The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 2nd edition

By Daniel Szechi

The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi’s popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe. Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest. This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English colonial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526123190

Daniel Szechi

Daniel Szechi is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester

Book preview

The Jacobites

The Jacobites

Britain and Europe, 1688–1788

2nd edition

Daniel Szechi

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Daniel Szechi 2019

The right of Daniel Szechi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3966 5 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 2318 3 paperback

First published 2019

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For Jan, who persuaded me I should do this

Contents

List of figures

Preface

Glossary and conventions

A Jacobite chronology

Maps

1  Introduction

The optimists

The pessimists

The rejectionists

New directions in Jacobite studies

Jacobitism and the shape of British history

2  Jacobite society

Hierarchy and power in the British Isles, 1688–1788

The structure of Jacobite society

The Jacobite milieu

3  The ideology of Jacobitism

The unfolding of the Jacobite ideal

Popular Jacobitism and its motifs

The religion of Jacobitism

4  The Revolution and the War of the English Succession, 1688–97

The Jacobite wars in Ireland and Scotland, 1689–91

The War of the English Succession, 1689–97

5  Jacobitism and the three kingdoms, 1689–1714

The Jacobite communication system

Jacobite politics, 1689–1714

The underground war, 1689–1714: military conspiracies

The underground war, 1689–1714: subversion

The rise of Jacobitism in England, 1692–1714

The rise of Jacobitism in Scotland, 1692–1714

6  Jacobitism and the Whig Ascendancy, 1715–66

The great Jacobite rising of 1715

The Jacobite court and the new diaspora

The underground war, 1716–66: politics and subversion

7  A European cause and its defeat, 1716–59

Rebellion as a tool of statecraft in eighteenth-century Europe

Sweden and the Jacobites

Spain and the Jacobites

Russia and the Jacobites

France and the Jacobites

Prussia and the Jacobites

The papacy and the Jacobites

8  The Jacobite diaspora, 1688–1788

The external diaspora

The internal diaspora

Conclusion

Illustrative documents

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

King James II and VII (1633–1701), portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, ca. 1686, Wikipedia, public domain

Mary of Modena (1658–1718), portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller and Studio, ca. 1685, Chirk Castle, Wrexham, NT 1171160 © National Trust

King William III and II (1650–1702), portrait after Willem Wissing, ca. 1680–1710, Rijksmuseum, public domain

Queen Mary II (1662–94), portrait attributed to Jan van der Vaart, ca. 1692–4, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 197 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Queen Anne (1665–1714), portrait by studio of John Closterman, ca. 1702, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 215 © National Portrait Gallery, London

King George I (1660–1727), portrait after Sir Godfrey Kneller, ca. 1714, Wikipedia, public domain

King George II (1683–1760), portrait by or after Thomas Worlidge, ca. 1753, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 256 © National Portrait Gallery, London

James III and VIII in the Jacobite line (1688–1766), portrait formerly identified as the work of Alexis-Simon Belle, ca. 1720, Wikipedia, public domain

Charles Edward Stuart, Jacobite Prince of Wales (1720–88), portrait by Louis Gabriel Blanchet, 1739, Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 401208 © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

Henry Benedict Stuart, Jacobite Duke of York (1725–1807), portrait by circle of Anton Raphael Mengs, ca. 1750, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 129 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Preface

For permission to publish extracts and citations in this book I am indebted to Her Majesty the Queen for her gracious permission to use the Stuart Papers; Historic Archives, University of Aberdeen, for permission to cite letters from the Scottish Catholic Archives; and Mrs C. Methuen Campbell for the use of the Penrice and Margam collection held at the National Library of Wales. My thanks are also due to the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library in London, and the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh for their courtesy and patience.

In addition, I owe a particular debt of thanks to Manchester University Press for permission to reuse sections of my book Britain’s Lost Revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French Grand Strategy, 1701–8 (Manchester, 2015), and to the many friends and fellow scholars who have encouraged me to write a second edition of this book. Though the bones of the first edition are still visible what follows is a very different work. Historians should not be afraid to change their minds. Winston Churchill’s famous aphorism about having had to eat his words many times during his long career, but finding them a most wholesome diet, is as true for us as for statesmen on a world stage. Thanks to my editor at MUP, Emma Brennan, this edition is longer and – I hope – commensurately improved. It certainly takes into account nearly a quarter of a century of new scholarship on Jacobitism, and incorporates my own advancing understanding of the phenomenon. Nonetheless, I have tried to make the subject accessible. If this edition becomes as well thumbed as the copies of the old one on library shelves, or as frequently downloaded as its predecessor went out on loan, I shall be well satisfied.

Glossary and conventions

Abbreviations

Dates, spelling and punctuation

Until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar on 2 September 1752 the British Isles used the Julian calendar, which was ten days behind the rest of Europe (except Russia) in the seventeenth century and eleven days behind in the eighteenth century. All dates given below up to 2 September 1752 are therefore either ten or eleven days behind most of their European counterparts, but with the beginning of the year dated from 1 January rather than 25 March, the official date of the new year in the three kingdoms (England, Ireland and Scotland) up to 1751. All of the correspondence and documents cited below stemming from continental locations has therefore had the old-style, British Isles, date added in the following form: 6/17. Thus a letter written in Paris on 14 May 1745 would be cited below as having been written on 3/14 May 1745.

The spelling and punctuation of all quotations and documents have been modernised wherever this helps elucidate the meaning of the text. Commonplace contractions and abbreviations have all been silently expanded.

Nomenclature

Throughout the second edition of this book I refer to the son of King James II of England and VII of Scotland as James III and VIII. This is not intended as any kind of political statement, but as a simple recognition of a fact: he was the legitimate and oldest son of the reigning king at the time of his birth and was proclaimed Prince of Wales shortly afterwards. He was also at various times recognised as a genuine king by most of the great powers of Europe and a large minority of the population in the British Isles. The only reason he was ever dubbed ‘the Pretender’ by post-Revolutionary Parliaments was silently to impugn his claim to the throne after he was retrospectively excluded from the succession by laws passed by those same Parliaments. The original grounds for this exclusion (and in part for his father’s deposition) was that King William III and II’s supporters claimed that the new-born Prince of Wales was not the son of James II and VII, but a ‘suppositious child’ smuggled into the royal bedchamber in a warming-pan. This, they asserted, was the culmination of a Catholic conspiracy by which the allegedly impotent/diseased King James would be provided with a male heir who would in due course persecute Protestants throughout the British Isles in order to force their conversion to Catholicism.

In contemporary terms this conspiracy theory was necessary to justify the invasion of England and the overthrow of King James by William, Prince of Orange, and a Dutch army supported by armed uprisings by Englishmen of all ranks of society across the whole of the country. This was because a rebellion in support of a foreign invader was an affront to English national pride and went directly against the teachings of the Church of England, the church regularly attended by the great majority of the population. Only the most real and present danger to Protestantism and the Church of England could justify such an egregious sin. The entire warming-pan story was, however, completely false.¹ To use modern terminology, it was fake news.

As was customary, James III and VIII’s birth was witnessed by dozens of nobles and courtiers (Protestant and Catholic) from all over the British Isles, to say nothing of servants, midwives and soldiers standing guard. And even though he used the story to justify his seizure of the throne King William himself did not believe it, as he showed when he secretly discussed with Louis XIV taking the Prince of Wales as his heir. The proposal came to nothing because James II and VII refused to allow his son to become ‘a[c]complice to his unjust dethronement’, but the fact that William entertained it at all is telling.²

Thus what happened in the winter of 1688–9 was the overthrow of one king of England (he was not deposed in Ireland and Scotland until later) and his replacement by another, retrospectively endorsed by Acts of Parliament. This was nothing exceptional in English history: leaving aside the bloody family politics of the Norman and Angevin kings, Edward II was deposed in favour of Edward III, Henry IV seized the throne from Richard II, Edward IV overthrew Henry VI (twice), Richard III deposed Edward V, and Henry VII defeated and killed Richard III. Each of these usurpations was retrospectively endorsed and legitimised by Acts of Parliament. Yet historical orthodoxy has had little problem in recognising the titles of all these monarchs, no matter whether they were actually crowned or not (viz. Edward V). Charles I and Charles II were also unkinged by a Parliament, yet they are still accorded their titles even, as in Charles II’s case, when they had been legally deposed by a revolutionary Parliament and were in exile.

My use of the title James III and VIII to designate the son of James II and VII is, then, a pragmatic statement accurately identifying a particular historical actor. From a dispassionate historical perspective we can see that there were two royal lines claiming the right to rule the British Isles between 1688 and 1807, each basing its claim on precedent and law. The first, the Catholic Stuart line, was directly descended by blood from James II and VII, an anointed, consecrated and fully recognised king, who never abdicated (Parliament claimed he had in 1689, but this was a legal fiction) and only ended in 1807 when Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart died. The second, the Protestant Stuart line from 1688 to 1714 and the Guelf or Hanoverian line from 1714 to 1901, was legally endorsed by multiple acts of multiple Parliaments and thus had at least as much right to reign as the Lancastrian, Yorkist or Tudor dynasties. It also had the inestimable advantage of actually being in possession of real power, in London. Monarchs in both lines of succession were, furthermore, at various times recognised by most of the great powers of Europe, that is, they were acknowledged to be part of the princes club. This only ended with the death of James III and VIII on 1 January 1766. Thereafter nobody other than a handful of ageing Jacobite diehards recognised Charles Edward Stuart or Henry Benedict, both legitimate sons of James III and VIII, as Charles ‘III’ or Henry ‘IX’. Hence I shall refer to them only by their names and Jacobite titles (i.e. Jacobite Prince of Wales and Jacobite Duke of York).

I shall also use this form of nomenclature when referring to other individuals with titles granted by the exiled Stuarts. Following on from the two lines of succession, over time there came to be two strands in the peerages of the three kingdoms. Thus, for example, in 1715 James III and VIII created John Erskine, Earl of Mar, Jacobite Duke of Mar. Since Mar was subsequently attaindered by the British Parliament he became no peer at all in territories ruled by the British state. But he was still recognised as a peer (indeed, as a duke) by James’s supporters in the British Isles and the European great powers with whom he came into contact. Where necessary I shall therefore refer to him as the Jacobite Duke of Mar.

Notes

1  As Professor Murray Pittock has convincingly argued, terms such as ‘the Pretender’ are ‘based on a lie concerning his birth’ (Pittock, Culloden (Cùil Lodair) (Oxford, 2016), p. xiii), which modern historians do not need to accept.

2  J. S. Clarke (ed.), The Life of James the Second, King of England, &c, Collected Out of Memoirs Writ of His Own Hand (2 vols, London, 1816), ii. 574–5. James subsequently regretted his decision to spurn the proposal.

A Jacobite chronology

Until 1707 all the monarchs and putative monarchs of the three kingdoms had different titles in England and Scotland (Ireland followed English practice); thus William of Orange became William III in England and William II in Scotland. Purely for the sake of brevity, however, the chronology below identifies monarchs by their English/British title, viz. James II, rather than James II and VII.