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cahnLast post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)
<i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-02 10:27 pm (UTC)Well, this was good--I like how all the chapter titles are lines from Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation. *g* But I do understand why the '45 gets all the attention, because it just has a much better dramatic arc as a story, even though measured in the amount of soldiers on the Jacobite side it was actually smaller than the '15. Still, there was some interesting stuff here. I'm going to do a contrast/compare between the '15 and the '45.
Geopolitical situation
In the '45, Britain and France were at war, and in '44, France had actually tried to invade. So it was pretty favourable for the Jacobites. By contrast, in 1715 there was peace between Britain and France, and France was financially broke besides. Even worse, Louis XIV died and Orleans became regent, and he was wary of Philip of Spain invading in which case he would have been dependent on help from the British and their allies. So it really was a lousy situation for the Jacobites to get any help from France. Why then did they rebel?
Internal political situation
The '45 was basically prompted by the arrival of BPC in Scotland and there was little internal reason to rebel. By contrast, there was a lot of political disturbance in the years leading up to the '15. The 1707 Union had led to no economic improvement for Scotland, and the Hanoverians had succeeded to the throne. The Tories had been ousted from office by George I, and when they failed in the elections (partly because the king threw his weight behind the Whigs) there was lots of Tory and Jacobite rioting in England and Scotland. The political climate was very polarized, and actually both Whigs and Jacobites in Scotland were stockpiling weapons and thinking that there might be civil war. The actual Jacobite rising was not centralized, it was lots of local risings where more and more lairds and nobles came out because they didn't want to seem like they were chickening out.
Military stuff
Sadly there was no outstanding competence to admire on either side, and a fair amount of incompetence. The government had pretty much abandoned the Duke of Argyll to defend Scotland on his own, because they thought protecting England was more important. A lot of the war was spent with the rebels coalescing in Perth and trying to build up their army, and the Duke of Argyll hanging out in Stirling guarding the way south. Then, when they finally meet, they have an encounter battle at Sheriffmuir where one side of the Jacobite army puts the Whig army to flight, and vice versa on the other side. The most experienced officer on the Jacobite side was a General Hamilton, but he had served in the Dutch army and had no idea how to best use the Highland troops.
Really the most charming military detail is the war in the north and west of the Highlands, which was fought entirely between Highland troops. These people were neighbors and did not want to incur blood feuds if they really didn't have to, so the war became a sort of shadow boxing. There were thousands of men in the field, and Inverness was taken and retaken several times, but only two men are recorded to have died! I find this charming. Although of course there was looting, but even that was restrained, with people from both sides being considerate of their neighbors.
Relations between the opponents
Famously in the ‘45, the government side refused to acknowledge the Jacobites as legitimate opponents, while the Jacobites scrupulously followed the rules of war. In the '15, both sides started out following the usual rules of war. Interestingly, this was apparently also the case during the English Civil War of the mid 17th century and during the Williamite war in Ireland in the 1690s—the two sides had cartel agreements, exchanged prisoners, etc. The Duke of Argyll used this approach, but the central government in London had a hard time making up its mind on the point, and finally decided that there was no negotiation with rebels. I really did not expect to come out of this book feeling so well inclined to the Duke of Argyll! (This is the second Duke, by the name of John Campbell, as if they aren't all named John Campbell, except the ones who are named Archibald. He died in 1743, and so wasn't around for the next rising.)
Anyway, after the battle of Sheriffmuir, the Jacobites wanted to negotiate for surrender, which the Duke of Argyll thought was a great idea; he wanted to offer them good terms. But the government in London said, again, no negotiation with rebels and we're going to treat them all as traitors, so the war went on. Argyll pestered the government, basically saying that if they had let him negotiate, the war would have been over now! Finally they got tired of him.
Aftermath
First I'm just going to note the delightful fact that habeas corpus (the law that says you can only imprison someone for a short period of time without putting them to a trial) was called in Scotland the Act Anent Wrongeous Imprisonment.
There were two reasons why the government treatment of the rebels was less harsh in 1715 than 1745. First, the Whigs still remembered how they had been treated after Monmouth's rebellion of 1685 and the Bloody Assizes, and shrank from doing the same (they had apparently forgotten this in 1745, when they decided to be bloodthirsty in turn). But still, they did not want to let the rebels off easily, and were determined to punish them. So: second, Scotland's elite really united and tried to prevent harsh punishment of rebels in general, and were largely successful. This I think is one of the most charming aspects of the ’15! The social elite in Scotland was in some ways bitterly divided (they were certainly much more prone to take up arms against each other than in England!) but in other ways they were very cohesive. Whigs and Jacobites were neighbors and had socially interwoven lives in ways that they didn't have in England. So when the government tried to have about 100 of the elite prisoners from Scotland tried in England, the whole Scottish legal establishment obstructed it completely--and not just the legal establishment, but also the Whig elite. They also obstructed the dispossession of the estates of the Scottish rebels. When the government came to take their estates, it suddenly was found that large debts were owed to their Whig neighbors, or maybe the estate actually legally belonged to someone else! Etcetera, it's really delightful to read about. Whig friends and neighbors also interceded for their Jacobite friends (which Jacobites also did for Whig friends in the areas which were under Jacobite rule during the rising). Of course, this did have a cost for them: that the Jacobites came under an obligation not to rebel again--but it also helped heal the social fabric of Scotland. This all happened to some extent after the '45 as well, but the central government was stronger and more bloodthirsty then. Also, in 1715, the Whigs had more understanding for the rebellion given the bad conditions after the Union.
At the end of the book there's also a section about the exiles, who mostly went to France. From this I will just quote a wonderful phrase from one of them, describing his dreary existence in a small provincial French town: one day being as like the other as two eggs and these eaten without either pepper or salt. Aww. : (
Well, of course there's lots more in the book. Ask if you have questions.
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-02 11:27 pm (UTC)The Tories had been ousted from office by George I, and when they failed in the elections (partly because the king threw his weight behind the Whigs)
His mid-century biographer Ragnhild Hatton thinks his Whig-favoring and Tory-undermining has been overstated and he actually supported a bipartisan coalition, but then Jeremy Black, in his foreword to the new edition of her biography, thinks she's wrong, so...who knows. Just calling attention to the controversy here.
battle at Sheriffmuir where one side of the Jacobite army puts the Whig army to flight, and vice versa on the other side
There was a hilarious song in Scots written about the battle, and the first verse goes like this:
There's some say that we wan [won],
And some say that they wan,
And some say that nane wan at a', man;
But ae thing I'm sure,
That at Sheriff-muir
A battle there was, that I saw, man;
And we ran, and they ran; and they ran, and we ran;
And we ran, and they ran awa', man.
There were thousands of men in the field, and Inverness was taken and retaken several times, but only two men are recorded to have died!
That part I didn't know! Definitely charming.
Of course, this did have a cost for them: that the Jacobites came under an obligation not to rebel again--but it also helped heal the social fabric of Scotland.
That's always nice when people manage that, doesn't happen often enough.
describing his dreary existence in a small provincial French town: one day being as like the other as two eggs and these eaten without either pepper or salt.
That is indeed a wonderful phrase.
Thanks for sharing this!
(I still haven't made it very far into Szechi's book on the Jacobites, but 2022 was not much of a year for reading English for me. But my German is noticeably faster than it was!)
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-03 01:18 pm (UTC)Re: George I and whether he favored the Whigs or not, Szechi seems well positioned to know, since he wrote a book called Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710-14? This is how he describes it: the future George I had been careful to maintain a friendly demeanor towards the both the Whigs and the Tories until 1712. But after that time, the influential Tory the Earl of Oxford sold out the interests of Britain's continental allies, as the price of a favorable separate peace for Britain with France. Obviously the future George I was not happy about that and took a stand, but he did so in a temperate fashion and tried to maintain lines of communication with both parties. But the political climate in Britain was very polarized and this antagonized the Tories, while the Whigs worked hard to ingratiate themselves. When George I succeeded to the throne, he did not wholeheartedly accept the Whigs' claim to be the only friends he had and he tried to bring into office Tories who had overtly maintain their commitment to the Hanoverian succession. But these Tories didn't want to be separated from the rest of their party. So he turned to the Whigs, who then purged every level of government and installed their own people (as the Tories had done in 1710). After that the Tories hoped to secure a majority in the Commons in the next election, but at that point the king did throw his support behind the Whigs. This led many Tories to look to Jacobitism.
ETA: Er, I see my phrasing in the original comment does not really do justice to what the book said...
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-04 03:44 am (UTC)Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-04 05:17 am (UTC)=
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-03 05:49 am (UTC)1.) Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu‘s brother in law, the Earl of Mar, comes across as terrible and incompetent both in her biographies. What‘s this book‘s take on him?
2.) Any interesting mentions of our friends the brothers Keith (George and James) of future Prussian fame in their youth? Speaking of inner Scottish divisions, the mid 19th century editor of the Andrew Mitchell papers, Andrew Bisset, is like Mitchell a lowland Scot. And Bisset on the one hand fanboys especially James Keith like no one‘s business, but otoh can‘t stand the Jacobite cause, so in his Keith-themed appendixes he speculates the brothers weren‘t REALLY Jacobites in spirit, they might as well have joined Team Hannover, they were just doing their Mum a favor, it was an accident etc. This sounded less than plausible to me.
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-04 02:51 pm (UTC)Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-15 05:20 pm (UTC)- to state that he was a religious skeptic,
- he was repairing the fortifications of Dunnottar castle during the build up to the ’15,
- he had only done peacetime military service, and so was not a contender to be one of the military leaders of the ‘15 (I mean, both he and James were pretty young!)
- a bit about his actions during the battle of Sheriffmuir, where he seems to have commanded four cavalry squadrons and tried to charge three infantry regiments from the front, which didn't succeed well,
- he apparently argued that James III shouldn't give up and leave Scotland without more of a fight
- after the ‘15, he led a rival faction in the Jacobite court which opposed Mar,
- he couldn't speak French before he was exiled in connection with the ’15.
James Keith is quoted a few times in order to give evidence about the course of events or judgments about situations or characters. He is the source of the judgment about General Hamilton as being used to Dutch troops and not knowing what to do with the Highland troops. There is also a note near the end about Protestant Jacobites taking service in Catholic countries, and being pressed to convert. The book notes that James III never did this, and quotes him as saying that he did not want to convert his subjects except by example, nor display any partiality towards Catholics. But James Keith, when he served in the Spanish army, was explicitly told that he would not be promoted if he didn't convert, and that was why he left for Russia.
Yeah, it does seem implausible to argue that the Keith brothers were not actually Jacobites!
More in another comment later about Mar…
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-18 07:32 am (UTC)So they were. Also, judging by their later lives, only James seems to have had genuine liking for the military life - at least I don't recall George doing anything military, and certainly Friedrich II used him as a diplomat.
he couldn't speak French before he was exiled in connection with the ’15.
Now that is interesting, but chimes with something which I've come across in other contexts before - whereas being fluent in French was a sine qua non for the continental nobility (especially the Germans), to the point where this was literally their first language, this wasn't the case for the English nobility. Nor, going by this example, the Scots. (I'm reminded again that for all the Whig aristocracy bitching in their recollections about G1's lack of English as a sign of bad education, he was fluent in several languages (English just wasn't one of them) and had trouble finding a minister he could converse with in French because fluent French wasn't self evident for the English aristocracy. Didn't he have to start out in Latin in one case?)
But James Keith, when he served in the Spanish army, was explicitly told that he would not be promoted if he didn't convert, and that was why he left for Russia.
*nods* Figures. In addition to the Spanish heritage, I imagine Philippe V. as a Bourbon just adapted Grandpa's attitude in this regard, and Protestant officers wouldn't get far in the French army, either.
Incidentally, Seckendorff (Imperial envoy to Prussia in the later 1720s and early 1730s, and thus together with his buddy Grumbkow both pal of FW and for his successful opposition to the English marriage project deeply hated by SD) was a Protestant who made it all the way to Field Marshal in the service of the Habsburgs. Several of the Emperors he served did try the "won't you convert?" thing, but didn't make it a condition for further advancement, and he supposedly (according to his first biographer) impressed them by saying that if he went against his conscience there, how could they trust him, etc. (Or something like that.)
Thank you for extracting the Keith bits for me!
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-18 11:37 am (UTC)Was it bad education per se, or bad preparation for ruling a monolingual English-speaking kingdom?
I imagine Philippe V. as a Bourbon just adapted Grandpa's attitude in this regard, and Protestant officers wouldn't get far in the French army, either.
Yeah, Philip V was deeeeply devout, far more so than Grandpa (this is the guy who practiced self-flagellation, after all), so I wouldn't expect Protestants to get far there.
Likewise in Portugal: Peter Keith had to have the Queen of England, Caroline of Ansbach, intercede to get him permission to join the Portuguese army without converting, and he was just a Lt. Col.!
French as a lingua franca
Date: 2022-12-18 12:30 pm (UTC)Nor Spain, at least at the beginning of the century. Obviously Philip "the Frog" V's court contained Frenchmen exported from Grandpa's court, but Horowski says that when Saint-Simon showed up in 1722 as envoy during the exchange of princesses, he had to speak Latin to the Spaniards. Furthermore, the pronunciation of Latin in France and Spain had diverged so much that after Saint-Simon gave his speech in Latin, one of the Spaniards very politely said he would prefer to speak Latin, as he unfortunately didn't understand French!
From Henry Kamen's bio of Philip:
Philip's contact with French ideas and influences was a novelty, not shared by most of the ruling class in Spain. The continued isolation of the nobility from European influences can be seen also in the conduct of the country's foreign affairs. Spain's new aggressive stance in European politics was directed by personnel who, if they were Spaniards, had little or no experience of the world outside the peninsula...In the first years of Alberoni's influence, the ambassadors of Spain in The Hague, London and Paris were all Italians. Only these people, for instance, had any knowledge of foreign languages, and in particular of French, the tongue used by all diplomats to communicate among themselves.
I'm also seeing, glancing through Kamen, that Isabella Farnese arrived "fluent" in French, but preferring to write in Italian in response to French letters (much like half the people I end up emailing in Germany, present company excepted).
Mind you, I continue to be annoyed that Kamen manages to produce the following sentences at different points in the same book:
He was unable to pick up the Spanish language, a failure which aggravated his feeling of isolation (throughout his reign he continued to speak only French).
He probably knew little of how Spaniards lived, for he did not habitually speak their language.
In nearly all these areas, he made tourist visits to cathedrals and monasteries, prayed at the principal shrines, and had some contact with his subjects. His language did not cut him off from them: though he always preferred to use French, he read and spoke Spanish, and (as we have seen) he habitually employed it when annotating state documents.
Make up your mind, Kamen!
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-17 09:07 pm (UTC)Szechi portrays Mar as probably turning Jacobite because he was dismissed from office in September 1714. Mar was facing financial ruin without his minister’s salary (in fact he had not been paid his salary for a while because Oxford manipulated the payment of salaries to keep his followers in line), and in the first place (before turning Jacobite) he seemed to want to make himself a political nuisance who would be best bought off by the new regime. So he embarked on a campaign against the Union. But it failed because the Whigs and Tories couldn't work together, even though many Whigs were also skeptical about the union.
So after that, Mar turned to Jacobitism, and did what he could do promote rebellion in Scotland, among other things telling them that the English Jacobites were ready to rise. But it was larger than him, so it's not like the rising was caused by him. He has been called incompetent as a leader during the rising, and he probably wasn't very competent. But he never claimed to have military experience, and he did follow the advice of the officers he had (but none of them were that great).
Sorry, I don't think there's anything particularly juicy for you here!
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-18 07:34 am (UTC)Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-04 05:17 am (UTC)Really the most charming military detail is the war in the north and west of the Highlands, which was fought entirely between Highland troops. These people were neighbors and did not want to incur blood feuds if they really didn't have to, so the war became a sort of shadow boxing. There were thousands of men in the field, and Inverness was taken and retaken several times, but only two men are recorded to have died! I find this charming.
I love this. This reminds me of a book
Argyll pestered the government, basically saying that if they had let him negotiate, the war would have been over now! Finally they got tired of him.
Aw, that's great!
Whigs and Jacobites were neighbors and had socially interwoven lives in ways that they didn't have in England. So when the government tried to have about 100 of the elite prisoners from Scotland tried in England, the whole Scottish legal establishment obstructed it completely--and not just the legal establishment, but also the Whig elite. They also obstructed the dispossession of the estates of the Scottish rebels. When the government came to take their estates, it suddenly was found that large debts were owed to their Whig neighbors, or maybe the estate actually legally belonged to someone else!
That's just wonderful! (And not something that I feel is very much true of, say, the current-day US, with some small exceptions, sigh.)
one day being as like the other as two eggs and these eaten without either pepper or salt.
Aww indeed! :(
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-04 07:34 am (UTC)Oooh, yes, that is an excellent comparison!
Re: <i>The '15: The Great Jacobite Rebellion</i> by Daniel Szechi (2006)
Date: 2022-12-06 08:59 pm (UTC)For the White Rose by Katharine T. Hinkson (1905)
I had high hopes for this book, since it is a Jacobite adventure with f/f potential! Alas, it was not very good. The main character is Lady Nithsdale’s loyal lady’s maid, and the climax of the story is the actual historical event when Lady Nithsdale helped her husband escape from the Tower after the ’15. Lengthwise, it is more of a novella than a novel, and it feels very... simplified? It has more the feel of a fairy tale than a story set in an actual historical time and place. To exemplify, at one point a riderless horse comes back to the house, and I would not have been surprised if the horse had started talking of what happened to its master. It seems like the book thinks that Scotland consists only of the Highlands? The Earls of Nithsdale and of Kenmure are both turned into Highland chiefs. And I suspect that this book may actually confuse James III with BPC?? For one thing, he turns up before the rising begins, and for another, they consistently call him the Prince… *facepalm* The main relationship doesn't get much space to develop: the main character is instantly devoted to Lady Nithsdale, and we don't really get to see their relationship change and evolve.