Compared with the romance and legend of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the ’15 is, as Daniel Szechi ruefully concedes, ‘a dowdier bird’. It has been ill-served by history, just as the Jacobites as a whole have been neglected by historians of the 18th century in favour of the broader trend of Britain’s march of progress. There is perhaps a failure to understand why people should have risked everything for a dynasty that had been twice kicked off the throne and in support of James Stuart, every bit a dowdy bird himself.
That was certainly how the Whigs felt at the time. It was the ‘unnatural rebellion’ for them, started and carried out by stubborn and savage Scottish irreconcilables and a handful of Tory malcontents. In this version, even the most ardent Jacobite knew that it was doomed to failure. Whatever the case, the easy defeat of the rebellion meant that it was ‘pudding time’ for the Whigs, to whom George I reluctantly turned as the bulwark of his reign. The Tories, suspected of seditious tendencies, were left in the cold for generations.
As Szechi points out in a fascinating section on the feverish climate of millennial excitement in Scotland in the years leading up to the rebellion, potential rebels were not convinced that the Whigs could withstand a Stuart restoration. ‘We ar buzed with prophesies, dreams and visions in a transe, all of the King’s returne,’ wrote one. Millwheels turned against the current; a phantom army appeared, led by a man on a white horse; a hedge sprouted peas and strawberries; and, most ominously, there was an eclipse of the sun on 22 April 1714. It seemed as if Providence favoured James Stuart.
There were non-apocalyptic signs as well: riots in provincial towns on George’s Coronation Day, and ribald banners mocking the new king were openly displayed everywhere. The general election of 1715 was held amid violence and conspiracies. Many thought that George was a hostage of the Whigs — supposedly atheist republicans masquerading as monarchists — who would destroy both the Anglican and Episcopalian Church. Tories were deprived of office at every level, down to the gardener at Dublin Castle. So it was hardly surprising that some were deluded into believing that the Stuarts’ time had come; there was near-hysteria in Jacobite circles in expectation of another English revolution. ‘And it is too late to mend,’ one Tory wrote, ‘the Fault is committed, the Hearts of the People are lost to King George, and he must either stand or fall by the Whig Interest.’
George I might have been a national joke and very unpopular, but election riots were common even in less fraught times, and barbed comments did not translate into rebellion in England outside the Catholic North. As Szechi makes clear, the energy for a Stuart restoration came from those Scots smarting in the wake of the Act of Union of 1707. They had been on the point of rebellion ever since, and the succession of the Georges, the prospect of perpetual Whig government and unrest in England marked the culmination of their plots. But, despite their fondest hopes, Jacobitism in England had reached a highpoint in 1714 when many believed that the dying Queen Anne would leave the crown to her half-brother, James.
Her refusal to break the Act of Succession and James’s subsequent vacillation drained the energy from English Jacobitism. Leading conspirators refused to rebel without an invasion by a sympathetic foreign army to protect them from Whig vengeance; European monarchs refused to invade until the English rebelled. And, as Bolingbroke said, despite popular anger aimed at the House of Hanover, ‘England would as soon have a Turk as a Roman Catholic for a King.’ It was left to the Scottish Jacobites, intoxicated by their own fantasies, to lead the rebellion, and bear the brunt of its failure.
The ’15 will never supplant the ’45, but with great clarity Szechi carries the reader through the web of conspiracies, political chicanery, the bitter divisions in British society, and, in the heat of the rebellion, the military campaign. Most importantly, he explains the wildly divergent intentions and strategies of Jacobites of all hues and in all parts of the British Isles, ascribing their reasons for trying to ignite a civil war, or indeed shying away from one when the moment arrived.
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