18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 32

[cahn]

:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

Comments

Re: Duke of Berwick

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ha, wow, that is some bad timing for the Jacobites in the '15, re: the French motivations...

Yeah. :) I mean, some of it is written with the benefit of hindsight, in that I'm talking about what Philippe/France was going to do in 1716 rather than what I can be sure they already had in mind in late 1715, but the point is that France very quickly moved into an alliance with England in the Regency period.

Would things have been different had Louis lived? Maybe, maybe not. His country was exhausted by the most recent war in a nonstop series of wars (anecdotally, he's supposed to have said on his deathbed, "I have loved war too well"), and he was being forced to make concessions to Britain in the peace negotiations. If he'd really wanted to support the Jacobites, the time was in 1714, when George ascended. Instead, one of my sources that I was reading today said he refused James III an audience and told the Jacobites not to expect any support.

But, Louis had been known to acknowledge the Protestant succession before (1697 Treaty of Ryswick) and then turn around and acknowledge James III on James II's deathbed (1701). Maybe he would have let Berwick go, maybe he wouldn't have. Maybe that would have changed things, maybe it wouldn't have. Maybe he would have been more inclined than Philippe to help once things got off the ground in late 1715, maybe not. Louis may have been a Jacobite at heart, but he was also not Charles XII and was capable of facing political realities.

But it's clear that on September 1, 1715, a monarch whose personal sympathies were with the Jacobites died, which didn't help their odds.