more and more radical commitments by the exiled Stuarts. Their natural allies were the politically alienated and dispossessed, and so they accumulated more and more commitments to alter the status quo in the event of a restoration. The most important and momentous of these was the pledge by the Jacobite government-in-exile (repeated again and again in public statements and propaganda) that as soon as the exiled dynasty was restored it would hold a ‘Free Parliament’. This had been a radical nostrum since the 1650s, produced political revolutions in 1660 and 1688, and was bound to appeal to anyone who felt they had been unjustly treated by the existing order.²⁵ Likewise the Stuarts’ promise from 1715 onwards to institute a complete religious toleration (including full civil rights for religious minorities) augured no less a political and social earthquake.²⁶ To appreciate the potential upset implicit within this proposal it is only necessary to reflect that this was an issue very, very few conventional politicians would touch before the 1770s, that it convulsed British politics in 1780, 1799–1800 and 1825–9, and brought down at least two governments before it was finally passed. In the same vein, from the mid-1720s James promised to roll back the systematic disfranchisement of plebeian Londoners by Walpolean legislation designed to boost the powers of the oligarchical court of Aldermen. This would in effect have given back control of the city to ordinary Londoners and transformed the politics of the English/British capital. And London’s politics were nothing less than crucial on a national scale. The denouement of this process came in the 1750s, when Charles Edward added to these commitments pledges to institute biennial or triennial Parliaments, disband the standing army, cut the number of placemen in Parliament to no more than fifty, and enact legal guarantees of the liberty of the press and the right of the people to resist tyrannical governments (see document 15). It was an agenda a great many late eighteenth-century radicals and revolutionaries would have enthusiastically endorsed.
I also note that "document 15", written by BPC, also mentions his conversion to the Anglican Church, so that's another primary source for that.
Then the book goes through the various attempts at coups and up until the '15, as well as shifts of opinion within England and Scotland. It goes into the '15 in some detail, which makes sense as the author has written a separate book on that. It seems it wasn't as spontaneous as I'd thought before, since it was preceded by plotting between James III, Tory conspirators in England and Jacobites in Scotland. James III explicitly promised to break the 1707 union. The reason the rebellion failed seems the same one I've read before: that Mar was a very bad military commander, and that the English Jacobites didn't rise. But actually he never claimed to be one, he was waiting on James and Berwick (an Irish military commander in French service) to arrive and take over. But the French government forbade Berwick to take part, and James arrived too late to make a difference to the outcome.
I'd thought the government's punishments after the '15 were milder than after the '45, and it seems that they were to the extent that ordinary soldiers in Scotland were not punished. But in other respects they were as harsh. There was plenty of executions of the leaders, the confiscation of estates for all involved, and systematic looting and burning in the Highlands with no separation of guilty and innocent (says nothing about outright killing as after the '45, though). The confiscation of estates did sort of fail in that the Scots Whigs were alienated by the harshness of the treatment of the Highlands, and the whole judiciary establishment in Scotland obstructed the confiscation of estates. The government took 1,000 prisoners in Preston and the majority of the ordinary soldiers were to be transported to the Caribbean, which was basically a death sentence. But that too went awry since most of them were skilled workers and the entrepreneurs who bought the prisoners from the government instead sold them to North America since that paid better.
Then we get developments in England, Scotland and Ireland after the '15, and what the Jacobite court was up to. The most interesting bit for me here was Ireland. Ireland never rose after the 1690's, but that was not for lack of Jacobitism. Even if they'd been disillusioned by James II back then, they really had nowhere else to turn. England was very aware of their discontent, since the Gaelic and Catholic majority basically had no power, and all the power was held by the Protestant and English minority. Because of that awareness, there were plenty of garrisons to keep them down and they were not allowed to have arms. But Ireland contributed in another way: the "Wild Geese" who followed James to the continent in the 1690's formed Irish brigades in France and in Spain that evolved into crack military units. The effect of this on Irish Jacobite morale at home was great: there was a whole culture of songs and stories about it, relating the exploits of these soldiers to old mythical heroes, and illegal recruiting networks that ensured that the units actually remained Irish over time. Also, the commanders of these units had the ears of the kings/ministers in the respective countries. Jacobitism actually clung on the longest in Ireland, into the 1780's, and the transition to Jacobinism seems to have been pretty easy in the sense that both these movements were about trying to get help from the continent to overthrow their English Protestant overlords.
Skipping over the '45, nothing new. Then we get an interesting chapter first motivating why the Jacobites were so tempting to other countries: it gives examples of other countries being taken out of commission by civil wars and how great a way it was of breaking the military deadlock. He goes through various countries one by one and their diplomatic contacts with the Jacobites over time and reasons for why the countries acted as they did. Then there's a last chapter on the Jacobite diaspora.