THE FIRST SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT PART 2
In the first of two articles spotlighting my recent book, The First Scottish Enlightenment, I outlined a period which I have defined as ‘the first Scottish Enlightenment’, a period which stretched from the 1680s to the 1740s and saw Scotland, especially its northeast, engaging with the new trends in European thought decades before has generally been assumed. Having located that Enlightenment in the culture of the northeast, with its remote aristocratic strongholds and strong Episcopal and Catholic leanings, I now want to write about the Enlightenment and Jacobitism.
For many, the very juxtaposition will seem ridiculous. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of Jacobite stereotypes, going back to Sir Walter Scott and before, which make any connection between Jacobitism and the Enlightenment seem implausible at best, ludicrous at worst. Our image of Jacobites – one which modern popular representations such as Outlander has done little to change – is of bekilted clansmen and tyrannical lairds, figures somewhere between the authoritarian, almost medieval clan chief Fergus MacIvor in Scott’s Waverley and the brooding, Gothic laird Sir Hugh Redgauntlet in his eponymous Redgauntlet. These stereotypes endured because they were useful. Presenting Jacobites as incorrigibly backwards and doomed from the start served both to shore up the Hanoverian regime and to validate the narrative of Whig history with which it and its successors into the 20th century were so closely associated.
Only since the 1990s have these old canards been challenged. Allan Macinnes’s (1996) argued that Jacobites could also be ‘improvers’ in the Enlightened, commercial sense, and that adherence to the Stuarts did not necessarily imply a nostalgic desire for a feudal, agrarian society. Murray Pittock added his voice to this dissent in the (1995; 2nd ed., 2009), challenging the enduring image of the Jacobite army as a ragtag force of Catholic highlanders armed with claymores and agricultural implements. Instead, he concluded, based on extensive archival research, the Jacobites had fielded a modern army, little different from the government forces they fought. From marginal voices a few decades ago, the claims of Macinnes and Pittock have now
