The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: The Jacobite Army in 1745 9781474471688

Citation preview

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans The Jacobite Army in 1745

Murray Pittock Second, comprehensively revised and expanded edition

Edinburgh University Press

To the memory of Ross Mackenzie

Murray Pittock, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Linotype Sabon by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2756 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 2757 8 (paperback) The right of Murray Pittock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: British Histories and Scottish Myths

vii 1

1

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

31

2

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

65

3

Jacobites in the Localities, 1745–60

110

4

Nationalists or Jacobites?

140

5

Jacobite Weapons

163

Appendix: The Jacobite Armies, 1688–1746

183

Bibliography

195

Index

225

Acknowledgements

Times change, and with them debts. This book was originally completed on leave from the University of Edinburgh and with the support of funding from the British Academy and a Fellowship at the Thomas Reid Institute in the University of Aberdeen; its successor is being written during the first year of the author’s tenure of the Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow with research support from the Carnegie Trust. In between, I have worked at the universities of Strathclyde and Manchester. Both the personal and more general intellectual climate have changed: people, places and debates all move on in their different kind of spaces. Some of these changes are the very reasons for writing this much expanded second edition of The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: I deal with these reasons in more detail in the Introduction below. A second edition is necessarily indebted both to the friends and the critics of the first: a friendly critic is especially invaluable. In this context, Chris Whatley’s challenges, acceptances and friendship have been very important to me: his tercentenary study of The Scots and the Union is a masterly work which clearly sets out the parameters for another side of the debate in Scotland about the country’s future which took place in the early eighteenth century. At every level, his critique of the first edition of this book was serious, informed and complex; and to that extent, this edition’s addressing of these questions is a tribute to him. The friendship of Daniel Szechi, and our lengthy late night conversations into all the intricacies of the Jacobite cause have also been very important to me: his cautious judgement and precise analysis are only the surface evidence of the sheer balance and professionalism of his historiographical approach. Likewise I owe debts to the friendship, conversation and support of Jeremy Black, Eveline Cruickshanks, Howard Erskine-Hill and Paul Monod. Allan Macinnes very kindly let me see his cutting-edge work on the developing political ideology of Jacobitism before it was published, ´ Ciardha’s 2002 study An Unfortunate Attachment while Eamonn O

viii

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

revealed both the importance – and the exclusion – of Jacobitism from public discourse concerning Irish history and nationality. Some of the new research for this second edition was initially aired at the inaugural Jacobite Studies Trust conference at the British Academy in July 2007, where these and other scholars – including Christopher Duffy, whose work on the military campaign endorsed my own findings in the 1995 edition of this book – were able to comment. I am also grateful to Hannah Barker for giving me the opportunity to develop some of these ideas further at the north-western History seminar in Manchester in January 2008, and to Crawford Gribben for inviting me to discuss the findings of this study at the History seminar at Trinity College, Dublin in April 2008. A debt is also due to Colin Maclaren, erstwhile archivist at Aberdeen University, for letting me see the originals of the Pitsligo Papers (which are in a very poor state) and to other staff there who allowed me to consult manuscripts while the archive was largely closed in 2004. My thanks are also owed to the staff at the National Library, the National Archives, the library of Trinity College, Dublin and the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) and to Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, who granted permission for material from his family papers in the NAS to be quoted here. I am also indebted to Fiona Musk at Aberdeen City Archives, Alison Brown at Highland Archives in Inverness, Moira Mackenzie at St Andrews University Special Collections and Andrew Nicoll at the Scottish Catholic Archives, as well as to the staff at Angus, Dundee, Perth and Stirling archives who made time and material available and colleagues in the Special Collections section of Edinburgh University Library. The help of specialists at the Bodleian and British Libraries was also invaluable. My ability to take the findings of the first edition further is also owed in part to the editorial team at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who asked me to write so many of the lives of the officers of the Jacobite army in 1745. On a long-term basis, I owe much to the conversation and scholarship of Frank McLynn, Bruce Lenman and Ross Mackenzie. Debts are cancelled by death, but this book remains dedicated to Ross Mackenzie (1960–2007), a close friend who when this book first appeared was the manager of Culloden Battlefield for the National Trust for Scotland. Ave atque vale.

Introduction British Histories and Scottish Myths

Nations, as well as men, arrive at maturity by degrees, and the events which happened during their infancy or early youth, cannot be recollected, and deserve not to be remembered. William Robertson, History of Scotland (1759) The writer . . . who, in this island, employs his genius on the ancient history of England, addresses himself to readers already enamoured of the subject, and who listen with fond prepossessions to the recital of facts consecrated in their imaginations by the tale of the nursery . . . such is the effect of that provincial situation to which Scotland is now reduced, that the transactions of former ages are apt to convey to ourselves exaggerated conceptions of barbarism . . . Dugald Stewart, Introduction to 1827 edition of William Robertson, History of Scotland It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels and heretics are those unlucky persons, who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790 [1759]) It is astonishing to what an extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive and whig . . . Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by making the past our present. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) On the whole . . . the books of the smaller countries were less biased than those of the great Powers . . . what English historians have come to call the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ has fastened itself too securely on historical studies in England and elsewhere. E. H. Dance, ‘Bias in History Teaching’, report to the Centre for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 19671

2

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

This is a book about Jacobitism. It is a study with a difference, seeking neither to romanticise its subject nor to demythologise it, but instead to examine the motivations behind the histories which do these things. Its task is twofold. First, it explains why the Jacobite cause has been so ignored or misrepresented by generations of historians, while preserving a high profile only in the never-never land of romance, sentiment, nostalgia and mystique. Secondly, it considers in detail the evidence for the extent of Jacobite support among the people of Scotland in the eighteenth century. As much as, or more so than, any other movement in British history, the Stuart cause attracts sentimentalists and debunkers alike, who share the central goal of distorting – or ignoring – the evidence. Their motive may be to stress the unity of the British state in the eighteenth century and the marginality of its opponents, or alternatively the British dimension of Stuart goals and the dynasty’s lack of interest in Scotland. It may also be to present a centrally national narrative of Irish history in which Stuart dynasticism is an alien irrelevance. These commentators may wish to endorse the idea of a divided and fragmented Scotland which could be healed only by the sympathetic powers of Union, or instead to castigate the Stuarts for not being nationalist enough to stop in Edinburgh. They may wish to paint the ’45 as the ‘archaic militarism’ of a feudal culture fighting to forestall the capitalist direction of shifting social relations, or they may simply wish to wallow in the phoney Highlandism of ‘the last battle of the Highlanders and the Strangers’. These images all depend on the Highland and marginal quality of Jacobitism, lost in a world of ‘the Swords and the Sorrows’, unable to contribute anything to the history of its own time but an immensely convenient Ossianic lament for the inevitability of its own defeat.2 For decades, centuries even, these primitivist or romantic interpretations of Jacobitism have been equally appealing to those who wish to see the political cause itself as marginal and unimportant, the last spasm of uncontrolled violence from hairy Gaels who would soon harness their native ferocity in the better cause of British unity, and those who preferred the romantic version which took the futile loyalty of the Highland Jacobite as evidence of both the sad inevitability of Gaeldom’s defeat and the moral superiority of those who were defeated. There have been variants: the idea that the Gaelic speakers did not understand what they were fighting for or that they were forced out by backward and self-interested aristocrats to defend a dying social order are versions of the ‘primitivist’ thesis,

Introduction

3

while there are more sophisticated varieties of the ‘romantic’ thesis in circulation. However, most of Jacobite historiography has – up to the last thirty years at least – issued from one of these camps. Both interpretations share much in common. Both, as I shall argue below, owe much to the historiography of William Robertson and other Scottish Enlightenment historians, writing in the age of the Militia controversy: historiography massively amplified in its importance during the nineteenth century both by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the narratives of the English constitutional historians. These Enlightenment writers wished to distance the Lowlands from the Highlands and the past from the present in their stress on a new British Scotland, and sentiment was one of the tools they used. In the process, they did much to create the entire school of Whig historiography, the progress and implications of which can to some extent be traced through the time-scale of the quotations which head this chapter.3 Since this book first appeared in 1995, its central argument, that the Jacobite Army of 1745 was as much a Lowland as a Highland force, and that this in turn has serious implications for the historical and contemporary understanding of Jacobitism as a political and military phenomenon, has won a wide degree of acceptance, both in scholarship of the ’45 (for example, in the work of Stuart Reid and Christopher Duffy) and in the media. My argument for the ‘national’ characteristics of the Jacobite Risings was a battleground in contemporary political debate when it was first aired in the age of direct rule and the ‘democratic deficit’; this can scarcely be less so in a devolved Scotland under its first Nationalist government. This is not to be historically presentist; but it must be acknowledged by any historian treating the subject that Jacobitism remains a politically live topic, and the very controversy which surrounds it is evidence enough that the Jacobites were not simply the relics of ‘feudal particularism’. If they had been, they would have been as remote to us as the Wars of the Roses, whereas their nationalist freight – for breaking the Union and restoring national rights can only be called that – is both evident and, therefore, often denied, or if it cannot be denied, marginalised. In England, the importance of Jacobitism in the eighteenth century remains bitterly controversial; in Ireland, the Stuarts are treated by the national narrative (for example, in the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks) as alien contestants in ‘the war of the two Kings’ rather than as representatives of Irish aspirations and loyalties; in Scotland since the age of

4

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Enlightenment, Jacobitism has been a legitimate subject of enquiry only in directly inverse proportion to its perceived relevance as a political threat. These then are dangerous waters. Because Jacobitism was a threat to the development of the modern British polity at its inception, to treat it seriously is discomfiting, as much for republican Ireland and America as in the United Kingdom. The multi-kingdom monarchy of Stuart policy between the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the third quarter of the eighteenth problematises both British centralism and its erstwhile colonial opponents. Even relatively balanced modern accounts like that of Stephen Conway, addressing the arguments made in the 1995 edition and by other writers, claims that ‘the ’Forty-five . . . was . . . less than a national movement’ because the Jacobite army invaded England and sought the restoration of James in all three kingdoms. So it did: no one doubts it. But the restoration of a sovereign Edinburgh parliament and a looser association between the British kingdoms is hardly inimical to nationalism: it was the constitutional settlement of the Irish Free State in 1922 and is a position about which the current Nationalist leadership in Scotland is entirely relaxed. Not all national movements are those of the American Republic in 1776 or the IRA after 1922.4 The controversy which surrounds Jacobitism for longstanding reasons of politics and state formation has been reinforced by the development of a serious revisionist history to challenge the old order since the appearance of Eveline Cruickshanks’ pioneering research in the 1715–54 volume of the History of Parliament, published under the general editorship of Romney Sedgwick in 1970. Cruickshanks followed up this work with her Political Untouchables: the Tories and the ’45 (1979) and a number of further collections, beginning with Ideology and Conspiracy (1982). Jonathan Clark provided a broader set of premisses which allowed the eighteenth century to be viewed in terms more open to the evidence for Jacobitism in English Society 1688–1832, first published in 1985. Less polemically, Daniel Szechi showed the importance of Jacobitism in Parliament in the last years of Queen Anne in his Jacobitism and Tory Politics 1710–14 (1984), following this up with an evaluation of Jacobitism’s international importance in The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788 (1994), an area first opened up in Frank McLynn’s France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (1981). Paul Monod’s Jacobitism and the English People (1989) made major claims for the importance of Jacobitism as a movement

Introduction

5

permeating English society at every level. More recently, serious studies of the Jacobite diaspora have begun to appear, such as Rebecca Wills’ The Jacobites and Russia 1715–1750 (2002) and Steve Murdoch’s Network North (2006). These revisionist accounts of Jacobitism largely focus on the English, high political or international context. They have proved controversial, but have stimulated much debate and gained ground from which it does not look likely that they will be entirely dislodged. Sadly, little Scotlanders and Irelanders have often simply ignored these quite significant historiographical developments, despite the work of Bruce Lenman, beginning with his The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (1980). Since The Myth of the Jacobite Clans first appeared in 1995, there has been some improvement in engagement with the significance of Jacobitism in Scotland and Ireland, as evidenced by with Stuart Reid’s 1745: A Military History (1996), which endorsed the strength and anti-Union nature of Lowland Jacobitism I had argued for, findings further reinforced in Christopher Duffy’s The ’45 (2003). Allan Macinnes’ Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (1996) demonstrated the inadequacy of a lot of oft-repeated shibboleths about the alien and lawless quality of the Highlands within the Scottish polity, ´ Ciardha’s An Unfortunate Attachment: Ireland while Eamonn O and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766 (2002) powerfully challenged the consensus of republican historiography in Ireland which marginalised Jacobitism and sometimes even adopted the Irish Brigades, led by noblemen loyal to the Stuarts, into the greeny and Fenian story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent works such as Daniel Szechi’s comprehensive 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (2006), which has transformed the scale of the use of primary evidence in accounts of the earlier Rising, have clearly provided further grounds for the argument for a ‘national quality’ in the Jacobite Risings made in the first edition of this book. As Szechi puts it, having demonstrated that 8 per cent of all adult males fought for the Stuarts: To put these percentages in a modern perspective, if there was a Scots Nationalist . . . rising in Scotland tomorrow that mobilised 8 per cent of the male population it would field an army in the region of 145,000 men (substantially larger than the modern British regular army).5

These are powerful figures, amply backed up from the MS evidence. Yet it is true that even those who acknowledge them (and many refuse to do so without consulting this evidence) often

6

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

argue that the Rising of 1745 was very much smaller than that of 1715, and that the Jacobite cause was a busted flush by the time of Charles Edward Stuart, championed only in the narrowing world of the Gaidhealtachd, with its recruits elsewhere the fruit of forcing or financial desperation: so Richard Tompson stresses that there was ‘no public response’ and that the army of 1745 was ‘a small force’. In Scotland and Scottish historiography, Jacobitism too often remains a localised civil conflict rather than a national and international struggle. Thus, although the weight of serious Jacobite history published since 1995 reinforces the case made in the first edition of this book (not least the second edition of the Muster Roll of Charles’s army, published in 2001), one of the reasons that it was first published remains intact.6 This second edition of The Myth of the Jacobite Clans will not only update the first edition and clarify its arguments: it will offer an extension of them in five main areas. First, it will extend the base primary documentary evidence (particularly from Scotland) to examine in more detail the case made in 1995 with respect to the Rising of 1745 and to a lesser extent (since this has already been so well treated by Daniel Szechi) that of 1715. Secondly, it will deepen the discussion of the reasons why British historiography has kept Jacobitism on the margins for so long. Thirdly, it will look in more detail at the military organisation and effectiveness of the 1745 Rising, and its presence in individual localities and networks, particularly in the light of the case for Hanoverian localism in Scotland advanced by Chris Whatley and Bob Harris (notably in the latter scholar’s Politics and the Nation (2002)). Fourthly, it will re-examine the case for the ’45 as a ‘national’ Rising. Fifthly, it will address the question of the sources and nature of Jacobite weaponry, with the serious purpose of ending once and for all the almost wholly inaccurate primitivist canard that the Jacobites fought with swords against opponents armed with the latest technology. This inaccurate presentation of the evidence is very much alive in the latest National Trust for Scotland Culloden audio-visual presentation, where the Jacobites do not appear to discharge a single musket, though their fire-power is quite properly stressed elsewhere in the exhibition. In addition to the books mentioned above, this study will benefit from secondary work carried out in the last five years by Margaret Sankey and Doron Zimmerman.7 Despite the new work which continues to be published on Jacobitism, the old problems of the Myth remain: in a 2006 study

Introduction

7

of eighteenth-century warfare, the Jacobites are, in the words of their enemies transformed into a matter of record, an ‘undisciplined militia’ beaten by ‘disciplined fire-power’, while in a 2002 study we are told (yet again) that ‘the Prince was able to gather support only in the Highlands’.8 Thus, the central myth which this book addresses remains the same, and so does its title, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans. This myth is present in accounts of all the major Risings: it is most powerfully deployed in studies of the last and most famous insurrection. The Myth contends that the Jacobite risings (principally the ’45) were decidedly peripheral events, based to the north and west of the Highland line, and chiefly supported by the fading civilisation of a Gaidhealtachd which is often characterised as Catholic, fighting the ‘last battle of the Highlanders and the Strangers’. The Myth can accommodate a negative reading of this, or the more (apparently) positive one of the ‘Children of the Mist’ who volunteered to restore their Bonnie Prince. The Highland Army can be seen as variously composed of patriots who didn’t understand contemporary political realities, the ignorant poor, forced out by self-interested chieftains, who did not have the least idea why they had to fight or thieving caterans hungry for booty. Depending on whether a predominantly sentimental or cynical view is taken, the proportions of soldiery occupying each of these categories fluctuate. Whichever view is taken, it is commonly said that Jacobitism was a bloody dynastic civil war rather than a national movement, and that – with regard to 1745 at least – more Scots fought against the Jacobites than for them. Neither these sentiments nor their context are properly supported by a comprehensive examination of the evidence, but this is not their purpose. Indeed, their purpose is often contrary to the evidence, which is why the full tale of the Stuart cause remains so inadequately told, despite its host of tellers: it is an historical narrative controlled by political need. It was no coincidence that on the opening of the redeveloped Culloden visitor centre the National Trust for Scotland’s representatives reiterated in the press and electronic media a single soundbite, that Culloden was a battle in a civil war, ‘not fought between Scotland and England’. This is much less than the whole truth. As we shall see, the idea that the conflict had no national dimension, and was purely fought out between ‘two dynasties, two faiths and two polarised social systems’ is grossly at odds both with the ascertainable facts and with the recorded sentiments of the Jacobites themselves. Why is this? Loosely, Whig history is to blame. Since Herbert

8

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Butterfield wrote in 1931, the end of such history has been frequently – if prematurely – proclaimed. Whig history is essentially a history which conditions its interpretation of the past by regarding it primarily as an explanatory prelude to the present: it is thus quintessentially a history written to glorify victors and marginalise losers, in the process converting a teleological premiss into a narrative which homogenises distinction, difference and opposition into a simple central story (at its most simple, ‘How We Became Top Nation’) and closes down the avenues of enquiry concerning them by scorn, silence or ad hominem argument. In the United Kingdom, confronted with a multinational state, it has, in Gilles Deleuze’s terms, sought to confirm the genesis of ‘a unitary state apparatus’. This is often true of even recent and distinguished historical work which appears to transcend the Whig tradition. Linda Colley’s Britons (1992), for example, stresses the achievement of a common Britishness through Protestantism, in the process eliding the deep divisions between the established churches and dissenters, and totally ignoring both the patriot parliament of Anglican Ireland and the radical nationalism of the United Irish Presbyterians. Britons proved to be an immensely popular study because it told a simple story – who we are and how we became us – in an apparently more sophisticated guise than its nineteenth-century predecessors. In a secular and ecumenical age, few know or care about the ferocious fissures within sectarian Protestantism in the early modern era; since 80 per cent of the island of Ireland is no longer British, it is easy to ignore Irish Britishness in centuries gone by. Although Protestantism, both established and dissenting, was a very important factor in anti-British Irishness in the eighteenth century, because Ireland became independent under the aegis of a Catholic and nativist nationalism, this can be conveniently forgotten. Silence about the realities of the past as it was experienced by its contemporaries is a very important part of Whig history, whether it is the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ to the poor exclaimed against by E. P. Thompson or the alternative religious, political and cultural territories of high culture which are annexed and suppressed in the creation of the ‘mythos’ of history, its ‘authoritative pronouncement’,9 a manifesto in the form of a foundation myth presented as a story, given rank by its claim to factual authenticity, achieving monopoly status through ‘the repetition of archetypal gestures’ of dismissal towards all opposition not already silenced. The ‘mythos’ has dealt with Jacobitism thus, through the repetition of romantic

Introduction

9

gestures and images concerning it, by silencing its ideology through sentiment or scorn, by ignoring much of the evidence for its importance as a movement, and by repeating the mantra of foundational modernity, that Jacobitism was backward, marginal and doomed, and that the new British eighteenth century was ‘enlightened’ (Enlightenment Jacobites such as Andrew Ramsay are one of the casualties of this assumption), ‘improved’ and modern. Jacobitism is the black sheep of the British family: romantic, glamorous, but on the edge in every sense, out on a limb or a ‘fringe’, not an ancestor. How did this historiographical position arise? Lord Acton observed that ‘knowledge of history means choice of ancestors’,10 and the Scottish Enlightenment historians chose an Anglocentric model of history in constructing the narrative of progress that would come to be called Whig history. The Enlightenment’s own interest in quantifiable improvement led in the study of human society to a teleology of civility, a stadial history driven by assumptions of progress. In order to combine the notion of progress with that of ancestry, an English pedigree for British identity was selected, which would allow English history to become the predecessor of British history, and England itself an avatar of Great Britain. The long-term effect of this choice can still be seen in the Englishness of much socalled ‘British’ history, particularly at the popular level. The choice of English historical models as ancestral had an effect on the seriousness with which Scottish and Irish history was taken and, therefore, on the serious study of Jacobitism. Yet there was more than this at work in challenging the significance of the Stuart cause, because the model that was chosen by the Scottish Enlightenment historians was one not only oriented towards English history, but towards English Whig Party history, and was thus from the beginning partisan.11 David Hume (1711–76) may have denied such party affiliation, but in a number of ways he revealed it by, for example, stressing the predisposition of the Germanic tribes to liberty, a liberty, of course, linked to progress, a progress driven by Anglo-Saxons rather than Celts – all part of the familiar Whig discourse of Gothic liberty. Much of William Robertson’s (1721–93) historiography confirmed this view. The concept of the Ancient Constitution, which enshrined Saxon liberties and was overturned by the Normans, had perhaps had its origins in the English Reformation, but came to prominence in the opposition to Charles I’s multi-kingdom Stuart monarchy in

10

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

the 1630s and 1640s. The view that England was gradually emerging from under the so-called ‘Norman Yoke’ of feudalism and monarchical power in the quest to regain its old Saxon liberties (a process completed in the Revolution of 1688) lay at the core of this partisan history, present from the beginning of the seventeenth century in the ideas of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), William L’Isle (c. 1579–1637) and William Prynne (1600–69), who argued in 1642 that kings had been elected. Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) has been seen as ‘the first Whig historian’. The Enlightenment historians, notably Hume and Robertson, combined such ideas with the idea of Scottish history as a struggle for liberty (thus Germanising Lowland Scots, and creating the idea of a racial division within Scotland) and with a constructive misreading of Montesquieu’s praise of the English Constitution. They amplified and restructured the second half of The Spirit of the Laws so that it illustrated the development of the conditions of a modern free government. Unlike Montesquieu, they were not interested in the complex of passions, beliefs and practices that supported other kinds of governments.

For them, ‘English liberty’ was the congenial message the French writer provided.12 The Enlightenment writers combined this concept with Protestantism (held to be more characteristic of the Germanic peoples of the northern Holy Roman Empire, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scandinavia and (by extension) Lowland Scotland). By this equation, Jacobites, friends of the Stuarts, who were Catholic monarchs (and popularly held to be absolutist tyrants) must be neither Germanic nor Protestant, since they were friends (so it was held) neither to political liberty nor liberty of conscience. Thus, virtually all Scots Jacobites were seen as Highlanders (Celts) and Catholics. It is interesting to note that, after this historiographical paradigm had taken root, as Highland troops became more and more loyal and important to the British Empire, the idea that Highlanders were now – as opposed to then – Catholics suddenly disappeared from both history and popular consciousness. No mass conversions were noted, or even supposed: quite simply, the Highlanders of Waterloo or even Ticonderoga were loyal to British liberty, so their Protestantism could now be assumed, just as their Catholicism had recently been alleged. Broadly speaking, for the main Scottish Enlightenment historians, if the Germanic peoples had a predisposition to liberty, if liberty and

Introduction

11

equality of access were necessary for commerce, and if commerce was the highest stage of human development, then the Teutonic peoples must be racial exemplars of the spirit of progress in human history. Scotland must be Germanic to be civilised. Its discarding of its feudal nobility and the ‘savage’ Highland/Catholic past was at the core of this process, while some Enlightenment writers ‘discovered’ the struggle for Germanic liberties in the Scottish past. John Millar thought there had been a pre-feudal Witanagemot in Scotland, as in Anglo-Saxon England, and wrote of ‘our Saxon forefathers’ with their ‘comprehensive notions of liberty’. In Millar’s Historical View of the English Government, as in Hume’s History of England, the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ slide into each other. As a modified English party model of historical explanation was used to incorporate Scotland into Britishness, English historical models were adopted wholesale. The transfer of English models to Scotland in a discourse where ‘England represented modernity’ led to the provincialisation of Scotland’s own history, which had its own long and distinguished patriot historiographical tradition, celebrated by Baldred Bisset, John of Fordoun, Walter Bower, Hector Boece and many more: Patrick Abercrombie’s The Martial Atchievements of the SCOTS NATION (1711) was a recent example. Robertson among others displayed an ‘implied acceptance of the Anglican interpretation of the Scottish dark age’ which so many of the controversialists of the Union and Jacobite era had struggled against. Although writers such as Gilbert Stuart (1743–86) and James Macpherson (1736–96) linked Celtic and Saxon struggles for liberty, there was an inescapable trend towards the marginalisation of Celtic Scotland as a serious contributor as opposed to an interesting but in the end unimportant locale of ‘old, unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago’. The Union with Ireland quite possibly hastened this, as the ‘Celtic’ peoples could be viewed as more of a threat in the new United Kingdom, about a third of whose inhabitants were now Irish Catholics. Thus, John Pinkerton (1758–1826) divided ‘ascendant Goths’ from ‘slavish Celts’, Robert Knox (1791– 1862) lectured on ‘the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race’ and George Combe (1788–1858) thought that ‘the Scotch Lowland population has done everything by which Scotland is distinguished’. The idea was exported globally, and ‘Saxonism became one of the most salient features of American political culture’.13 Hume’s History of England (1754–62, final edition 1778) was less partisan than some of the new history, but Hume none the less

12

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

rhetoricised Scotland and in particular Ireland as barbarous and fanatical: ‘savage’, ‘untractable’, ‘untamed’, ‘barbarity’, ‘sloth’, ‘most disorderly and least civilized’, ‘horrible’ and ‘wantonly’ are all among the qualifications his judgement attaches to Irish and Scottish society and political action. Hume identifies a propensity to fanaticism in the Scots and Irish, a vice he views as untypical of English society, where its occurrence (as in the Popish Plot) is deemed aberrant. Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759) is arguably more subtle. It presents the Scottish chieftains of old as violent, disorderly and lascivious: all features, incidentally, widely attributed to Scottish Jacobites in English propaganda cartoons of the eighteenth century. But at the same time, as Robertson applauds the triumph of civility over this armed carnival of a society, he still allowed ‘some emotional allegiance to the enduring virtues of Scottish culture, such as its martial spirit of independence and self-reliance’. Consent to these values was thus both acknowledged and at the same time circumscribed by sentiment, for as Karen O’Brien points out, in his portrayal of Queen Mary ‘as a sentimental heroine rather than as a fully responsible political agent . . . Robertson laid the ground for the subsequent reinvention of Jacobitism, by Walter Scott and others, as an aesthetic attitude only’. For Robertson, the Union is the culmination of Scottish history’s access to progress; the Rising of 1745 a last futile struggle against the ‘privileges’ of ‘the post-Union Anglicisation of Scottish life and institutions’ which ‘had been a major contribution to Scotland’s civil liberty’. Once defeated, it could be safely romanticised, through an emotion which – as emotions so often do – conferred only the illusion of respect. The Jacobite past was not to re-entered on its own terms: it was irrelevant, viewed rationally and politically; and futile though noble, viewed emotionally. Either way, it was doomed. Hume and Robertson both made large sums of money from their work.14 This was the birthplace of modern, ostensibly non-partisan, Whig history. In the nineteenth century, Henry Hallam’s (1777–1859) Constitutional History of England (1827) patronised the past, Charles Dickens’ Child’s History of England (1851–3) condemned it and J. A. Froude stressed the defining particularism of the Reformation. England was often viewed as Great Britain in potentia. William Stubbs (1825–1901) noted – on the basis of very little actual evidence – that there was an ‘ancient supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon kings’ over Scotland and Wales, while important school histories

Introduction

13

like that of J. M. D. Meiklejohn continued to stress the ‘widespread and powerful Teutonic race’, the ‘weak’ Brittonic Welsh and the theme of a pan-British monarchy dating back to Saxon times. E. A. Freeman took the Saxonist approach even further, with his brutal view that America would be a ‘great land . . . if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it’. Within this world, ‘primitive’ peoples only gradually (if at all) attain to the pace set by the English core. As the rise of imperial Germany made panTeutonism less desirable as an ideology, a notion emerged of ‘the ‘‘English-speaking peoples’’ . . . the inhabitants of the British Isles and . . . those independent nations who derive their beginnings, their speech, and many of their institutions from England’ as Winston Churchill put it. This ‘England’ was an ‘island’ of one ‘speech’ and ‘civilisation’. The ‘vague sovereignty’ held by the Saxons justified the growing elision of Scotland and Wales from British histories, while the notion of England’s universal parenthood led to calls for imperial federation: Sir John Seeley’s (1834–95) notion of a global Britain. Anglo-Scottish conflict in days gone by was understood in unapologetically teleological terms. In Churchill’s view, Edward I, who slew the population of Berwick and ordered his War Wolf trebuchet into action against Stirling Castle after its surrender, was agreed to be ‘a master-builder of British life, character, and fame’, who laid ‘the foundation of . . . a United Kingdom’. This was the end of history, for ‘when the English king was strong English laws generally made headway; otherwise a loose Celtic anarchy prevailed’.15 It was in this ‘loose Celtic anarchy’, the descendant of the unruly and divisive barbarism of Hume and Robertson, what Colin Kidd calls ‘the legend of . . . Scotland as a benighted magnate anarchy’,16 that Jacobite history resided. In the incipient modernity of eighteenth-century Britain, that modernising drive to civility celebrated by Robertson and materially manifest in the New Town of Edinburgh, Jacobitism was a peripheral event resisted by ‘modern’ Scotland. By this reasoning, since ‘modern’ Scotland did not support Jacobitism, only ‘backward’ Scotland – that is, the clans – did. The ‘clans who fought for Scotland and Prince Charlie’, to quote the Culloden monument, might have thought that they took up arms for a nation: but if they did so, that nation – one of the ‘clans’ – was about to be extinct. The charisma of the Highlander depended on his defeat; once that charisma was distributed in the marketplace, it became kitsch. As kitsch faded with time, it became heritage: defeat

14

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

was Scotland’s heritage, the curios which recalled the country’s own obliteration becoming themselves the only guarantors of its continuing existence. This was necessarily a confined and constrained role. The tourist industry which protects both heritage and the sentiment it crystallises dictates that the Jacobite ‘clans’ – that word again – faced Hanoverian ‘regiments’ at Culloden: the terms are those seen by some five million visitors to the National Trust for Scotland site from the 1980s on. The emphasis here is threefold: first, it renders the Jacobite force marginal and more akin to a ragbag militia than the conventional force illustrated in the order books of its own army; secondly, that marginality serves to underline the doomed yet chivalric role of the whole enterprise; and thirdly, tourist sentiment is stirred by encouraging visitors to ‘recognise’ their ‘families’ among the graves of the clans, an approach emphasised by the search for the descendants of those who had fought on either side as part of the public relations surrounding the opening of the redeveloped battlefield centre in 2008. In this way, a domestic, localist interpretation is inserted into an international political and military movement. Families fight regiments: how brave, how foolish, how sad. Historical marginalisation and sentimental charisma combine, while the emphasis on the ‘swords and the sorrows’ binds these elements together with the seductively romantic side of primitivism, the noble savage’s last stand in his remote wilderness, the tragic finale in receipt of a superficial flattery from a historiography which can only accommodate it once it has been destroyed. This is the Rising of 1745 as seen by millions over the past twenty-five years. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans thus combines historiographical neglect, sentimental nostalgia and glamorous primitivism. There are two other confusions which contribute to its long success. The first is the inadequate distinction made between the Highlands and the rest of Scotland north of the Forth in much historical writing. The confusion that arises from inexact definitions of what is or is not ‘Highland’, and the loose definitions of a distinct clan social system on which a number of assumptions rest, both to some extent have their roots in confused eighteenth-century accounts, which in their turn rested on the policy adopted by the Jacobite leadership of using Highland dress as a garb for all its troops, particularly in 1745. In Chapter 1, ‘What is a Highlander, what was a Jacobite?’ I shall be examining this question in more detail. It is a confusion which leads to assumptions about the Highland nature of the army.

Introduction

15

The second confusion feeds the oft-repeated views that more Scots fought against the Jacobites than for them, and that support for the Rising was marginal. It arises from a focus on the size of the army Charles led into England, and a corresponding neglect of the northern army in Scotland, and Jacobite strength in the localities. Ignoring this force of 4,000–6,000 men, heavily Lowland by origin, can be very important to those who want to denigrate Jacobite politicomilitary potential and uphold the Myth. The importance of the Myth to British self-definition can be seen in the extraordinary responses which mention of the northern army can bring: once again, if Jacobitism were really last-ditch feudalism or fey primitivist militarism, then people would not need to get so cross about it. When this book was first published, Michael Fry reviewed it in The Herald under the heading ‘Charlie’s phantom army’, scorning the very existence of a force which – as Chapter 2 will amply demonstrate – is evident from even the briefest visits to the primary evidence, not to speak of the need to find some Jacobite troops to fight the battle of Inverurie (23 December 1745).17 The point is that the northern army strengthens both the case for Lowland Jacobitism (for many Lowland troops seem to have served close to their place of recruitment) and the possibility that the ’45 had some of the features of a national movement: it is, therefore, important to rubbish it to keep the Myth intact. The glamour of the campaign may rest chiefly in the capture of Edinburgh, the battle of Prestonpans and the march to Derby, but Jacobite troops on the ground in Scotland also had a vital role to play, not least in controlling the burghs which were the army’s source of revenue. There are thus five main reasons in all for the Myth’s long reign in historical circles: historiographical exclusion; nostalgic sentimentalisation; heroic primitivism; the equation of tartan uniforms with Gaelic culture; and the neglect of the northern army. They are all of eighteenth-century vintage: the first three are linked to the development of Whig history, the cult of sentiment and the Romantic fondness for the primitive, particularly the primitive north; while the last two are the products of the romanticising and marginalising drive of the first three, further boosted by misunderstanding and conflation of Highland and Scottish identities. The remainder of this introductory chapter is dedicated to examples of how the historiography of the Myth has developed – or rather, remained undeveloped – in its anaphora of romance and neglect.

16

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

MAKING THE MYTH Although English supporters of the government in 1745 were quite likely to suspect that all Scots were disloyal, the habitual depiction of all Scots as Highlanders in the political cartoon tradition appears to have become blended with comments such as that of a leading Whig decision-maker, who spoke of ‘5,000 or 6,000 Highlanders’ to create an idea reflected in the 1745 set of ‘Lillibullero’ that ‘an army’s just coming without any shoes’, out of a marginal wilderness to threaten ‘Court, country and city’. Distinctions between the Gaidhealtachd and the rest of Scotland were blurred – a process not untypical in the characterisation of margins by centres. Prints such as Sawney on the Boghouse (originally published in 1745) showed a Scot – in Highland dress – with his feet down two lavatory pans and faeces and urine dribbling between, the clear inference being that the wild man from the sticks had never seen a lavatory before. In 1651, the Scots Army at Worcester had been described as ‘barbarians’; in 1746, Dubois’ print of The Highland Visitors provided an image of Scots as alien invaders intent on disturbing the rural idyll of an English village. Such violence was a threat unless it was channelled: so it was that the Cromwellian view of Scots soldiers as ‘an inexhaustible Magazeen of Auxiliaries’ foreshadowed the high casualty rates of Scottish troops in later British wars. Long before the ’45, pro-government propaganda was already presenting a peripheral and primitive view of the Jacobites in order to emphasise their barbarism and irrelevance. In the 1690s, the future James VIII and III’s status as Prince of Wales was deliberately conflated with ethnic Welshness, a nationality associated with backwardness, illiteracy, poverty and bad temper (‘my Welsh blood’s up’ James exclaims in one ballad).18 Likewise, William Cleland had described Highlanders as ‘monkeys’ as far back as 1678, and Rob Roy (1670– 1734) was himself depicted in the guise of an orang-outan. David Morier’s painting of An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745, probably painted using real Jacobite prisoners, depicted the Jacobites as huge, hairy, virile and armed principally with swords and Lochaber axes, a weapon already more or less obsolete in 1745, as we shall see in Chapter 5. The nearest thing that George II’s government had to reality television, Morier’s ‘authentic’ image formed the basis of numerous subsequent representations. In reality, of course, it was carefully staged to endorse the primitivism of the Jacobites, and to exaggerate their physical size (which we know from surviving

Introduction

17

statistics to have been around 162–166cm, on the whole smaller than government troops). Of course, making the Jacobites huge and hairy stressed the British pluck needed to face them, and surreptitiously excused British failures to beat them earlier: as Neil Davidson says, they [the Hanoverians] ‘decided on these tactics . . . to avenge, but also retrospectively to justify, their previous defeats by portraying the Jacobites as superhuman savages against whom any actions were permissible’. The dehumanising depictions identified by Perry Curtis in Apes and Angels (1997 [1971]) as characteristic of antiIrishness had a much earlier and broader history as a characterisation of what Britain was – and what it was not.19 This is not remarkable: what is remarkable is the endurance of propaganda as history, beginning in the arguments over a Scottish militia in the Seven Years War (1756–63). From the 1707 Union on, Scotland had been prevented from raising a militia, even in cases of dire military emergency. Hanoverian loyalists had sought to raise one in 1715, and had been rebuffed by the British government. The reason was that – pace the British history which would later go on to claim that Jacobitism was a marginal Highland affair – the government distrusted the whole country. In the 1750s, Lowland Scots in favour of a militia argued that the ’45 had been a marginal and Highland affair, which achieved such success only because the Lowlands, lacking a militia, had been defenceless against the northern caterans. Alexander Caryle argued that ‘five thousand undisciplined militia from the most remote parts of the kingdom’ had been able to stage their ‘pitiful insurrection’ because the heart of Scotland was defenceless against them. Lowland Scotland could and should be trusted with a militia, because it was British. In reality, however, Carlyle was well aware of the strength of Lowland Jacobitism, noting in his Autobiography that ‘Many people in East Lothian at that time were Jacobites, and they were most forward to mix with the soldiers. The commons in general, as well as two-thirds of the gentry at that period, had no aversion to the family of Stuart’.20 This disowning of recent history was – like the stadial historiography which grew up alongside it – part of an attempt to integrate Anglophone Scotland into the British state, much as radical northern Protestants in Ireland were to play down their own community’s role in the Rising of 1798 in order to cast it as a convulsion of the Gaelic peasantry, a misleading view which endured in part because it came to suit Nationalist as well as Unionist readings of Irish history. But the Myth of the Croppy is another study.

18

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Before the Enlightenment, Scottish history had often been understood through patriot historiographical models, and on these the Jacobites drew. The discourse of valour or ‘defensive patriotism’, which stressed Scotland’s status as a nation whose existence was defined in terms of its ongoing struggle for liberty, had its roots in the Wars of Independence, in Baldred Bisset’s case to the Curia in 1301, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, and in the writing of John Barbour’s (c. 1320–95) The Brus. John of Fordoun (c. 1320–84) stressed Scotland’s history as built on resistance to the ‘loathsome vale of slavery’, and both he and Hector Boece (c. 1465–1536), men of the patriot north-east, were among the historians who saw Scotland as ‘a nation-in-arms’ made noble through heroic resistance to endless tides of invasion. After 1689 (when the Declaration of Arbroath was republished), the works of these and similar figures (for example, Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon) were republished by Jacobites and others hostile to Union. In 1711, Patrick Abercrombie’s Martial Atchievements cited the Declaration of Arbroath as the voice ‘of the Nobility and Community of Scotland’ which told ‘of their Liberty and Independency . . . their insufferable Oppressions under the Tyranny of Edward I’.21 The new history growing up in the 1750s did not so much combat this old historiography, as ignore it. Scotland, an ancient state with a long history, was presented almost as a tabula rasa, fresh wax ready to receive the imprint of Britishness. Jacobitism’s status as a pointless barbarian spasm in favour of Popery, slavery and tyranny was confirmed by such a reading. It was, in a sense literally, ‘prehistoric’. The earlier historiography of the country was ignored; the history it described was thereby erased. That erasure was always a rhetorical position rather than an acknowledged fact. In 1780, for example, doubts were raised over the foundation of a Society of Antiquaries for Scotland, as it might ‘call the attention of Scots, to the ancient honours and constitution of their independent monarchy’. Interestingly, ‘a startling number of leading Catholics’ appeared on the early membership lists of the society, a group accommodated in the patriot Scottish past, but as yet with no place in the British history of their day. The cultural tensions which surfaced in this and related controversies were relaxed by the fiction of Sir Walter Scott, which reconciled the obsolescence of the Scottish past to its celebration: Scotland’s history was again respectable, but on strictly limited terms. It could be looked back on with pride, but its absorption into wider Britishness

Introduction

19

was necessary and progressive change. The battles of Bruce and Wallace became part of a discourse of Scottish self-respect, but only insofar as the victories they won saved Scotland from conquest to be a fit partner in Union. Scott’s powerful imaginative vision was extended through the activities of Victorian antiquarian societies and the cultus of a mediaeval past. Perhaps his greatest achievement in this sphere lay in his Jacobitising of the Royal Family itself. From George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822, when the kilted monarch posed as the heir of the Stuarts to his loyal ‘clansmen’, to the 1842 visit of Victoria and Albert (greeted in Lochaber by tenants carrying Lochaber axes) the tartan decoration of Balmoral in the 1850s and the Jacobite tableaux Victoria enjoyed there for many years, Jacobite symbolism was persistently reinserted into Hanoverian loyalism in a classic example of Scott’s doctrine of reconciliation. From a political challenge to the very fabric of the British state and the Hanoverian dynasty, Jacobitism had sunk to the status of a colourful accessory to the legitimacy of both its chiefest enemies. Small wonder that historians did not take it seriously as a movement.22 Scott, being a great artist, was more complicated than his popular reception indicated. In particular, his powerful realisation of historical localities and historical injustices militated against the universalisable pretensions of Enlightenment stadial history, with its doctrine of teleological progress everywhere towards the same advanced kind of civil society. If Rob Roy’s identity changes when his ‘foot is on his native heath’, then no universal civility is possible: place must always inflect societies. In this guise, Scott’s novels fed European nationalisms, while at home he was seen as the purveyor of a safely British narrative whose local colours only brightened the journey towards the common goal of a United Kingdom, within which the teleology of English constitutionalism was increasingly accepted. Scotland’s history (or rather its prehistory, for British history might exist before 1707, but predominantly as a descriptor for English history only) largely fossilised into a three-stage caricature. First, came the ‘long brawl’ of mediaeval warfare between over-mighty magnates, often subdivided into Highland/Lowland struggles, such as the discourse surrounding the Battle of Harlaw in 1411 or the clan battle at Perth in 1396, in part the subject of Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth (1828). In this context, ‘the negative associations of magnate anarchy with feudal oppression’ joined forces with Presbyterian distaste for the Catholic past to undermine appreciation of what was arguably the apogee of achievement for an

20

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

independent Scottish state. The second stage was the dark night of religious fanaticism and civil war (1638–1746), which was entitled to a patriotic gloss insofar as it was depicted as Presbyterian resistance to English Stuart oppression. Thus, the strong support for the Stuarts in Scotland (particularly after 1707) could be inserted into a discourse of support for alien absolutist values. And, of course, the Stuarts weren’t English either: they were a Norman family from Scotland, and the last bastion of the Norman Yoke rightfully thrown off by the English, after which Scot and English might thrive together in fraternal amity, rid of feudalism, Popery and tyranny. This was the third stage, the ‘burying of national pretensions’, when as Colin Kidd puts it the Scots became mature enough to realise that they were ‘bankrupt’ and ‘had only a set of discredited institutions and a debunked ancient constitution in their historical treasury’. This was ‘the new dawn of Union and Anglicisation which had dispelled the nightmare of Scottish feudal oppression and backwardness’. The country had at last grown up.23 The view taken by its historians largely echoed these assumptions where it did not define them. Jacobitism was alien and marginal, or primitive and romantic, or both. In 1861, Charles Macfarlane and Thomas Thomson in their Comprehensive History of England stated that ‘the majority . . . of Edinburgh’ were ‘wishing every ‘‘sharp-edged claymore man’’ behind Strathbogie’: the wild men with their backward weapons should have been penned back where they belonged. The few facts Macfarlane and Thomson adduce seem to confuse their outlook rather than amplify it: for example, they sneer at the appointment of a ‘quarter-master general’ as ‘an office scarce needed in a Highland army’, while at the same time observing that the army contained men ‘from that part of Scotland which lies nearest the Highlands’ (most of it does of course), while still categorising it as belonging ‘behind Strathbogie’. The Jacobite Army was, as we shall see in Chapter 2, remarkably conventional in its organisation and arms. It was also full of conventional military talent. A number of its senior commanders (for example, Ogilvie, Sharp and Drummond) became general officers abroad, while the Master of Lovat, Lord Macleod and Allan Maclean became British generals. The facts adduced by Macfarlane and Thomson are at odds with the story they want to tell: on occasion a sneer is their only recourse to deal with evidence which should be adduced, not traduced.24 Despite the occasional more positive reading of Scottish history,

Introduction

21

such as that of William Burns (1809–76) or above all W. F. Skene’s Celtic Scotland (1877–80), the trend continued: indeed, Skene’s rather romantic view of clan society offered little real challenge to the sentimentalist view of Jacobitism as some kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ between Celt and Teuton. In 1875, J. R. Green in A Short History of the English People declared that though Charles Edward was at the ‘head of six thousand men’ after Prestonpans, ‘all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard’. These Highlanders were savages, at best noble ones: as Justin McCarthy observed in 1890, the ‘clansmen’ were ‘as savage and desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees’; they also have an impossible patois, as Charles finds when he sets himself ‘the desperate task of trying to master the Gaelic speech’. McCarthy – as is not uncommon – spices up his sceptical history with a dose of patronising romance: for ‘the Young Chevalier’s troops . . . believed, in their wild Gaelic way, in the sanctity of their cause’. Henry Buckle (1821–62) called ‘the outbreaks of 1715 and 1745 . . . the last struggle of barbarism against civilisation’, while Samuel Gardiner (acknowledging Edinburgh as an exception) argued that ‘in Scotland the traders . . . were Hanoverians to a man’ (again, the primary evidence – or lack of it – for this statement will be discussed in Chapter 2). For A. V. Dicey and Robert Rait in 1920, ‘the Lowlanders were mostly Whigs and the clansmen, guided by loyalty to their chiefs, were hardly Jacobites’, while for Cassell’s History of the British People (1923), the whole thing was a ‘romantic episode’ supported by ‘a dozen clans, a few Lowland gentlemen, a few ruined adventurers and exiles’ (note how non-Highland Jacobites are characterised as individuals, Highland ones only by clan).25 Matters did not improve much as the twentieth century progressed for the unfortunate ‘Highlanders’ whom Basil Williams observed had been defeated at Culloden. Robert Rayner saw ‘the Highland clans’ as in pursuit of ‘a forlorn hope’, and although A. D. Innes might stress the ‘chivalry’,’loyalty’and ‘audacity’ which ‘had actually brought six thousand clansmen from the wild Highlands of Scotland within measurable distance of winning back the British crown for the House of Stuart’, Sir Winston Churchill chose to emphasise the baser motives of the Highlanders who were ‘living in their mountain villages like hill tribesmen . . . the immemorial zest for plunder . . . still unslaked’. Yet these two accounts are closer than they appear: all that is at issue is the motive of the Jacobites, not their quality as primitive inhabitants of a remote wilderness. For

22

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

G. M. Trevelyan in 1952, the Highlanders are simply ‘barbarians’ at a time when ‘the age of barbarism was just coming to an end’ in Scotland. Trevelyan dates this to the close of the seventeenth century, just in time for the Union: the trope of infancy and prehistory reappears, 200 years after the Scottish Enlightenment had invented it. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 is described as ‘5,000 Highlanders’ in pursuit of ‘a fantasia of misrule . . . in defiance of Parliament and the laws . . . Parliamentary government . . . could scarcely have survived the repeal of fundamental statutes by kilted swordsmen’ from what Trevelyan characterises as ‘an Afghanistan . . . within fifty miles of the ‘‘modern Athens’’ ’ [Edinburgh]. The classic Whig polarity between the ‘fundamental statutes’ of the constitution and the so-called ‘tribal swordsmen’ of intrusive barbarity could, one might think, hardly be more pronounced than this.26 At this point in the argument, some historians might want to object that these are all easy targets: popular secondary histories for the most part, products of the imperial era. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, such critics might say, belongs to a Whig history all know to be outworn: the criticisms may be just, but they are directed at old targets, straw men. Sadly, this is not the case. Albeit that balanced if sceptical histories (for example, W. A. Speck’s Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (1990 [1977]) increase in number as we move closer to the present day, major problems remain for the accurate wider understanding of the Jacobite phenomenon in terms other than those ultimately defined by the Myth. First, historians can often underestimate the potency of popular history in perpetuating attitudes that seem to them outmoded; secondly, those attitudes are more enduring, even in scholarly histories, than many are willing to acknowledge. Churchill and Trevelyan do not exhaust the Myth. In 1973, Charles Chevenix Trench’s biography of George II characterised the Jacobites as ‘a savage Highland horde, as alien . . . as a war party of Iroquois’, opposed by ‘English and Lowland troops alike’. Sir George Clark in 1971, saw the ’45 as ‘a year of romantic vicissitudes’; Fitzroy Maclean as a ‘Highland raid’. Paul Langford, writing in the standard Oxford history in 1989, passes on without comment the view that 1745 saw ‘the preservation of England against a Highland rabble’, while Linda Colley herself tells us in Britons (1992) that ‘only the poorer Highland clans . . . rallied to the Young Pretender’. Colley also follows the old Gardiner line by arguing that the ‘centrality of trade . . . helped to ensure that the rejection of the Jacobite option

Introduction

23

was decisive’. Scottish historians such as R. H. Campbell and Annette Smith often reach similar conclusions: Smith discusses Lowland recruitment in Dundee in 1745 while describing the army as an ‘occupying Highland force’. In 1992, Rex Whitworth described the Jacobite Army as ‘the upstart and his rabble’ of ‘ferocious Highlanders’, while Charles’ strategy is portrayed as that of some fey Pied Piper, ‘charming the clansmen out of the glens’.27 Whig assumptions, then, remained powerful into the 1980s and 1990s. But more disturbing still perhaps was the fact that new historical models, such as the ‘Four Nations’ history championed by J. G. A. Pocock from 1975, and the subject of Hugh Kearney’s definitive study (The British Isles: A History of Four Nations) ten years later, often suffered from the same problems, and in doing so helped to perpetuate the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. Even some of the most distinguished historians of the last fifty years, such as Pocock and John Morrill, can occasionally make statements which appear to assume an historical position for Scotland unjustified by the evidence. Pocock himself appears to see the conquest of the Highlands after 1745 as resulting from the ‘lowland kingdom’s’ having sought ‘an incorporating union’ which bound it to North British loyalties. This judgement was made despite the fact that no contemporary observer seems to have regarded the Union as having commanded majority popular support in the Lowlands: indeed, it was conservatively acknowledged that three-quarters of the population at the time were against it, and there were far higher estimates. Moreover, Alistair and Henrietta Tayler had published the biographies of hundreds of Lowland Jacobites from Aberdeenshire and Banffshire alone fifty years earlier. Once again, there was no need to consult even published secondary – far less primary – sources in order to make sweeping theoretical judgements about the supposedly ‘new’ subject of British history.28 Examples could be multiplied: the ‘four nations’ model is often just as unwilling to allow particular examples to infect a general theory as its Whig predecessor. Scotland is included, but on terms which treat British unity as a teleological goal, and the English polity as normative in the pursuit of that goal. What has been presented as a new historical wave would have been familiar territory to its predecessors. There are some fine exceptions: Norman Davies’ view that ‘diversity schematised is diversity denied’ should be attended to more often, while William Ferguson has made it clear that ‘recent research . . . freed from the incubus of Germanist fixations, has

24

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

shown that . . . Gaelic Scotland has left a marked imprint on the national institutions and culture’.29 Both Four Nations history and its older Whig counterpart often share, of course, a key teleological goal: explicit in the older form of historiography, implicit in the newer. That goal is Britain itself: both historiographies seek, noisily or quietly, to justify the status quo, and both use Anglocentric models to do so: as Allan Macinnes observes, ‘the primacy accorded to national identities, civil wars and, above all, state formation seriously questions whether the ‘‘New British Histories’’ have marked a distinctive shift away from Whiggish concerns with nation building’. It is in our status as Britons that we owe an historical debt to an identity which marginalised Jacobitism from the politically nationalist to the dynastically absolutist, from the core of controversy over the shape of the British state to its margins. It is thus no coincidence that strongly revisionist Jacobite scholarship began to be published in the early stages of the ascendancy of modern political nationalism: in Wales in 1966; in Scotland in 1967; in the north of Ireland in 1968–9. Much of this revisionist scholarship has come from English scholars, and is by no means politically nationalist: but its capacity to challenge conventional accounts of the coalescence of the modern British polity in the eighteenth century was unveiled in a new climate of doubt about Britishness and its validity as an inclusive model. Thus, it is that English Society 1688–1832 is the title of Jonathan Clark’s key contribution, originally published in 1985: Clark’s sense of nuance and his minute attention to the functionality of religion in society does not allow for the synonymity of ‘Britain’ with English concerns. The remainder of this new edition of The Myth of the Jacobite Clans will focus on defining the terms of Jacobite action in the major Risings – particularly that of 1745 – and the nature of Jacobitism itself. In Chapter 1, I will define the slippery concepts ‘Highlander’ and ‘Jacobite’ as regards the arguments of this study: for one of the best excuses sloppy historical treatment of the ’45 has had is the way in which these terms, which ought to be precise and of record, have themselves become vague in use. In Chapter 2, I will go on to examine the composition of the Jacobite armies in detail, reinforcing the demonstrably Lowland character of many of their troops as identified by Daniel Szechi, Christopher Duffy, Frank McLynn and the first edition of this book. In Chapter 3, the question of Jacobites in the localities will be addressed, seeking to take into account the important contribution of Chris Whatley and Bob Harris, whose

Introduction

25

work on the primary sources commands respect; while the Chapter 4 will return to the question of whether the ’45 can be said to have had a ‘national’ quality. Finally, Chapter 5 will demonstrate the nature, extent and some of the sources of Jacobite weaponry It is too late to hope to dissolve the image of the kilted swordsman from popular consciousness in the present state of our history and society: but it is never too early to try, in the hope that for some at least, facts remain chiels that winna ding. No history can escape the burden interpretation places on the indisputable truth of individuated quantities and times: but the history of the Jacobite cause has spent so much time on interpretation and so little on the research that justifies it that the open-minded reader can scarce avoid the conclusion that the Myth has become far more important as story than history. As Ernst Gellner put it, ‘logical and social coherence are inversely related’:30 the Myth of the Jacobite Clans is more important to the coherence of British history than its truth. NOTES 1 William Robertson, The History of Scotland, intr Dugald Stewart, 2 vols (London, 1827 [1759]), I: xii, 1; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 [1976]), 155 (the copy text is the 6th edition of 1790); Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1931), 3, 16; E. H. Dance, in Otto-Ernst Schuddehopf et al. (eds), History Teaching and History Textbook Revision, (Strasbourg: Centre for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967), 77, 85. 2 Neil Davidson, Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692–1746 (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 249. The 1996 National Trust for Scotland Culloden Battlefield 250th anniversary exhibition was called ‘The Sword and the Sorrows’; the audio-visual presentation used at Culloden for twenty years from the early 1980s presented the battle as essentially one between ‘the Highlanders and the Strangers’. 3 V. Murray Pittock, ‘Enlightenment historiography and its legacy: plurality, authority and power’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 33–44. 4 Davidson, Scottish Revolution, 241; Stephen Conway, War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 199.

26

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

5 Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 126. 6 Davidson, Scottish Revolution, 228–71; Richard S. Tompson, The Atlantic Archipelago (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1986), 238; No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Army, 1745–46, Alastair Livingstone of Bachuil, Christian W. H. Aikman and Betty Stuart Hart (eds) (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 2001 [1984]). See, for example, the History Scotland review of the 2nd edition of the 1745 Muster Roll: ‘The book explodes several common misconceptions about the Jacobite forces. Though they wore Highland dress, they were not a Highland army. Professor Murray Pittock has already observed, in The Myth of the Highland Clans (Edinburgh, 1995), that fewer than half were actually Highlanders the rest were Lowlanders, or French regulars of Irish or Scottish origin, or the hapless Manchester and the names on the Muster Roll appear to bear him out.’ 7 Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Doron Zimmerman, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 8 Conway, War, State and Society, 19; Frank Welsh, The Four Nations (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 206. 9 Iain Gale, ‘Building on the past’, Scotland In Trust 25:1 (2008), 20–27 at 21–22; Deleuze, cited in Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recording of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), x; Peter Heeks, ‘Myth, history and theory’, History and Theory 33:1 (1994), 1–2, 15. 10 Cited in Malcolm D. Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1983), 1. 11 V. Murray Pittock, ‘Historiography’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 258–79. 12 Hugh Douglas, Racial Myth in English History (Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1982); John Kenyon, The History Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 18, 20, 39; Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (tr. and eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xxvi, 167, 338, 636; David Wootton, ‘David Hume, ‘‘the historian’’ ’, in David Fate Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1993]), 281–312 at 293, 295. 13 John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (London,

Introduction

14

15

16 17 18

19

27

1787), 5, 41, 555–6; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137, 196, 210, 233, 239– 41; Kidd, ‘Sentiment, race and revival: Scottish identities in the aftermath of Enlightenment’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles c. 1750–c. 1850, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 110–26 at 117–18; and in British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 107, 267; Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 56; Kenyon, The History Men. V. the discussion in Pittock, ‘Historiography’, 268–72 and also in Inventing and Resisting Britain (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997), Ch. 1; Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73 and ‘Historical Writing’, in David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 522–35 at 530–1; Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 193. J. R. Hale (ed.), The Evolution of British Historiography, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 31, 39, 54, 57, 270; J. M. D. Meiklejohn, A New History of England and Great Britain, 17th edn (London: n.p., 1902), 15–16, 18, 27; for Freeman, v, Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: The Cultivation of Hatred (New York: Norton, 1993), 81; Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples. Vol. I, the Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956), viii, ix, xii, 243, 259. Colin Kidd in Scotlands 1 (1994), 1–17. Michael Fry, ‘Charlie’s phantom army’, The Herald, 2 December 1995. Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 79; James Michael Hill, Celtic Warfare 1595–1763 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986) for casualty rates among Scottish troops in 1756–63; Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 23–4; the same author’s Poetry and Jacobite Politics in EighteenthCentury Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1994]), deals with the Welshness issue in more detail, particularly in Chs 2 and 4. See also Pittock, Celtic Identity, 29–30, 107–8 for Scots in the British Army. Paul Hopkins, Glencoe and the end of the Highland War (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998 [1986]), 185 for Cleland; David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myths, (Edinburgh: John Donald,

28

20

21

22

23 24

25

26

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans 2004), 230–1; Murray Pittock, ‘Patriot dress and patriot games: tartan from the Jacobites to Queen Victoria’, in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 158–74 at 166–7; Davidson, Scottish Revolution, 261. Cited in John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 99; Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1861), 133. V. Murray Pittock, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 95–7, 314n: the term ‘defensive patriotism’ is used by Alexander du Toit in his 2000 London Ph.D. thesis on William Robertson. Roger Mason’s Kingship and the Commonweal (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998) enlarges on the patriot historiographical tradition. V. also Patrick Abercrombie, The Martial Atchievements of the SCOTS NATION, (Edinburgh: Robert Freebairn, 1711), 610. Marinell Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1980), 34; Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon Press, 2004), 113; Pittock, Celtic Identity, 62–3. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 267, 280. Charles Macfarlane and Thomas Thomson, The Comprehensive History of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackie, 1861), III: 275, 284, 289; v. Stephen Wood, The Auld Alliance (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989),77– 86; Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 130ff; Mary Beacock Fryer, Allan Maclean: Jacobite General, (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987); Sir Bruce Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot, The Prisoners of The ’45, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1928/9), III: 308–9. Pittock, Celtic Identity, 58; J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People, (London: Macmillan, 1875),724; Justin McCarthy, A History of the Four Georges, 4 vols, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1890), II: 294; for Buckle, v. Davidson, Scottish Revolution, 174; Samuel R. Gardiner, A Student’s History of England from the Earlies Times to the Death of King Edward VII, new edn (London: Longmans, 1910), 740; A. V. Dicey and Robert S. Rait, Thoughts on the Union Between England and Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1920), 305; Cassell’s History of the British People 5: From the Revolutionary Settlement to Waterloo (London: Waverley Book Club, 1923), 1630, 1633. Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 [1939]), 243; Robert Rayner, A Concise History of Britain (London: Longmans, 1941), 386–7; A. D. Innes, A History of the

Introduction

27

28

29

30

29

British Nation from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1912), 601; Churchill, English-Speaking Peoples, III: 109; G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, 1952), 536, 538. Charles Chevenix Trench, George II (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 234, 236; Sir George Clark, English History: A Survey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Sir Fitzroy Maclean, A Concise History of Scotland (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988 [1970]), 171, 174; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 197; Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 81 and passim; R. H. Campbell, Scotland Since 1707, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985 [1965]), 7; Annette Smith, ‘Dundee and The ’45’, in Lesley Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), The ’45: To Gather an Image Whole (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1988), 108; Rex Whitworth, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (London: Les Cooper, 1992), 56, 57, 58. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The limits and divisions of British history: in search of an Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review 87 (1982), 328 (see ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’, Journal of Modern History 47:4 (1975), 601–21, 626–8 for the start of the debate). Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five (Aberdeen: Milne and Hutchison, 1928); Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Rising of 1715 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934). For John Morrill, v. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem 1534–1707 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 1–38 at 7, also discussed in Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997 [1996]), 650; William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 303; Pittock, Celtic Identity, 99–100. Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49; For Gellner, v. the first edition of Myth of the Jacobite Clans, 20, 126n.

1 What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

DUKE OF PERTH – is no Claned family, although the head of a Considerable number of Barrons and Gentlemen of the Name of Drummond in the Low Countreys he is brought in here Allenarly Upon account of his command of about 300 Highlanders in Glenertonie and Neighbourhood. ‘Memoriall Anent the True State of the Highlands as to their Chieftenries’ All from the Shires of Angus Aberdeen & Banf one third of them are Highlanders the rest low Country altho’ many of them put on Highland Dress ‘List of the Several Numbers of which the Rebell Army is Composed’ The important point . . . is that the witnesses drew no distinction between officers of Cromartie’s, Lochiel’s and the Grants on the one hand, and of Glenbucket’s, Ogilvy’s or Roy Stewart’s on the other. In other words the Highland–Lowland complex which appears to dominate the ideas of modern writers on the ’45 seems not to have existed in the minds of these eyewitnesses, on the accuracy of whose observation lives depended . . . We are driven, then, by the evidence of a court of law, to admit . . . that wearing the ‘Highland habit’ was, to say the least of it, a common practice among officers in the Lowland regiments. Sir Bruce Seton1

The question of ‘what is a Highlander?’ is an important one in Scottish history, and still too seldom asked, particularly in popular accounts. Typically, the word serves as shorthand for a confusion of three concepts: geographical/geological; linguistic; and social. The Highland boundary fault which runs from around Montrose to Helensburgh, with its different rock formations, more ancient to the north, less ancient to the south, is one way of dividing Scotland into

32

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Highland and Lowland. A second is that of the Gaidhealtachd: the areas of Scotland which speak or spoke Gaelic. A third is the supposed presence of a differing kind of social organisation in the north and west of Scotland, known (at any rate from Victorian times) as the ‘clan system’. The opening quotations here, which will be discussed in more detail below and as this study progresses, are evidence of the confusions this third category can cause. The confusions are even richer when it is operated in unacknowledged combination with one or both of the other categories. For all these definitions of the ‘Highlands’ have their problems. The geological definition is presentist insofar as geology was an unknown science in 1745. The uplands could, of course, be seen: but they were in the south (the Southern Uplands) as well as the north; and in the north-east, along the 150 miles from Montrose to Dingwall and in the Black Isle, an area of Mackenzie strength, the land was low. Although the ‘Highlander’ had been the subject of dislike from the sixteenth century – particularly after the Reformation – in some quarters a distinction was often made between west Highlanders/Islesmen and others. Ironically, Lachlan Mackintosh, Chief of the Name and of Clan Chattan was one of those who advised James VI on the ‘demarcation of Hebridean from mainland Gaels’. The economic and religious tensions generated in early modern Scotland were not absolutely viewed as ethnic until the writers of the Enlightenment classified them as such. The resentment of the ‘Highlander’ was not formalised into a romanticised conflict between the men of the mountains and the men of the plains before 1745. Rather it was a dislike of a complex of cultural differences: language; sometimes religion (often assumed to be a difference even when it wasn’t); and the growing resentment of scattered clans and broken men who lived by their wits and beyond the law in the worsening economic conditions of the seventeenth century. The wars of 1638–60 in particular, in which Gaelic-speaking Scotland was heavily engaged, left a legacy of ‘broken men’.2 Far from the Highland boundary fault being an internal division in the kingdom which prevented its unity, until the draining of the moss at Stirling in the eighteenth century, Forth–Clyde was a far more important natural, military, political and even cultural boundary point. Fording the Forth at Stirling was the only clear route north, which is why so many battles were fought on this line: Scotland north of Forth–Clyde was, in Tacitus’ words, ‘virtually another island’. Mediaeval maps bear out the view that Scotland’s

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

33

crucial geographical division was at Forth–Clyde, not along the Highland Line. This was true as late as the eighteenth century: in 1715, for example, it was the case ‘that as a rough rule of thumb Scotland north of Stirling was pro Jacobite and pro Hanoverian south of Stirling’. As the first quotation which heads this chapter indicates, the great magnates of Scotland: the Drummonds, the Murrays, the Gordons, the Erskines, frequently held contiguous landholdings on both sides of the ‘Highland Line’. On a very basic level, how did the fighting tail raised from Gordon or Atholl lands communicate with each other, if some were Lowlanders who hated the Gael, and some were Gaels who hated the Lowlander? There are relatively few – if any – signs of the tenantry exhibiting such cultural division. Indeed, Leah Leneman, studying the Atholl estates in the 1980s, was clearly puzzled that there seemed to be little difference in the make up or behaviour of tenants in ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ parishes: ‘the estate records make no distinction’. She took the view that ‘it is hardly conceivable that Highlanders would blindly follow the leadership of common Lowlanders’, before going on to note in puzzlement that ‘the approach to crime and justice was fundamentally the same in both societies’, and that Highland and Lowland ‘were treated exactly the same’ in the records. In an essay published a couple of years later, Leneman observes that ‘Kirk session records for Highland parishes do not reveal social mores radically different from Lowland parishes’. Such apparent bemusement in the face of acknowledged fact is evidence, perhaps, of an assumption so deeply ingrained that it is bewildered rather than challenged by the evidence it adduces.3 A ‘Highlander’ cannot then simply be one who lives in the Highlands. Not only did the territory of major Jacobite magnates cross over the Highland boundary fault; the Highlands must – if they are to be a descriptive and not merely an ideological term – take some account of the fact that the Southern Uplands are often higher than Strathearn or Strathnairn. Also there is the additional problem that much of the land behind the ‘Highland Line’ isn’t very high at all, and it includes – on some measures, for example, ‘north of the Mounth’ – Aberdeen, Scotland’s third city now as in the early modern period, a burgh which can hardly be said to exhibit the classic ‘wild cateran’ model of the Highlander: indeed, given the long-reputed douceness and meanness of its citizens, quite the reverse. In Aberdeen, Bennachie by Old Rayne is seen as a Highland – Lowland border, but to so modern a writer as Ian Rankin, in Black

34

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

and Blue, (1997), Aberdeen is itself a Highland town. To Glaswegians, Aberdonians are ‘teuchters’ – country bumpkins – but to Aberdonians, teuchters live farther off. Highlanders are a moveable feast. In the anti-West Highland policy of James VI, which culminated in the infamous Bond and Statutes of Iona in 1609, the idea was floated that the Marquis of Huntly should occupy Uist and other islands to colonise them for civilisation: yet Huntly’s own troops from his own lands in 1715 are often themselves counted as Highlanders.4 If the first definition will not do because there are too many inconsistencies on where the Highlands are, what of the second? Gaelic-speaking is surely indicative of a major cultural divide. But once again, the Gaidhealtachd is a treacherous friend to any robust definition of the ‘Highlands’. In 1100, Gaelic was the general language of Scotland outwith Lothian; by the thirteenth century, there were Anglophones north of Tay, in the east coast burghs and in Strathclyde. At the opening of the fifteenth century, Gaelic was still Scotice, the language of the Scots, but by the sixteenth century a move to identify it as Erse, Irish, had begun. This was not necessarily pejorative (there were, and are, a spectrum of dialects in Gaelic, and that of north-east Ireland is close to that of south-west Scotland), but was a manifestation of the growing strength of Scots vernacular, in an era when such vernaculars were on the rise throughout Europe: ‘Scottis’ was the national tongue, as opposed to ‘Suddroun’, English.5 In the eighteenth century, at the time of the 1745 Rising, the Gaidhealtachd had retreated very approximately to the area of the ‘Highland Line’, and this fortuitous historical moment, where geographical and linguistic features were briefly one, quite possibly fed the idea that there were distinct ‘men of the mountains’ and ‘men of the plains’, Celts and Teutons, in the years that followed. Substantial immigration by Gaelic-speakers into west-central Scotland and elsewhere made something of a mockery of such racial distinctions, but they continued for a long time, and perhaps have not quite disappeared even yet. However, the retreat of the Gaelic language was not, of course, the retreat of an isolated race to its last fastnesses: the patronymics of Gaelic Scotland were themselves a global entity through diaspora as early as the eighteenth century, and divisions between Gael and Lowlander had little currency outwith Scotland. Gaelic was no more the mark of a race in Scotland than in Ireland, which even at the height of the Gaelic Revival from 1890–1922, gave no support to the supposition that a native Irishman who could

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

35

only speak English was of a different race from one who spoke Gaelic. Pearse’s Gaels were frequently sturdily Anglophone. So indeed were the Jacobites. There is Gaelic Jacobite poetry aplenty, but apparently no known orders in Gaelic. The surviving regimental lists and order books from 1745 do not differ in their language or military organisation (as we shall see in Chapter 2), whether they concern Ogilvy’s regiment from Angus or Ardsheal’s from the West Highlands. Cameron of Locheil spoke English: English was the language of the army. English, or in the case of some traditional figures, Court Scots, was also the language of Jacobite society. The Irish Brigade officers spoke English; the Manchester Regiment spoke English. Naturally, Gaelic was spoken by Chiefs of the Name from the Gaidhealtachd: but seldom, it would seem, to their social equals or superiors. Gaelic was widely spoken among the rank and file (a report from Derby states ‘their dialect seemed to be as if a herd of Hottentots, wild monkeys in a desert, and vagrant gypsies had been jabbering’), but the likelihood is that English or Scots was far more widely understood than has been sometimes assumed. There is simply almost no evidence to the contrary: even Charles’ Gaelic tutor, the poet and Jacobite captain Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair, passionate advocate of the Gaidhealtachd as he was, had introduced English terms into his poetry and worked for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which existed to spread Anglophone Protestantism. The surviving diary of Captain John Maclean, first published in 1996, is in English: he is, among other things, very interested in the Derbyshire textile industry: ‘I missd the Seeing of a Curious Silk Manufactory which is at Derby which had (as I was told) more than ninty thousand motions’.6 So much for the last battle of the Highlanders and the strangers: Scottish Jacobitism, even in the Gaidhealtachd, does not belong in Tir nan Og, but in eighteenth-century British society. The Gaidhealtachd itself was a liminal line: again, it is very likely that Gaelic was understood beyond it, not least in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire. It seems entirely plausible that all Jacobite officers who spoke Gaelic were bilingual, and probably a great number of others too: they could neither have understood nor implemented their own army’s orders were this not the case. And what of social organisation? As Geoffrey Barrow observes with regard to the mediaeval period, ‘there is absolutely no suggestion that king, council or capella regis [chancery] was conscious that grants and infeftments of landed estates in the Highlands or in the

36

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Isles differed in any fundamental respect from those made by the Crown elsewhere in the realm’. In Scotland, the pattern of lordship found elsewhere in Europe was superimposed on an underlying Celtic aristocracy by the Flemish and Norman servants of the monarchy in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In many areas, change was superficial. The ‘Mormaer’ or ‘great steward’ of the king probably derived from the under-kings of traditional Gaelic practice, the rı´ ruirech under the high king, ard-rı´gh. The Lord of the Isles in the mediaeval period was Rı´ Innse Gall. On this traditional base (later compromised, but by no means abolished, by Stewart reforms) were grafted the great territorial earldoms and lordships. Fife, Atholl, Strathearn, Caithness, Mar and Angus were all earldoms arguably based not only on the territories of the pre-Norman mormaers, but on the provinces of the Picts. The power of the Scottish magnates was traditionally regionally concentrated, unlike many of their English counterparts, who owned estates in many different areas, whatever their title might indicate. In Scotland, regional concentration and familial concentration often went together: the family of a great house, and those who took its name to signify their allegiance or seek its protection, led to the magnates frequently becoming Chiefs of the Name, as Argyll was Chief of the Name of Campbell or Lord Lovat Chief of the Name of Fraser. The Frasers might bear a Norman-derived name, but the social organisation of Lovat’s fighting tail (his armed retinue in war) was hard to distinguish from that of Clan Donald. Although the power of the great regional magnates was curbed under the early Stewarts, and the ‘secularisation of the kirklands’ had less effect in the north-west due to the lack of ecclesiastical foundations, major similarities remained: ‘both Highlands and Lowlands depended upon the strength of family affinities, in essence the blood ties of kinship supplemented by local ties of kindness and friendship between landowners, their tenants, followers and other associates’. These could provide an impenetrable boundary to outsiders: as late as 1715, the Earl of Mar could not be stopped by the government from launching the Jacobite Rising at Braemar because he was regarded as untouchable on his own land. It was the abolition of heritable jurisdictions in 1747 which brought this social order to its knees, not earlier cultural or political changes. Scottish society was hybrid. As Alexander Grant notes, ‘the Celtic features of Scotland were deeply embedded in her social structure, her language and her customs’; in Allan Macinnes’ words, ‘clanship’ was ‘the fusion

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

37

not the fission of feudalism, kinship and local assocation . . . clans were Anglian, Anglo-Norman and Flemish as well as Celtic and Norse-Gaelic in origin. Clanship was by no means confined to the Highlands of Scotland’ and ‘operated within the framework of Scots Law’.7 What then, is a Highlander? Anti-Lowland and anti-Highland feeling in the period 1550–1750 was so strongly bound up with religious and political sympathies that a good deal of it (it would take a book to say how much) was conditional on these rather than on on any ‘essential’ divisions. On a substrate of limited linguistic and cultural division within Scotland a superstructure of prejudice was erected, driven by political disagreement. This can be seen in many ways. Antipathy to the Highlands was much less marked in the Episcopalian and Jacobite north-east than elsewhere, even though this part of the country was adjacent to, if not actually in, the Highlands, as they came to be understood. Episcopalians and Catholics in general seem to have been benevolent towards Gaelic8: it was often the language of their political allies. On the other hand, the Duke of Argyll was the greatest of Gaelic chieftains, but because of the pro-British politics of successive members of his family, he is free of the ethnic stereotyping that might be applied to Clanranald or Locheil. Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair, apparently a traditional figure of Clan Donald, who wrote of the great ill-will the Lowlander bore the Gael, nevertheless promoted pan-Scottish anti-Union feeling (as did Sileas na Ceapaich, another Clan Donald poet), included English words in his poetry, was influenced by James Thomson and recognised in the Lowlander Allan Ramsay (‘Ailean Bard’) a fellow poet of similar rank. Cultural interchange between the Gaidhealtachd and more Anglophone Scotland was – certainly at elite levels – far more hybrid than the old and rather clunky cultural models suppose: and for MacMhaighstir Alasdair, the fact that Ramsay was a Lowlander was less important than his Jacobitism and Scottish patriotism, just as the Argyll Campbells were vile in his eyes irrespective of the Gaelic they spoke, because they were for Hanover and Union. The ‘Highland Army’ raised by the Jacobites in 1745 was, as I shall argue below, an ideological more than a geographical description. For the purposes of the present volume, only those units in Jacobite armies mainly composed of those who were Gaelic speakers from behind the Highland boundary fault and excluding the north-east as far as Inverness will be counted as ‘Highland units’: but this itself is a flag of convenience, for the issue remains a complex

38

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

one. As I hope has been demonstrated above, none of the three ways of defining a Highlander can be judged entirely appropriate or watertight. That should be no reason, however, for failing to challenge the core myth of Jacobite historiography, which maximises and misrepresents the ‘Highlands’ at every turn. If modern histories find secure definitions of the Highlands difficult, contemporary documentation on the Jacobite Risings also not infrequently shows similar confusion on the question of what constitutes a Highlander. For Fraser of Lovat himself in 1727, the Highlands were ‘That part of Scotland’ which was ‘very barren, and unimproved’; in 1746, Lord President Forbes noted that the Highlands were ‘that large Tract of Mountainous Ground, to the Northwards of the Forth, and the Tay, where the Natives speak the Irish Language’, while at the same time excluding the counties of Perth, Forfar, Kincardine, Aberdeen, Banff and Moray from the Highlands: a verdict which seriously undermines the case for the Jacobite Army being Highland, and does so out of the mouth of government itself. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the Duke of Perth’s name occurs in a 1745 list of Highland chieftains. The entry concerning him tells us that he is not a Highlander, or at least not of a ‘Claned family’, but we are then immediately informed that he is the ‘head of a Considerable number . . . of the Name of Drummond in the Low Countreys’. Similarity of name is traditionally one of the central features of what the Victorian age dubbed the ‘clan system’, but here the problem is that the Highlanders who are dependent on the Duke do not seem to share his name, while the Lowlanders he commands do share it. The confusion here is over the status of the Chief of the Name: not a tribal leader, but a man who might well be in all respects a conventional British nobleman. Even modern historians sometimes count the Murrays of Atholl as clan leaders, though Forbes of Culloden (who ought to have known) said that ‘the Murray’s is no Highland family’; yet even he confusedly also defined the Highlands as ‘that large tract of mountainous ground to the Northwest of the Tay’, which certainly includes plenty of Murray land! Some historians have, in their eagerness to feed the Myth of the Jacobite Clans, decided that all ‘Scotsmen north of the Forth in 1745’ were ‘essentially Highlanders’,9 a view which would render Adam Smith a claymore-wielding Gael. The Myth itself, however, if sustained in many cases by wanton inaccuracy, has also long been fed by the confusion of contemporaries, who sometimes could not tell Gaelic and Anglophone

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

39

members of the Jacobite Army apart. Moreover, as early as 1689, the Jacobite force raised by Viscount Dundee was described by itself (in English) as a ‘Highland army’, while the army of 1745 issued orders for horses and arms in the name of the ‘Highland Army’.10 Such clear statements might seem to make the Myth of the Jacobite Clans no myth at all. In fact, the ‘Highland Army’ was, as we shall see, an ideological term, not a descriptive one: ‘each campaign deliberately promoted a Highland identity’ as Allan Macinnes observes. In the patriot historiographical tradition of which the Jacobites saw themselves the inheritors, the martial quality of Scotland in its purest form was always to be found in the North. From the Calgacus of Tacitus’ Agricola, defending his mountains at the end of the earth from Roman imperialism, to the northern valour praised by Boece and John of Fordoun, the image of the Highlander, the ‘old Scot’, lay at the heart of the discourse of patriot valour as the most loyal subjects of the Scottish nation: in the words of Sir James Campbell, ‘my Race has bene tenne hundreth yeeris kyndlie Scottismen under the Kingis of Scotland’. Tartan was used to signify the antiquity of Scots national tradition; the Gaidhealtachd was an imagined space where Scots looked ‘in order to recapture the pristine virtue of their forebears’. In seventeenth-century Scotland, tartan began to be a badge of party as much as a badge of nationality: it was the flag of the Episcopalian and Catholic party, the Jacobites, to whom Scottish history and valour mattered more than the emergent British polity: it was in this context, for example, that a ‘cult’ of ‘tartanry’ ‘briefly flowered in the 1680s’ at James’s viceregal court at Holyrood, long before the Royal Visit of 1822.11 One of the last historians of this old school, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, whose Martial Atchievements of the SCOTS NATION appeared in 1711 (the second volume was dedicated to Lockhart of Carnwath, who believed that only in the Highlands was the true spirit of Scotland to be found), funded the 1715 Rising to the tune of 4,000 pistoles. ‘St Andrew and Scotland’ was a repeated regimental password in 1745, when the army – as Sir Bruce Seton pointed out as long ago as 1927 – were uniformed in tartan irrespective of their place of origin, tartan being the signifier of old Scotland. In 1689 and 1715 there is evidence of the uniforming of non-Highland troops in tartan: for example, ‘Mr Drummond, the advocate’ was reported in ‘Highland habit’ in Dundee’s army, while in 1715 the Jacobite Army at Perth on 1 October was described as ‘betwixt 3 and

40

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

4000 foot . . . all in Highland cloaths tho mostly Lowland men’. By 1745 (when tartan hose was ordered for the entire army just before Christmas), this was the case for the entire Jacobite force, though most of Stoneywood’s Aberdeen battalion were not in Highland dress, and the Royal Scots wore it only intermittently, as did other Irish and French reinforcements, who adopted tartan ‘as a Protection against the highlanders who joined us’ and to ‘avoid danger in travelling in red clothes’. Nonetheless, Bruce Lenman is right in the main in arguing that the whole army was in Highland dress; and Stuart Reid has suggested that the black or dark blue on red sett used by Ogilvy’s had been adopted as a generic uniform in some units. Lord George Murray wore his ‘philabeg . . . without Britches . . . Nothing encourag’d the men more’; Lord Lewis Gordon accepted ‘Highland clothes’ in lieu of money from Aberdeen, and intelligence for the Duke of Gordon noted his men dressed in ‘Highland Cloths’; while Commissary Bisset, the Atholl Whig, noted ‘lowlanders . . . putting themselves in highland dress like the others’, and a contemporary observer of the Jacobite Army at Macclesfield recalls ‘a young Lowlander (but in Highland dress)’.12 Tartan was certainly seen as a uniform rather than as an ethnic identifier when it came to gathering evidence. The evidence given by Alexander Law, a Brechin innkeeper, at Whitehall in August 1746, states, for example, that James Lindsay ‘wore Highland Cloaths’ and that ‘Buchannan was dress’d at that time in Highland Habit’, whereas John Wedderburn was never seen in ‘Highland Dress’ (this did not save him). Part of the reason for the intense use of tartan in 1745, was in all probability the intensification of its symbolic adoption as a patriot badge by the Stuart dynasty itself in exile. In 1741, Charles Edward and Henry wore tartan to a ball in Italy, and Charles wore it on campaign in 1745, by which time it was so strongly associated with him that Richard Cooper, an Edinburgh engraver, used it to the mark the Prince out in a print advertising a reward for his capture. By the early 1750s, Charles was being depicted in tartan on drinking glasses. Anti-Jacobite propaganda used his tartan guise to depict him as something of a Highland Pied Piper, come to seduce his immature supporters (rats or children, according to taste) away from their homes and duties.13 English Jacobites followed suit. Not only did Beppy Byrom in Manchester wear plaid garters and Sir John Hynde Cotton order a full tartan suit (still to be seen in the Museum of Scotland) in 1743–4 to signify their allegiance, but the display of this badge of patriot

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

41

Scotland was commonplace south of the Border. Girls wearing ‘Plaid Breast-knots, Ribbands, and Garters’ were known as the ‘Lancashire Witches’, while the Manchester Regiment itself appeared on parade with ‘each officer . . . in a plaid waistcoat and a white cockade . . . Colonel Townley, as commanding officer, was distinguished by the addition of a Highland plaid sash lined with white silk’. In other words, the Jacobite ethos was pictorially Highland rather than actually Gaelic. Tartan made a statement of a wider political allegiance, in which the ‘honest man’ code of English Jacobitism could readily represent itself in the garb of the patriot Highlander, whose preference for poverty and liberty to wealth and slavery was an undeniable mark of such ‘honesty’. On 18 August 1746, Lord Balmerino, a Fife aristocrat, was executed wearing a tartan blindfold: ‘brave Balmerrony . . . in the midst of all his foes/ Claps Tartan on his eyes . . . A Scots Man I livd . . . A Scots Man now I die . . . May all the Scots my footsteps trace’, as a song commemorating the event put it. Tartan here signifies patriot martyrdom: what Daniel Szechi has called ‘The Jacobite Theatre of Death’.14 Balmerino had fought for his king and Scotland in an Anglophone army with Anglophone orders. At some point in some regiments below company level orders may have been given in Gaelic, but we have little or no available evidence of this. What can be said is that the imagery used of the Jacobites by themselves and of their leader, Charles, was substantially similar whether he was the ‘Tearlach Ruadh’, the ruddy Charles who would restore fertility to a barren land, ‘the Highland Laddie’ of Anglophone song, whose sexual prowess could ‘wanton’ Caledonia back to freedom, or the young man with a Long Tail, as he appeared in English Jacobite cartoons. The widespread and consistent nature of Jacobite imagery and ideology is one of its most notable features. That these were often presented in ‘Highland’ terms had little or nothing to do with the lived life of the Gaidhealtachd in comparison with the message they sent out of the Prince as a patriot from Old Scotland, who was above the corruption of the financial revolution and a foreign policy in hock to Hanoverian interests. By the 1740s, English Jacobitism was adopting Scottish Jacobite symbolism, without – in all probability – accepting the often nationally focused Scottish Jacobite political agenda. Highlandism was a rhetoric. English cartoonists wrapped all disaffected Scots in plaid as much as Jacobite songsters hymned the Gaidhealtachd in Scots. In both cases, the rhetoric symbolised the opposition of True Scots – and

42

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

in the later days of weakening domestic Jacobitism in England, True Britons – to an anti-Hanoverian agenda. Yet it is seldom remarked that the ‘Highland Army’ is an English name for a supposedly Gaelic phenomenon. As Mark Knights has observed, in the years after the Exclusion Crisis, political ‘cant’ both ‘helped to create party allegiance’ and at the same time ‘imperilled a common language’: we should subject all the rhetorical positions of party in 1679–1760 to analysis with this in mind, instead of accepting them as simply descriptive of phenomena of which they are in fact characteristic.15 The confusion between the geographical and ideological status of the Jacobite Army can be seen abroad as well as at home. An estimate of Jacobite strength in France from the 1720s characterises the leadership as ‘Cheffs Montagnards’, Highland chiefs. Those named include the dukes of Gordon, Perth, Athol, Hamilton and Mar, Lord Aboyne, Lord Forbes, Lord Wemyss, Lord Traquair, Arbuthnot and many others. A distinction between ‘le plat Pays’ (the low countries) and the mountains is acknowledged, but there is no clear sign that it is understood that many of those named are Scottish or British peers whose lives, interests and fighting tails lay far from the Gaidhealtachd. At home, George III was painted in tartan as a child in 1745, possibly in order to emphasise the reconciliatory, patriot king quality of the second in line to the throne: certainly not to suggest that he was a Highlander. In any event, the Rising of that year kept tartan from the wardrobe of the British royal family for almost half a century.16 WHAT WAS A JACOBITE? Beyond the symbolism of tartan, and its conflation of the Gaidhealtachd with the patriot nation as a whole, Jacobitism was undoubtedly a complex phenomenon throughout the British Isles . Like most political choices, it allowed for varying levels of commitment, but it was yet more complicated insofar as the goals sought by the Jacobites were different in the different British kingdoms. Relatively few Jacobites, especially after the earliest stages of the movement, fought or intrigued or wrote or displayed their sympathy with the cause solely for reasons of personal allegiance to the Stuart heir. Had this – or an abstract affection for absolutist monarchy – been the prime motivations of Jacobitism, as some historians have pretended, it would not have remained the controversial phenomenon it is. Instead, the Stuarts were the means to an end, the lever which would

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

43

deliver a jackpot of differing political and religious values to the diverse nations engaged in playing the odds against the post-1688 regime. What Jacobites had in common was a desire to undermine the British state in its early modern form, and that is why their cause has had no good or serious press from the tellers of Britain’s national story: north of the Border, as Stuart Reid rightly observes, ‘the majority of those who donned the Jacobite white cockade were certainly very consciously fighting for Scotland’. There was no question for virtually all Jacobites that the Stuarts would be restored to their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, it is true: but the British government of the Stuarts would be a restored multikingdom monarchy, not the centralist state that had begun to develop after 1688: as James VII and II himself wrote ‘ ’tis the true interest of the crown to keep that kingdom [Scotland] separate from England’. The separateness of the three kingdoms in much proJacobite thinking can be seen in the fact that French foreign policy occasionally considered the possibility of restoration in Scotland or Ireland alone.17 However, almost as much separated the Jacobites as united them. Irish Jacobites frequently desired Catholic hegemony and the end of Saxon rule in Ireland; Scottish Jacobites wanted to restore the Edinburgh Parliament and Episcopal Church government; English and Welsh Jacobites focused on the financial revolution, higher taxes, pro-Hanoverian foreign policy and the threat to the Anglican High Church posed by the Lutheran Georges. Some Jacobites also wanted religious toleration in a more diverse British state: for example, George Flint argued for ‘Christian Union’ and ‘for the complete equality of England, Wales and Scotland’. Oppressive enclosures of land and the culture of smuggling were issues which roused popular Jacobitism. Support for the Stuarts was thus far more than the taking of sides in a dynastic squabble: it was a major military, political and religious threat both to the manner of the British state’s organisation, and to the existence of that state itself. Leaving aside the dangerously fissiparous tendencies of Scottish and Irish Jacobitism, there was a fear in England that a restored Stuart Crown’s Parliament might (as in 1660) pass an Act Rescissory which would annul decades of legislation. Although Charles II had accepted some of the changes in landholding which had occurred in 1642–60, and James VIII and III was at least on occasion prepared to negotiate acceptance of the National Debt, fear of major

44

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

retrospective legislation was not unjustified. The Jacobite threat certainly moved markets.18 For Jacobites, the deposition of James II and VII from the Crowns of England (1688), Scotland (1689) and Ireland (1691) was not only the replacement of a rightful king by a usurper, but the end of caesaropapist Anglican sacramental monarchy, hopes for Catholic rights and the idea of a British Isles with multiple centres of power. The sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament, which offered William and Mary the Crown, emerged as a post hoc ergo propter hoc doctrine of justification for its own proceedings in 1688–9. Ireland and the Irish Parliament were marginalised, the Council of Wales and the Marches was abolished, the Scottish Parliament was dissolved by Union and Scotland’s Privy Council by fiat; the Convocation of the Church of England was sidelined, and the bench of bishops further politicised through a stream of Whig appointments. In the end, even the Cornish Stannaries assembly disappeared. The Act of Settlement (1701) had by 1714 excluded fifty-seven Catholic heirs, and Catholic, Dissenter, dissenting Anglican and Episcopalian alike laboured under a series of penalties, which included further challenges to the right of primogeniture, itself already cast in doubt by the exclusion of the Stuarts and all near heirs, and intensified by the fact that the Stuarts were the legitimate heirs of all the AngloScottish dynasties back to the House of Wessex and the claim of Bruce. The bias to the poor and support for traditional gentry duties which the Stuart regimes had evinced, or were thought to have evinced in England, served in certain areas to coalesce the interests of Tory gentlemen and the ‘lower orders’. In Ireland, the claims for national autonomy made by James’s 1689 Dublin Parliament were to remain a focus of nationalist nostalgia for centuries, while the Stuarts themselves (through their descent as a Scottish royal house from Irish roots) were regarded as rightful monarchs, whose return would expel the Saxon and renew Catholicism and righteousness. In Scotland, Scottish nationalism, Episcopalianism and a deep commitment to the traditional organisation of the society from which its native kings sprang, were all important factors. Jacobitism was – and always remained – an international movement, at odds with the couthy and cosy marginalia of the Myth. In November 1745, for example, the French invasion force being prepared to sail included the 1st, 2nd and 3rd battalions of the Ecossais Royal in the French service, two battalions of Crillon’s, two

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

45

battalions of the Regiment d’Orle´ans, one of the Wallon, one of Beauvoisis, six Irish Brigade battalions and two mixed battalions under the duc de Fronsac. These ‘were merely the first units to be definitely allocated’, and display in their very composition the international nature of Jacobitism, as well as the separate national agenda of Ireland and Scotland within it. The Royal Scots battalion which landed at Montrose in November 1745 recruited a second battalion while on campaign in Scotland, during his exile after 1746, Cameron of Locheil (a ‘Highland’ Jacobite) commanded the Regiment d’Albany (Scots Regiment) and David Ogilvy of Airlie (a ‘Lowland’ Jacobite) commanded the Regiment d’Ogilvy. In 1762, the Royal Scots and Ogilvy’s were ‘drafted into the Irish Brigades’ (d’Albany having been disbanded in the meantime). As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4, the Irish Brigades were already no strangers to Scottish recruits, and indeed Scottish recruiting.19 In Scotland, the strongest Jacobite areas tended to be Episcopalian rather than Highland: although more than 70 per cent of the principal clans had ‘a significant commitment’ to Episcopalianism, it was this commitment rather than the social organisation in which it occurred that was a defining factor in Jacobite activity: as Allan Macinnes points out, ‘confessional nationalism . . . came to be rooted in non-juring Episcopalianism’, who ‘no less than the Catholic community, were subject to the penal laws’, even if these were often more discreetly applied (though not always: after the ’45 Catholic priests were treated with more lenity than their Episcopalian brethren). In Ross, Moray and Aberdeenshire over 40 per cent were Episcopalians at the time of the Union (almost twenty years after disestablishment), with a high of around 50 per cent in Ross; in Angus and the Mearns, about a quarter (possibly up to a half) were Episcopalians. By contrast, Lothian (excluding Edinburgh) and the eastern Borders had under 5 per cent Episcopalians in the population. I will examine what effect this had on recruitment in the next chapter.20 SCOTTISH RISINGS BEFORE THE ’45 Scotland was the country where the pattern and nature of Jacobite support, and the rationale for supporting a Jacobite Rising, changed most in the period after 1689. In the first Rising, John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, although he commanded James VII’s army in Scotland and had recently led it south to engage

46

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

William of Orange’s forces, could find only fifty horsemen to accompany him out of Edinburgh in early April 1689, and had hardly – if any – more troops in the field when he raised King James’ standard on Dundee Law a couple of weeks later. Eventually, Dundee amassed an army of around 2,600 men, three regiments of whom were Irish troops sent across to support the Jacobite cause in Scotland (Antrim’s, Cormac O’Neill’s and Brigadier-General Ramsay’s). This force was much the same size as some of Montrose’s Royalist armies in the 1640s. As in Montrose’s wars, it drew primarily on western clans hostile to the power of Argyll, which was potentially immeasurably enhanced by the Revolution: Glengarry, MacDonalds of Sleat, Keppoch and Glencoe, Stewarts of Appin, Clanranald, Locheil and Sir Alexander Maclean. The northeast, later a bastion of Jacobitism, was relatively passive; although quite a number of the Lowland gentry were thought to be sympathetic, few joined. Indeed, arguments which explain away Jacobite recruiting in 1715 and 1745 on the grounds that many were forced, need to address the evidently woeful recruitment figures in 1689. Only forty horse fought at Killiecrankie for the Jacobites, as against the 2,000 plus they fielded in 1715 and 600 in 1745 (see Appendix). As late as 1745, the above clans – even excluding Sleat – raised a maximum of around 4,200 men, far more than they had managed in 1689 (see Appendix). Dundee’s army triumphed at Killiecrankie at the cost of 700 lives including his own, in a battle whose horrendous casualty rates (almost half of those engaged may have been killed, including over a third of the Jacobites) prefigured Culloden more than might be assumed. Mackay’s plug bayonets are sometimes blamed for disabling his troops from firing with fixed bayonets: this possibly is part of a mythology which exaggerates the importance of Cumberland’s bayonet drill at Culloden (see Chapter 5). With regard to Killiecrankie, it is not unreasonable to say that had Mackay had level ground, Cumberland’s artillery and the flanking move of the Argyll militia, he would have won – plug bayonets or no plug bayonets.21 The frontal charge against musketry which did so much to decimate the Jacobite Army at Killiecrankie was followed by their force being stalemated by a single battalion of Cameronians at Dunkeld. The accession of forces to the Jacobites was slow, falling far short of Mackay’s fear that ‘the whole north’ would declare for James if Dundee won a victory. His successors, Colonel Cannon and Major-General Thomas Buchan, failed to achieve momentum.

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

47

Eventually, some 4,000–5,000 men were involved in the military side of the Rising including ‘about 300 horse’. The Stuart force of Dundee and his successors was defeated at Cromdale in 1690, petered out with the surrenders of 1691 and was extinguished with the fall of the Bass Rock in 1694. James VII had lost his Crown by force. The commander of his armies in Scotland was loyal to him, as was the Duke of Gordon, who held Edinburgh Castle. In Ireland, uniquely in the Jacobite era, tens of thousands were in arms for King James. William’s Dutch regime was insecure, based on military force, and had to fight in both Scotland and Ireland, while France openly supported the Stuart cause. In Scotland, Dundee, serving Major-General at the Revolution and of the family and name of the great Montrose, should have been able to rally a vast army to defend Scotland’s native king and kingdom, and strike a decisive blow against the foreign invader. He could not. Indeed, his small, fastmoving force had much more in common with Montrose’s armies of similar strength than with the Jacobite armies of 1715 and 1745: Dundee’s force was ill-equipped to hold territory, elect local magistrates, gain Lowland recruitment and much else that these armies managed, nor is there any sign that he could ever have faced a regular army of 10,000, such as Hawley’s at Falkirk in January 1746, and defeated it. Victories outwith high ground were hard to come by for forces such as Dundee’s; by contrast, in 1745, the Jacobite Army won three battles in the south and east of Scotland. The armies raised to fight for the Stuarts in the ’15 and ’45 came much closer in strength to national precedents for full Scottish mobilisation than did the small and overwhelmingly Highland force commanded by Dundee. If Scottish Jacobitism was primarily based on loyalty to the Stuart dynasty ahead of other considerations, why could it raise almost ten times as many men in 1715 as in 1689?22 The chief and most obvious reason was the Union, but it is important to consider others. The position of the Episcopalians was not so clear-cut in 1689 as it was to become in 1690, when a General Assembly solely constituted of those from south of the Tay established Presbyterianism in Scotland. Presbyterians had a secure majority south of the Tay; but more than half the population lived north of it. From the days of Erskine of Dun, Superintendent (Bishop) of Angus and Mearns from 1562 to 1589, and ‘sole representative of the burgesses of Scotland at the wedding of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin of France’, through resistance to the Covenant in the 1630s to the Jacobite period, the east coast had been

48

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

sympathetic to Episcopalianism, if not to Catholicism itself. As Gordon Donaldson noted in his key essay on ‘The Conservative North’, in 1690 only four out of 200 clergy in the synods of Aberdeen, Banff, Moray, Ross and Caithness ‘conformed to Presbyterianism’.23 For the next twenty years, the representatives of this Kirk sought – often with difficulty and sometimes with violence – to dispossess all Episcopalians from their livings in the northern half of Scotland: with mixed success, for as late as 1710 there were still 113 Episcopalian incumbents north of the Tay. As Michael Lynch argues, ‘in effect, it was a partition church of southern Scotland which claimed the right to deprive all ministers who fell short of its ideal of fullblown presbyterianism’. Attitudes hardened on both sides, and the Episcopalian areas of Scotland became increasingly confirmed in their Jacobitism, largely rejecting both a potential accommodation with the Presbyterian Kirk in 1695, and the toleration offered in 1712: as with their Nonjuring brethren in England (strongest in the south of that country), the Acts requiring explicit abjuration of the Stuart heir pressed hard on their consciences. Limited toleration was always on the basis of loyalty to the post-1689 monarchy, and this was slow in coming. The consequence was that Episcopalianism gradually drifted towards the position of Catholicism under the Penal Laws, though this always remained technically worse: for example, the Scots Parliament introduced an Act of 1700 which deprived ‘Catholic families of their estate in favour of the nearest protestant heir’. In practice however, despite the supposed hatred of the Highlands, ‘no member of any clan fine faced punitive sanctions for recusancy’.24 Under the pressure of persecution, Episcopalian belief and practice, particularly in its north-east heartlands, drifted towards Catholic or at least pre-Reformation spirituality: in 1716 the Jacobite Allan Sanderson, ‘who had lived as an Episcopalian, confessed on the gallows to being secretly a Catholic and wanting to die in open acknowledgement of his faith,’ while both Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’s cross-confessional retreat at Rosehearty (‘closely modelled on Poiret’s Rhinjsburg experiment’, a community based on Quietist principles) and the 1717–21 conversations with the Orthodox are evidence of the ecumenical nature of a good deal of Episcopalian thought and practice. After the accession of the Lutheran George I in 1714, Episcopalian attitudes hardened further. In the 1720s, controversy over the Catholicising ‘Usages’ split the Scottish

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

49

Episcopalian community, though in the end the Usages prevailed. These were the mixed chalice (Catholic and Apostolic, rejected by Luther, included in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer but omitted in 1552), the epiclesis (prayer for descent of the Holy Spirit on the consecrated Elements, reintroduced from the 1637 Laudian Prayer Book), prayers of oblation offering the Elements to the Father and prayers for the faithful departed, introduced in a new liturgy by the English Nonjuring Primus (chief bishop) Jeremy Collier in 1717. These Usages were clearly suggestive both of transubstantiation and intercession for the dead, both Catholic doctrines. Whether or not they accepted the Usages, however, Episcopalians shared with Catholics a refusal to see the Reformation as a Year Zero after which nothing could be the same. The two confessions were thus often identified by their Presbyterian opponents as sharing similar, or, indeed, the same, goals. In a ‘complaint’ to the Presbytery of Kincardine O’Neil in 1704, it was stated by the minister James Robertson that 134 out of 168 local Catholics were apostate Protestants. There would have been much local sympathy for them: the penalties for ‘popery’ in Scotland were evaded most at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Buchan, Strathdee and Strathbogie, all areas with large Episcopalian populations, while even in the mid-seventeenth century it was stated that ‘no buyers could be found’ for ‘the forfeited Estates of the Roman Catholicks and those that stood out against the Covenant’ in Aberdeen. Bourignonism (adopted by the Arminian Protestant Poiret) and the religious ideas associated with Mme Guyon spread ecumenically through Episcopalian and Catholic ranks in the north-eastern Lowlands, a place where many local Episcopalian gentry had more time for the Archbishop of Cambrai (Fe´nelon) than that of Canterbury. The ‘Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746, so far as it concerned the counties of Aberdeen and Banff’ records that ‘a very great and good understanding there was betwixt the Nonjurants [Episcopalians] and them [Catholics], so that Seaton, a priest, and Law, a Nonjurant minister, were very commonly joined together among Lord Lewis Gordon’s council’. In the Highlands, Jean McCann remarks that Episcopalians and Catholics were ‘closely mingled’ in Ardnamurchan and the Cameron country. The government agreed that Episcopalians were as much or more of a threat than Catholics, and the penal legislation of 1746 declared Scottish Episcopal holy orders invalid, and capped this attack by prescribing that ‘no Scottish Priest, whether he took the Oaths or not, was to be

50

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

allowed to officiate’. Only clergy ordained by the Church of England or Church or Ireland could henceforth legitimately hold Episcopal orders in Scotland.25 The Episcopalian Church of Scotland was then, pace Colley, a ‘Protestant’ confession which was opposed – even virulently opposed – to the British state in its post-Revolution form. The hardening of Episcopalian Jacobite sympathies in the 1690s and early 1700s rendered the Church’s adherents a formidable ideological and, at times, military force in favour of the Stuarts and against the Union – which of course, enshrined the Presbyterian Kirk as the established religion of Scotland. Episcopalian Jacobitism was much more important than Catholic Jacobitism, for although we almost certainly underestimate the number of Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland (Catholics who outwardly conformed to Protestantism can be found as late as 1777, for example), they were still a tiny minority, around 2 per cent or so of the population of Scotland in Allan Macinnes’ estimate, and even the most generous allowances and suppositions could hardly double that figure. Episcopalianism, by contrast, had the adherence of ‘between one-third and one-half’ (the lower estimate is much the safer) of the population at the time of the Union. More generally, it should be noted that over 40 per cent of the population of the British Isles did not belong to the established Churches, and that over half were not Anglicans. The united Protestant front was illusory in an age when people still cared about theology.26 If religious tensions fed the Jacobite cause, the famines of the 1690s, ‘King William’s Ill Years’, also contributed. Up to 20 per cent of the population in some areas died or emigrated (13 per cent in Scotland as a whole), and the Episcopal clergy claimed that the famine represented a judgement on Scotland for abandoning the Stuarts. Some east coast areas, strong for Episcopalianism, suffered significant losses (Aberdeenshire saw a 21 per cent ‘population decline’, for example): they had also suffered heavy losses in the 1644–5 plague, which had marked the climax and defeat of Montrose’s campaign. Between 1639 and 1690, Dundee’s population dropped from around 12,000 to under 9,000. Other figures were comparable: Aberdeen (including Futtie, Torry and Oldmachar) lost almost 20 per cent of its population in 1647 alone. ‘Two-thirds’ of the population of Brechin and a large part of Leith’s died in 1645. Many areas had barely recovered before the 1690s swept away a fresh generation; up to 200,000 Scots emigrated to Ireland between

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

51

1688 and 1715 alone. By 1745, the populations of the counties of Angus, Midlothian and Kincardine had advanced barely, if at all, on their population in 1691; the west Lowlands had increased, but it is still arguable on the mid-eighteenth century figures that ‘it is not impossible . . . that Lowland Scotland in 1691 had much the same population as it had in 1755’. Given the losses of the mid- to late 1640s, it is likely that in 1745 the population of Scotland was more or less unchanged from a century earlier. Not only are these statistics an indicator of suffering and likely consequent resentment; they also provide an important consideration in comparing the forces raised by the Jacobites for those in arms for the Covenant in the 1640s, the last time that anything approaching national mobilisation had occurred in Scotland.27 On James VII and II’s death in 1701, the English Parliament’s Act of Settlement excluded all Catholic heirs from the English Crown for good: Sophia of Hanover was to become heir to Anne, who was King William’s sister-in-law. The Act was reinforced by that of Abjuration (1702), which required a formal renunciation of allegiance to the Jacobite claimant James III (VIII of Scotland), whose title was widely recognised on the Continent. The political views of many among the Scottish elite were not as radical as this, as there was a lingering sympathy for the native line of kings. For a while some – including the Duke of Hamilton, who would have been a likely heir – toyed with the idea of retaining a Protestant succession in the native line of Scotland, while others may have turned to Jacobitism as the only realistic option. In any event, the Act of Security of the Scottish Parliament (1704) indicated an unwillingness to ratify the Act of Settlement, reserving the right to alter the Hanoverian succession. This, in turn, was a major driver of the Union, for England could not afford the dynastic or foreign policy risk an independent Scotland might pose, while tiresomely independent Caledonian imperial ventures such as Darien also complicated English policy goals. The Treaty of Union, which took effect on 1 May 1707, was undoubtedly the trigger for a massive increase in Jacobite military support, compared with any previous levels of support for the Episcopalian and Stuart causes: even supporters of the Union admitted that three-quarters of the Scottish people disliked it. The Earl of Mar, one of its supporters, wrote to his brother on 9 August 1707 about the ‘aversion to the Union’, and its role in Jacobite designs. Crucially, however, the loss of national independence in a

52

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

climate of economic weakness was combined with the imposition of the English Act of Settlement and the irreversible establishment of Presbyterianism in a country where Episcopalian clergy in possession before 1689 were still in the process of being removed from their livings by force. Jacobite opposition to the Union was thus not merely opportunistic: it was fundamental, because the Union enshrined usurpation and Presbyterianism, two things that Scottish Jacobites in general hated. As Allan Macinnes emphasises, ‘the exiled Stuarts were committed to reversing the Union no less than the Revolution Settlement in order to effect their restoration to the three kingdoms’. Scotland was ‘stripped of what their Predecessors had gallantly maintained for many Hundred Years . . . Independency and Sovereignty’, while it was widely thought that ‘the Presbyterian Ministers . . . Preached up against the Union whilst they thought their Kirk not well enough secured, but that once being done, they valued not the Country nor the Peoples Liberties’. Some Presbyterians supported the Jacobites on the national and dynastic question alone in 1715 (many others stayed neutral), though all the evidence is that these were much fewer in number by 1745. In England, the Nonjuring Church supported – at least in principle – the Stuarts, and opposed the often Whiggish and latitudinarian Anglicanism that gained ground after 1714: but had England under the Hanoverians established Presbyterianism, Jacobitism would have been much stronger. This was the case in Scotland. After the Union, Jacobites operated increasingly clearly as an ‘identifiable group within the framework of the Scottish political system’. In the 1710 elections, ‘the Scots Jacobite Tories showed all the characteristics of a contemporary political party’.28 Strong Presbyterians – such as the former Covenanters of the West – also opposed the Union, because it did not establish their own brand of Presbyterianism, which, in its intense vision of Scotland as a kind of new Israel, was in any case more nationally particularist than that of the established Kirk. However, these radicals had nowhere to go after 1707, and Jacobite hopes that they might be enlisted in support of a Stuart restoration were almost certainly misplaced, though Mar among others suspected a Jacobite–Cameronian link.29 Taxation increased as a consequence of the Union, rising ‘approximately five-fold overall’ after 1707, and this helped the Jacobites further. National identity, bound up with the loss of independence and the loss of native kings, was also bound up with a suffering economy. The east coast ports in particular lost their

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

53

Continental trade or saw it severely disrupted, and smuggling throve in burghs like Montrose, becoming a politicised crime strongly associated with Jacobites, which flourished in these coastal towns in consequence. Jacobite efforts to break the Union began almost at once, with the abortive Rising of 1708. In the 1710 General Election, about sixteen of the forty-five MPs returned in Scotland could be identified as Jacobites, and this group (which included Sir Alexander Erskine, the Lord Lyon, Lord James Murray and John Carnegie of Boysack, who was out in 1715) agitated for qualified Episcopal toleration and a repeal of the Union. Scottish elites in general were heavily Jacobite: In August and September 1715, 261 JPs (almost one in five) were dismissed for Jacobite sympathes and 198 new appointments made. If this was a purge it was far from comprehensive . . . after the rising 77 per cent of the JPs in Kincardine were dismissed, 54 per cent of those in Forfarshire, a half of those in Inverness-shire, and three in ten of those in Aberdeenshire. The extent of the disaffection from the Hanoverian regime was almost incalculable . . .30

It will be noted that there is no apparent distinction here between Highland (Inverness-shire at least) and Lowland areas: the JP system was a national issue. As Elizabeth Carmichael has argued, the JP system allowed Jacobites to ‘operate’ ‘as a clearly identifiable group within the framework of the Scottish political system’ ‘for almost fifty years after the Act of Union’. In 1715, when King James ‘VIII’ landed in what he called ‘my own ancient kingdom’ at Peterhead, he found at least the northern part of it secured for him. Unrest had been evident for some years: in 1712, there was disorder in Edinburgh on King James’s birthday, when ‘Early in the morning, about One or Two of the Cloack, Some boyes in a body went through the Streett Crying God Save King James and drinking his health, Discharging Some few Musquetts, or Pistols . . . this continued for two or three hours’. A further mob were in the streets that evening. Groups of men armed met and mustered: a list in the Mar and Kellie papers gives nineteen names of those who attended one armed rendezvous in the Grassmarket alone. Shortly after Queen Anne died, on 11 August 1714, ‘a procession consisting of a number of young men and two fiddlers playing Jacobite tunes marched through the streets and gathering round the well at the Castlegate, drank the health of James VIII’. On 21 August 1714, Aberdeen

54

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

began to prepare for a possible Rising. Inverness, Montrose, Elgin and Dundee all reacted negatively to ‘the proclamation of George I’, while there were Jacobite incidents in Aberdeen, Perth (where ‘No Union’ was the cry) and near Falkirk. There was a general ‘campaign against the Union’ at this time in a number of Jacobite areas. By contrast, a Whig mob of 5,000 was reported in Glasgow, with the exception of Ayr the only considerable burgh where the Stuarts were genuinely unpopular. In October, Colonel John Forrester of the Irish Brigade was ‘sent over’ to assess the situation in Scotland: it was certainly strong for those who wished to restore the Stuarts and break the Union.31 During the next year, unrest intensified. Commissions were being distributed by men in the Irish service throughout southern Scotland and the north of England: one was offered to James Dundas, younger of Arniston, on the streets of Edinburgh in August 1715. On 23 August 1715, Sir George Warrender opined that the Jacobites were in a majority in the north; on 24 September, Argyll wrote to Townshend that ‘On the other side of the river [Forth], excepting my few friends in the North and those of my vassals in the West Highlands, they [the Jacobites] have a hundred to one at least in their interest’. Pardonable exaggeration or not, some 60–70 per cent of the population probably lived north of Forth, and Argyll’s figure tallies with an estimate that ‘two-thirds of Scotland were Stuart in sympathy’. It is also yet another indication that the Forth, and not the Highland line, was the significant political frontier within Scotland in the Jacobite era.32 The Rising of 1715, as I shall argue in detail in Chapter 4, was a national rising to ‘restore the Kingdom [of Scotland] to its ancient free and independent state’ in the words of King James; to gain the ‘independency’ of the ‘ancient kingdom’ in Mar’s manifesto (‘the present Quarrel turns upon these Two Points, the Restoring our Lawful Natural King, And the Dissolving the Union’); in the words of Captain John Nairn, it was a Rising to ‘assist in dissolving the union and making Scotland a free nation’. Robert Fairbairn printed a call which presented the rising as a national war for the whole of ‘our Brave and Ancient Nation’: ‘shew that you are indeed Scotsmen by joining with an Army’, for ‘Our whole Nation either is, or pretends to be sensible of the Mischief of the Union’. There was talk of ‘a Coronation at Scone and a Parliament at Perth’ among the Jacobites as Henry Fletcher of Saltoun wrote to his brother: this was to be a restored national monarchy. Even its opponents

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

55

acknowledged this: after the defeat of the ’15, Lord Stair argued that the best way to prevent another Rising was ‘to make the Union not grievous to Scotland’. As Michael Lynch observed many years ago, ‘the ’15 was never quite the Highland rising which the government, once it was over, chose to portray it as. The core of its active support had been in the north-eastern shires of Aberdeen, Forfar, Kincardine and Angus’. More recently, Daniel Szechi’s new standard study has continued to revise upwards the number of men involved: Szechi estimates a total of 21,000 Jacobites in arms (with a maximum strength of 15,000 at any one time), twice as many as fought with the government, and a figure close to the maximum levies thought possible in the Covenanting era).33 Such massive recruitment figures were not obtainable in the northeast and the Highlands alone, and a closer examination of the units of the Rising (see Appendix) bears this out. At a rough estimate there seem to have been about fifteen battalions of foot from Perthshire and environs with about three cavalry squadrons, ten battalions from Aberdeen (both city and county were reported in ‘general defection’ to the Jacobites) and Banff, plus about six to seven squadrons of cavalry, sixteen to eighteen Highland battalions and a horse troop, two battalions and a cavalry squadron from Angus, and the equivalent of seven squadrons of horse from Fife and southern Scotland (‘not a leading man of weight or fortune to be trusted’ in Dumfries was the report to government). We do not have muster strengths for every unit, but in raw terms there seems to have been a 60:40 Lowland/Highland split. However, as I have argued above, such hard and fast ethno-cultural distinctions themselves vary from the rough and ready to the meaningless; and it is likely that a good number of units were mixed (Panmure’s Foot, for example, and Mackintosh’s, as we shall see below), as also occurred in 1745, while the ideology of the ‘Highland’ army again militated in favour of tartan for all troops, irrespective of origin: Lord Drummond, it was remarked, ‘endeavoured to pass all upon the world as Highlanders’ who had enlisted in his three battalions. In a report of 30 September 1715, Mar was estimated to have ‘betwixt 3 and 4000 foot but not well armed . . . all in Highland Cloaths tho mostly Lowland men’, with over 200 horse, and 1,200 foot coming in; an October report mentions 2,700 Lowland infantry and 900 cavalry, with 2,435 Highlanders. By late October, one government estimate suggests that out of 17,700 under arms, only 4,100 (23 per cent) were clansmen, but on the other hand, Highland

56

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

forces were often later in coming up. At Perth, on 5 November 1715, twenty-one troops of horse are counted with the Jacobites, all but one Lowland, and some ten out of thirty-two Lowland infantry battalions, including those who have not yet come up, suggesting that ‘Lowlanders’ were 90 per cent of the cavalry (though Huntly’s ‘light horse’, mounted on Shetland ponies, were to an extent arguably ‘Highland’) and 30 per cent of the infantry, roughly 42 per cent overall. The review at Auchterarder before Sheriffmuir suggests some 44 per cent (3,900 from 8,800) in ‘Lowland units’; Mackintosh in the south had some 70 per cent Lowlanders from his 2,000–2,400 command after Viscount Kenmure joined with five troops of horse. The early- to mid-November total would then be 5,650 Lowlanders from 11,400 – almost 50 per cent, and to this must be added perhaps 1,000 more under Huntly and 1,100 or so English recruits, suggesting that ‘Highland’ troops were only some 43 per cent of the ascertainable November musters. But it is now clear these musters fall well short of the total number engaged on the Jacobite side, with only 13,500 men or so accounted for by them. The peak figures for the army units reported suggest just short of 18,000 men engaged, with a few additional units for which no reliable estimate of strength exists: the whole army ‘expect to be 20,000 strong’ at the ‘head of Forth’ as a contemporary government intelligence source noted. Although the ’15 is less well-documented in the localities than the ‘Forty-five, it is surely likely that – as in the later Rising – ‘Lowland’ Jacobite forces were likely to be disproportionately engaged in guarding the localities, particularly if they were urban recruits and part of nobody’s ‘fighting tail’: such was the position of many Arbroath and Montrose levies in 1745, for example. Factoring these in would suggest a total of only 35–40 per cent of Mar’s army came from the Gaidhealtachd excluding Perthshire/Banff. The Clerk of Penicuik papers suggest that Mar ‘marched 15,000 out of pearth and in battell’ at Sheriffmuir, (though intriguingly, Clerk himself elsewhere estimated the entire army at ‘about 10,000 men’); Argyll estimated 11,000 engaged at Sheriffmuir, ‘two thousand men out on Detachments’ and 500 guarding Perth itself. More recent estimates for Mar’s total force have ranged over the years from 12,000 to 20,000, but Szechi’s definitive study goes beyond the higher figure to demonstrate the strength in depth of the Rising.34 Within two months then, Mar had ten times the army Dundee had raised in the same period, though the former was a politician of mixed reputation without military experience, and the latter in

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

57

command of the king’s army in Scotland. The Union was surely the key to this change, not just by virtue of the end of Scottish independence but because of the other religious and political issues which it enshrined and the changes that had begun to take effect in its wake. Jacobite rhetoric reflected these realities among the Jacobite support, as I will discuss in more detail later. The historic unity of the Scottish kingdom, rubbished by the Enlightenment historians and their nineteenth-century Whig successors, and only now being rehabilitated by scholars, was an important article in Jacobite ideology. The old historiography of patriot resistance implied it; and the publishing history of the Jacobite era reflected it. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, an iconic text for modern nationalists, was first published in 1689; in 1745, it was republished at Edinburgh, its stress on ‘Liberty alone that we fight and contend for’ having a particularly contemporary ring. The core case for Jacobitism’s strong link to nationalism, which I will be looking at in detail in Chapter 4, was the fact that the native dynasty and the unified nation had long had a symbiotic relationship. This was not unusual in early modern Europe, though perhaps its intensity was. As R. R. Davies puts it: What is surely striking . . . in the remarkable political rhetoric [of Scotland] . . . is the degree to which the growth in the power of the monarchy is matched by the evidence for an active, self-identifying community or solidarity, a single people . . . the position of the Scots admitted of no argument . . .35

We have travelled a long way from the Highland clans, and their bloody and feckless barbarity or noble and misplaced loyalty. Indeed, the personnel of the ’15 reflected this: of the Scots officers taken prisoner at Preston among 1,005 Scots and 463 English, there are some fifty-seven ‘Lowland’ and sixty-four ‘Highland’ names (including all Robertsons and Stewarts as the latter, and allowing for the ‘Dow’ which might indicate ‘dubh’, and other Gaelic-related Anglicisations), a national spread reflected also within the structures of regimental command. Among the captured Mackintosh officers are Lieutenant-Colonel Ferguson, Captain Richard Shaw, Lieutenant William McGuire and Ensigns John Dunbar and William Milne: only fifteen of forty captured Mackintosh officers bore the name of the clan. Similarly, any list of those involved in the ’15 shows the extent of its national reach, from figures like Patrick Bannerman, Provost of Aberdeen and John Bayne, Deacon of the

58

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Wrights in Perth, to Alexander Barclay, Minister at Peterhead and Robert Douglas, Minister of Bothwell. A significant number of Presbyterian clergy joined the Rising.36 As in 1745, where I will be examining the case in detail in the next chapter, the Jacobite forces of 1715 were conventionally organised in the manner of any other contemporary European army. A complete account of the officers and their commands exists for the Earl of Panmure’s foot regiment: the colonel was, of course, Panmure himself, the lieutenant-colonel Patrick Lyon of Auchterhouse and the major Alexander Leslie. Panmure had the first company’s command, Lyon the second and Leslie the third. The other nine companies in the battalion were commanded by captains, usually with a lieutenant and ensign under them, two sergeants and two corporals. There were an adjutant, a quartermaster, a surgeon, a chaplain and three drummers. The commanders of the other nine companies were William Chrichton, Alexander Duncan of Ardournie, David Gairn of Latoun, Malcolm Gregorie, John Blair, William Nairne of Baldowan, Alexander Arbuthnot of Findaurie, James Carnegie of Finhaven and John Oliphant, a Dundee bailie, who captained the 12th (Grenadier) company. The companies ranged in size from thirty to fifty: as we shall see in Chapter 2, this was by no means out of line with contemporary army practice. The Jacobite Army of 1715 was a regular force, with strong elements of regular organisation.37 Both the terms Highlander and Jacobite are slippery concepts, but they are important ones, driven by politics and ideology as much as loyalty or culture. In 1715 and 1745, that politics and culture appealed across much of Scotland. In the next chapter, I will be examining the strength and military organisation of the Jacobite Army in 1745 in a discussion which will open with an evaluation of the size, nature and strength of the Covenanting armies, raised from a broadly similar population a century before, in comparison with the post-Union forces raised by the Jacobites. NOTES 1 Colonel James Allardyce (ed.), Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699–1750, 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1895/ 6), I: 166, 169–70; National Library of Scotland Adv MS 23.3.30f. 56; Sir Bruce Seton, ‘Dress of the Jacobite Army’, Scottish Historical Review 25 (1928), 270–81, 273–4, 277–9.

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

59

2 Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603– 1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 59; Peter Simpson, The Independent Highland Companies 1603–1760 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996), 74. 3 David Dobson, Jacobites of the ’15 (Aberdeen: Scottish Association of Family History Societies, 1993), 1; Murray Pittock, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 6–7; Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 23; Leah Leneman, Living in Atholl, 1685–1785 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 44, 142, 168ff and ‘A new role for a lost cause: Lowland romanticism of the Jacobite Highlander’, in Leneman (ed.), Perspectives in Scottish Social History in honour of Rosalind Mitchison (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 107–24, 121n. 4 Pittock, New History, 173. 5 Pittock, New History, 48–9. 6 John Malcolm Bulloch, ‘The lairds of Glenbuchat’, in W. Douglas Simpson (ed.), The Book of Glenbuchat, (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1942), 57–82, 76 for report from Derby; Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape, Witness to Rebellion: John Maclean’s Journal of the ‘FortyFive and the Penicuik Drawings (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 27. 7 Thomas Clancy and Barbara E. Crawford, ‘The formation of the Scottish Kingdom’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland, (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 28–95, 41, 65; A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1978 [1975]), 64; Peter G. B. MacNeill and Hector L. MacQueen, An Atlas of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1996); G. W. S. Barrow, ‘The sources for the history of the highlands in the middle ages’, in Loraine Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands, (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981), 11–22, 19; Alexander Grant, ‘Whither Scottish History? To the Medieval Foundations’, Scottish Historical Review (1994), 4–24, 7, 12, 22; A. Macinnes, Clanship, ix, 1, 2, 6. 8 William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988) and Macinnes, Clanship, 176 for Episcopal and Catholic attitudes towards Gaelic. 9 ‘Memorial concerning the Highlands of Scotland, by Simon Lord Lovat’ [1727], National Archives SP 54/18/55; ‘Some Thoughts Concerning the State of the Highlands of Scotland’, NA SP 54/34/4G (Lord President Forbes, extract sent to Albermarle, 24 January 1747); Jean McCann, ‘The organization of the Jacobite Army, 1745–1746’, unpublished Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1963, 55; List of Persons

60

10 11

12

13

14

15

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans Concerned in the Rebellion, Earl of Rosebery and Walter Macleod (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1890), xv; Martin Kelvin, The Scottish Pistol, (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 25. National Archives of Scotland GD 103/2/4/44 (Society of Antiquaries Collection: Order of Highland Army). Macinnes, Clanship, 38 (Sir James Campbell), 169; Murray Pittock, ‘Patriot dress and patriot games: tartan from the Jacobites to Queen Victoria’, in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Culture, Nation, and the new Scottish Parliament (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 158–74, 161–2; Roger A. Mason, ‘Civil society and the Celts: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the ancient Scottish past’, in Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (eds), Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 95– 119, 103, 113–17; Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991), 299. ‘March of the Highland Army, in the Years 1745–46, Being the Day Book of Captain James Stuart, of Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment’, Spalding Miscellany I (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1841), 275–344, 299, 313, 320; Seton, ‘Dress of the Jacobite Army’, 273ff; SP Domestic 54/9/2d (Intelligence Report from Perth, Stirling, 1 October 1715–I am indebted to Daniel Szechi for this reference and for the reference to Lockhart of Carnwath’s enthusiasm for the Highlands); Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Cause (Glasgow: Richard Drew and National Trust for Scotland, 1986), 105; Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46, (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 59–60, 62–3; Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England in 1745: The Last Campaign, (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 28; National Archives of Scotland GD 44/17/26/1 (‘Information for his Grace the Duke of Gordon by James Milne-Gordon Castle, November 22d 1745’); Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 56–7. National Archives, TS 20/88/16, 36, 38; Letters of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, George Smythe (ed.) (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1826), 47; Robin Nicholson, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture, 1720–1892 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 62–5, 73, 80. Roger Turner, Manchester in 1745 (London: Royal Stuart Society, n.d.), 12, 16, 17; Aberdeen University Library MS 2222; for Szechi essay, v. Jeremy Black and Eveline Cruickshanks (eds), The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). V. Murray Pittock, Jacobitism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Paul Kle´ber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

61

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army, 3; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [2005]), 297–8. ‘Volontaires e´cossais’, Fonds d’Argenson X: 60, Bibliotheque Universitaire de Poitiers. I am grateful to Dr Eveline Cruickshanks for this reference; Pittock, in Culture, Nation and the New Scottish Parliament, 162. V. Pittock, Jacobitism; Frank McLynn, ‘An eighteenth-century Scots republic? – an unlikely project from Absolutist France’, Scottish Historical Review 59 (1980), 177–81; Edward Corp, ‘The Irish at the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), 143–56, 149. George Flint, cited in Leo Gooch, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-East England, 1688–1745 (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1995), 155. F. J. McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981),115; Stuart Reid, Highland Clansmen 1689–1746 (Oxford: Osprey, 1999 [1997]), 59. Allan Macinnes, Clanship, 174, 176; Bruce Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot, The Prisoners of the ’45, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1929), I: 224; McCann,’Jacobite army’, 147; Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 47. Letters of John Grahame of Claverhouse, 42; Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiell, Bindon Blood and James MacKnight (eds) (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1842), 251; Paul Hopkins, Glencoe and the End of the Highland War (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998 [1986]), 130, 132, 136, 140, 143 182, 186; Macinnes, Clanship, 163 for comparable size of Montrose’s and Dundee’s armies. Hopkins, Glencoe, 182, 186, 465; Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiell, 369n; Magnus Linklater and Christian Hesketh, For King and Conscience: John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee (1648– 1689) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 171, 179, 200, 222, 224; Edward M. Furgol, A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies, 1639–1651 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990); David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland 1644–1657 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977) does not significantly disagree with Furgol’s figures for the period. Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: Scottish

62

24

25

26

27

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans Academic Press, 1985), 191, 200; Duncan Fraser, Montrose (before 1700) (Montrose: Standard Press, 1970), 85–6, 90. Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991), 304; Roger Davies, Bishop Nathaniel Spinckes and the Non-Juring Church, Royal Stuart Society Paper LXXI (Sevenoaks, 2007), 9; Macinnes, Clanship, 79. Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 51; Roger Davies, Bishop Nathaniel Spinckes and the Non-Juring Church, (Royal Stuart Society Paper LXXI. Sevenoaks, 2007), 17, 20, 23; National Archives of Scotland GD 95/11/11 (2); RH 15/105/3; RH 15/201/18; Scottish Catholic Archives MM 4/14 for account of selling of estates in Aberdeen in 1745; David E. Shuttleton, ‘Jacobitism and millenial Enlightenment: Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’s ‘‘Remarks’’ on the mystics’, Enlightenment and Dissent 15 (1996), 33–56, 38–9; Rev. John Pratt, Buchan (Aberdeen, 1858), 85; William Watt, History of Aberdeen and Banff (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1900), 276; Miscellany of the Spalding Club I: 57; G. D. Henderson, Mystics of the North East, (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1934); Allan Macinnes, Clanship, 174, 176; Jean McCann, ‘Jacobite Army’, 137, 146, 147; Rev. Canon George Farquhar, The Episcopal History of Perth (Perth: James Jackson, 1894), 171; John Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 9; Fraser, Montrose, 169; Alexander Keith, A Thousand Years of Aberdeen, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,1972), 134–5; Peter F. Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland 1622–1878 (Montrose: Standard Press, 1970), 102, 111, 113 and passim; W.B. Blaikie, Origins of the ’Forty-Five: And Other Papers Relating to that Rising, (Edinburgh: Constable, 1916), 127. Murray Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), ch. 1, especially 10–11, 44–5 for confessional strengths and differences in the British Isles; Pittock, New History, 193; Macinnes, Clanship, 175 for estimate of Catholic numbers. Pittock, New History, 196; David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myths (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004), 32; Karen J. Cullen, Christopher A. Whatley and Mary Young, ‘King William’s Ill years: new evidence on the impact of scarcity and harvest failure during the crisis of the 1690s on Tayside’, Scottish Historical Review LXXXV: 2 (2006), 250–76, 252–3; Colin Kidd, ‘The canon of patriotic landmarks in Scottish history’, Scotlands 1 (1994), 1–17; Michael Flinn et al. (eds), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the

What is a Highlander, What was a Jacobite?

28

29 30

31

32

33

34

63

1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977), 8, 144 ff, 180, 198–9, 200; Furgol, Covenanting Armies, 4–6. Lynch, Scotland, 319; National Archives of Scotland GD 124/15/491/ 21 (Mar and Kellie papers); Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710–14 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984), 63–4; Szechi (ed.), Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1989), 53n, 57n, 58n, 75n, 76n, 85n, 93n and passim; Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Jacobites and the Union, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 1, 3; Macinnes, Clanship, 181. National Archives of Scotland GD 124/15/491/21. Lynch, Scotland, 327. For a detailed account of the 1708 Rising v. Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card; for the make-up of Scottish parliamentarians at the 1710 election, v. Szechi. Lockhart. Elizabeth Carmichael, ‘Jacobitism in the Scottish Commission of the Peace,1707–1760’, Scottish Historical Review 58 (1979), 58–69; National Archives SP 54/4/73 for 1712 riots; Mar and Kellie Papers, National Archives of Scotland GD 124/13/68/4; Taylers, 1715, xix; Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 70, 73, 81, 114. National Archives SP 54/7/54B (Dundas to Cockburne, 18 August 1715); NA SP 54/7/64 (Warrender to Stanhope, 23 August 1715); Argyll to Townshend, quoted in Taylers, 1715, 60; Lynch, Scotland, 319. ‘To all True-Hearted SCOTSMEN’, National Archives SP 54/10/73; Irene J. Murray (ed.), ‘Letters of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun to his family, 1715–1716’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society X (1965), 143–74, 149, 155; Lynch, Scotland, 328; Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 44; Szechi, 1715, 119, 121, 125, 242. National Archives SP 54/11/194A for Jacobite support in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire; NA SP54/7/59B for the situation in Dumfries; for Argyll’s report on Sheriffmuir, v. NA SP 54/10/62; v. NA SP 54/9/ 29 for intelligence report, NA SP 54/10/173 for Fairbairn; National Library of Scotland MS 874 (‘Information of A.B. to J.C.’), NLS MS 1498 (‘List of the King’s Army’); John, Master of Sinclair, Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, Knight and Lang (eds), with a foreword by Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1858), 73; John Baynes, The Jacobite Rising of 1715 (London: Cassell, 1970), 59, 71 , 75, 98, 131, 133, 225n; National Archives of Scotland GD 18/ 3157: cf. GD18/2110/3, cited in Brown and Cheape, Witness to Rebellion, 45; Taylers, 1715, 72, 95; Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson,

64

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715 and 1719 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 97n, 113; Pittock, Myth of the Jacobite Clans, 50; Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 26 for Huntly’s ‘light horse’. Alistair and Henrietta Tayler estimate up to 18,000 in Mar’s army in their 1936 study of the ’15. 35 For the reclamation of Scottish nationality by modern scholarship, v. G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993 [1965]); William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); R. R. Davies, ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100–1400: II: Names, boundaries and regnal solidarities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) V (1995): 1–20, 15–16, 17, 20. For Declaration of Arbroath, v. National Library of Scotland Rosebery 1.236 (A letter in Latin and English, From the Nobility Barons and Commons of Scotland). 36 National Archives of Scotland (Irvine-Robertson Papers), RH 1/2/494; compare Gooch, The Desperate Faction, 60 and Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners, 21 for differences in the prisoner figures – those quoted are taken from British Library Add MSS 33954f. 30 (‘The Rebellion Happily Suppressed at Preston by General Wills’); Dobson, Jacobites of the ’15. 37 National Archives of Scotland GD45/1/201 (Dalhousie Muniments: ‘Returne of the Earle of Panmure’s Regiment of Foot’).

2 The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Accounts of the Jacobite Risings which portray them as marginal ‘Highland’ affairs have an evident interest in minimising the size of the forces raised by the Jacobites in Scotland in 1715 and 1745, as well as rendering them atypical in other ways: for example, in respect of recruitment, training, organisation or military equipment. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans sustains itself by ‘othering’ all these aspects of the Jacobite war machine, setting them up as marginal and oppositional to traditional British military practice and, therefore, making them appear outmoded, amateurish or barbarous. In this chapter I will deal with all of these points in turn, returning in Chapter 5 to the question of military equipment, which repays more extensive separate treatment. THE SIZE OF THE ARMY Of the various elements of the Myth, low recruitment is the most important in rendering Jacobitism marginal. It is becoming impossible to minimise the recruitment strength of the ’15; and both the first and second editions of this book seek to make it equally difficult for those who pay attention to the evidence to minimise the strength of the ’45. In assessing the military strength of these Risings, it is important to have a comparator in view. The best comparator – and one structurally unfavourable to the Jacobites – is the size of the armies raised in the Covenanting era (1638–51), when (as we have seen in Chapter 1) the population of Scotland was to all intents and purposes about the same as it was in 1745. The Covenanting armies were national forces, set up in the first place to vindicate Scotland’s religious rights, later to impose them on the rest of Great Britain, later still to endeavour to fight – on conditions – for the Stuarts they had done so much to depose. Like the Jacobites, they faced internal opposition from relatively small forces within Scotland: in the Covenanters’ case, these were Stuart royalists, in the Jacobite case, Hanoverian ones. Unlike the Jaco-

66

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

bites, the Covenanters had control for much of the time over many years of the Kirk and the instruments of government. They were able to exert unchallenged authority in many areas over an extended period, and were not restricted to raising as many men as possible in a few weeks. We can, therefore, be fairly confident that their armies – which are the first in Scotland on which we have detailed statistical information – represented (with the addition of their opponents’ numbers) the maximum effective fencible force that Scotland could field. It is in any case clear that no larger armies raised from Scotland can be demonstrated to have existed before the modern era. The Covenanting wars were also the first to engage the Gaidhealtachd fully. As Allan Macinnes argues, ‘the unprecedented ideological, financial and military pressures generated by the Covenanting movement not only polarised the clans politically, but committed them irrevocably to Scottish . . . politics’, producing ‘a vernacular cultural response that associated the traditional values of clanship with the Royalist cause’. In this context, the fact that the sluagh (hosting) of forces in the Gaidhealtachd was a ‘mobilisation by rapid response’ much faster than that found in the burghs should confer no advantage on Jacobite numbers, for the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland were already heavily politicised – and thus liable to be militarily engaged – in the Covenanting era. In fact, some of Montrose’s most famous victories (such as Inverlochy) were fought between opposing interests in the Gaidhealtachd.1 Thus, here, too, no necessary advantage lies with Jacobite recruitment. The Covenanters had many advantages over the Jacobites: their established legitimacy; their avowed Protestantism; their prolonged hold on the instruments of government – the clans were raised by similar methods and similar ends in the 1640s as the 1740s. We would, therefore, expect Covenanting forces to dwarf those of the Jacobites. The National Covenant of 1638 commanded great support in Scotland and led directly to the two ‘Bishops’ Wars’ with England, which resulted in defeat for the Crown forces. In 1639–40, the Army of the Covenant had a peak of 24,000 men under arms: General Leslie invaded England with 17,775 in 1640. Following the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, an army of 18,000 foot, 3,000 horse and 500–600 dragoons invaded England, and there were several thousand troops elsewhere. In 1648, the now pro-Stuart (and ideologically purged) Engager Army had around 14,000–15,000 or more; in 1650, with a new Stuart on the throne who had agreed the Covenant, 23,000 were in the army. Between 2,000 and 5,000 of

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

67

these were purged on ideological grounds. In 1651, the army did not exceed 21,000; 12,000 marched with Charles II to Worcester in an invasion force which, like that of 1745, attracted few English recruits, though Charles II’s subsequent popularity in his southern kingdom is seldom if ever challenged on those grounds.2 Against these forces, the royalist insurgents under Lord Aboyne and Sir George Ogilvie in 1638–9 numbered around 2,000, while the armies of Montrose in 1643–5 (which included the 2,500 Irish veterans under MacColla) seldom if ever exceeded 5,000 in total. At Tippermuir, Montrose had about 3,000; 1,500 at Inverlochy. The period 1638–51 was highly militarised, highly polarised and highly ideological: it was also the first war which saw the Gaidhealtachd being drawn into pan-British military conflict.3 It would thus appear that the maximum force that Scotland could put in the field was around 30,000 men in the very best circumstances, with 25,000 a more likely practical ceiling. As we shall see below, the numbers officially levied often exceeded those fielded by some margin: it is thus likely that turnover of troops is to some extent contained within the official figures. Direct comparisons of turnover – as opposed to maximal levies – with the Jacobite era are, of course, difficult, as there was well over a decade for turnover to take place in the Covenanting era armies, as opposed to a few months in 1715 and 1745. Clearly, some areas of Scotland were hostile to the Covenant, and here there was frequently mediocre recruitment and high desertion, as well as evidence of forcing – in any case a normal practice, as we shall see later in the chapter. Aberdeen, which had not joined the opposition to the new Prayer Book in 1637 and not signed the Covenant in 1638, was understandably difficult territory for the Army of the Covenant. In 1640, Aberdeen ‘put up stiff resistance to providing [the Earl] Marischal with 110 men’; ‘Old Aberdeen supplied twenty men under duress’. By October 1640, some 1,200 had deserted Marischal’s forces, probably anti-Covenanters from Aberdeenshire and the Mearns; in 1644, Lord Gordon was to fare even worse, when 2,600 of his 3,000 muster deserted the standard of the Covenant. Thus, even the presence of the most powerful local magnates, while it could force men to come out, could not force them to stay out: no Jacobite unit suffered desertion on this scale in 1745. In 1644, the magistrates of Aberdeen had to press twenty-eight men to reach the burgh ‘quota of 120 soldiers, ten officers and a

68

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

captain’. It is worth noting the high proportion of officers here: overofficering has long been alleged to be a Jacobite vice, but in fact was – as we shall see – anything but uncommon on a more general basis. The small companies alleged to be the unfortunate legacy of jealous clans unable to work together were also not untypical of those found in other, allegedly more regular, armies. In the Army of the Covenant, the average size of a company of Sinclair’s Foot was forty, and this was not an active service figure. Erskine’s Foot averaged fiftyone to a company, Livingston’s twenty-eight, while Balcarres’ Horse had forty-two to a troop, Dalhousie’s forty and Gordon’s twentysix. Companies were increased in size in the later campaigns, at least on paper. The reality could be very different. Horse troops were officially seventy-five, but were in practice fifty-four to sixty-seven in strength in 1644; in 1646 one regiment had seven troops with an average of only twenty-four men each, and in 1646 minimum troop size was set at fifty. Given that there were eight troops in a regiment of horse, however, the minimum regimental size of 200 was revealing (one Jacobite two-troop horse squadron reached this size in 1745), as was the 300 minimum for an infantry regiment. Such numbers for foot battalions are in line with those found in Jacobite armies – and indeed more generally in early modern warfare, as we shall see.4 Although sacked by Montrose’s armies in 1644, Aberdeen continued to be poor recruiting territory for the Covenant. In the course of 1649, it provided only thirty men, with only another thirty in 1650, leaving the burgh ‘still deficient by sixty men in early September’ in its contribution to Viscount Arbuthnot’s Foot, a unit which may never have been properly raised. Assessed for ninety men in 1650–1, Aberdeen only managed to produce them by 21 August in the latter year. These were not high figures in a burgh of not far short of 10,000 people, but they were apparently still difficult to field. It is possible that as time went on the Covenanting authorities became less ambitious with regard to the numbers they might expect: in 1650, the Committee of Estates from Aberdeen and Banff shires required 310 men as the levy, a poor comparison with the 1,183 recorded by Alistair and Henrietta Tayler as joining the Jacobites in 1745.5 Elsewhere in the north-east, Dundee was assessed at a notional 200 men during 1639, 150 during the Engagement period, when the burgh only raised ninety, with it taking three weeks to find even thirty men. In 1648–50, it took six months to raise 170 men. On the

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

69

other hand, ten companies were raised from southern Perthshire and the presbytery of Dundee for the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant; in Angus and the Mearns, Montrose – while still a Covenanter – raised over 4,000 in 1639, many more than would subsequently join him as a Royalist (there is reason to believe that the sack of Aberdeen in 1644 damaged his recruiting abilities in the north-east).6 On the whole, the Covenanting armies could draw an impressive muster from what would later be heavily Jacobite areas, while having difficulty in the burghs and losing men rapidly from those brought out by magnates in the north, whom, we can perhaps presume, were unsympathetic to the politico-religious goals for which they were enlisted to fight. Certainly, the Committee of Estates had very unambitious recruitment figures for the north-east at the end of the 1638–51 period compared with the large but transient forces raised by Gordon and Marischal at the beginning of it. With regard to the national picture across Scotland, it is clear that the maximal practicable fencible capacity of Scotland in the 1640s is more or less exactly in line with the situation in 1715. Daniel Szechi’s estimates, based on in-depth primary research, of 20,000 Scots plus 1,200 English Jacobites and 9,000–10,000 total government forces, with ‘9000 Scots actively participating in the war on the government side’ are uncannily close to the maximum size of the total forces engaged in the Covenanting era. There were other estimates of the total number of fencible men in Scotland: Wade estimated Scottish clan/feudal military strength at 22,000 in 1724 (with 45 per cent favourable to government), but higher figures were banded about in wartime. One estimate for the government (almost certainly Robert Patten’s) suggests broadly (it can be counted in more than one way) 16,300 for, 32,100 against the government in 1715, with 1,600 in the balance (Atholl at 6,000 might be counted either way), while in 1746 Lord President Forbes estimated 32,000 men as the military strength of the ‘Highlands’: again including feudal superiors who would not be recognised as Highlanders. These were very much theoretical, not practical totals: nowhere near so many men had ever been raised. Wade’s is the only estimate from a military source, and it is the least inaccurate. What is interesting about Patten’s 1715 figure though, is that it matches Szechi’s findings in its assessment of a 2:1 Jacobite advantage. The Patten document also estimates that the Lowland nobility had almost four times the military strength of the clan chieftains, though admittedly some in the former category might be counted by historians in the latter.7

70

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Either way, the forces in the field in 1715 suggest that Scotland was as heavily militarised as was practicable in that year, particularly given the relatively short duration of the Rising, and its insecure hold on much of the country. Surely, however, 1745 was a different matter? Many of the elite who had supported the Jacobites in 1715 had been purged, bought off or simply placed in a restraining network of kinship and associational obligations. Some had despaired of the cause as a whole, or of their benefiting by it personally. Even leaving all these aside, thirty years had passed, Scotland was inevitably getting more used to the Union, Whig society had strengthened its grip on the central and southern Lowlands. The ’45 was surely a poor, badly organised affair: the last throw of the dice from a desperate dynasty? Certainly, the view of the Rising in modern Anglophone culture tends to continue to be driven by this interpretation – which is why this chapter is the core of the book, the central critique of the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. To celebrate the redevelopment of Culloden Battlefield, the National Trust for Scotland’s house journal, Scotland in Trust, has been printing a number of articles. In Spring 2007, one of these observed that ‘being composed of small bands’, the clan ‘regiments were outrageously and unmanageably top-heavy in officers’. In an article which also managed to suggest that the Manchester Regiment was present at Culloden, the canards of Jacobitism were recycled and at the same time stated to be based on recent research. Culloden was, according to the author, ‘to a large extent a fight between two cultures – the Highland and the Lowland’. As I stared at the Saltoun Papers, at the Order Books, at other lists of those active in the Rising, and read – as I had first done long before – the names of hundreds of ordinary burgh folk: James Bruce, weaver in Dundee; James Coutt, mason in Arbroath; James Clarke, chapman in Slains; even Henry Boyston, the Staffordshire tailor taken at Dunblane and Henry Williams, the Herefordshire soap-boiler who fell into Hanoverian hands at Crieff, I wondered afresh how long it would be before it was regarded as even minimally necessary to encounter these documents – or even synthesise the historians who had read them – before pontificating on the Rising.8 The Jacobite forces in 1745–6 were also not as small as is sometimes assumed: it is still quite easy to find the figure of 5,000 bandied about. At best, there is an element of confusion between the size of the army Charles led into England and the total size of the forces raised, though since a much larger army fought at Falkirk, this must

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

71

be a slender excuse for professional historians. Although Charles Edward led something under 6,000 men (see below) into England in the late autumn of 1745 (in addition to some 2,000 women and camp-followers, twenty-one of whom were in prison in Chester Castle in 1746), there was a second army being raised in the north, which helped to implement the ‘comprehensive military and civilian administration’ of Scotland benorth the Forth under Viscount Strathallan. In Perth alone, £5,192 was raised between September 1745 and February 1746, of which only £5,038 was spent: some was lent out. By 16 November, with Charles’ army in Edinburgh preparing to move, Cromartie’s regiment occupied Perth with 300 men; by 20 November, there were thought to be 710, with 400–500 coming up, though other estimates had already risen to 1,500 at Perth; shortly thereafter government informants estimated a force of 1,603 there. By 21 November, the northern army had lost contact with Charles’ force in England, a sign of the bad communications which hindered the Jacobite Army throughout the campaign, but it continued to grow rapidly, reaching an estimated 2,450 the next day (though another estimate puts only half that number at Perth and the same number coming up – in truth, it seems that soldiers were moving in and out of Perth all the time, as the Jacobite account book with payments for guides and so on bears out). On 5 December it was noted that ‘those Rebells that Deserted from the South’ (presumably because they did not want to fight in England) were ‘all flocking’ to Lord John Drummond; on 6 December an estimate from Stirling puts the total as 2,000–3,000; on 7 December, 2,556 are estimated in the northern army. By 13 December there were 3,300– 3,450 (depending on the government agent whose view one accepts – the two figures are from Blakeney’s intelligence and a report to the Lord Justice Clerk) in arms: ‘numbers have been dayly encreaseing, we can have no doubt’, as the Earl of Findlater wrote to Tweeddale. According to the more detailed report made on that day, there were around 1,500 at Perth, 1,000 at Dundee and Montrose (where the artillery was), 300 with some artillery including a 16-pounder at Stonehaven; 300 at Aberdeen, 200 at Brechin and 150 at Banff (another estimate places 1,000 at Aberdeen on 7 December). Units began to move north in preparation for the interception of Loudoun’s forces. At Inverurie on 23 December 1745, when a significant number of the northern army went into action, the men engaged consisted of the 1st (Avochie’s), 3rd (Stoneywood’s) and 4th (Monaltrie’s) battalions of Lord Lewis Gordon’s, the 2nd battalion

72

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Ogilvy’s and two companies of the Royal Scots, though some assessments count Bannerman’s and Viscount Frendraught’s 2nd battalion of Lord Lewis Gordon’s as also present. They faced seven companies of MacLeod and Munro’s Highlanders, and the Jacobite victory may have led to more Highlanders being in prison in Aberdeen for supporting the Hanoverians than there were Jacobite Highlanders in the burgh. On 28 December, a report at Inverary estimated that the Jacobite force at Perth ‘do not exceed 2000’, but to this must be added the 1,000 men recorded by the intelligence as having marched out (to Inverurie, presumably), and the fact that ‘neither the master of Lovat nor Lord Lewis Gordon were come to Perth’: these were to command up to 1,600 between them. The report also notes that Clanranald has 150 in the field in the north and that the Macleans are on the point of rising. This takes us to around 5,000 Jacobites in Scotland. By January, when the northern and southern armies made rendezvous, both could muster about 5,000 men, although numbers left the northern army at Glasgow (see below), who probably returned later. We are thus dealing with an operational Jacobite army of 10,000 as an absolute minimum during the campaign.9 Perhaps 8,000–10,000 Jacobites fought at Falkirk (government estimates range up to 12,000), but this is an inadequate assessment of the army’s total strength, as no force engaged in holding territory to raise men and money (accomplished more effectively in 1745 than 1715) can put all its troops in the field: the lack of observation of the principle of concentration of force would prove fatal at Culloden. At Falkirk, which saw the greatest concentration of Jacobite military strength in any single engagement, the 4th battalion of the Atholl Brigade, Bannerman of Elsick’s, two battalions of Frasers of Lovat, one or two battalions of Lord Lewis Gordon’s, some at least of the Duke of Perth’s, John Roy Stuart’s and Strathallan’s Perthshire Horse did not fight: a maximal force of about 2,000 men. It is likely that the figure for those absent from these units was lower, but taking the estimate of 8,260 for the Jacobite force at Falkirk from the Muster Roll, this is again indicative of 10,000 Jacobites in arms (indeed, several hundred of the Frasers had not yet risen in January). To this can be added an unknown number of deserters (one estimate puts the main army on 22 January after Falkirk as low as 5,000, but is not supported elsewhere), the military turnover of the army, which all sources agree to be significant, and the fact that the southern army was recorded as being over 1,000 stronger in England than it

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

73

was by the time it reached Glasgow. In addition, there was often an absence of men available to raise men, a problem attested to in contemporary correspondence. The last element to be considered is the lack of arms, for there are instances of men being sent home due to an absence of weapons: for example, a number of Camerons before Prestonpans. On several counts, evidence exists which suggests that the peak Jacobite forces were significantly in excess of even the 10,000 who were in the field in January.10 Reputable scholarship has confirmed figures on this scale for over a century. In 1890, Lord Rosebery estimated the total force at 11,000, while in 1963, Jean McCann arrived at a figure of between 12,470 and 14,140 including French and Franco-Irish troops (Hilary Kemp has estimated that there were 780 of these in the army by the end of the campaign). Taking Daniel Szechi’s model for the turnover of recruits in the ’15 and applying it to the ’45 might lead to a still higher estimated figure, but in this chapter (and in the Appendix) I shall aim to stick with numbers reported throughout the Rising for different units, surviving musters and so on, to arrive at an overall number of those engaged. There are only 2,520 names in the List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, which shows that much of the detail concerning the names, occupation and origin of recruits is irrecoverable: but the situation regarding such details is still better than it is with regard to the ’15. There were 3,471 prisoners, twice the number in 1715, and the latest edition of the Muster Roll lists around 4,500 names.11 However large the Jacobite Army was, another oft-repeated canard is that there were more Scots in arms against the Jacobites than for them: ‘there were easily as many Scots fighting for King George as were standing in Prince Charles Edward’s ranks’, Stuart Reid tells us; ‘more Scots were in arms against Prince Charles than for him’, Christopher Duffy observes. As we have seen, this is not supportable with regard to the 1715 Rising: with regard to the ’45, it is instructive that those who repeat this view sometimes do not know how large the Jacobite Army was. Lord Elcho estimated that there were 2,400 Scots in Cumberland’s army, including 600 Campbell militia; the Cumberland papers give 2,284. Both figures are less than half the Jacobite force on the battlefield.12 To this must be added, of course, government forces raised in the localities: 2,000 in the Highlands, perhaps up to 4,000 in the south. None the less, taking all this into consideration, it is hard to push the peak numbers on the Government side past 6,000, and the total in arms past

74

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

8,000–9,000, including British Army soldiers involved or potentially involved in the suppression of the Rising. There were a total of 4,435 recruits raised by the government in southern Scotland – the least Jacobite area of the country – but this includes 500 from Berwick, so perhaps only 4,000 or so of these can be counted as Scots recruits. In Paisley, Renfrew, Glasgow, Stirling and Linlithgow, the government gained fewer than 1,100 men for King George’s colours: hardly a resounding success in what was largely a core area of Hanoverian support. In Dumfries, government supporters raided Jacobite baggage, and Whig militia were mobilised throughout the south-west from Kirkcudbright to Clydesdale: they were harder to find outside this area, and there appear to have been no loyal addresses north of Forth. Here, apart from the Independent Companies, only isolated efforts by Presbyterian ministers rallied men to the government. Bob Harris, an historian who is by no means favourable to Jacobitism, suggests that ‘an extremely conservative estimate of Lowlanders in arms to defend the Hanoverian regime would be around 3,000’. Even as a conservative an estimate this is not very impressive, and Harris also notes that isolated Whigs were socially ostracised in strongly Jacobite areas, such as the north-east.13 Moreover, the militia were very ineffective. In Edinburgh, there were 124 reported as able to defend the capital on 9 September; by the 15th, this was a highly notional 700, of whom 400 initially mustered: as the prospect of fighting loomed, this dwindled to fortytwo. To count 700 as raised in these circumstances seems ridiculous: indeed, the Covenanters managed only 500, and Edinburgh was the only burgh to raise a full regiment for the Covenant. The Jacobite muster roll gives 118 names from Edinburgh, and other figures suggest a total of just under 140: it is probably not unreasonable (and is indeed generous to the government) to suppose that active militant Jacobites were at least equal in numbers to their Hanoverian counterparts in the city. In Aberdeen, with a population of 15,000 (including the Aulton and Old Machar) agreement could not even be reached to try and defend the city, which had only fifty men guarding it (if even this was anything but a notional figure) on 16 September 1745. In 1746, the magistrates protested that the town’s supply of arms to General Cope meant that it was ‘quite open to the Invasion of the Rebels’, which they could do nothing about; but this is not the whole story, as we will see in the next chapter. Meanwhile, among the regulars, the Black Watch were so mistrusted

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

75

that they were mostly kept in the south of England, and a number seem to have joined the Jacobites anyway. In the north, Loudon had ‘2000 militiamen in the field’ (another estimate puts it at 1,800), although a number of these deserted: it was remarked in a letter to the Duke of Atholl on 17 March 1746 that ‘upon Lord Loudon’s marching North, all the McDonalds, McLeods, and McKenzies of his Corps deserted from him, and joined the Highland Army, these make about 600’, while other intelligence suggested that ‘Lord Loudon on his March from Inverness to Sutherland lost the 200 . . . Mckenzies . . . all deserted and it was believed most of them had joined the Rebels’. By 1746, Loudon had just over 900 men. The previous autumn, Cope marched north with around 1,750 ‘illarmed, ill-equipped and ill-officered’ men at most; the only men who joined him came from Atholl, and these ‘deserted at the first opportunity with their arms’. As Houlding notes, ‘Cope got no support from the ‘‘loyal’’ clans’, while Macinnes observes that ‘the Jacobite cause consistently recruited more adherents in Scotland than the Whig governments’. Desertions from the Jacobites to the government are hard to find. The evidence simply does not seem to be there to support the assertion that more Scots were in arms against the Jacobites than for them: in fact, it seems that the government was no more successful in raising men than in 1715, a rather interesting comment on the widespread perception that Scotland was more fully reconciled to the Hanoverian dynasty and the British state in 1745. I will return to this issue in Chapters 3 and 4.14 We have both good and consistent figures for the total size of the Jacobite Army. In early September, the army is put at no more than 3,000 in total by government informers, and here few if any historians would disagree: it is the size of the army after Prestonpans on 21 September that causes most confusion, or is most misrepresented. That it grew rapidly is clear. As early as 2 October 1745, an estimate of 8,060 is offered; on 4 October, a report from Robert Bovey to General Huske which confirms that 160 from 200 Hanoverian prisoners have joined the Jacobites, estimates the army’s strength in Edinburgh at around 6,000. The intelligence estimate of the army at Edinburgh on 29 October, shortly before the march south, is 6,287, with an estimate of the total Jacobite force raised to date of 8,880, a figure repeated in a January report. Those leaving Edinburgh to march into England are estimated at 5,000 in Jacobite correspondence. A (probably) November count gives 5,715, with only 2,325 assessed as clansmen; another gives only 4,060 (plus

76

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Lifeguards, Hussars and John Roy Stewart’s, so about 4,500) as the number of effectives in England, from an original force of 5,725. Atholl brigade desertions occurred between Edinburgh and Carlisle, and perhaps only some 5,500–5,600 crossed the border. On leaving Penrith, an estimate put the army at 5,006; but there are two other estimates of 6,000 in England, and 7,148 were counted at Derby, a figure which almost certainly includes some camp-followers: 6,620 were later assessed as having left the city. Almost certainly there were more English who joined the army than survive in the records, but these were still few in number: we must presume that they disappeared on retreat. At Moffat on the retreat in December, there were adjudged to be ‘not . . . above 5,000’ Jacobites, with 3,600 at Glasgow in January. At this stage detachments were out, and the northern reinforcements had not arrived: some of these may have included ‘deserters’ from the main army, and here there is a risk of some double counting. In Edinburgh their numbers were feared as ‘about Seven thousand’ in December.15 Most of the government reports concur closely, they are often detailed unit by unit, and wilful or self-interested exaggeration is unlikely given their consistency. The total for both armies would then be at least 9,500, or 12,330 if one adds the maximal Edinburgh November figures together with the northern January ones, excluding the Franco-Irish reinforcements landed after Drummond’s arrival in Montrose, the English volunteers (who are quite possibly the reason the army in England is reported as larger at Derby than at any other time) and any local levies – say 1,500 in total. To these could be added in theory the Franco-Irish and Scots sent to aid the Jacobites who were intercepted or turned back, but who nonetheless were engaged to fight: over 500 of Bulkeley’s, Clare’s and Berwick’s regiments in the French service were taken prisoner, together with 359 of Fitzjames’s Horse. Three of the four squadrons of Fitzjames’s Horse sent from France were captured, as were two of the three picquets of Berwick’s. Overall, up to 1,000 of the largely FrancoIrish and Franco-Scots troops sent from France failed to reach the theatre of war. This might move the numbers engaged on the Jacobite side (including those who did not reach the theatre of war, as these are counted in the government case) to 15,000 men. Given the kind of turnover assumptions employed by Daniel Szechi in the ’15, we could be looking at a Rising on the same scale: 20,000 engaged on the Jacobite side, 8,000–9,000 on the government’s. It is possible to go even higher, given the arguably higher turnover rates

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

77

in 1745: the government reports suggest ‘dayly somebody joining the Army’ and that ‘many desert with their arms & plunder’. In such a case, it might be argued that Charles raised over 70 per cent of Scotland’s existing military capacity in what was indeed ‘to all intents and purposes the last Scots army . . . raised from nearly all over Scotland, excepting the old Covenanting south-west’.16 Such a maximalist interpretation would, however, be less secure than the figures from the ’Fifteen. Two armies can lead to double counting, and almost certainly the maximal figure should be doubted. In autumn 1745, it is clear that some poorer armed or deserting levies from Edinburgh appear from government reports to have been incorporated into the northern army. The merging and demerging of regiments seems to have been more frequent than in the ’15: figures for MacDonald of Keppoch’s battalion, to take one example, may or may not at different times reflect the incorporation of Glencoe’s and Mackinnon’s men, while the 2nd battalion of the Duke of Perth’s regiment contained elements both of Pitsligo’s Foot and Moir of Stoneywood’s Aberdeen battalion, which was later incorporated into Lord Lewis Gordon’s.17 There was only one established brigade in the army, compared with six in 1715. Instead there were more regiments with more than a single battalion, of which in the ’15 Breadalbane’s seems to have been the only consistent example. At different times, Cameron of Lochiel’s, the Farquharsons, MacDonell of Glengarry’s, the Duke of Perth’s, Lord Lewis Gordon’s, Lord Lovat’s, the Royal Scots and Lord Ogilvy’s regiments all contained more than one battalion. In part this was due to second battalions in various units being raised for the northern army; in part it was a function of the more complex and sophisticated campaigning which was taking place – by comparison with the ’15, at any rate. But it can lead to problems: Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’s Foot, Kilmarnock’s Foot Guards and Stoneywood’s Aberdeen battalion are all examples of battalions which can sometimes appear separately and are sometimes incorporated into other regiments. This is a distinct question from the size of battalions, which I shall return to below. However, it is important to be conscious of these problems before venturing any maximalist interpretation of the size of Charles’ army. Allan Macinnes estimates the maximum fencible strength in the Gaidhealtachd at about 15,000, as implied in his argument that the forces raised from the Gaidhealtachd were 5,000 in 1689, calculated at 35 per cent of maximum fencible capacity; 11,000 in 1715–16,

78

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

calculated at 75 per cent (Wade’s own estimate at the time was 11,140, including 1,800 north-eastern and Perthshire levies who were mixed Gaidhealtachd at best), and 7,000 in 1745–6, calculated at 48 per cent. The 1689 Rising was virtually solely a ‘Highland’ rising, as argued in Chapter 1; Macinnes’s figures for the ’15 and ’45 suggest that about 47–55 per cent of the forces engaged for the Jacobites were from the Gaidhealtachd, which is not significantly out of line with the arguments advanced here and by other authorities. A slightly lower figure (43–46 per cent ‘Highlanders’) has been offered by Jean McCann, Frank McLynn and most recently by Christopher Duffy’s 2003 study, The ’45, who also sets the maximum fencible capacity of the Gaidhealtachd at about 15,000, that is, at about 50 per cent of the absolute maximum for Scotland in general. Macinnes’s figures suggest that Jacobite recruitment was no stronger in the Gaidhealtachd than outside it in 1745, if we allow Charles’ army to have been 14,000 men: if we go for 12,000, we get a 55 per cent Gaidhealtachd force. McCann, McLynn and Duffy certainly count a lower Gaidhealtachd figure, and it may be that the final figure depends on the interpretation of the background of some Aberdeenshire and Perthshire recruits from counties which contemporary commentators – such as Lord President Forbes – did not count as ‘Highland’ (v. Chapter 1). Macinnes estimates that a higher proportion of the Jacobite Army were from the Gaidhealtachd at Culloden (certainly possible, as it was fought in the Gaidhealtachd), but notes that the ‘percentage of clansmen among prisoners and other reported survivors’ was only 33 per cent. This figure he attributes to frontline casualty rates: but this is more difficult to sustain, as presuming that 7,000 ‘Highlanders’ and 7,000 others were engaged, for two-thirds of those captured to be from the second category by reason of casualty rates, then pro rata 50 per cent of ‘Highlanders’ would need to have been killed, with no one else suffering any casualties. This is quite impossible (though it is true that French regulars were more likely to be taken alive), so the possibilities are that the army was significantly less than 50 per cent from the Gaidhealtachd, or that the ‘Highlanders’ were better at melting away into the localities: it is likely that the reason that only 33 per cent of prisoners were clansmen is a figure in debt to a combination of the factors mentioned above.18 In assessing the composition and size of the Jacobite Army, we are not only hampered by the presence of mix and merged units, but by the fact that the prolonged and highly mobile nature of the campaign

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

79

led to widely varying musters and government estimates of strength during the course of 1745–6. The various figures are to be found in detail in the Appendix. On occasion the army was divided into ‘Lowland’ and ‘Highland’ divisions. A British Army division (not regularised until Wellington’s time) was commanded by a major or lieutenant-general, and consisted of two or three brigades (commanded by colonels, brigadiers (a temporary rank) or major-generals), each with three to five battalions. The Highland Division of the Jacobite Army (under Lord George Murray) consisted – in theory as the battalions were often separated for operational purposes – of the 1st and 2nd battalions Glengarry’s, Keppoch’s, Clanranalds, Macpherson’s, Ardsheal’s, the 1st and 2nd battalions of Lochiel’s and the Lifeguard Squadron; the Lowland Division of the Atholl Brigade (four battalions), 1st and 2nd battalions the Duke of Perth’s, Glenbuchat’s, John Roy Stewart’s, 1st and 2nd battalions Ogilvy’s, Forbes of Pitsligo’s and the Hussar squadrons, Kilmarnock’s troop and the baggage train. In other words, with eight to ten battalions each plus cavalry, these were of conventional size and scale – they were also, of course, more or less evenly split between ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ forces.19 Among unequivocally Gaidhealtachd forces can be counted the two battalions of Cameron of Lochiel’s, estimated between 600 and 1,050 men, Chisholm’s at 80–150, three battalions of Frasers (800– 900), MacDonald of Clanranald (200–350), 1st and 2nd MacDonell of Glengarry’s (500–1,200, the top estimate rather insecure, and 900 might be safer), MacDonald of Keppoch’s at 400 including Glencoe and the Mackinnon contingents, MacGregor of Glengyle’s (100– 300), Lady Mackintosh’s (200–500), MacLachlan’s (40–260, probably double counted elsewhere), MacLean’s (150–500), Macphersons (280–400) and Stewart of Ardsheal’s (150–500, the top figure possibly rather high). Primarily non-Gaidhealtachd units are the four battalions of the Atholl Brigade (in fact, to an extent mixed, but counted as ‘Lowland Division’, at 450–1,200), Balmerino and Elcho’s Lifeguard troops (46–220), Bannerman of Elsick’s (100– 160), Fitzjames’ Horse (four squadrons, only one reached action, which was 70–131, although some authorities mention a third troop as well as the two of the squadron), Forbes of Pitsligo’s Foot (250– 300) and Horse (100–200), Grante’s Artillery (40–60 plus a threecompany secondment from Perth’s), Kilmarnock’s Footguards (200, but best excluded as double counted elsewhere, as the horse grenadiers became footguards on giving up their horses to Fitzjames’s),

80

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Lord Lewis Gordon’s (600–800 for three battalions), Irish Picquets (150–300), Kilmarnock’s Horse Grenadiers (30–100), the Manchester Regiment (118–300), Murray’s Hussar squadron (70–80), 1st and 2nd Lord Ogilvy’s (430–900), Duke of Perth’s (200–750, the lower figure only secure given double counting of other troops under Pitsligo and Lord Lewis Gordon’s), 1st and 2nd battalions, Royal Scots (250–400), Stewart’s Edinburgh Regiment (200–450) and Strathallan’s Perthshire Horse (36–82). Mixed units with a majority from outwith the Gaidhealtachd include Glenbuchat’s (200–427, a possible 5th battalion for Lord Lewis Gordon’s) and possibly the 1st and 2nd battalions Farquharsons (300): the 1st was sometimes brigaded with Lewis Gordon’s as a 4th battalion, but is not double counted above. Mixed units with a majority from within the Gaidhealtachd include Cromartie’s (160–400). Together these give a maximum possible strength of fifteen Gaidhealtachd battalions (3,560–5,800/6,100 men), sixteen non-Gaidhealtachd battalions (2,718–5,210), together with five horse squadrons, a troop and the artillery (392–873 men). Mixed units add four battalions (660– 1,127). Double counting has been avoided here wherever possible. The maximum total fielded by the Jacobite Army would thus be 13,310, plus the 1,000 or so French reinforcements that did not get through, though it is highly probable that these figures fail to capture all of the turnover of the army, not least in England.20 A total of 13,000–14,000 is probably as high as we should go for the number of men in arms in 1745 who reached the theatre of war (12,000–13,000 is a conservative alternative). This was by no means a negligible figure, for in 1738 the British Army estimates list 26,891 men on the establishment, and it was less than 5,000 higher in 1755. Although the British Army was larger in wartime, it was also committed: and there was no doubt that the number of men the Jacobites could raise provided a major military threat. Given the provenance of the mixed troops and the Gaelic-speaking nature of at least the 4th battalion of the Atholl Brigade, the 7,000 Gaidhealtachd troops Macinnes cites seems about right. We would be safe in such circumstances assuming a 50:50 split, with a margin for error either way. There is space for quibbles: Stuart Reid has argued that the Duke of Perth’s regiment was more ‘Highland’ than indicated here, though he undercuts his own case by noting that Perth’s was – both in Edinburgh and England – one of the regiments that recruited in the most conventional way. Reid also states that Cromartie’s was ‘not really a clan levy’, and that a ‘significant number’ of the 1st

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

81

Farquharson battalion were in ‘Lowland dress’, despite the policy of uniforming the army in tartan. The absolute minimal assessed strengths give a floor of 7,330 for the Jacobite Army when every unit was at its weakest, which would again put the Gaidhealtachd contingent at around 50 per cent.21 It is likely that troops raised in the Lowlands were used to protect localities, and that their number is, therefore, underestimated: as Duffy points out, ‘in Scotland there were more Lowlanders in the Jacobite raids than Highlanders’. In the eastern and central belt of Scotland, there is plenty of evidence of desertion from the Edinburgh Town Guard during the Rising, while figures of up to 1,000 for the Jacobites in the shires of Edinburgh and Stirling were reported to government. The ‘Highland Army’ moniker clearly confused government agents even at the time: uniformed in tartan and inimical to the British state, the visual Highlandism of the Jacobite forces was often taken for reality. For example, the intelligence from Perth concerning the northern army on 20 November 1745 estimated that ‘there are just now in Dundee about 1000 Highland men a great many of them raised in Angus by Sir James Kinloch’, while another piece of intelligence at the same time spoke of ‘Lowlanders under Sir James Kinloch’. The bulk of these men were the 2nd battalion of Ogilvy’s Forfarshires, whose major was James Rattray and whose company commanders included James Carnegie, John Erskine of Dun, David Ferrier, Alexander Kinloch a merchant from Meigle, Charles Kinloch an Aberdeen bookkeeper and Patrick Wallace, who commanded the 2nd Arbroath company. The sergeants included John Adam a Brechin shoemaker, George Bruce a butcher in the town and Walter Young a sailor from Montrose. In the ranks there were three Grants, two of whom lived in Angus towns, and seventeen Macs, of whom a dozen lived in burghs. None of the common names used to conceal a Gaelic surname, such as ‘Dow’ (=‘dubh) or ‘Glass’ (=‘glas’, grey) are to be found. This was no Highland force.22 THE NATURE OF THE ARMY In 1745, as in 1715, the leadership of the Jacobite Army was mainly in Lowland hands. Although Highlanders disproportionately predominated on the Council of War, they were in a minority not only on the Privy Council but by almost every other measure of political and military authority. Of 112 officers of field rank or above in

82

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

1745, only fifty-three were ‘Highlanders’, as was an even lower proportion of the force’s 300 or so commissioned officers, despite the persistent allegation that small clan units inflated officer numbers, a point I will return to in discussing regimental organisation below. In fact, what evidence we have suggests that officers from the major burghs predominated: one tally suggests that fifty-five from 290 commissioned officers came from Edinburgh and Leith, thirty-eight from Aberdeen and environs, thirty-six from around Dundee, twenty-one from Arbroath and Montrose and seventeen from Perth. Of the army’s senior general staff officers, one out of fifteen were Highlanders, or two if John Gordon of Glenbuchat is counted; of those of general officer rank in the direct chain of military command (including the temporary rank of brigadiergeneral), there was one ‘Highlander’ among the nine – and Alexander Robertson of Struan, whose rank was in any case a courtesy extended to a septuagenarian loyalist, was rather an ambiguous Highlander, being a late Cavalier poet whose art and conversation alike were in English. Moving to those with the rank of full colonel should favour Highland regiments whose small numbers were no bar to the vanity of the chief being colonel of a regiment hardly bigger than a company: if there were too many ‘Highland’ colonels leading ‘small bands’, it should show up here. The list runs: Sir Alexander Bannerman; William Boyd, 4th Earl of Kilmarnock; Donald Cameron of Lochiel; John Cameron of Lochiel; Arthur Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino; Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo; Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat; Lord Lewis Gordon; James Grante (Irish Brigade); Henry Kerr of Graden; Donald MacDonald of Kinlochmoidart; Ranald MacDonald; Sir John MacDonald (French service); Alexander MacDonell; Angus MacDonell; MacGhie of Shirloch; Alexander MacGillivray of Dunmaglass; Gregor MacGregorMurray; George Mackenzie, 3rd Earl of Cromartie; Lachlan MacLachlan of Castle Lachlan; Malcolm MacLeod; Ewan Macpherson of Cluny; John Murray of Broughton; O’Reilly (French or Spanish service); John Sullivan (Irish Brigade); David, Lord Ogilvy; Duncan Roberson of Drumachine; John Roy Stewart; Francis Strickland; Charles Stewart of Ardsheal; Francis Townley; Richard Warren; David Wemyss, Lord Elcho. About 50 per cent of this list are Highlanders, even on a generous interpretation (the Earl of Cromartie and Duncan Robertson of Drumachine are hardly the figures who come to mind in fantasising about ‘Highland–Lowland’ ethnic conflict). There are also only thirty-three names, which, allowing for

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

83

staff officers, military advisers, cavalry commands and so on, suggests on the face of it a fairly normal size of regimental unit by the standards of the military conventions of the era. I will return to this point below.23 The ascertainable backgrounds of a wide variety of Jacobite troops indicate the cross-class nature of the enterprise. One of the notes in the background music to the Myth of the Jacobite Clans is that the ‘new’ post-Union Scotland of middle-class tradesmen and professionals would have nothing to do with the 1745 Rising. As R. H. Campbell puts it, ‘the majority of Scots, especially those promoting and profiting from the reorientation of economic contacts’ viewed the Risings as ‘unfortunate interruptions’. But it is by no means clear that this was the case. Out of a total of 695 recruits from north-east Scotland identified by McCann, there were twentynine professionals (a tiny proportion of the UK population as a whole), forty-two merchants, 109 tenant farmers and 187 tradesmen. Analysis of the Taylers’ list from the same area confirms the pattern almost exactly: out of 757 names from Aberdeen and Banffshire they identify as engaged in the Rising, there are 179 professionals, merchants and farmers and 159 tradesmen. In Angus, McCann identifies 199 tradesmen from 825 recruits; in Edinburgh, thirteen professionals and sixty-seven tradesmen from 138 names. These claims are based on the primary evidence. Examining such evidence in more detail reveals that of the 179 names submitted to the authorities of ‘Persons in and about the District of Montrose Said to be Concerned in the Wicked and Unnatural Rebellion’, forty-four are prosperous middle class. The ‘List of those concerned that have Carried Arms and Aided and Assisted in the present wicked and unnatural Rebellion in or round Stonehaven in the Parish of Dunnoter [sic] and Fetteresso’ gives eleven professional or prosperous nanes from forty-four. Forty-six names from Banffshire give twentynine of the middling sort, thirty-six from eighty in Dundee, forty-two from seventy-three in Aberdeen. I cited more of these figures in the first edition: they are readily available, and as readily neglected. On the east coast of Scotland at least, large numbers of the well-to-do merchants, professionals and tradesmen of the main burghs supported the Jacobite Army, and the regimental lists amply bear this out. The Lifeguards boasted twenty-three merchants, writers, surgeons or artists among those whose occupations were known, while Ogilvy’s had twenty-six in these categories, together with ninetyseven weavers, shoemakers, masons, wrights and tailors, and a

84

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

rather telling eleven chapmen, given the role that song and ballad culture played in the Jacobite movement.24 We do not have all the regimental lists, of course, but those we do have hardly tell the story of the ’45 familiar from the Myth. The Order Book for Charles Stewart of Ardsheal’s regiment lists eight companies (hardly a ‘small clan band’) with a roll of 284 at one muster. The Colour Company has a captain, two lieutenants, two ensigns and a regimental surgeon and adjutant. The average company size is thirty-five. Surely this does reveal what has been often alleged, that the army consisted of small units which were grossly over-officered? As Stuart Reid argues ‘Many so-called regiments were wretchedly small and over-officered . . . that there were too many officers is indisputable’. Does this claim stand up?25 In evaluating this, it is important to use a range of contemporary comparators, and this has been too seldom done. As we have seen above, companies in the Army of the Covenant were on the whole no, or hardly any, larger than Ardsheal’s in 1745, while Panmure’s Foot, which we have examined in the context of the 1715 Rising, averaged forty-two to a company: in 1745, Spalding of Ashentullie’s company was forty-three strong. The company-sized Irish picquets in 1745 officially had fifty-one men each, including two officers, though ‘prisoner lists show that those sent to Scotland were doubleofficered’, no doubt in order to supply experienced leaders for training purposes. This was routine practice and these were routine figures for the age. In 1685, Hastings’ Regiment was raised on the basis of fifty men and three officers to a company. In 1775, the Royal Welch Fusiliers had thirty-eight to a company, while in the Peninsular War, the average company size was forty-seven. In 1689–90, James’s forces in Ireland had quite a number of companies under twenty in strength; the average company of foot was around fifty; William’s regiments after the Boyne ranged from 400 to 600 strong, also in line with Jacobite numbers. The Independent Companies in the Highands in the eighteenth century were larger, with forty-nine to seventy men in their establishment at different times, but these were unusual and freestanding units; their captains were also often considerable landowners, and remunerated at 10s a day including an allowance for servants. Eighteenth-century battalions on the Irish establishment had around 300 men (more after 1770), with three officers and four NCOs in each company of under forty; British battalions were 100 or so larger. Company strength was much lower in early modern armies in the British Isles; moreover, officering was

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

85

high, There were, for example, often as few as six privates to an NCO, and ‘there were more NCOs to private men in the British Army than there were in the Prussian army’. At least three Jacobite units in 1745 (Cameron of Lochiel’s, Glengarry’s and Ogilvie’s) were conventional enough (as Panmure’s Foot had been) to carry a grenadier company, irrespective of ‘Highland’ or ‘Lowland’ origin, although it was true that Jacobite battalions were more likely to carry only the eight main companies of a battalion formation, and not the light and grenadier companies that made up the last part of a ten-company battalion. Reid relies significantly on Sullivan’s comment that the army went ‘by tribes’ who ‘would have double officers’: as Daniel Szechi has pointed out, double officering was in any case a training device to accelerate the ‘learning curve’ for ‘potential officers’ in regular armies as well as Jacobite ones, who would, of course, have stood in especial need of it because of their lack of experience. It was used in both 1715 and 1745. As a French regular, Sullivan was not used to companies raised by tacksmen and fine on an obligatory or associational basis; he was also used to company units in the French army, which might well have been somewhat larger. As a matter of fact, the Independent Companies had four officers per company; and if Sullivan complained of there being two captains and two lieutenants in each Jacobite company, he was complaining about more or less established practice, though it is true that the Independent Companies did not have two captains. Neither, of course, did most Jacobite companies. Stuart Reid, for example, even when claiming over-officering, notes that ‘Glengarry’s Regiment’ had ‘two lieutenant-colonels, four majors, 14 captains and at least 15 other officers’. This sounds a lot, but Glengarry’s had two battalions, and was, therefore, pretty well bound to have two lieutenant-colonels and fourteen company commanders. In fact, in the British Army itself, ‘single battalion infantry regiments usually had two lieutenant-colonels on their establishment.’26 What of the cavalry? At the 7 February 1746 muster (when it was hardly at peak effectiveness), Gask’s Troop in Strathallan’s Perthshire Horse squadron was forty-two strong with three officers; the other troop was smaller, but only carried a complement of a single officer and a surgeon. By comparison a Covenanting cavalry troop might range between twenty-six and forty-two, a Williamite one might be as low as thirty-eight, while a British cavalry troop in the Napoleonic Wars might have fifty, and carry four officers: more

86

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

over-officered than Gask’s. Nor was this untypical: a 1780 dragoon troop carried four officers and six NCOs in its complement of sixtyeight. In the ’45, Hanoverian regiments of horse had six troops grouped into two or three squadrons. Jacobite cavalry, then, was fairly indistinguishable from the standard organisation of the time.27 Moreover, although the number of officers in regular army units was officially quite low, in practice things could be rather different. The 16th Lancers had, as Richard Holmes informs us, ‘no fewer than four lieutenant-colonels’, while horse artillery were institutionally over-officered, with two captains, three lieutenants and fourteen NCOs in each (admittedly large) troop. On active service – and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 was pretty active – the British Army’s own single battalion regiments could sink very low, down to 126 men and officers in one case. Lack of rotation could make things even worse for some battalions: in 1788, the 29th Foot, incredibly, could only muster ‘28 file . . . at a regimental review’. The 31st Foot had 299 (official establishment 440) in 1773; in 1785 the 8th Foot consisted solely of 150 ‘very Old Men’ (official establishment 400). The companies of such a battalion would only have had between fifteen and twenty men each. All this puts the so-called overofficering of the Jacobites into some perspective. This is not, of course, to say that no Jacobite unit was over-officered: a number (including Locheil’s) were. It is simply to state that the existing canard which generalises both over-officering and small units as endemic weaknesses of the Jacobite Army, signs of its marginality, oddity and unprofessionalism is not supported by enough evidence to justify its existence.28 FORCING? Of course, it could be argued that over-officering might also be a means of keeping forced and unwilling recruits under control, and here can be found another great canard of the Rising: that many or most of the Jacobite Army were forced. This long-standing allegation has two problems. First, it is hard to see that it is made in the interests of equity and historical balance. It tends to ignore the realities of eighteenth-century levying of troops in general. Historians do not stress the role of forcing at Trafalgar or the Heights of Abraham: these are British victories, and reflect well on the national story. Hence, it is important to note that insistence on Jacobite forcing is usually motivated by a desire to discredit, not

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

87

to understand, the past: we must imagine that a historian hostile to Great Britain might equally choose to stress the forgotten forcing which underpinned great victories and historic wars. As Sir Bruce Seton pointed out eighty years ago, ‘forcing’ is a technical term not an emotive one: it is simply descriptive of the normal contemporary means of raising armies. It is seldom that the enemies of the Jacobites are evaluated in the same terms: yet Thomas Grant, writing as late as 15 April 1746, when government victory must have seemed almost certain, opined that the Laird of Grant ‘will need to Imploy a party’ to bring out his men for the government.29 The second problem attendant on allegations of Jacobite forcing is that it may not have occurred on anything like the scale alleged. On the face of it, there are plenty of statistics to be advanced in favour of forcing in 1745, as well as evidence concerning its widespread use in 1715. For example, there are the ‘Rannoch men, about one hundred, mostly of the name of Cameron’ forced by Locheil’s men; the ’57 out of 87 men from Glen Urquhart and Glenmoriston who surrendered in May 1746’ who had been ‘ ‘‘forced’’, ‘‘pressed’’, or . . . ‘‘dragd out’’ ’ (but see below), or the Rev. William Gordon of Alvie’s assertion ‘that out of 43 of his parishioners . . . only three had gone voluntarily’. Alexander Piggot of Ogilvie’s claimed that the 2nd battalion ‘forced all they could’ in giving King’s Evidence; Alexander Cameron claimed that the 140 of Struan’s who came to Perth ‘were all forced’; Donald McIntosh claimed Keppoch’s brother forced ‘about fourty men’, while John McDonald from Moidart claimed that ‘most’ of Clanranald’s 300 were forced, and it was also stated that Dr Cameron and Major Cameron of Dungallon forced 500 and that there was forcing on Glengarry lands. Locheil apparently whipped Cameron deserters outside Edinburgh. The widespread use of forcing in Atholl (‘many seem’d to be forc’d’ the Lord Advocate was informed on 7 September 1745) is claimed to have led to a ‘desertion rate . . . reckoned to have been the worst of any Jacobite unit’. It was certainly true that Tullibardine (the Jacobite Duke of Atholl) was vigorous in his forcing orders: ‘you should let every Taxman [tacksman] in Atholl know that if they do not come out at your order, their Tacts are broke, besides distroying [sic] all they have’, he wrote on 21 January 1746, while there are also other forcing orders extant: for example, that of 5 February 1746 from Murray of Broughton to James Carnegy Arbuthnot. The Saltoun papers report claims of forcing in Angus. Quotas which obliged landowners to supply a man for every £100 (Scots) of the rental

88

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

value of their land (which indicate the generally good and informed quality of Jacobite administration) were claimed by Lord Lewis Gordon himself to make up ‘att least two-thirds’ of the forces he had raised in December 1745, while one-third of the Banffshire contingent were reported ‘hired out by the county’.30 However, there is a good deal of evidence which does not fit this picture. Although the motivation to claim forcing if captured was high, when one examines the lists of those engaged drawn up for the Lord Justice Clerk, which includes notes on those viewed by government as forced, a different picture emerges. In Port of Leith, none are named as forced from thirty-nine names supplied; in Dundee, none from eighty. There ‘was no pressing’ in Dundee; and Annette Smith, a historian hardly favourable to the Jacobites, was reduced to suggesting that in Dundee ‘we cannot know whether they were persuaded to join by the attractions of Ogilvie’s men’s smart red and black uniform’, a suggestion barely worthy of serious consideration save for the assumptions it reveals about the ‘primitive’ qualities of men who would supposedly risk their lives for a pretty piece of fabric. In Montrose almost 200 names are listed and in Perth eighty: none are marked as forced. There are almost 150 names from Aberdeen: one is marked as deserted, none forced. Two from forty in Anstruther and Kirkcaldy are cited as forced, one from thirty-six in Fraserburgh, six from twenty-one in Stonehaven, two from seventy-five in Elgin and Buckie, none from nineteen in Dumfries. Although pressing and forcing are annotated against the names on the lists, out of almost 900 names, fewer than twenty are marked as pressed or forced. The situation in the Saltoun papers is roughly similar. The lists are manifestly incomplete, of course, and there is apparently little reporting from many core Jacobite areas, with only nine names appearing from Inverness, Nairn and Peterhead combined. Moreover, these lists are primarily enumerations of those engaged in the Scottish ports, which – given the politicisation of smuggling as a crime after the Union – might be expected to contain more dedicated Jacobites. However, the overall numbers are still striking.31 Other figures largely, if not entirely, bear this out. The Commissioners of Excise lists printed in 1890 note seven from 220 forced in Aberdeen, twenty-two hired and one forced in Banff from 200, four from 115 forced in Perth, forty-five from 388 in Elgin, ten hired and three forced from 335 in Montrose, seventy-two hired and fortyseven forced from c. 490 in Dundee and environs, two forced from

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

89

138 in Edinburgh and none from forty-six in Stirling. Although another report from Stonehaven lists thirty names alleging that all were forced, this still leaves under 140 forced men from almost 2,000 in arms. As Allan Macinnes points out ‘of the 2,950 prisoners listed after Culloden, only 200 actually claimed to have been forced out’, a figure which should give those who hold the conventional verdict pause for thought. Individual records elsewhere usually bear this out. Aberdeen City Archives hold a list of fifty-one men who volunteered for Stoneywood’s Aberdeen battalion between 23 October and 14 November 1745 (2nd battalion, Duke of Perth’s then 3rd battalion, Lord Lewis Gordon’s) who, even in the words of a hostile witness, ‘found enough about the town of Aberdeen and places adjacent without force’. Some did claim to have been ‘prased out’ in Aberdeen later, but the claim that ‘the Rebells . . . by arbitrary rules forced what they pleased’ was perhaps more typical of subsequent petitioning (it was lodged on 15 February 1747), not least in its use of the word ‘arbitrary’, music to Hanoverian ears. Prisoners might be expected to claim forcing, and given that there were dozens kept in conditions such as ‘the Black Hole’ in Edinburgh Castle, there was every incentive to do so. None the less not very many seemed to avail themselves of this opportunity, and those who did sometimes produced less than convincing evidence: Thomas Drummond of Logiealmond, who was estimated in government spy reports to have commanded fifty men in November 1745, petitioned Cumberland that ‘he owns his going to Edinburgh in harvest last, which he did on purpose to visit a Lady, a near relation of his, who was then Indisposed’. This lady was presumably the personification of the suffering Caledonia, if she was anyone.32 Although it might be in the interests of the government to deny claims of forcing made by particular individuals, it was very much in the government interest to establish forcing as a Jacobite practice, for very much the same reasons as later historians have focused on it. Establishing that forcing had been a widespread practice would imply that Jacobitism was not so much a popular movement as the product of outmoded social structures drawing on misplaced loyalties or the bullying of those over whom the leadership had power to acquiesce: in other words, it would fit in well with the abolition of heritable jurisdictions. As we would expect then, there is an attempt to establish forcing under the early stages of British military occupation recorded in the Albemarle Papers, and substantial claims are made in reports there of Jacobite forcing and the extraction of cash

90

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

payments in lieu of supplying men. However, the extensive depositions concerning this all turn out to relate to one unit, Lady Lude’s company in the 2nd battalion of the Atholl Brigade, commanded by Captain Robert Stewart. The lack of a more broader evidence base is surely significant, given the wide-ranging power and remit of Albemarle’s military administration. Even adding charges of forcing made to the Lord Justice Clerk concerning Angus does not change the picture much. The ‘trawl by constables on the lookout for the unemployed’ required to press men in Moray in 1756 was hardly required by the Jacobite Army ten years earlier33. Moreover, if there were examples of forcing on clan lands (many made by those with an interest in claiming them), there were counter-examples. The complex web of kinship and associational links which led men to war under their tacksmen can hardly be reduced to the name of ‘forcing’: and in any case, it often operated against the interest of senior members of the fine. As Macinnes points out, ‘despite the endeavours of the clan elite to enforce neutrality, the Atholl men together with the Grants in Glenmoriston and Glenurquhart mobilised for the Jacobite cause in all three principal risings’, which at least sets a question mark against the claim of the Grants who surrendered in May 1746 to have been forced: in fact, a letter of Patrick Grant of Glenmoriston to his wife on 31 October 1745 makes it clear that the Grants have volunteered. We may note that anyone surrendering as late as May had a very high incentive to claim forcing; we may also note that Charles Edward received some of the most notable hospitality of his flight among Clan Grant, and that despite all the forcing, pressing and dragging they claimed to have been subject to, they still contrived to be out in each major Rising while many others managed to stay at home. Indeed, in 1745, ‘clansmen mobilized in defiance of their chiefs in at least another five clans’ as against 1715: and Wade estimated that 3,000 had been out without their superiors in that Rising.34 Moreover, the correspondence of the Jacobite soldiery on campaign – where it survives – indicates more intricate and complex responses to service in the army. ‘Evander McIver Glengares Soldier’ (not a name found in the Muster Roll) writes to his chief (in English!) to ‘be kind to my mother and Children, that I left at home as I was willing, as I was willing to serve your Honor . . . & that it is only for you & if you pleas Desire me to go home or to stay here’. McIver evidently wanted to go home for a visit at least, so he may have been

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

91

flattering Glengarry: but he does insist on his free service – ‘I would serve you as good & as honest as any other’ – as a justification for his request. Ewan McDonald wrote to his wife that ‘I did not come home as others did for I do assure you I think it both my duty and Interest to keep by my master and serve my prince’, while promising to bring his son (?) George home a (toy?) gun. John Fraser, on the other hand, writes to his wife that ‘it was my inclination to see you befor now but Could not for fear of a fronting my Captain . . . we are Gowing toward England which the Rigement Do not Like’. Officers could be more upbeat: Archibald Menzies of Shian wrote to his wife that ‘our men are in Top Spirits’; Andrew Rattray that ‘It is impossible for me to Return home for it would be more Dangerous for me to return home than to go forward’, and that he is ‘willing to take my chance with the rest of my countrymen’. Since forcing was an established tactic, it might be expected that the government would have been more successful in raising troops. In fact: Despite his long-standing association with and active support from the House of Argyll, John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, had considerable difficulty in recruiting in the western and southern Highlands . . . It took Loudoun over four months to raise the full complement of eight Independent Companies for his Highland regiment . . . Government plans to raise an additional 20 Independent Companies from clans they deemed loyal . . . were still two short of completion by the outset of February 1746.35

Both Macleod and MacDonald of Sleat clearly found difficulty in raising their Jacobite dependants for the government: Macleod allegedly provided his with white cockades to deceive them as to which side they were on, while Sir Alexander MacDonald noted that ‘the men are as devoted to the young gentleman [the Prince] as their wives and daughters are’. Moreover, despite the lenity displayed by the Jacobites to captured Hanoverian troops, there is plenty of evidence that the government rank and file at least were not unwilling to volunteer. In Edinburgh after Prestonpans, ‘redcoat sergeants, corporals and privates of Cope’s army arrived in such numbers that the Jacobite clerks were almost overwhelmed’: in the end, about 160 joined. At Culloden alone, ninety-eight of Guise’s Foot who had deserted to the Jacobites were retaken. Some of Loudon’s forces deserted to Cromartie, and in general Loudon did not trust the Independent Company men . By contrast with

92

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

the lack of success in recruiting for the Independent Companies, many dependants of Argyll rose for the Jacobites, and could not be prevented from doing so: there is a list of well over 1,000 ‘gentlemen of Argyll’ in the Rising. Unquestionably the Jacobites forced, and there were men in their ranks (for example, the ‘MacGlasserichs . . . of Brae Lochaber’ in Keppoch’s) who did not want to be there; there is also some evidence that forcing was used by West Highlanders against others. However, in many places that saw forcing (such as the Gordon lands), the effect seems at best to have been patchy. Heavy forcing on Gordon lands might have been expected (on comparators from the 1640s and 1715) to yield up to 3,000 men, and the actual numbers who may have been forced or hired out (c. 300–400 at best) suggest somewhat spasmodic efforts. In Atholl, men followed Duke William (Tullibardine) openly in preference to Duke James: they could not be compelled to fight for Hanover. Even Lord George Murray, always something of a sceptic, remarked that ‘the Low country people seem to be much in our interest, and, were it not for our marauding, I believe we would be welcome guests’. Moreover, the extent of positive feelings towards the Prince and the Jacobite cause, and their deep emplacement in Scottish history and story is itself hardly suggestive of an indifferent population: Jacobite songs, far from being the products of Romantic nostalgia, were largely composed and sung in the Jacobite period, appearing to popular airs throughout the country. Such evidence is hardly compelling, it is true: but it is not suggestive of a cause lacking ideological appeal either. Individual loyalties were also strong. Leaving aside the familiar tales of Gask and Sergeant-Major Peter Grant of the Farquharsons (introduced to George IV as ‘your Majesty’s oldest enemy’ in 1822), in 1815 another veteran, then 101, told his interlocutors that ‘he wd go under ground for the Prince any day’. Pressing, fencible men supplied by landowners or money in lieu to hire such men, and soldiers hired out by the county all played a role in the Jacobite forces, and no doubt encouraged others to volunteer, as pressing did in the British army: but in the first place, forcing – now, of course, called ‘conscription’ – of one kind or another was normal in the contemporary armies of Europe; in the second, it is clear that claims that the majority, or even a large minority, of the army was forced are ahead of the primary evidence that can be deployed to support them. The corollary of forcing, desertion, is now acknowledged to have been exaggerated. It is time that the same attention was paid to forcing itself, especially given the

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

93

presence of conventional recruiting activity in the Jacobite Army, such as the thirty-eight names of those ‘that Recruited Men & took up Arms’ in Fraserburgh. Post-harvest recruiting of the kind carried out by the Jacobites that autumn was, of course, common practice in the contemporary British Army.36 TRAINING AND ORGANISATION The training and organisation of the Jacobite Army has not received very much attention, though Stuart Reid has done some useful work. This neglect is in itself indicative of the power of the Myth of the Jacobite Clans to distort scholarly enquiry: the assumption that the ’45 was fought by a wild rabble of swordsmen enacting an Ossianic last stand for the benefit of literary posterity rather than contemporary politics tends to marginalise scholarly enquiry in areas such as staff work and logistics, despite Christopher Duffy’s verdict that ‘the standard of Jacobite staff work was usually very high, and was capable of bringing off a tour de force like the reunion of their three separate columns just outside Carlisle on 9 November 1745’.37 One of the signs of this has been the scorn evinced for Colonel John Sullivan, Quartermaster General in 1745–6. Despite his long and reasonably successful career as a French regular, the contempt shown for him by Lord George Murray and his allies long passed as conventional wisdom, although those who shared Murray’s scorn had little to say of his own somewhat exiguous staff work. In fact, there is quite a lot of evidence for the organisation of the army: interestingly contemporary government documents accept the existence of the organised regimental units which were later ignored by subscribers to the Myth. There are two surviving order books: that of the 1st battalion of Ogilvy’s and a less detailed one for Stewart of Ardsheal’s. Both are substantially consistent and indicate similarity of practice across predominantly ‘Lowland’ and ‘Highland’ units. Each morning the battalion major (normally the secondin-command) or an officer nominated in his place, would come to receive the orders of the day. Each company commander was required to carry out a muster roll to be presented to the major, following which a company officer deputed by the captain would give the major the day’s report on the company: in other words, the misleading desertion figures alleged by Lord George Murray after Falkirk were either a matter of deliberate deceit or poor staffwork, neither of which reflects well on a lieutenant general. The company

94

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

commanders were responsible for permissions as well as ‘the welfare, supply and feeding’ of the company, and on the march they took the rear of the company with the subalterns flanking it. The field officers controlled the battalion from back to front. Soldiers were required to clean arms, and the regimental quartermaster (James Lyon, a Dundee innkeeper, was quartermaster of the 1st battalion of Ogilvy’s) ensured that the arms were carried. Curfew was at 9pm. Even assuming that these directions were not always followed to the letter (and there is indeed evidence for this), they indicate an aspirational consistency of practice. There is no indication that orders were given in Gaelic, even at company level. One can assume it, but the occasional presence of Lowland officers in Gaidhealtachd regiments makes such an assumption problematic, although it is true that interpreters were sometimes used to gather evidence after Culloden. William Belfour or Balfour was surgeon to MacGregor’s and Henry Clark, a Canongate gentleman was commissary in Mackintosh’s: difficult roles to fulfil without Gaelic if Gaelic was widely used. Lowland rank and file (for example, David Roe, an Anstruther customs officer in MacDonell of Glengarry’s or Dougald Souter, an Edinburgh messenger-at-arms, in Keppoch’s) present even greater difficulties. There is no proof either way, but the burden of implication is that the main language of communication throughout the army was English or Scots, and that we should assume a high level of bilingualism among commissioned officers from the Gaidhealtachd, and probably to an extent among those of lower rank also, as indeed the letters quoted above seem to indicate.38 The ‘overall planning’ of the army’s movements fell to Sullivan as quartermaster general (QMG), and the many accomplished rendezvous suggest his competence, though there were problems with provisions – even relatively early in the campaign on the march from Edinburgh – which led to desertions. Others, however, also contributed greatly to the staff work of the army. The perennially underestimated Duke of Perth ‘formed an effective pioneer corps’ and ‘took up whatever newspapers were to be found in town or at the post office . . . interrogating suspects in person’. Charles Edward himself retained a fairly efficient staff and secretariat, and took care to mislead about the numbers in the army by never making ‘a general review’. Finance was on the whole well-raised in the localities (‘they are but too Successful in their Extortions of Money from the Country’, Cope remarked on 3 October), with the cess collection

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

95

more efficiently carried out than in 1715, though Allan Macinnes suggests that even in this improved state of affairs, cess collection was ‘never efficiently applied nationwide’. However, the extent to which it was applied suggests something about the strength of Jacobite forces in the localities, a question I will be returning to in Chapter 3. These were the more important because the army relied on ‘local requisitions instead of the cumbersome system of trains and fixed magazines which supplied the conventional armies of the period’. In Edinburgh, bread was delivered direct to Holyrood by a favoured supplier out of fear of being cheated in the local shops; regimental colonels were advised to send their officers there to supervise its collection. Camp-followers continued to be a difficulty throughout the Rising (particularly on the march into England), though married women were permitted to accompany their husbands.39 The army was paid at fairly standardised rates: 2s. 6d. sterling (30s. Scots) per diem for a captain, 2s. for a lieutenant or surgeon, 1s. 8d. for 2nd lieutenants where these are named, 1s. 6d. for ensigns, cavalry sergeants and colour bearers and 1s. 2d. for the occasional 2nd ensign. Cavalry troopers got 1s., drummers, pipers and sergeants got 9d., private soldiers 6d.–8d. Volunteers (see above under ‘Forcing’) might get 1s., with ‘Gentleman Volunteers’ 2s. Occasional one-off payments were made: 6d. for a guide to show the way from Perth to Coupar Angus, for example. These figures were on the low side in contemporary practice in the British Army: in the late seventeenth century, captains might get 8s., lieutenants 4s. and soldiers 8d., and in 1745 approximately 10s., 4s. and just under 7d., respectively. Jacobite pay rates are closer to those of the Scottish army of 1688, where lieutenants had 30s. Scots a day (2s. 6d. sterling), ensigns 20s (1s. 8d.), sergeants 14s. (1s. 2d.), pipers 10s. (10d.) and soldiers 3s. (3d.), with some small payments in kind: these sums are very similar to those paid out by Charles’s army, though Jacobite private soldiers earned more than both their Scottish predecessors and at least some of their British contemporaries. The average height of a Jacobite soldier was 162–166cm, shorter than the 170cm regarded as the minimum acceptable for listed recruits in the regulars, who, interestingly, were instructed ‘To Inlist no Irishmen’: there was at least one mutiny of Irishmen eager to join the Jacobites on a merchant vessel.40 I will be dealing with the arming of the Jacobite forces in detail in Chapter 5, but will inevitably be touching on some questions of the

96

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

use of weaponry in Jacobite tactics here. The training of the Jacobite Army (praised in 1715 by Argyll, no less) has long been a neglected topic, but both Stuart Reid and Christopher Duffy have started to disentangle the implications of the evidence. Early indications from government informers were that in Lowland areas such as Perth, ‘the whole Corps raised were altogether undisciplined’. Lord George Murray, a former officer in the Royals, introduced a drill, exercise and parade system at Duddingston and Leith in the autumn of 1745 (‘the routine of a regular army, complete with drill, orders of the day, and daily challenges and passwords’), but as Reid argues, it is likely that – among the regiments from the Gaidhealteachd at least – this adapted rather than altered traditional marching and manoeuvring practice. After French regulars started landing in November, Nicholas Glascoe, a lieutenant in Dillon’s attached to the 2nd battalion of Ogilvy’s as a major, seems to have introduced more conventional French battlefield tactics to the northern army. Though these were possibly not effective by the time of the battle of Inverurie on 23 December, after the northern and southern armies reunited at the beginning of January, French training practice (which appears to have suited the Jacobites better, since it involved firing at will more frequently than the ‘locked ranks’ firing system of the British Army) seems to have become quickly manifest in the fighting at Falkirk on 18 January; it was also in evidence at Culloden. It is quite likely that it was not entirely consistently applied, and that there were differences in the localities: also, there is no evidence of cavalry training. Figures such as the Chelsea pensioner John Webster ‘assisted in training the Rebels at Arbroath’, presumably using British Army practice (Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline (1727) or the 1728 Regulations for drill), while regulars with recent service such as the former grenadier captain John Roy Stuart, might also have been expected to have their own ideas. Nor were the Gaidhealtachd regiments innocent of those with experience of conventional British military practice: Cluny Macpherson had held a commission in the independent Highland companies, and John Cameron, a lieutenant in Lochiel’s, was another Chelsea pensioner. Some, such as Alexander Robertson of Struan, who may have reached the rank of colonel in the French army, had Continental experience.41 It is a tribute to the success of Jacobite tactics that the ’45 was the catalyst for issuing a revised British Army drill in 1748. The ‘Highland charge’ has iconic status as a Jacobite military tactic within the Myth of the Jacobite clans. It has been seen as

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

97

everything from a sign of barbarian savagery to an avatar of Confederate battle tactics. The role played by the sword, the heroic weapon of Gaelic poetry, and one in large part only carried by the fine in the front rank of Gaidhealtachd regiments, has been grossly exaggerated, as will be made clear in Chapter 5. The reality was more complex, but even eyewitness accounts can mislead us in identifying moments in battlefield tactics which appear definitive, but are in fact only partial descriptions of what the Jacobite Army did. For example, Chevalier de Johnstone, Lord George Murray’s aide-de-camp, suggests that the targe was used to cover the body of kneeling Jacobites within reach of government bayonets: but the furious onset of the ‘Highland charge’ would surely be difficult to carry out with bent knee, no matter how huge and hairy you might be: it possibly refers to the stabbing of horses in the belly at close quarters at Falkirk. Like other descriptions, Johnston’s cuts across the usual understanding of a reckless frontal attack, depending on hand-to-hand combat for success.42 The charge proper was only one aspect of Jacobite battlefield tactics. It involved racing in a group of men three or four deep (quite possibly a company under the command of its fine captain or the ‘paired companies’ of French practice) to within 50–55m of the enemy. This was the outer verge of accurate musket fire: muskets could hit at 100m, but in tests in 1779, the crack Norfolk militia secured only 20 per cent hits against a stationary target of 15m2 at 63m distance, and the Prussian Foot Guards fared little better. At 50m (sometimes even closer), the attacking unit would then fire single shots – more or less at will – before switching from line to clusters ‘of a dozen or so’. These may have been in a wedge formation, narrow at the point of impact, but up to ‘12 or 14 deep by the time they come up to the people they attack’. The front rank, the fine in a Gaidhealtachd regiment, might then fire a pistol in the face of the enemy before cutting with the broadsword, sometimes with broadsword in one hand and 50–cm dirk in the other if no targe was carried (Duffy argues that ‘most . . . had been discarded’ by Culloden) or where the bayonet line was broken. The often broader rear of the unit then poured through the gap. Carried out in unison and at speed against a static front, the effect was to create multiple flanking of the enemy’s line, which was then destroyed as it tried to flee. The effectiveness of Jacobite marksmanship continues to be a matter of debate, but the balance of evidence probably indicates that they were better individual shots than their government opponents;

98

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

the Jacobite officers who led at the point of impact were in addition more likely to behave with physical bravery, particularly in regiments closely tied by kinship and associational obligations, than their government counterparts. The rank and file Jacobite soldier held most of his fire to closer quarters than the government troops, who were drilled to firefighting tactics dependent on weight of fire beyond the distance at which muskets could select a mark with any accuracy.43 It must be said that the above account is a rather platonic one: the charge was seldom so straightforward as this. In particular, a number of accounts make clear that the Jacobites often depended on weaknesses appearing in the government line before they reached it, and that if the attackers discharged at 50m against a line which continued to hold firm, the final stage of the charge might be aborted. Indeed, Jacobite troops might rush at the enemy several times in order to create confusion in the front line opposing them. If it held absolutely firm, and if the platoons along it stuck to the sequence of their firings, so that musket-fire rolled along the line, the odds against frontal attack were often too great. On the other hand, the tremendous results achieved by such attack – more than other armies might hope for against British Army regulars – are not always indicative of panic and inexperience among the government troops. What seems to have been the case was that even the smallest gap or confusion in the line was enough to break it frighteningly quickly – in 30 seconds or so – and this opportunity offered itself more often than not. It must be remembered that ‘precision of distance and pace’ was not available ‘between the ranks’ when marching or manoeuvring at this time, and that there was a great deal of reliance on heavy fire and close order, of which an agile opponent could take advantage. It should also be noted that training and drill were quite poor throughout the British Army, ‘even basic training such as ‘‘firings’’ ’, which is probably one of the reasons Cumberland spent so long before closing with the Jacobites in Scotland, drilling them constantly44. The Jacobite Army manoeuvred in column, and itself often used the bayonet in close-quarter fighting, though supply of bayonets to different units was patchy. Jacobite columns were, as Christopher Duffy points out, much narrower at around three as against the ten to twelve of Hanoverian ones. They made the army manoeuvrable over broken ground and helped to conceal its numbers on the march, as careless observers used to the way the British Army looked on the

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

99

march might automatically assume higher Jacobite numbers, though government spies were more accurate, as their close agreement on separately recorded figures testifies. Nevertheless, it was a useful initial blind when exercised on inexperienced townsfolk. The elongated nature of Jacobite columns was difficult to manage at night, and this was one of the factors which led to the army breaking up during the abortive night attack before Culloden.45 At the same time, the Jacobites were versed in more conventional tactics. At Sheriffmuir, ranks fifteen deep ‘fired by ranks each rank retreating and not in platoons’. At Prestonpans, the Jacobite front was – according to eyewitnesses – about 700m, with a 1,350m gap between the armies closing to 900m as the government troops advanced. At Culloden the distance was less – maybe 500m. This conventional line of battle might be followed by a charge over the intervening ground: or it might not. Firepower was used both offensively and defensively: the Jacobites thought that ‘real soldiers carried muskets’ just as a much as the regulars did. At Falkirk, the volley firing of three regiments broke Hawley’s dragoon charge. In the words of one trooper in Pitsligo’s Horse Squadron (in the third line), the government horse ‘received a full fire of our first line from Right to left’, while another account notes that ‘the enemy’s horse . . . came at last at the full trot, in very good order, within pistol shot of the first line. Then Lord George Murray gave orders to fire . . . it entirely broke them’ .The fact that the regiments firing were MacDonell of Glengarry’s, Keppoch’s and Clanranald’s is yet another ironic reflection on the Myth of the Jacobite Clans, for ‘Highland armies’ are popularly supposed both to have feared cavalry and not to have known one end of a musket from the other. At Culloden, according to Sir John Wedderburn, recollecting the battle in 1792, Ogilvy’s Forfarshires (Wedderburn then commanding a company in the 1st battalion) were on the right of the second line. As the Atholl Brigade disintegrated ahead of them, they moved up to hold the government advance, receiving a full volley designed to break them, ‘which they returned in very good order’ before they had to withdraw, continuing scattered fire from their retreating line as individuals managed to reload.46 The delayed advance, the difficult ground, the Campbell militia’s flanking action and the 200 casualties a minute caused by canister shot against the slowing and staggered charge over uneven ground all played their part that day of course. Most of the Jacobite cavalry had lost their horses by the end of the

100

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

campaign, many of those that remained being donated to Fitzjames’ Horse in February. This seems, however, to have been a fairly late development: government intelligence at Lancaster on 13 December suggested that the Jacobites ‘have got more Horses than they had when they went South’. The major duties of the cavalry appear to have been patrolling and reconnoitring. They had relatively little combat use: with only five squadrons and a troop of horse, compared with the eleven squadrons and fourteen discrete troops mobilised in 1715, they lacked the strength to play a major role in battle, though Strathallan’s Perthshire Horse may have played a vital delaying role at Culloden.47 Artillery was a much more significant resource for the Jacobites than it has conventionally been understood to be, and again I will be looking at its role in more detail in Chapter 5. The ‘six brass’ Swedish (in fact, French) guns landed at Stonehaven under the screen of the (presumably unforced) fishing fleet were feared by the government, as they could fire up to ‘11 times in a minute’. Moreover, artillery was present in force at a late stage of the campaign. Lord George Murray left twenty-seven guns at Perth, about half of them 8-pounders, and took seventeen guns north in the final stage of the campaign: but it is clear that these were augmented. At the siege of Fort William nine cohorn mortars, some 4-pounders, four 6-pounders and a 14-pounder fired hundreds of rounds, while Cumberland captured thirty artillery pieces at Culloden, although only eleven are recorded as being present at the outset of the battle. Jacobite artillery was a significant arm, and was often effectively deployed.48 STRATEGY AND PROSPECTS In some ways Jacobite strategy was obvious, at least in Charles Edward’s mind: seize London as quickly as possible, as Charles I had fatally failed to do after Edgehill in 1642. This was not only an obvious strategy: it was the only one to adopt in the face of the massive advantages in resources enjoyed by the British state, which could – if given time – not only raise huge amounts of men and money, but also run an effective naval blockade. In November 1745, £1.3 million was voted by Parliament for the services, while by the spring of 1746, Yorkshire alone had raised £26,000 in loyal subscriptions. By comparison, the Jacobite Army in England cost around £200 a day in wages. These basic economic facts did not

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

101

stop the advance from Edinburgh from being controversial at the time among the Jacobites themselves, not predicted by their opponents, and often castigated by their successors. Scottish nationalist commentators with more sentiment than acuity have a weakness for suggesting that Charles should not have advanced from Edinburgh, where he would have been overwhelmed militarily, strangled by Royal Navy blockade and have had a weak tax base. Those who counsel that the old 1708 Hooke plan of advancing on Newcastle and securing the coalfields would have succeeded in bringing Great Britain to its knees might be right. However, apart from the task of defeating Wade’s army, how long would it have taken? Sitting in Newcastle, the Jacobites could have been surrounded in weeks by gigantic concentrations of force, their stationary army even more effectively blockaded than it would have been in Edinburgh. The fewer ports the Jacobites controlled, the more any blockade would bite. French plans were clear, though French intentions might be doubted: either way, occupying Newcastle or Edinburgh would make reinforcements of men, money or materiel an easy target for the Royal Navy. Hanoverian and other German troops would have been landed. What was a small expansion in the National Debt to save the state? As it was £100,000 was made available in January 1746 alone to bring 6,000 Hessian troops over, and this was when the Jacobites were in retreat. As long as London was not directly threatened, London would win: that was the message of 1642–51. And when Stuart troops were holed up in towns, as in Worcester in 1651 and Preston in 1715, they did not tend to fare well. Speed and surprise were the most effective strategic weapons the Jacobites could muster: time and again, they evaded and tricked their opponents. The signs were that they could have done this all the way to London.49 Although it is not the subject of this book to revisit the endless question of ‘what if the Jacobites had marched on from Derby?’ it is important to realise that it is quite likely that the Jacobite army would have reached London, whatever happened thereafter. By 5 December, when the Jacobites retreated (although advance parties had apparently moved up to Leicester and Loughborough), the artillery train was on the move from Woolwich; on 3 December, seven companies of the Black Watch (together with three other companies of foot) had been moved up to Enfield, and on 4 and 5 December five more companies of foot and a dragoon squadron moved into position, with two more or less full battalions to follow, Sinclair’s

102

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Royals and the 39th Foot. Apart from the trained bands, there were thus only some four battalions’ worth of regulars against three times the number of Jacobites. Although heavy artillery would have defended the Tower and other strongholds effectively, it is fairly clear that the southern Jacobite Army would have entered the capital, even presuming that the Black Watch were not as unreliable as the government feared they were.50 Once in London, the Jacobites might have been wiped out or won; if they didn’t reach it, they would be wiped out anyway. Culloden and its aftermath proved that the supposed security of northern Scotland was an illusion once the British state was roused. In January 1689, James had had – perhaps rather theoretically in Scotland’s case – two of his three kingdoms, Scotland and Ireland: without London, he had lost both within three years. Charles Edward’s government might repeal the Union, but he was a multi-kingdom monarch by both inclination and necessity: it was militarily and politically impossible to be restored in Scotland alone. That is not to say that Scottish issues did not dominate underlying reasons for recruitment. Moreover, there were problems in the rapid advance strategy: by losing recruitment time, it failed to achieve concentration of force in England and led to the development of northern and southern armies; and it made effective communications difficult, most particularly with France. In addition, its chances of success would have been greatly improved by high quality intelligence-gathering, and here government was clearly superior to the Jacobites. In fact, Charles himself blocked Lord George Murray’s wish for a system of espionage.51 None the less, it remains the case that the Jacobite forces stood a good chance of reaching their objectives if the British government was deprived of time to raise money and expand its army. If the size of the forces raised by the Jacobites in 1715 and 1745 need to be seen in the context of those raised by the Covenant, as suggested at the beginning of this chapter, they also need to be viewed in the context of the small size of the eighteenth-century British Army compared with its Continental equivalents: it was not for nothing that the Dutch and Hessians had to be drafted in to help save the British state in 1745–6. The British Army had twenty-eight battalions in 1702; forty-three battalions, eight regiments of horse and six troops of Household Cavalry in 1714; sixty-one foot battalions in 1739, sixty-nine in 1748–55 with four (later seven) cavalry regiments and four Household Cavalry troops. As we have seen, many of those

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

103

battalions were under-strength: and the establishment strength was under 500 in England, and 100 or more lower in Ireland. They faced a Jacobite force of forty-three battalions and the equivalent of eighteen or nineteen squadrons of horse in 1715; thirty-seven battalions and five or six squadrons of horse in 1745. Given the difficulty of removing troops from station overseas (there was no rotation, and the luckless 38th Foot spent the entire period from 1716–65 in the West Indies) – or from Jacobite-leaning Ireland – there is no doubt that contemporary fears of military victory for the Jacobites were not unrealistic, even if the greater prospect of success nearly always lay with government.52 The next two chapters will be occupied with different facets of the question of whether the ’45 can be termed a national Rising. Chapter 3 will examine the strength of Jacobite feeling and activity in the different areas of Scotland in the years before and after 1745, with some comparison to 1715, while Chapter 4 will discuss the underpinning ideology of the Jacobite movement, and its effectiveness or otherwise in post-Union Scotland. NOTES 1 Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603– 1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 23, 89, 114. 2 Edward M. Furgol, A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies, 1639–1651 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 4–6. 3 David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644, (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), 71, 92, 139, 146; James Michael Hill, Celtic Warfare 1595–1763 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 46, 48, 51ff; for a detailed discussion of the politicisation of the Gaidhealtachd in this period, v. Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–1651: the vernacular response to the Covenanting dynamic’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d. [1983]), 59–94. 4 Furgol, Covenanting Armies, 7–8, 61, 133, 165, 195, 220, 296 ff, 378; G.D. Henderson, ‘The Aberdeen doctors’, Aberdeen University Review XXVI (1938–9), 10–19; Papers Relating to the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant, 2 vols, Charles Sanford Terry (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1917), xxxiv, xl, xliii, xlviii, xlix, lii, liii. These are Lord Humbie’s figures as Commissary-General of the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant.

104

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

5 Furgol, Covenanting Armies; Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five (Aberdeen: Milne and Hutchison, 1928), 418ff. 6 Furgol, Covenanting Armies, 22, 32, 271, 308 and passim. For the damage to recruitment caused by Montrose’s sack of Aberdeen, v. Gordon DesBrisay, ‘ ‘‘The civill warrs did overrun all’’: Aberdeen, 1630–1690’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History, (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 238–66, 260. 7 Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 119–20, 125; National Library of Scotland MS 6290 f.20 (‘A list of the most considerable Chiefs in Scotland & the number of men they can raise with an Account of their Disposition for or Against the Government’). This is the list reproduced as Patten’s in Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715 and 1719 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 195–8. V. Peter Simpson, The Independent Highland Companies 1603–1760, (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996), 38, 162 for Wade’s and Forbes’ figures. 8 Iain Gale, in Scotland in Trust (Spring 2007), 20–4, 21–3; v. National Library of Scotland MS 3142 f. 140 for these names among the prisoners at Stirling, of whom thirty-four were Scots, four English and three Irish. 9 Frank McLynn, Jacobite Army in England, 24–5, thirty-one for campfollowers; v. also R. Murdoch-Lawrence, ‘Aberdeen women as Jacobites’, Aberdeen Journal: Notes and Queries 1 (1908), 49; National Library of Scotland MSS 17514 ff. 55–6, 17525 ff. 87, 97, 98, 109, 119, 120, 126, 129 for the sequence of information to the Lord Justice Clerk on the northern army; NLS MS 17526 ff. 43, 48, 56; NLS MS 7072 f. 166; NLS MS 7073 ff. 40, 57; National Archives SP 54/26/322B for Inveraray report; Christopher Duffy, The ’45, (London: Cassell, 2003), 47, 358, 362; Stuart Reid, 1745: A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996), 87. For an example of Strathallan’s administration, v. National Archives of Scotland GD190/ 3/294/1 (Smythe of Methven Papers: ‘Precept by Viscount Strathallan, ordering Cess from Methven heritors’). 10 No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Army, 1745–46, Alastair Livingstone of Bachuil, Christian W. H. Aikman and Betty Stuart Hart (eds) (Glasgow: Neil Wilson Publishing, 2001 [1984]), 230–2; Jacobite Correspondence of The Atholl Family During the Rebellion, 1745–46, Burton and Laing (eds) (Edinburgh:

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

11

12

13

14

105

Abbotsford Club, 1840); Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart (London: Routledge, 1988), 149. For a high government estimate of Jacobite numbers at Falkirk, v. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 186; for a low estimate of Jacobite numbers after Falkirk, v. Thomas Jack’s intelligence at National Archives SP54/27/41C. List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion Transmitted to the Commissioners of Excise by the Several Supervisors in Scotland in Obedience to a General Letter of 7th May 1746 and a Supplementary List with Evidences to Prove the Same, with a Preface by the Earl of Rosebery and Annotations by the Rev. Walter Macleod (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Scottish History Society, 1890), xvi, xvii; Jean McCann, ‘The organisation of the Jacobite Army, 1745–46’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, (Edinburgh, 1963), xi; Hilary Kemp, The Jacobite Rebellion (London: Almark Publishing, 1975); Szechi, 1715; Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 56; No Quarter Given. Bruce Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot, Prisoners of The ’45, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1927) offers a figure of 1,264 French service prisoners, but these include those intercepted en route to the theatre of war. Reid, Jacobite Army, 3; Christopher Duffy, The ’45, (London: Cassell, 2003), 145–6; Lord Elcho, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland, Hon. Evan Charteris (ed.) (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1907), 424–5, 425n. National Library of Scotland Adv MS 23.3.30 f. 16; Stuart Reid, 1745: A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996), 84; Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151, 154, 156, 159, 161–2. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 ff. 49, 212, 213 (v. also MS 3142); NLS MS 290; NLS Advocates’ MSS 23.3.28 (Eaglescarnie Papers) f. 137, National Archives SP 54/30/1B for desertions from Loudon’s; Aberdeen City Archives L/A/1 for guard on the town, L/J/1 for magistrates’ protestation of loyalty; The Albemarle Papers Charles Sanford Terry (ed), 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1902), II: 277 for Loudon’s numbers in 1746; Furgol, Covenanting Armies, 42, 133; Robert E. Tyson, ‘People in the Two Towns’, in Dennison et al. (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800, 111–28, 112; David Findlay and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Revolution to Reform’, idem, 267–86, 273; Rupert C. Jarvis, Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), I: 8, 20, 29, II: 38 for Cope’s force; J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service? The Training of the British Army 1715– 1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000 [1981], 63n; Duffy, The ’45, 147, 210, 214–15; Macinnes, Clanship, 199.

106

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

15 National Library of Scotland MS 7072 ff. 21, 89, 97; NLS MS 17514 ff. 55–6, 167, 184; NLS MS 17526 (Saltoun Papers); NLS Adv MS 23.3.30 ff. 55–6; National Archives SP 54/26/54 (‘Information of Robert Boivey [Bovey]); NA SP 54/26/122/1; Allardyce, Miscellaneous Papers, Spalding Club, 1895–6, I: 292; Duffy, The ’45, 314; Jarvis, Collected Papers, II: 15 for Penrith report; F. J. McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 24–5. For a fearful overestimate of the northern army at Perth, v. NLS Acc. 6446, from John Hamilton at Edinburgh to his brother Alexander at Lincoln’s Inn. 16 National Library of Scotland MS 7073 f. 57; NLS MS 17514 f. 56; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 3, 5, 30–1. 17 Reid, Jacobite Army, 2. 18 Macinnes, Clanship, 163, 182; Jean McCann, ‘The organisation of the Jacobite Army, 1745–46’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1963), xi–xvi, 5; Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 27; Duffy, The ’45, 80, 524 and passim; Simpson, Independent Companies, 191. 19 Richard Holmes, Redcoat (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 337; Duffy, The ’45, 211. 20 These figures are in the Appendix, and derive from a variety of sources, including d’Eguilles’ correspondence, No Quarter Given, Duffy, The ’45, McCann, ‘Organization’, xi–xvi, 5 and National Library of Scotland MSS 3142 f. 84; MS 17514 f. 55: MS 17514 f. 97; MS 17514 f. 109: MS 17514 f. 126; Adv MS 82.9.2 ff. 110–13; National Archives of Scotland GD18/3256 for mention of ‘three troops of Fits James’s horse’. 21 Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), fiftyseven for strength of British army; Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 9, 14, 18, 27. 22 Duffy, The ’45, 210; National Library of Scotland Adv MS 82.4.2; NLS MSS 17514 f. 108; 17526 f. 100; No Quarter Given, 93–115. 23 No Quarter Given; National Library of Scotland MS 290. 24 R. H. Campbell, Scotland Since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985 [1965]), 7; McCann, ‘Organization’, 95–6, 108; Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five (Aberdeen: Milne and Hutchison,1928); National Library of Scotland MS 17522 ff. 35, 38, 56, 82, 83, 85, 87; Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 82–3, No Quarter Given, passim.

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

107

25 National Library of Scotland MS 3787 f. 49; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 14. 26 Houlding, Fit for Service?, 49, 129n, 271, 421; John Kinross, The Boyne and Aughrim: The War of the Two Kings, (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1998 [1997]), 38; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 14, 15, 33; Highland Clansmen, 9; Simpson, Independent Companies, 92, 97, 115, 116, 197–8; Holmes, Redcoat, 111, 112, 125; Szechi, 1715, 130 for double-officering in 1715; National Archives SP 54/26/122/58 for Spalding of Ashentullie. 27 National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 82.9.2, ff. 110–11; Holmes, Redcoat, 127; Kinross, The Boyne and Aughrim, 111–50; Houlding, Fit for Service?, 422; Duffy, The ’45, 142. 28 Houlding, Fit for Service? 15n, 16, 17; Holmes, Redcoat, 112, 127, 129. For double-officering in Locheil’s as a matter of obligation rather than policy, v. National Archives SP 54/26/122/5. 29 National Archives of Scotland GD 48/4/27; Sir Bruce Gordon Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot, The Prisoners of The ’45, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1928–9), I: 272–3. 30 National Library of Scotland MS 7072 f. 91; NLS MS 17516 f. 2; NLS MS 17498 f. 136 for forcing in 1715; National Archives SP 54/26/152, NA 54/26/514, NA TS20/83/35 for forcing in 1745; Aberdeen City Archives L/B/4 (Lord Lewis Gordon); Atholl Correspondence, 150; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 6–7, 10–11, 19. 31 National Library of Scotland MS 1918; NLS MS 17522 ff. 9, 10, 31, 35, 37 and passim; James Thomson, The History of Dundee (Dundee: John Durkan & Son, 1874), 118.; Annette Smith, ‘Dundee and The ’45’, in Lesley Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), The ’45: To Gather an Image Whole (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1988), 99–112, 107–8. 32 National Library of Scotland MS 17523 ff. 197–8; NLS MS 7073 f. 114 for the prisoners in ‘the Black Hole’; NLS MS 17518 (Saltoun Papers) ff. 18, 47, 68, 102 for petitions, f. 206 for Logiealmond’s petition; Aberdeen City Archives L/B/1 (‘A List of Volunteers raised for the Prince Service by Lt. Col. James More of the Aberdeen battalion’); List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, 31 and passim; Allan Macinnes, Clanship, 167; McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, 75 ff; Annette Smith, in Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), To Gather an Image, 107. 33 Albemarle Papers I: 244–59; National Library of Scotland MS 17516 f. 2; Conway, War, State, and Society, 71. 34 Macinnes, Clanship, 166; National Archives SP 54/26/122/18; Reid, Jacobite Army, 6; Simpson, Highland Companies, 190ff.

108

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

35 For correspondence, v. National Archives SP 54.26/122/17–21, 46–8, 54–5; Simpson, Highland Companies, 168. 36 National Archives of Scotland GD14/88 (Campbell of Stonefield Papers); NAS GD155/900; National Library of Scotland MS 17522 (Saltoun Papers) f. 55; Simpson, Highland Companies, 157; Macinnes, Clanship, 184n; Duffy, The ’45, 206; Stuart Reid, 1745, 200–2; Jean McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, 14, 30, 200; Atholl Correspondence, 16; Houlding, Fit for Service?, 117–18. For a full and detailed examination of the contemporaneity of the Jacobite song based on large-scale primary research, v. Murray Pittock (ed.), James Hogg:The Jacobite Relics of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002–3). 37 Duffy, The ’45, 109. 38 National Library of Scotland MS 3787; National Archives TS 20/88/11 for use of an interpreter in gaining evidence; TS 20/88/39 for acknowledgement of Jacobite regimental units; Spalding Miscellany I (1841), 277–9, 282, 285, 290–1, 312; Witness to Rebellion: John Maclean’s Journal of the ’Forty-Five and the Penicuik Drawings. Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape (eds) (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 13; No Quarter Given for muster roll details for the various regiments. 39 National Library of Scotland MS 3787 ff. 1, 5; NLS MS 7072 f. 103; National Archives SP 54/26/122/44 (Ogilvy to Sir James Kinloch on lack of provisions); Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 46; Duffy, The ’45, 110, 113; Macinnes, Clanship, 201. 40 National Library of Scotland MS 3787; NLS MS 17514 f. 249 for Irish mutiny; NLS MS 17536 f. 57; NLS Adv MS 82. 4.1 ff. 41, 101, 102, 114; National Archives of Scotland GD18/4186 (Clerk of Penicuik); Seton and Arnot, Prisoners, I: 230–1, 276; Kinross, Boyne and Aughrim, 38; Simpson, Independent Highland Companies, 73. In 1917–18, 168–170cm was the average height for a soldier (Seton and Arnot, Prisoners of The ’45). 41 National Library of Scotland MS 7072 f. 91; NLS MS 17522 f. 35; Daniel Szechi, 1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2006), 129; No Quarter Given; Duffy, The ’45, 204; Reid, 1745, 203; Highland Clansmen, 16, Scottish Jacobite Army, 54; Houlding, Fit for Service?, 179, 281, 370; Alexander Robertson of Struan, entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 42 For the ‘Celtic South’ thesis, see Hill, Celtic Warfare; Chevalier de Johnstone, A Memoir of the ’Forty-Five, intr. Brian Rawson (London: Folio Society, 1958), 88. 43 Simpson, Highland Companies, 172; Reid, Highland Clansmen, 18;

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

44 45 46

47 48 49

50

51 52

109

Scottish Jacobite Army, 54–5; Duffy, The ’45, 114–18, 518; Houlding, Fit for Service?, 262–3; Martin Kelvin, The Scottish Pistol: Its History, Manufacture and Design (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 40–1; Duffy argues that ‘the Jacobites were on the whole better shots’, 118. Lord George Murray also held this view (Reid, Highland Clansmen, 18). Reid, Highland Clansmen, 20, 27; Houlding, Fit for Service?, 2–3, 23, 259–61, 369. Duffy, The ’45, 116–17. National Archives of Scotland GD 18/3256 (Clerk of Penicuik); NAS GD 1/931/15; National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 82.9.2 f. 109; NLS MS 17514 f. 186; News Letters of 1715–16, A. Francis Steuart (ed.) (London and Edinburgh: Chambers, 1910), 70 for Sheriffmuir; Jacobite Memoirs of the Rebellion of 1745, Robert Chambers (ed.) (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1834), 85 for Falkirk; Reid, Highland Clansmen, 18. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 127. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 57; Reid, 1745, 113. Murray Pittock, Jacobitism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 101–5 for the pros and cons of leaving Scotland and advancing to Derby; Frank McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981) for the seriousness of French invasion plans: McLynn’s argument has never been seriously rebutted, let alone refuted. For the Hooke plan, v. John Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988). Duffy, The ’45, 312–13; Rupert C. Jarvis, Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), II: 221–2; Pittock, Jacobitism, 103ff for a more detailed discussion. ‘Lord George Murray’ in Oxford DNB. Houlding, Fit for Service?, 8–11, 19.

3 Jacobites in the Localities, 1745–60

THE MAJOR BURGHS It has been argued that Jacobitism was less popular in the burghs in 1745 than in 1715, because the administration did not oversee the election of sympathetic magistrates, but instead often resorted to military rule. In 1715, Dundee was enthusiastic for the Jacobites but less so in 1745. As Bruce Lenman argues, ‘whereas in 1715 the Jacobites were able to hold elections to confirm their grip on the east-coast burghs north of Tay, in the ’45 Charles had to simply appoint governors of the major burghs’.1 There is, however, the possibility that this was done with a view to maximising recruitment, efficiency in raising monies and speed. Certainly, the opinions of contemporaries respecting the burghs did not suggest that the Jacobites were unpopular there. In 1745, apart from Dundee, it was suggested that ‘the Magistracies of the most part of the other Burrows in Scotland have fallen into the Hands of Persons known by many circumstances . . . to be very much disaffected’. The ‘ ‘‘common people’’ and the women’ flocked to Charles Edward, and evidence for this exists in documented detail as well as impressionistic report: for example,’ An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig . . . or . . . Jacobite Partie’ enumerates 134 Jacobite and 194 Whig ladies in Edinburgh and its environs. It appears to have been written to prove that not all women were Jacobites, which it certainly does: but 44 per cent is not a small minority among the movers and shakers of the capital’s society. Another document records the presence of thirteen Nonjuring Episcopalian congregations in the city. While there is no proof of there being majority support for the Jacobites in Edinburgh, it is likely that there was at least a very large minority. Lord Provost Archibald Stewart was unsuccessfully prosecuted for connivance with the Jacobites, and although he was not convicted, the evidence was impressive: he had refused to ‘deprive

Jacobites in the Localities

111

Jacobite sympathisers of arms’, obstructed the appointment of volunteer officers to defend the capital, blocked requests for grenades, refused to order removal of cannon to the castle, undermanned the guards, and would allow no work to be done on the city walls without estimates. This might have been bureaucratic pedantry, but equally might be suggestive of not only the Lord Provost’s personal, but of widespread sentiments, seen not least in the presence of armed Jacobites in Edinburgh before it fell. When Stewart was acquitted in late 1747, a Jacobite celebration in Edinburgh had to be suppressed. Cumberland himself thought that few were well affected to government in the capital and suspected widespread collaboration: Jacobite sympathies were thought to be ‘still rampant’ in the capital in 1746. Even after Hanoverian forces reoccupied Edinburgh, there were persistent cases of pro-Jacobite unrest in the Town Guard which endured until late February 1746, well after the Prince’s army had retreated out of the range of any would-be volunteers. On 27 March 1746, James Pringle wrote from the city that: I don’t know what is the matter with the Whigs in this Town, or what has become of them, but so it is that one would think they were all dead or turn’d Jacobite; and were an Englishman to come here it would Confirm him in the Notion they have, that the Scots are all Jacobites . . . if one sees three or four People gathered together upon the Streets its Ten to one but they are of the same Kidney.2

In the environs, ‘many people in East Lothian . . . were Jacobites’, and although only around 140 were raised in Edinburgh, up to 1,000 came from close by the city. On 18 April 1746, it was reported that government ‘cannot buy horses’ in Edinburgh, ‘save at an extravagant price’, and the best solution was felt to be paying only a third over the ‘ordinary Price’ to the ‘Tennants in east lothian’, who, presumably, could be leant on by their superiors. On 23 April, Cumberland told Newcastle that Jacobite colours were to burnt by the common hangman in Edinburgh, ‘as that town has been so very ill affected’.3 Unrest in the capital continued for a number of years. On 20 December 1746, Charles Edward’s birthday (Old Style), the Albemarle Papers note a planned meeting at Leith, where ‘by way of distinction the female sex were to be clothd in Tartan’, symbolic of old or traditional Scotland. On the same day two years later, ‘the Lion, the crest of the Scots arms placed above the outer entry of the

112

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Parliament House . . . was found dressed in a white wig and a blue bonet [sic] . . . the mob (a very numerous one) cried several times ‘‘Huzza! huzza! the blue bonnet has won the day! the blue bonnet has won the day for ever!’’ ’ One of the eyes of Cumberland’s picture on the Crown Tavern signpost ‘had been scraped out’, and the crowd cried ‘that Cumberland has gratten out baith his een to see the lion better busked than himsell’. A bonfire was lit on Salisbury Craigs, and between forty and fifty marched down ‘the Canongate to the Abbay gate’ in ‘blue bonnets, with white cockades’. On 16 January 1748, Bland commented to Newcastle that Edinburgh ‘Swarms with Nonjurors and Jacobites’, and there were disaffected meetings to be found in Leith until at least the early 1750s, while as late as the 1770s the Jacobite Episcopalian congregations were still counted in hundreds.4 It was estimated by a Whig source that ‘full two-thirds of the two towns of Aberdeen were very well-affected to the Government’, with Old Aberdeen (the Aulton) reported to show ‘a more than ordinary zeal’. If this was so it was an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1715, when ‘the male part of the population may have been between two-thirds and three-quarters Jacobite-sympathising’. Yet if some thought that Aberdeen was ‘by the farr greatest part very Loyall’, there were others (like the Caledonian Mercury) which claimed that ‘the whole free-holders of Aberdeen (four only excepted) have actually declared for the Prince’s interest’. There was, in any event, little sign of Hanoverian activity during the Jacobite occupation, and although some might think the city ‘overaw’d by the Rebells’, it is surely worth noting that even less attempt was made to defend Aberdeen than Edinburgh before the Jacobites arrived. It was believed at the time of the battle of Inverurie that Lord Loudon’s militia supposed that 300 in Aberdeen would rise in their support. In this they were sadly mistaken. After the Rising, however, the Jacobites were braver: on 3 July 1746, it was reported that both at Edinburgh and Aberdeen, ‘they [the Jacobites] continue prodigious insolent’. On 1 August, as the windows and inhabitants of Aberdeen were stoned by occupying British troops for refusing to show lights in honour of the Hanoverian succession, the Earl of Ancrum declared it ‘this infamous town’. After all, had not the Aberdeenshire and Banffshire Jacobites done ‘more harm than all the Highlanders put together’ in the north-east of Scotland? This event has been played down: but failing to light windows was a clear sign of disaffection or of social pressure to condone disaffection, as

Jacobites in the Localities

113

when ‘scarcely any’ of ‘the townspeople of Kilkenny’ lit theirs to celebrate the British victory at Quiberon Bay in 1759. In Aberdeen, the magistrates themselves were reluctant to order the windows lit, ostensibly on the very Aberdonian grounds of ‘Considerable expence’ and thus ‘no notification was given to the Inhabitants to put up lights’: it was stated that Cumberland had had none in Edinburgh. Bells were rung and flags were ‘displayed’, but this was not enough, and the military ‘Ryot and Tumult’ which followed (beginning near the Town House) was the subject of compensation claims for over a year after the damage was done. As in other burghs, the military avoided prosecution by defying the magistrates, whose subsequent self-exculpatory statement that ‘Illumination Occasioned Noise & Confusion’ when it was adopted only suggests the divided nature of the town.5 There are wide variations in the estimate of the number of men raised in the city of Aberdeen itself (not including environs). The Muster Roll gives 110, and Rosebery’s list 117 including Oldmachar. Over 100 names are found in the City Archives alone. In 1928, the Taylers offered a figure of 263, which included not only those who fought but also those with manifest Jacobite sympathies (such as the masters at Aberdeen Grammar School who stopped praying for King George). A figure of about 200 seems right given that Stoneywood was widely viewed as having raised a battalion’s strength in the city. Moreover, these men were raised by conventional means of recruitment. Although the Rev. John Bisset might have been ‘ravished to hear that, when the [recruiting] drum beats, not a few of the boys cry God save King George!’, the fact was that the Jacobite Army was openly recruiting for volunteers, and this was more than adequate, for ‘Stoneywood . . . found enough about the town of Aberdeen and places adjacent without force’, while a September 1745 letter in the City Archives suggests that the 200 plus Jacobites who entered the city under Glenbuchat and David Tulloch of Dunbennan ‘did not offer to force any man’. Indeed, on the march to confront Loudon at Inverurie, the countrymen of Bucksburn came out to join the army.6 Many of those from Aberdeen engaged or alleged to be engaged in the Rising were tradesmen or relatively well to do. Among those under suspicion, or against whom evidence was subsequently given were: George Duguid, William Murray, Walter Nicol, William Strachan and Andrew Walker junior, merchants in the city; William Smith, an Episcopalian preacher; Thomas Mosman, an advocate

114

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

(writer); William Baird, a silk dyer; Alexander Annand, James Johnston, Alexander Marr and William Williamson, butchers; William Findlater, James Irvine, William Luckie and William Murdo, shoemakers; Alexander Robertson, a chapman; John Shaw, a musician; and James Moir, son to the late Town officer in the Aulton. The servants of professional men and gentry of the Forbes and Menzies of Pitfodels families were also engaged, as were a good number of fishers from Futtie, the small fishing town on the sea’s edge. Many were at least minimally literate: twenty-five of the thirty who petitioned the magistrates from the Tolbooth in 1747 could write their own names. Jacobite activity beyond the army within Aberdeen was clearly widespread: Hary Wright from the city confessed to having been involved in the removal of arms from a Spanish ship at Peterhead (there is a list of places where ships could make landfall in the City Archives). A number were also accused after the Rising of involvement in the anti-Hanoverian riot on 20 January 1746, the Prince of Wales’ birthday. George Gordon was accused of conducting Catholic worship in the Gallowgate (not necessarily an explicitly Jacobite action, of course), while the vintners Alexander Dyce and Robert Stevenson confessed to having provided lodgings for disaffected noblemen. At best, Aberdeen was divided, from the disputed Town Council election of 25 September 1745 onwards: the evidence suggests that the majority – albeit quite possibly a small majority – of those in the town were at least sympathetic to the Jacobites. The burgess register has a whole page of names crossed out for Jacobite activity. Subsequently, Jacobite sympathisers were raised to official and professional rank in the city and its environs.7 In Dundee and Perth, matters stood less well for the Jacobites in 1745, though, as we have seen in Chapter 2, there was significant support in the former town, where eighty-nine names appear on the Muster Roll, Rosebery has 105 and Dundee and environs raised 490. The records from Dundee in 1745–6 do not show the magistrates having an easy time. The King’s Birthday celebration on 30 October was a litmus test of loyalism, which brought people out into the streets with the promise of free wine. Expenditure on it had been rising in Dundee, perhaps indicative of a need to keep a not altogether reliable populace sweet; after 1745, it fell back. In 1732, the celebrations (including eighty-seven wine glasses) cost £45 15s. 6d. Scots, but by 1741, this had risen to over £130, and by 1744 to almost £180. By this time there was clearly already unrest and ‘stray

Jacobites in the Localities

115

persons going to or coming from abroad’, as was clear in a letter to the magistrates from the Lord Justice Clerk on 14 March: there was also concern about the stealing or trafficking of ‘arms and amunition’. In 1745, although the birthday was celebrated while the Jacobite Army occupied the town, it does not appear separately in the Treasurer’s Accounts; in 1746, it was down to £58 6s. and had only recovered to £95 11s. by 1748. This was a highly eccentric pattern of expenditure, and suggests the event may have been being used as a focus for the generation of Hanoverian loyalism rather than being a reflection of the reality of it: there tends to be more dealing with the King’s Birthday in Dundee than in other burgh minutes. A fine of £5 Scots was levied on all who did not light their windows on this or similar days, in contrast to Aberdeen’s avoidance of lit windows altogether. The magistrates in Dundee appear repeatedly to be uncertain of the loyalty of the town. On the King’s Birthday in 1745, sometimes portrayed as a grassroots Hanoverian riot against Jacobite occupation, they planned to go to the cross with only ‘such persons as they shall judge proper’, while James Gib the town jailor, who ‘had not behaved in the Rebellion as he ought’ was suspended on 1 March 1746, but not actually removed from his post until 24 June, by which time the Council could be sure that Dundee was safe from the Jacobite threat. Not that the Jacobites had been very injurious: they had even offered the local ministers the compromise of praying ‘for all Christian Kings’ rather than James or George, a compromise which was predictably refused.8 In Perth up to sixty-three appeared for the Jacobites from a population of up to 9,000 (over 100 from the town and environs), compared with the 103 names given to General Cadogan in 1716. Charles Edward no doubt tried to win sceptical elements of the populace over by attending Episcopal worship at St John’s, and although there was a Hanoverian riot on the King’s Birthday in 1745, there is some evidence of a Jacobite mob contesting events that day also. Cumberland’s birthday was celebrated after the Jacobites retreated, but the minute concerning it is much altered, and the list of those attending has been altered, possibly after the event. After the Rising, there was widespread discontent with the occupying forces: this had also been the case after 1716, when there were a number of complaints to the effect that ‘it seems we must content our Selves to ly under, the Murmuring and Complaints That the Inhabitants make upon the Injurys and Abuses done them by the Military . . . it is not in our power to Address them . . . the military are suffered to escape

116

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

without punishment’. On July 18 1750 there was a sharp exchange between Lieutenant-Colonel (later General) Wolfe and the Provost relative to the sentence passed on a soldier ’who had been charged by Convener Buchan of insulting him in the public street’. The Provost expressed his ‘hopes’ that good relations ‘subsist’ between the town and the army, but it is clear that repeated attempts by the military to circumvent the law enraged the local authorities. How many in Perth agreed with the toast ‘Oh King of Heaven, our sorrow to allay/Turn Hogmanay [Charles Edward’s birthday] to 29th of May’ [Charles II’s restoration] is not clear: but the town was certainly divided.9 THE LOCALITIES In 1715, the Master of Sinclair raised a cavalry force of about eighty to ninety from Fife, and there was considerable enthusiasm for James there, particularly in the small East Neuk ports: the Jacobite Army was able to ‘still possess fife’ right up to the end of January 1716, according to the Clerk of Penicuik papers. In 1720, there were serious meal riots, particularly at Elie, though any linkage of these to Jacobitism remains obscure, and Christopher Whatley has rightly pointed out a lack of explicit ‘dynastic disloyalty’ in the riots; however, there was clear discontent with the post-Union taxation system and the deteriorating economic position of the east coast ports, and these were politically volatile, if not clearly Jacobite, protests. These riots subsequently spread round the Fife coast and as far as Linlithgow: it may be noted that the 1736 Porteous Riots arose in the very first instance from an attack on the excise at Pittenweem, and as the linkage between smuggling, excise and Jacobitism is very easy to demonstrate in the case of the north-east, it is hardly likely to have been entirely absent only a few miles south, though more work needs to be done on this.10 In 1745, levels of Jacobite support in Fife remained reasonable, though far below the ten companies raised for the Earl of CrawfordLindsay or the ten foot companies raised round Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline (to say nothing of Balcarres’ four troops of horse) in the Covenanting cause a century earlier. St Andrews and its environs yielded up to forty-four men (fewer than a quarter from St Andrews itself), Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline perhaps the same number between them, a tenth of what had been raised for the Covenant at Kirkcaldy in 1640. Dunfermline, however, saw some unrest on the King’s Birthday, with a scuffle between Jacobite forces and the

Jacobites in the Localities

117

townspeople, though this seems to have fallen short of a full-scale riot. Anstruther brought out a more proportionately impressive twenty-seven (whether or not the Beggar’s Benison, with its smuggling links, had anything to do with it), while Crail and Cupar contributed ten to fifteen each: though there were signs of antiJacobite feeling in Crail too, unusually for an east coast port. In all, only 120 recruits in 1745 came from Fife, though it must be said that these were volunteers to a dangerous cause from a largely nonJacobite area. This was roughly the same as elsewhere round the capital and small town Lowlands: From Edinburgh, Haddington, Dunfermline and Stirling, a large proportion of those joining were either tradesmen, craftsmen or workmen.These men came from classes upon whom no economic pressure, of the kind found in the Highlands, could be exerted . . . Their adherence was apparently voluntary – few complained of being forced out and none of being hired out.

In other words, even if the level of recruitment in these areas was not very high (not many over 100 at most from Stirling and Haddington combined), it was still significant in the sense that recruits were willing to risk the loss of life and fortune for the Stuart cause. Not only was ‘coming out’ from towns risky; it grew riskier as the overall level of Jacobite support declined. In the event of defeat, not only was the Jacobite soldier from these places more vulnerable to delation, but he also lacked the places to hide or the sympathisers to turn to that he might have enjoyed in Banff or Angus. Thus, apparently low levels of Jacobite support might, none the less, be significant. Stirling itself had seen Jacobite-related unrest between the Risings, with attacks on the town guard on the King’s Birthday in the 1730s, which was strengthened to fifty as a consequence. Even so, all they could do was protect the birthday bonfire: the threat was such that they were quite unable to prevent the drinking of hostile – quite possibly Jacobite – healths.11 Montrose, Arbroath and the smaller east coast burghs were much more strongly pro-Jacobite, and were proportionately much larger towns than they were to become: Montrose, for example, had about a half of Dundee’s population, as against a twelfth today. The smaller east coast ports in particular were home to the crime of smuggling, which in its evasion of English excise duties, Continental links and ability to traffic messages between the Scottish diaspora and its homeland, was closely aligned with Jacobitism and Scottish

118

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

patriotism: in 1744, the burgh council of Arbroath, noting the doubtful fact that smuggling was in decline, ‘out of a Christian Tenderness . . . designed not to have taken any Notice of what was past’, and indeed apologised for mentioning it, ‘had they not been call’d upon by the late Convention of the Royal Burrows to manifest their Sentiments in a publick manner’. In Brechin, the ‘smuggling of uncustomed goods’ was a major problem.12 The Muster Roll and other sources give around forty to fifty names from Arbroath, and there are records of sixty from Montrose and 179 from the surrounding area; other figures raise this to over 300. On 22 January 1746, it was reported ‘that Wallace of Arbroth [sic] & Erskine of Montrose have within these Eight dayes raised about 300 men that [were] never in arms before all Lowlanders’: interesting evidence of continuing strong recruitment at the time of and, indeed, after the battle of Falkirk, and a number that must be counted in addition to the 150–200 from the towns who had gone north to join the fight at Inverurie the previous month. Nor were these the only strong areas: Forfar provided 40–50 men, Kirriemuir between thirty-five and fifty-five plus. Johnshaven was seen as so totally Jacobite that it was despoiled by Cumberland, while Brechin (where the Muster Roll gives almost seventy names and 100–200 Jacobites were recruited) was regarded as a like case. On his march into Scotland, it was made clear to Cumberland that Brechin was hostile, and that troops were required to safeguard government supporters in the town, where ‘many people’ had countenanced ‘recruiting for the Pretender, and mennacing the Small Number of the well Affected’. Cumberland sent fifty dragoons and their officers ‘to keep the People within due bounds’. In ‘intensely Jacobite’ Angus, Arbroath folk customs long recalled the ‘hungry Hessians’ billeted on them by the government. In one game, girls refuse King George’s men ‘bread and wine’ with the words: What care we for King George’s men, King George’s men, King George’s men; What care we for King George’s men, Cam a teerie, arrie ma torry.

In Forfar, where in 1716 there was ‘not one man..but was concerned in rebellion’, John Webster, the Burgh Thesaurer (Treasurer) moved against taking the oaths on 2 October 1745, on the grounds that ‘the Capital [Edinburgh]’ was ‘itself under the Government of an army fighting in opposition to the Regnant power’: carefully chosen words

Jacobites in the Localities

119

which stress that the Jacobites were a ‘government’, those opposing them only a ‘Regnant power’, not a rightful king. In 1746, the burgh magistrates of Forfar pleaded that they had been ‘Overawed by numbers of Rebells’, but there had been Jacobite recruitment up to ‘the day before’ Cumberland entered the town.13 In Arbroath, the council noted on 14 March 1746 that the September 1745 elections had been ‘orderly and regularly carried on . . . they at that Time delayed to qualify themselves by taking the Oaths to the Government’ only on account of being ‘overawd’. Hardly anyone can have believed them: on 8 May, muted congratulations to Cumberland were minuted on his victory at Culloden, but there was no celebration and the council was simply asked ‘to consider what further might be done at this Juncture for the Good of the Royal Burrow’, not for the Crown or anyone else. On 18 July, the council confirmed that it had taken the oaths, ‘no Member desiring or demanding any other Oath’, an explicit statement indicative of how far they were under suspicion. In Brechin, the Town Council minutes are silent from 25 September 1745 to 9 July 1747; in Montrose, there was an extensive discussion over whether councillors who were in prison for Jacobite activity should vote in July 1746, with the ludicrous qualifier that this was ‘out of Regard to the Constitution and Constant Customs of this Burgh . . . such shall not be construed against the present Councillors as being favourers of disaffected persons’. Not all took the oaths, even under British army occupation, and on 15 November the oaths had to be tendered again to both the councillors of 1744–5 and those of 1746–7. The inhabitants of the burgh seemed likewise disposed: on 10 June 1746, ‘the Jacobite gentlewomen of Montrose . . . got on white gowns and white roses, [and] made a procession through the streets’, while Jacobite bonfires were lit.14 Further north, ‘Banff and the Seaport towns betwixt it and Aberdeen were mostly all dissaffected [sic]’ and this was also true in Stonehaven and Johnshaven, as well as throughout many of the inland towns: Jacobites were reported ‘thickest about Carnousie, Achmedden, Pitsligo, Fraserburgh, Altri in Old Deer Parish, Inverugy, Fyvie, Monwheiter’. Although the north-eastern gentry were reported ‘not one fourth of what they were’ in 1715, and there was no Mar or Huntly to lead them, while Marischal was in exile, there were plenty of men to be found in the north-east who disliked the Hanoverians, the Union, the malt tax and the remote government that levied it. Captain David Tulloch of Dunbennan required 200

120

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

from Banff, and although he got only sixty to eighty (the Muster Roll has forty-five names, the Taylers sixty-four, McCann 195 including environs) this was still very successful recruitment from a small burgh. Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo, himself raised two companies in Banffshire, and James Gordon, younger of Aberlour a further two. James Hamilton of Sandiestown raised seventy foot and twenty-five horse round Huntly, while Patrick Duguid of Auchinhove brought a company’s strength (thirty to forty men) out of Lumphanan to join the northern army in 1745. Rather more (about fifty to sixty) came from Stonehaven, with company levels from each of Oldmeldrum, Fochabers, Fraserburgh, Turriff and Ellon, while there was significant recruitment below this level in Aboyne, Banchory, Cruden, Inverurie, Keith, Peterhead, Rayne and elsewhere: almost every settlement of any size in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire provided some recruits. Not all were as colourful or vigorous as the Quaker lairds of Brux: Jonathan Forbes (1710– 1801), the 10th laird’s second son, remarking with relish in after years that he ‘let daylicht into three of the English deevils’ before leaving the field at Culloden. Forbes at any rate did not think he was fighting in a civil war: the tradition of subsuming Scots who supported the English cause under English nationality dated back to the Wars of Independence. Chevalier de Johnstone persistently refers to the ‘English troops’ fighting against the Jacobites, and his is a typical response.15 In Nairn, the council was wary in recording its discussion of ‘Severall affairs relating to the present situation of affairs and that there are Forces passing and repassing’, while Inverness council’s minutes are silent from October 1745 until June 1746. The 1745 King’s Birthday celebrations went ahead though, but only with payment to Loudon’s ‘to guard the Table & Bon fire’ and to other soldiers. Duncan Forbes of Culloden’s influence was unsurprisingly significant. In the country areas as a whole, naturally much depended on the sympathy of local magnates. Perthshire saw problems with forcing and desertion in some places, but others were reported in July 1746 as ‘still out in open defiance of every body’. Those who backed the Rising often had a personal tie to the lands or house of Atholl, or because they were Episcopalians. A not untypical example might be Laurence Oliphant of Gask (1691–1767), lieutenant and adjutant in Lord Rollo’s Perthshire horse in 1715, who appointed the Jacobite poet William Meston as his son’s tutor in 1746, and whose younger brother Ebenezer made a beautiful canteen of cutlery

Jacobites in the Localities

121

for Charles Edward Stuart in the early 1740s. Oliphant was a supporter of the old patriot historiography (as were many other Jacobites such as the Chevalier de Johnstone), being asked to subscribe to a new edition of John of Fordoun’s work in 1745. In the same year, he raised a troop of horse and acted as governor of Perth, holding the Town House with only nineteen men against the Hanoverian King’s Birthday rioters on 30 October. Escaping after the ’45, he returned from exile in 1763, but with his family Jacobitism apparently undiminished; in 1788, his son sacked the family’s Episcopalian chaplain when the Episcopalian Church decided to acknowledge George III’s title on Charles Edward’s death. Yet Gask’s own tenants were reluctant to follow him out in 1745, and although in the end they seem not to have been forced, it is clear that the Jacobitism of the Perthshire rank and file could be at times very diluted by comparison with that of their magnate leaders, who still showed great solidarity: this was in contrast to the north-east, where magnate support was dropping off compared with 1715, but popular Jacobitism remained strong. Some twenty-eight out of thirty-five lairds between Perth and Loch Lomond were reported Jacobite, and such solid magnate support helped to raise several battalions, including the four of the Atholl Brigade. Indeed, it was mainly on the Atholl lands that strong support for the Jacobites among ordinary people was reported, in contrast to the forcing that went on in some estates with obligation or association to or with the name of Murray and its house. In the burghs, recruitment was limited. Towns such as Crieff (which none the less provided a significant number of recruits, to say nothing of fellow-travellers like David Drummond, the session clerk and schoolmaster, whose contribution appears to have been limited at best to Jacobite songs) and Auchterarder contained many inhabitants who remembered 1715, when Mar had persuaded a reluctant James to allow them to be burnt on the Jacobite retreat in the pursuit of a futile scorched earth policy. Only Callander and Dunkeld among the smaller towns came close to providing a company, and outside the up to 1,400 men of the Atholl Brigade (including Struan Robertson’s forces, of which a company also joined the Duke of Perth’s), only the Duke of Perth and Viscount Strathallan raised significant groups of troops. Perthshire’s behaviour during the Rising of 1745 is thus mixed and patchy, with strong and weak Jacobite areas, and clear evidence of magnate ties as even more important than usual in influencing political behaviour. What can be said is that the Jacobite Duke of

122

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Atholl was more influential in recruitment and in preventing recruits coming out for government than the Hanoverian Duke of Argyll was in pursuit of opposite ends, despite the enormous advantages he enjoyed.16 In the south and west, recruitment was very patchy. Only the Catholic Maxwell of Kirkconnel family offered strong support to the Jacobites among the landowners of the south-west, and in contrast to 1715 they could only bring out themselves: only two, the Maxwell gentry of Kirkconnel and Kirrochan, are recorded as rising in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. It is doubtful if more than a company’s strength came from the Borders as a whole, while the south-west and Campbell heartlands were predictably the worst areas for recruitment, though two hardy souls from Campbeltown joined the army. Glasgow provided only ten to fifteen recruits from a population of 25,000, and unsurprisingly the King’s Birthday was celebrated in the city at the end of October. Handfuls came from Lanark, Greenock and Hamilton, and a more respectable up to half a company’s strength from Dumfries. In total, Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire produced about forty-seven recruits. The contrast with the Covenanting era was devastating: 500 had been raised for Lord Fleming’s Foot, 300 for Montgomery’s, 1,200 for the Galloway Foot, 1,000 for Cassilis’ and 450 for Eglinton’s horse in the 1640s. Despite hopes and fantasies since 1707, the Cameronian anti-Unionist tradition was the one clear failure for Jacobite attempts to mobilise Scottish patriotism.17 Nonetheless, as the reports of the Commissioners of Excise indicate, there were few places untouched by the Rising (one of these was Stranraer). As far afield as Orkney, there was Jacobite activity and men in arms. In Stromness, ‘James Grahame . . . late Baillie . . . joined with the Rebells . . . in Robbing and plundering several Houses there. He went to Caithness with them, and returned again to this County where he sculks and lurks’. A very wise decision on his part, one might think! According to a report of 23 June 1746, six were in prison in Orkney, three had been released upon bail and a further five examined, presumably in addition to those who continued to ‘lurk’. Although some of these may have been (as perhaps in James Grahame’s case) taking criminal advantage of the general unrest caused by the 1745 Rising, it is clear that Jacobite activity was taking place far beyond the reach of the army or the plan of campaign.18

Jacobites in the Localities

123

RECRUITMENT IN 1715 AND 1745 Three main constituent elements emerge in the pattern of Jacobite recruitment in the Lowlands. First, Jacobite support in 1745 rested on a broad geographical base, even where it was thinly spread. Secondly, in some areas it matched or even exceeded previous levels of recruitment (v. Chapter 1 for the Covenanting comparison and below for comparison with 1715). Thirdly, Jacobite heartlands almost exactly matched traditionally strong Episcopalian areas, and this was true to a greater extent in 1745 than in 1715. Almost the whole of the coast and most inland areas in the lowland strip from Cromarty to Arbroath provided substantial Jacobite support, as did Perthshire outside the main towns, thanks to the strong magnate influence. The coast from Dundee to Edinburgh provided useful, if not heavy, support, as did the Lothians and central Lowlands, while south of Haddington and Glasgow hardly 100 men joined. As we shall see below, these areas had been more fruitful in Mar’s Rising; but even in 1745, it was clear that over much of Scotland there was a readiness to fight for the Stuarts which far exceeded their pulling power before 1707. Jacobite support was at least in a shallow sense national, while regional strongholds readily matched or exceeded previous levels of mobilisation. Moreover, armed recruits were in some cases the tip of the iceberg: some towns, such as Peterhead, for a variety of reasons had strong Jacobite sympathies but relatively few recruits. Seldom outside the central and south-western Lowlands did the Jacobites encounter sustained hostility.19 If one compares recruitment figures from 1715 and 1745, a number of interesting details are at once apparent. In the northeast in 1715, Glenbuchat raised up to 330 including horse. In the north, Seaforth had 2,200–2,400, including 500 or so Frasers and Chisholms and 650–700 under MacDonald of Sleat, who promised to come out in 1745 but did not. In Perthshire, Tullibardine’s brigade was 1,000, all from Atholl lands, and around 2,500 others were brigaded as Athollmen, including a battalion of Ogilvy’s (c. 350), of Robertson of Struan’s (200–300), Strathallan’s (250) and Panmure’s (400–700). The Appin Stewarts brought out 260– 350, Breadalbane over 600, Lochiel 300–600, MacDonald of Glencoe 100–300, Clanranalds 550, Glengarry 460, the MacGregors 250 and the MacLeans 350. In 1745 in the north-east, on occasion more men were raised than

124

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

in 1715, with over 400 in Glenbuchat’s and up to 900 under Ogilvy. The Bannermans raised a small foot battalion rather than the horse troop of 1715: in all, probably more men than in the earlier Rising. The Farquharsons brought out as many as in 1715, even though Invercauld, the Chief of the Name, did not rise. A peak of 1,400 Athollmen were out, again nearly all with family connections, and including 200 or so under Struan. Except for Struan’s contingent (and he kept his lands in a kind of time warp by keeping roads off them) this is a significant decline, one echoed by the Drummond and Strathallan contingents. Lochiel eventually raised more than 1,000 Camerons, and there were a similar number of Frasers and Chisholms, double the numbers of 1715. The Glencoe and Clanranald MacDonalds raised fewer; but Glengarry pulled out more than double the 460 of thirty years earlier. The MacGregors were slightly stronger than 1715, as were the Macleans. Cromartie fared much worse than Seaforth had done thirty years earlier in raising Mackenzie lands. There are many and varied interpretations that can be put on these figures, but one of the clearest is that the area with the most pronounced problems with forcing and desertion – Perthshire – was the mainstay of the Jacobite Army in 1715 and significantly weaker in 1745. On the other hand, the central and western Gaidhealtachd often (though not always) supplied many more troops than in 1715, yet without increasing the ‘Highland’ nature of the Rising, for the north-east almost matched it. In 1715, up to around 4,000 foot and 1,100 horse came from Aberdeenshire, Banff, the Mearns and Angus; in 1745, around 3,100 foot and 400 horse in a significantly smaller army, where neither Huntly nor Panmure nor Marischal nor Southesk had come out. These figures are based on government reports, and must be treated with some caution, particularly as regards 1715, where higher and more disparate estimates exist, and the surviving primary information is poorer. None the less, what one can say is that many areas in 1745 held up very well or even on occasion improved their position from thirty years earlier, despite all the erosion, absorption and assimilation which Scottish social networks, in partnership with Whig Britishness, were accomplishing throughout the country in creating ‘a network of obligations that it would have been dishonourable to ignore by undertaking further Jacobite activity’. To some extent, this can be linked to local factors, such as the connections between smuggling and political disaffection in the north-eastern towns, in its

Jacobites in the Localities

125

turn linked to resentment of ‘the Customs and Excise service introduced into Scotland after 1707’, which in its turn perhaps became symptomatic of a more general shift of economic power from the east towards the west coasts that would become more and more apparent as the century progressed. These and other factors can be considered in more detail by examining the aftermath of the Rising.20 AFTERMATH Robert Cunningham’s report to the Earl of Crawford reveals how little reliance the government placed on protestations of loyalty which may have satisfied later historians. Writing in the aftermath of Culloden, Cunningham warns that: what is still more extraordinary, every one thought themselves obliged to put on the Appearance of being pleased, altho’ their neighbours well knew they were otherways affected. In the little Town of Keith [in] Strathbogie, all was gayly & good humour, expressed by Ringing of Bells, Bonefires [sic], & drinking of Healths, so much were they Convinced of the Total Defeat of their Friends.21

Signs of more open disaffection in fact continued for some considerable time, not least because of the continued presence of Jacobite forces in the field under Locheil and other commanders in the spring and summer of 1746, and in occasional cases even later. In April, it was necessary to deploy four battalions against ‘Jacobite stragglers’, while the MacGregors re-entered Perthshire ‘with colours flying and pipes playing’; in mid- to late May, Locheil still had a battalion in the field. James Campbell informed the Earl of Crawford on 26 April that there was a force of 120 Jacobites reported near Balquhidder; in July, significant numbers of Stewart of Ardsheal’s Foot had yet to surrender arms, and Ardsheal was still dealing with arrears of pay. There were revenge attacks on British troops. Jacobite expresses continued to be sent as late as August; on the 23rd of that month, there were still reported to be Jacobites lurking in Banff: a British regiment was deployed over the county, with half its strength in Banff and Portsoy. In September, an observer in Strathdee noted that ‘I could perceive no difference from . . . nine months ago except the want of a Musket and Cockade they were stuck about with pistols and durks’, while in the same month, the Presbytery of Brechin applied for protection against insurgents who

126

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

were harrying round Edzell. On 5 November, Patrick Campbell’s intelligence report suggested that ‘there are a good many still in the hills in Full Arms that are under pay’, singling out Cameron and MacDonald units in Moidart, who were – Campbell claimed – being covertly supplied by the governor of Fort William’s son-in-law in one of those traditional kin and associational nexuses which one must always reckon on in dealing with Scottish Jacobitism. In January 1747, there were ‘still plenty of Arms in Badenoch’ reported; on 7 March, ‘two Rebel officers of Lord Cromartie’s Regiment’ brought sixteen or seventeen armed men into Dingwall to abduct Murdoch Mackenzie, a former fellow-officer. Afterwards they were joined by more troops on ‘the Hill above Dingwall’. This was a significant event in that it clearly indicates that the 180 men or so who surrendered with Cromartie the preceding April were by no means all the surviving members of his battalion. Arms surrenders continued in both ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ areas for a prolonged period. In Stonehaven and Laurencekirk, two arms surrenders on 20 and 27 May 1748 from a variety of local men returned twenty firelocks, seven bayonets, six pistols and thirteen swords. In January that year, the Lord Justice Clerk could still opine that ‘the disaffected are still buoyed up with the Expectation of Invasions’.22 Besides armed groups in the field, there was plenty of evidence of Jacobite disaffection in the localities, into which many could melt away: ‘the Highlanders were never more disaffected than at present’ was the view taken in a report to Bland of 2 January 1748, while Albemarle thought that ‘upon the whole I think this Kingdom can never be Kept in Awe but by a sufficient military force’. Jacobites in the towns and ports were often concealed: form passes survive with blanks for the house name to authorise searches, and the mass production of these items suggest that government found it frequently necessary to carry out such searches. In May 1746, the Whig Commissary Bisset in Aberdeen was complaining of Jacobites ‘going about in the habit of beggars’. In January 1747, it was stated that ‘the Inhabitants of all that Country [Badenoch] are living peacably [sic] at home, save a very few who never Surrendered and all of them as fond of a Rebellion . . . they have still plenty of Arms for when they surrendered they gave up only some Rusty useless arms and still keep the fresh good Arms’. Similarly, it was said that ‘the People of Aberdeenshire . . . are in Readyness to embrace a Rebellion’, while ‘the Expectations of the Disaffected encrease daily’: ‘Loyalty is not the General Growth of that County’, as Bland remarked to

Jacobites in the Localities

127

Newcastle. In November 1747, there were complaints of attempts to appoint Jacobites as sheriff deputes (‘strong Solicitations are made in behalf of many Lawyers or Advocates to be appointed Deputy Sherrifs . . . Who are far from being firmly loyal’); in the same year, Albemarle himself regarded most officials as still Jacobite. There was an attempt at direct political intervention by Newcastle – who leant on the Lord Advocate – when the Court of Session ruled that ‘it was unlawfull for the Officers, or Soldiers, to seize any Goods belonging to Rebels in open Rebellion, other than Arms and Ammunition, Except on the Day of Battle, or possibly the next Day after’, and that it was illegal to apprehend rebels ‘without a Warrant’. The lapse of time since the Rising was slow in changing hearts and minds. In Stirling in 1748, a group of British soldiers ‘singing loyal songs’ were called ‘Rascals and Scoundrels’ and ‘English Bougers’ before they were assaulted by outraged locals. A man seized for wearing the trews at Killin was freed by a mob. As late as 1756, Viscount Fitzmaurice noted that ‘practically everyone he met on a . . . tour of Scotland . . . was a Jacobite sympathiser’. One can hardly take this at face value: but whatever value one takes it at it is hardly indicative of steady Hanoverianism.23 I have written extensively elsewhere about Jacobite culture as a means of resistance, and there is little space to do justice to its complexities here. We should, however, be aware of what Allan Macinnes has called the ‘journalistic fervour’ of Gaelic poetry and the importance of women as transmitters of Jacobite culture due to their ability to ‘speak treason . . . display Jacobite emblems, or participate in demonstrations with little fear of serious consequences for themselves’. The very ‘exclusion from political life’ of women gave them room to manoeuvre in a Jacobite context, and they were responsible for circulating ‘Libels’, ‘Lampoons’ and other Jacobite propaganda. On 20 December 1746, ‘the female sex were to be clothed in Tartan’ as a sign of a Jacobite meeting in Leith: this would not have been nearly so easy for men to get away with. Women carriers warned lurking Jacobites of Hanoverian patrols, while figures such as Barbara Strachan, ‘the Jackobite, postmistress off [sic] Buchan’ interfered in their turn with Hanoverian communications. In addition, Jacobite material culture (such as the ‘Send him Victorious’ national anthem glass of 1743) occupied by its very nature a private and often domestic space in which female power was often in the ascendant; though it is equally true that the Jacobite clubs continued to provide a controlled irruption into the public

128

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

sphere in pursuit of the preservation and circulation of the radical ideas of their cause among men. In the clubs, the patriot historiography of pre-Enlightenment days and the ‘old Scot’ topos which described the loyal and true patriot in contradistinction to those who sought ‘to root out Scots antiquity’ was often honoured and promoted. James Wilson’s poem on ‘The Echo of the Royal Park of the Palace of Holy-rood-house, which fell under Military Execution, anno 1755’ is an example of this kind of discourse, one which anticipates the Scoto-Latin description of Edinburgh as ‘Edina’ and ‘Auld Reekie’, later so familiar from the poetry of Robert Fergusson, in its turn strongly influenced by the broadside tradition: And to AULD REEKIE thus did speak: What is my crime? Oh! what my blot? AULD-REEKIE cry’d, Thou’rt an old SCOT; What then? My Echo loud did cry; Must Scots antiquity now die?

The ‘old Scot’ topos was continuing to articulate the patriot historiographical tradition of Scotland in the very decade in which Hume and Robertson were erasing it from even the recorded interpretation of Scottish history, let alone their view of its significance. Yet a Jacobite analysis continued to make itself heard, at every level of discourse from defence of Mary Queen of Scots (whose portrait in particular had been singled out for vandalism at Holyrood in 1746), to more straightforwardly explicit Jacobite and patriotic language. As late as 1788, an elegy on Charles Edward was sold on the streets for a penny. In exile, networks based on freemasonry, art dealing and no doubt many other associational channels of communication were developed: these had also been present between the 1715 and 1745 Risings, for example, in James Oglethorpe’s Jacobite-influenced settlement of Georgia, initially settled by 177 colonists from Clan Chattan in 1735, and subsequently reinforced from the same source. After 1745, Lord Wintoun’s ‘widow passed . . . to Andrew Lumisden’ (James VIII’s secretary) the minutes of the Jacobite lodge at Rome, who passed them on to John McGowan in Paris (where the Scots College ran a dead letter office for Jacobite correspondence), who in turn was to pass it to the apparently upstanding Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield (in fact, a member of the Jacobite Order del Toboso), whose son ‘gave it ‘to Sir James Stirling, Lord Provost’. Lumisden (who had been appointed Charles’ secretary ‘at the recommendation of his

Jacobites in the Localities

129

relative Sir Alexander Dick’) also paid out money to Alexander Runciman (via a financial intermediary) and carried on a number of arm’s-length correspondences of a similar kind through the Scots College on behalf of his ‘trade’ or ‘business’: the Stuart court. Lumisden’s correspondence and library reveal that he kept up to date with the texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as carrying a good selection of older patriotic material and books on the contemporary Corsican nationalist movement (another network which ran through Boswell). Scottish literature, history and culture from Barbour’s Brus to Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling could be found in Lumisden’s library.24 In Scotland, the east coast ports continued to be difficult to control, with exiles using them to recruit for the Irish Brigades, the Royal Scots (into which some Jacobites, such as Major Patrick Byres of Stoneywood’s Aberdeen battalion, were commissioned) or perhaps the Regiments d’Albanie and d’Ogilvy in the French service, where both Lochiel (until his death in 1748) and Ogilvy were regimental commanders: tracing Scottish Jacobite officers abroad will surely prove to be an important part of the future study of the Scottish diaspora. Ogilvy subsequently rose to be a French lieutenant-general, and his force was mentioned for use in any future Jacobite rising; it also recruited heavily among Jacobite veterans. Scottish units certainly continued to use national symbols, such as the St Andrew’s Cross, in their uniform: as in the Royal Scot grenadier cap, for instance. Recruiting continued ‘for several years . . . notwithstanding the utmost vigilance of government’. At the end of the 1740s, the government’s continuing inability to control the east coast ports was viewed as ‘a great encouragement to the revivall and progress of Jacobitism’ as trafficking continued for the French service: The generality of shipmasters in the Ports of Aberdeen, Peterhead, Aberbrothick [Arbroath], Montrose, Stonhive & Leith are disaffected, and have been from time to time employed in bringing disaffected persons to the Countrey & carrying them off again with recruits for the French service.

Recruitment of this kind continued until the French Revolution, being particularly prevalent on the Aberdeenshire and Banffshire coast. As in the 1750 expedition commented on above, exiled Jacobites could lead the recruiting parties. Lieutenant-Colonel Ludovic Cameron, Captain Donald MacDonald of Lochgarry

130

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

and Lieutenant Ross (the latter pair formerly of Loudon’s and deserters to the Jacobites in 1745–6 – MacDonald was later surprised by British troops on a raid that summer) were all among the officers named as carrying out recruitment for the Irish Brigades, and spreading the view that ‘to rise unanimously, in arms’ was the ‘only way . . . to recover the use of the Highland dress’. There were over ten Irish Brigade officers reported in Perthshire, with more in the counties of Aberdeen and Banff . The use of ‘Irish Brigades’ in this context may also cover the recruitment of Scottish troops: at the same time it was also the case that there were Scots in the Irish units, even among the picquets from France captured before they could join the Rising.25 To meet this kind of situation it was evidently necessary that large numbers of British Army troops would need to be deployed, and they were. The extent to which Scotland was an occupied country in the years after 1745 has only recently started to be openly acknowledged by historians: it is an embarrassing fact which offers a complete contrast to Linda Colley’s assertion that Charles Edward enjoyed ‘negligible civilian support’ and that ‘active or passive proHanoverianism’ prevailed in ‘virtually all’ of the Scottish towns, just as it seriously undermines the National Trust for Scotland’s interpretation of the ’45 as simply a civil war with no national dimension. If this were so, the British Army occupation was an unnecessary, expensive and alienating folly. The occupation, in fact, carries the profoundly important implication that either the British government was wasting its time, or else there was good reason to believe that there was deep-seated and widespread Jacobitism. Moreover, the army did not focus on the Highlands: of the ‘five distinct areas of occupation’ by British troops, only one was Highland. By 31 August, the British Army had deployments at or near Berwick, Kelso, Haddington, Dalkeith, Dumfries, Ayr, Stranraer, Cupar, Inverness, Nairn, Forres, Elgin, Banff, Newburgh, Aberdeen, Stonehaven, Inverbervie, Johnshaven, Montrose, Arbroath, Dundee, Perth, Stirling, Linlithgow, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dunfermline. These were almost all regulars: Lord Mark Ker’s Dragoons round Edinburgh; Mordaunt’s Foot at Nairn, Forres and Findhorn; nine companies of Handisyde’s at Elgin; six of Dejean’s at Banff, two at Peterhead; five of Fleming’s at Aberdeen, five at Montrose; Sackville’s Foot at Arbroath and Dundee; Barrel’s in West Lothian and many others. On 1 September, Albemarle reported drily to Newcastle that ‘there has been some differences in the shires of Aberdeen

Jacobites in the Localities

131

and Angus amongst the Inhabitants and the Military’. By this stage, there were between 12,000 and 13,000 British troops in Scotland, over 10,000 regulars and 2,000 plus of Loudon’s and the independent companies.26 By the beginning of September then, the British Army had fifteen battalions of foot and five dragoon regiments in Scotland, with forces stationed at or near twenty-five burghs: this was not an occupation of the ‘Highlands’. On 23 August 1746, there were 200 troops within a few miles of Stirling; on 3 October, 430 men were requested from Albemarle by Donald Campbell of Airds to disarm Camerons who were still in arms, and to ensure ‘Complyance with the present Laws against carrying of Arms, and wearing of Highland Cloathes’. This was military occupation on an Irish scale. In 1748–9, five companies under Lord John Murray and Lord Loudon were deployed to prevent raiding in the north-east. In October 1748 the 8th dragoons alone had almost 400 deployed in south Fife and round the Forth, with dragoon troops (sixty-two men and horses) at Culross, Dunfermline, Alloa and elsewhere. In summer 1749, there were still ten regiments in Scotland, one each at Fort William, Inverness, Aberdeen, Montrose, Perth, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with three dragoon regiments ‘stationed up and down the coast to help customs officers combat smuggling’ (which, of course, was used to communicate Jacobitism and aid recruitment, as indicated above); there were also thirty-one army patrols. As late as summer 1756, there were sixty British Army patrols in Scotland. Trouble as far from the Great Glen as Angus was clearly still expected, as the Kirriemuir patrol consisted of a subaltern, sergeant, corporal, drummer and twenty men: a larger detachment than was deployed in most places in the Highlands. In December 1756, ‘turbulent People’ in Scotland were thought best managed by being pressed into service. As Bob Harris has argued, there was clear evidence ‘that force majeure was the ultimate basis of Hanoverian rule . . . the disaffected . . . were to be cowed not only through the presence and proximity of soldiers, but also by the sight of their heroes suspended in chains in their parish of origin’. Harris is not a historian who holds any brief for Jacobitism: but he is influenced by the evidence.27 The suppression of the Episcopalian Church seriously weakened Lowland Jacobitism. In Angus, Major John Lafansille plundered and burnt the Episcopalian ‘meeting houses’, though he shared their ostensibly Protestant faith, and as a member of a Huguenot family,

132

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

was close to those who had suffered for it. The severe attacks on Episcopalianism in the aftermath of the Rising, both through penal legislation and direct violence, ensured both an expansion in the number of licensed congregations with priests in English or Irish orders who did not acknowledge a Scottish bishop, and the consequent marginalisation of the clergy who did. In addition, the suppression of Episcopacy had a tendency to lead to migration towards Catholicism in certain places, for example, in the northeast: ‘Nonjurors themselves did not always make the distinction [between Episcopalianism and Catholicism] when their meeting houses were closed down . . . many of them started attending mass instead’. As Clotilde Prunier argues, Episcopalians and Catholics were ‘objective allies’: thus, they both fell together. By 1755, there were perhaps only one-fifth as many Scottish Episcopalian clergy with pastoral responsibility as there had been ten years earlier. By its own lights, the government had chosen the right target.28 Bob Harris and Christopher Whatley have argued that the widespread celebration of the King’s Birthday in Scotland under George II is evidence of the weakness of Jacobite support in many parts of the country. Naturally, the King’s Birthday was often celebrated: it was surely hard to resist the up to ‘eighty or ninety bottles of claret, as well as other liquors such as sherry and ale’ paid for by the treasurer of Dundee, for example. Better evidence for Hanoverian sympathy can be found in Dundee, Dunfermline and Perth, where there was resistance to the Jacobite authorities on that day; on the other hand, there are Jacobite celebrations of 10 June (James VIII’s birthday) in Aberdeen, Dundee, Leith and Montrose even when these burghs were under Hanoverian control. Dundee at any rate, was seriously divided, which may – as indicated in discussion of the town above – have been a reason for the burgh treasurer’s munificence. The fact that fines for those who failed to celebrate the King’s Birthday were repeatedly minuted by the council is also indicative of divided views, while Dundee apparently could not rely on its citizens to celebrate Cumberland’s birthday without threatening them again with fines. At Stirling, King’s Birthday celebrations were attacked in the 1730s, and the town guard had to be reinforced to defend them; in Inverness, as we have seen, armed force was necessary to secure them in 1745. As Harris and Whatley point out, ‘the ungovernability of the Scots and . . . their failure to acknowledge the sovereignty of Westminster’ was a particular concern of the British government.29 Was Jacobitism then a national movement? This was an argument

Jacobites in the Localities

133

claimed for the first edition of this book by those who wished to criticise it: in fact, I suggested that the Jacobite Risings had a national quality. This is an idea which has a great deal of popular resonance, but which many scholars dislike. Yet three generations after Evan Barron argued that the Wars of Independence were largely fought and won by northern Scots, no one calls Bannockburn a Highland– Lowland conflict, nor are the (significant) numbers of Scots who fought for England’s cause and England’s choice of dynasty in the fourteenth century counted up to ‘prove’ that Bruce was fighting a British civil war. In America in 1776, in Scotland in 1306–14, in Ireland in 1918–21, and indeed usually, a country at war to establish its existence stands divided: but the victory of the insurgents converts a civil war into a struggle for national liberation, though one, of course, complicated in Jacobitism’s case by the multi-kingdom monarchy it sought to restore. Anything else is a story we tell ourselves, not comparative historical analysis. In 1745–46, the Jacobite army went down to defeat, and there were those in Scotland – many in parts of Scotland – who virulently opposed it. The same was exactly true in the thirteen colonies in 1775–76 and in Ireland in 1918–21. In telling the Jacobite story to exclude the national dimension of the Jacobite struggle, we betray ourselves into the company of the Children of the Mist, the battle of Gael and Gall, the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. As a minimum, a bare minimum, we should at least consider what the story might have been if the Jacobites had won, and why no Scottish court could be trusted to hang them. British history still doesn’t know what to do with the Jacobite Army in 1745: and that is because the reality of its intentions both brought modern British historiography to birth and almost strangled it at birth. The reality of those intentions is the subject of the next chapter, ‘Nationalists or Jacobites?’ which addresses not only the political programme of the Jacobite cause and the pronouncements of its leaders within the three kingdoms, but also something of the nature of the performance of Jacobitism within Scottish society itself. NOTES 1 National Archives, SP 54/30/30F for Jacobite magistracies in 1715 and loyalty of Dundee to Hanover in 1745; Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746, (London: Methuen, 1980), 257. 2 National Library of Scotland MS 2960; NLS MS 17525 f.139 ff;

134

3

4

5

6

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans National Archives SP 54/30/30/F; SP 54/37/24 (Bland to Newcastle) on celebrating Stewart’s acquittal; Miscellany of the Scottish History Society V (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1933), 345; Bruce A. Hedman (ed.), ‘Colin Maclaurin’s Journal of the ’Forty-five’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XIII, (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2004), 312–22, 315. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 55 for strength of Jacobite recruitment in the counties of Edinburgh and Stirling; NLS Advocates’ MSS 23.3.28 (Eaglescarnie Papers) ff. 203–4; W. Forbes Gray and James H. Jamieson, A Short History of Haddington (Edinburgh: Neill & Co., 1944), 56; Mary Ingram, A Jacobite Stronghold of the Church (Edinburgh: R. Grant & Son, 1907), 33; Bishop Robert Forbes, The Lyon in Mourning, Henry Paton (ed.), 3 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1895). The Albemarle Papers, Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1902), I: 350–1; The Lyon in Mourning II: 221–2; III: 305ff; National Archives SP 54/38/5A; Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, (London: Routledge, 1988), 148. Aberdeen City Archives L/L/2, 11, 16 (‘Papers relating to the riot in Aberdeen on 1 August 1746’); Christopher Whatley, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 349 for Jacobitism in Aberdeen in 1715; Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Rising of 1745 (Aberdeen: Milne and Hutchison, 1928), 8, 357; ‘Memoirs of the Rebellion in Aberdeen and Banff’, in Walter Biggar Blaikie (ed.), Origins of the ’Forty-Five: And Other Papers Relating to that Rising (Edinburgh: Constable, 1926), 135ff, 163n; Caledonian Mercury, 7 October 1745; National Library of Scotland MS 3142 f. 84 for city being ‘overaw’d’; for report on sentiments of Loudon’s militia and other relevant details, v. Revd Bisset’s narrative in Spalding Club Miscellany (Aberdeen, 1841); Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Rising of 1715 (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1934), vii for Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstown’s views to Alexander Brodie, the Lord Lyon on the vitality of north-east Jacobitism; Stephen Conway, War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 202 for Kilkenny. Aberdeen City Archives L/B/1 for list of Stoneywood’s volunteers in the Aberdeen battalion and Parcel L/I in general for number of names; L/S/ 1 for letter to ‘Mr Alexander Thomson Advocate in Aberdeen’ on Jacobite conduct; Miscellany of the Spalding Club I (1841), 353, 357, 363 and passim; Jean McCann, ‘The Organization of the Jacobite

Jacobites in the Localities

7

8

9

10

11

135

Army in 1745–46’, unpublished Ph.D. (University of Edinburgh, 1963),75–7; List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, Earl of Rosebery and Rev. Walter MacLeod (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Scottish History Society, 1890), 3ff; Taylers, 1745, passim; Blaikie, Origins of the ‘Forty-Five, 129. Aberdeen City Archives L/I/2–18, 27; ACA L/J/3 for the elections of 1745–6; L/S/4 (‘Where Ships can come on & go out’); ACA Burgess Register 1694–1760, p. 700; National Library of Scotland MS17518 f. 1 for petitions; Taylers, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Rising of 1745, 115 ff, 312 for the later careers of Jacobite sympathisers. Dundee City Archives, Treasurer’s Account Books 1727–60; Council Minutes IX (1743–55); General Session Minutes 1716–56; Lenman, Jacobite Risings; No Quarter Given, passim; List of Persons Concerned; McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’; Christopher Whatley, email to the author, 18 February 2008. Perth and Kinross Archives B59/30/36 for numbers in 1715–16, Sir Bruce Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot, Prisoners of the ’45, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1928–9) for numbers in 1745; List of Persons, 53 for Jacobites in Perth; Perth & Kinross Archives B59/33/12 for Cumberland’s birthday in the burgh; B59/32/22, 23, 25, 31, 37, 41 for the conduct of the military in the burgh; PK Thriepland of Fingask Papers MS 169/7/3/9; National Library of Scotland MS 17514 ff. 108, 244; Rev. Canon George Farquhar, The Episcopal History of Perth (Perth: Jackson, 1894), 165. National Archives of Scotland GD 1/616/52 for 1720 riots; NAS GD 18/3178 (Clerk of Penicuik papers) for persistence of Jacobite presence in Fife in 1715. V. Christopher Whatley, ‘The Union of 1707, Integration and the Scottish Burghs: The Case of the 1720 Food Riots’, Scottish Historical Review 78 (1999), 192–218, 203–4, 207–8, 215. National Library of Scotland MS 7073 (Yester Papers) ff. 8–9 for King’s Birthday in Dunfermline; National Archives of Scotland GD 124/6/235 (Mar and Kellie papers) for unrest in Stirling; National Library of Scotland MS 17522 ff. 45, 55; Edward M. Furgol, A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies, 1639–1651 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 114, 135, 137; Bob Harris and Christopher Whatley, ‘ ‘‘To Solemnize His Majesty’s Birthday’’: New Perspectives on Loyalism in George II’s Britain’, History 83 (1998), 397–419 (398–9); McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, ix–x, 95–6, 108. For evidence of the Beggaar’s Benison’s political proclivities, v. David Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment

136

12

13

14

15

16

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans Edinburgh and their Rituals (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), especially 124, 129, 164–5. Angus Archives A1/1/2 (Arbroath Town Council Minutes 1740–66 (20 July 1744)); B1/1/2 (Brechin Town Council Minutes 1713–59 (27 June 1744)). National Library of Scotland MS 17514 ff. 87, 190; MS 17522 ff. 35 ff, 66, 83, 85, 87, MS 17523 ff. 197–8; NLS Advocates MSS (Eaglescarnie Papers) 23.3.28 f. 96; Jacobite Correspondence of The Atholl Family During the Rebellion, 1745–46, Burton and Laing (eds) (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1840), 16, 96–7; J. M. McBain, Arbroath Past and Present (Arbroath: Brodie and Salmond, 1887), 342; Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1989), 217, Alexander Mackintosh, Muster Roll of Ogilvy’s, 90; No Quarter Given and List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, passim; Christopher Duffy, The ’45, (London: Cassell, 2003), 534; Harris and Whatley, ‘ ‘‘To Solemnize His Majesty’s Birthday’’ ’, 416; National Archives SP (State Papers) 54/37/36; Whatley, The Scots and the Union, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 342 and Christopher Duffy, The ’45 (London: Cassell, 2003), 87 for Forfar’s disaffection: v. also Angus Archives F1/1/4 (Forfar Minutes 1737–58 (2 October 1745; 20 May 1746). Angus Archives A1/1/2 (Arbroath Town Council Minute Books 1740– 66 (14 March, 8 May, 18 July 1746)); M1/1/7 (Montrose Town Council Minute Books 1730–57 (10 July, 15 November 1746); National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MSS (Eaglescarnie Papers) 23.3.28 f. 96; Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 67–8. Taylers, 1745, 8, 14, 115ff, 186, 288, 406; Blaikie, Origins of the ’Forty-Five, 122, 130–1; List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, passim; National Library of Scotland MS 17522 ff.55–6, 85, 87, 92; No Quarter Given, passim; McCann,’Organization of the Jacobite Army’. For fourteenth-century parallels to Forbes’ position, v. Murray G. H. Pittock, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 122; Chevalier de Johnstone, A Memoir of the ’Forty-Five, (London: Folio Society, 1958), 34, 127. National Library of Scotland MS 17522; MS 17527 (Saltoun Papers) f.16 for the state of Perthshire after the Rising; Highland Council Archives 1B1/1/3A (Town Council Minutes, 1720–49); BN1/1/3 (Nairn Town Council Minutes 1711–84); Inverness Treasurer’s Account Book, 1727–60’; McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, 39–55, 197; Atholl Correspondence, passim; T. L. Kingston Oliphant,

Jacobites in the Localities

17

18 19 20

21

22

23

137

The Jacobite Lairds of Gask (London: Griffin, 1870), 102; Johnstone, Memoir, 45; ‘William Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine’, ‘Laurence Oliphant’, ‘Alexander Robertson of Struan’ , Oxford DNB. For the alleged involvement of David Drummond at Crieff, v. M. G. Selkirk, ‘Crieff in the ’45’, The Jacobite 76 (1991), 6–9 (7). National Library of Scotland MS 17522 f. 36 ff; NLS MS 17523 f. 195; NLS MS 7072 f. 179 for King’s Birthday in Glasgow; Furgol, Covenanting Armies, 45, 51, 62, 134, 141 and passim; ‘James Maxwell of Kirkconnel’, Oxford DNB; McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, passim. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 231; NLS MS 17522 ff. 111– 15, 128 ff; MS 17523 f. 196. Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, 1715: The Story of the Rising (London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1936), 122. For other figures, v. McCann, ‘Organization of the Jacobite Army’, xi, xii ff, 8; Taylers, 1715, 39ff; John Baynes, The Jacobite Rising of 1715, (London: Cassell, 1970), 59 ff; National Library of Scotland MS 1498 f. 1r for the units in Mar’s army at Perth; Bruce Lenman, Jacobite Risings, 216–17; The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, 1650–1784 (London: Methuen, 1984), 75. For the power of associational networks to integrate Jacobitism into the British state, v. Margaret Sankey and Daniel Szechi’s outstanding article on ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism’, Past and Present (2001), 90–128 (125). National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 23.3.28 (Eaglescarnie Papers), ff.96, 277; Taylers, 1745, 8; Walter Biggar Blaikie, Origins of the ’Forty-Five, 124; Spalding Club Miscellany 1 (1841) and 4 (1849), 321–2. National Archives of Scotland GD14/98 (Campbell of Stonefield Papers); NAS DG 26/9.498 (Leven and Melville Papers); National Library of Scotland MS 17514 ff. 26, 268, 271, 274–5; NLS MS 17527 ff. 76, 105; NLS ACC 5039 (Albemarle Papers) Advocates MS 23.3.28 (Eaglescarnie Papers) f. 273; National Archives SP 54/35/53; Albemarle Papers, I: 165–6, II: 524; Taylers, 1745; Doron Zimmerman, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 26, 29, 34–5; Alexander Mackintosh, The Muster Roll of the Forfarshire or Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment (Inverness: the Northern Counties Newspaper & Printing & Publishing Co., 1914), x. National Library of Scotland MS 17514 ff. 271, 274; NLS MS 17527 ff. 76, 105; National Archives, SP 54/37/36; SP 54/35/1; SP 54/35/8B, SP 54/35/23A, SP 54/35/31C, SP 54/38/1A, SP 54/38/5; Taylers,

138

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five, 106, 112; Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175, 177. For Viscount Fitzmaurice, v. James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58. 24 Murray Pittock, ‘The Culture of Jacobitism’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 124–45 and Jacobitism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 75–7, 80–1; Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996), 165; Niall Mackenzie, ‘The ‘‘Poetical Performance’’ between John Roy Stuart and Lord Lovat (1736)’, E´igse XXXIV (2004), 127–40, 129, 133; National Library of Scotland ACC 3412 ff. 3, 61, 69; Albemarle Papers I: 350–1; Miscellany of the Spalding Club IV (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1849), 324–5; Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London: Profile, 2004 [2003]), 115–16 for Oglethorpe. Details of the transmission of the Lodge Minutes from David Currie, ‘The Jacobite Lodge at Rome’, The Jacobite 92 (1996), 10–12, 10; for Oglethorpe and a Jacobite Georgia, v. David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 118–20; National Library of Scotland MS 14260 ff. 1, 70, 97, 104, 105; NLS MS 14262 ff. 7, 11, 38; NLS MS 14265 for Lumisden’s papers. For Dick’s membership of the Order del Toboso, v. Steve Murdoch’s essay in Monod, Pittock and Szechi (eds), ‘Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad’ (Macmillan, forthcoming). 25 Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699–1750, Colonel James Allardyce (ed.), 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1895–6), II: xx; National Library of Scotland ACC 5820 for Byres in Royal Scots; NLS MS 7073 f. 59 for Scots in the Irish Picquets; The Jacobite 97 (1998), 1; Stuart Allan and David Carswell, The Thin Red Line: War, Empire and Visions of Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, n.d.), 64; National Library of Scotland MS 98 ff. 39, 40 for recruiting in 1750; ‘David Ogilvy’, Oxford DNB. 26 Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 83, 85; J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service? The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000 [1981]), 34–5; Albemarle Papers I: 201–4, 210, 225; v. National Archives of Scotland GD 26/9/ 490 (Leven and Melville Papers) for earlier troop deployments in Scotland.

Jacobites in the Localities

139

27 National Library of Scotland Acc 5039 (Albemarle Papers); National Library of Scotland MS 3142 f. 154; NLS MS 17505 ff. 65 ff, f. 78; NLS MS 17525 f. 97; Harris, Politics and the Nation, 170, 179, 182. 28 Duffy, The ’45, 480–1; Farquhar, Episcopal History of Perth, 161, 171, 199; Clotilde Prunier, Anti-Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004), 70; National Archives of Scotland GD 95/11/11 (2) for implied conversion from Episcopalian to Catholic worship. I am indebted to Clotilde Prunier for this reference. 29 Harris and Whatley, ‘ ‘‘To Solemnize His Majesty’s Birthday’’ ’, 398–9, 403, 411, 414–16; Christopher A.Whatley, ‘Royal Day, People’s Day: The Monarch’s Birthday in Scotland, c. 1660–1860’, in Roger Mason and Norman Macdougall (eds), People and Power in Scotland: Essays in Honour of T. C. Smout (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 170–88.

4 Nationalists or Jacobites?

. . . the Earl Marischal should publish a manifesto, in which, after having enumerated the many grievances attending the Union . . . he should declare that it is the King’s intention to restore his Scots subjects to their ancient rights and independent state. And that he himself and those with him appear in arms as well to redeem the nation as restore the King. George Lockhart to the Earl Marischal, April 1719 Before 1707, Jacobitism had sought to alter the political direction of Scotland. Following the Union, this objective was submerged in the struggle to reassert and retain the political identity of Scotland . . . Nationalism no less than dynasticism became the guiding force . . . The liberty of Scotland was linked emphatically to the success of the Jacobite cause. Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart . . . popular support for the Jacobites in Scotland owed much to complaints about the union and the Jacobites’ commitment to break it, by force if need be. Even in 1745, Charles Edward Stuart was convinced that by declaring the ‘pretended Union’ at an end he would elicit . . . nationalist support . . . ‘The Scotch’, wrote Dorothy Wentworth, ‘will not fight an inch upon English ground for the Pretender, all they want is to Breke the Union’. Christopher Whatley, The Scots and the Union I will draw my sword whenever there is to be a general effort for restoring the king and kingdom of Scotland . . . Alexander Murray of Stanhope The plight of Scotland as I left her calls for your Majesty’s close attention. The Kingdom is about to be destroyed and the English government is resolved to treat alike those who supported it and those who took up arms for me. Charles Edward Stuart’s memorandum to Louis XV, 10 November 17461

Nationalists or Jacobites?

141

Just as the Myth of the Jacobite Clans has long sought to allege the marginal nature of Jacobite support, its Catholicism, its dependence on an outdated social system and its pointless adherence to an absolute divine right monarchy in opposition to the trend of history towards liberty, improvement and Enlightenment, so the adherents of the Myth have usually sought to downplay if not ignore the details of the Jacobite political agenda. As the movement itself was often regarded as an atavistic and despotic sideshow, there hardly seemed to be any need to take its politics seriously. The idea that Jacobites were improvers (Mackintosh of Borlum, Lockhart), economists (John Law, Sir James Steuart), ecumenists (Alexander, Lord Forbes, George Flint), significant Enlightenment thinkers (Andrew Ramsay) or nationalists has been slow to penetrate the general historiography of the eighteenth century, despite the work of Frank McLynn, Paul Monod, Allan Macinnes and many others. A perceived drift towards the condition of modernity in history may no longer always appear under the crudely sectarian terminology of the past, or even the more recent euphemisms for Whig history, ‘the growth of stability’ or ‘a polite and commercial people’, but – as indicated in the Introduction – even Four Nations historiography often has as its remit the teleological goal of British unity. In the Jacobite era, divergent political goals are held to imply ‘backwardness’, though this is demonstrably inapplicable in many cases2. Such views are in retreat among many specialists in the period, but not yet generally among other early modern historians, particularly in social and economic history. Since the idea of economic growth in particular is one which seems to demonstrate the realities of progress in one dimension (for economies on the whole grow), so it becomes correspondingly easier for the stadial language of Whig historiography to penetrate other assumptions about the nature of a period. The view of ‘the lack of a reality and unpopularity of a . . . Stuart restoration’ remains a common one, even though historians with a speciality in the period clearly see that through Jacobitism, ‘Scotland struggled to maintain a separate, independent state’ through a number of means, leading at last to the existence of a ‘Jacobite-cum-nationalist minority ’ who persisted without success to fight to liberate their country by force of arms. As Allan Macinnes has argued, ‘clan commitment to Jacobitism has been singled out by polemicists partly to play down the nationalist dimension of the cause in Scotland’, while Stuart Reid observes that in 1745, ‘the single most important reason for volunteering

142

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

seems to have been a widespread desire to re-establish Scotland’s independence’.3 Yet such terminology is itself fraught with difficulties: what we mean by ‘nationalist’ in such a context is only one of them, as many theorists of nationalism proclaim it to be a post-Enlightenment concept. Then there are other questions. Was such an attitude to Scotland (Ireland is a related and interesting, though separate, question) common to all supporters of a Stuart restoration, or only some of them? How far was it the major motivating force in Scottish Jacobitism? Was it shared by the Stuarts themselves, and if so, what was their motive, expediency or sincerity? And what kind of Scotland did the Jacobites wish to see? Between 1603 and 1689 the majority of Stuart monarchs (James VI and I being the notable exception) treated Scotland and Ireland as kingdoms distinct from England in a number of ways: this was one of the reasons why the Cromwellian union in Scotland was reversed after 1660. The Stuarts ran a multi-kingdom monarchy with strong localities: the Council of the North and the Council of Wales and the Marches at Ludlow, neither of which survived the seventeenth century. Under James VI and I, it became easier to hear cases in Welsh at Ludlow; under James VII and II, there was a Welsh Lord Chancellor, Jeffreys, and the king himself made the last royal Catholic pilgrimage in Wales, to St Winifred’s Well at Holywell, Flint, in 1686. With regard to Scotland, by the early years of Charles II’s reign, as Michael Lynch remarks, ‘it was deliberate royal policy to keep the settlement of the three kingdoms apart from each other’, despite the discussions over commercial union in the 1660s and 1670s. Both Charles II and James VII (the latter in particular during his sojourns at Edinburgh between 1679 and 1682, which may have led him to back off from earlier interest in closer political ties between Scotland and England) endeavoured to keep a sense of a distinctive Scottish monarchy. Both kings carried out significant works at Holyrood, including a commission for a series of portraits illustrating the Scottish royal line back to the days of Fergus, and James attempted to create a Royalist and Episcopalian culture in the Scottish capital. In pursuit of this, he both founded some of the institutions which may have underlain the subsequent development of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh (for example, the Advocates’ Library and the Royal College of Physicians), and also endorsed the antiquity and legitimacy of the Stuart line through antiquarian revivals (for example, the Royal Company of Archers,

Nationalists or Jacobites?

143

the Order of the Thistle), some of which had ‘a distinctly preReformation tinge’. Plans to expand the Scottish capital (which later resulted in the New Town) were encouraged by James. After 1689, the Stuarts continued to view their ‘ancient kingdom’ as a distinct entity: the ‘three kingdoms’ are clearly distinct objects of policy. Long before Union, James VII recommended in his advice to his son that Scotland as a free and ancient kingdom should be kept separate in its business from England. The king seems to have believed in ‘a series of at least nominally equal kingdoms held together by royal authority’. A Stuart ‘Britain’ was a very different thing from the term ‘Britain’ as it is used today: staunch anti-Unionists like Lord Forbes of Pitsligo could use the term while acting in support of separate realms but common aims. Jacobite interest in a federal – or more properly federative, to use Allan Macinnes’s useful distinction – Union as an alternative to an incorporating one in the first decade of the eighteenth century may sometimes have been more than a spoiling tactic. After it failed, the Jacobites were ‘committed to the abrogation of the Treaty of Union’ in ‘a patriotic endeavour to restore national independence’. There was a sense that the Union was morally illegitimate (William Forbes of Disblair called it ‘morally impossible’), and undemocratic (James Hodges argued that ‘the only constitutional means to create incorporation would be the unanimous consent of ‘‘the Whole Freeborn Subjects of Scotland, Conven’d in ONE Great Assembly’’ ’).4 After the Union was passed, there was little sign of the Stuarts wavering from opposition to it, though Charles Edward in his later career was on occasion an exception to this rule. The Union was the means of enforcing the 1701 English Act of Settlement on Scotland and of overcoming the resistance to this Act enshrined in the 1703 Scottish Act of Security, which sought to keep the succession to the two kingdoms separate: and this was at a time when ‘Jacobite plotting had an increasingly Scottish focus’. If the famines of the 1690s seemed the insignia of Providence in the eyes of Episcopalian ideologues, so the Union seemed a final simoniac alienation of the Crown and with it the nation: that it led to an increase in taxes only emphasised this dimension of its oppressiveness. The strength of feeling against the Union, evident in a memorial signed by over twenty peers, led to the 1708 attempt to restore James, primarily in Scotland alone. The Act of Settlement remained inextricably linked to Union in the Jacobite mind. So it was that when Charles Edward declared against the Union in Edinburgh on 10 October 1745, he

144

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

noted that ‘the Principal Point then in View was the Exclusion of the Royal Family from their undoubted Right to the Crown’. In alluding to the ‘Grossest Corruptions’ used to secure Union, the Stuart Prince endorsed the view that ‘a parcel of rogues’ ‘bought and sold for English gold’ destroyed their country for the sake of personal advancement (the song, often attributed to Burns, was in fact contemporary with the events of 1688–1707). Such a critique of the Union was nationalist, if the word has any meaning. So it was that: On the steps of Holyrood Palace, Hepburn of Keith . . . acted out a piece of theatre. He ostentatiously went ahead of the prince in a gallery touch meant to convey to the crowd both that Scotland took precedence over the House of Stuart and that to oppose Union with England was logically to be a Jacobite.5

So strong was Scottish opposition to the Union that the Jacobites even thought (probably erroneously) that Presbyterian and Cameronian opponents (such as the crowd, thousands strong, who burnt the Articles of the treaty at Dumfries on 20 November 1706) could be brought to support a Stuart restoration. George Lockhart of Carnwath, one of the few Jacobite leaders to live in Covenanting territory, considered that the opposition of certain strands in Presbyterian opinion towards Union was great enough to turn them to the Jacobites, for ‘God may convert him [James], or he may have Protestant children, but the Union can never be good’. Even after the ’15, Lockhart was so sure of the ‘heartie aversion to the Union’ in the ‘western shires’ that in 1719 he advised increasing the emphasis on national independence and anti-Unionism in Jacobite declarations. James was already doing this: in 1718 he wrote to ‘our people of Scotland, commonly called Cameronians’ asking for: a sense of their duty to us and their native country . . . to restore us to the throne of our ancestors, and our kingdom of Scotland to its ancient free and independent state . . . we hereby renew the promises we have already made in our former declaration, in relation to the unhappy union of our two kingdoms, which we thereby declared null and void from the beginning.

The ‘former declaration’, probably that issued on 15 October 1714, called for Scotland to be returned from ‘the late unhappy Union . . . to its ancient free and independent state . . . a free and independent Scots Parliament’. In alluding to restoration to ‘the throne of our

Nationalists or Jacobites?

145

ancestors’ in the 1718 declaration, James may be hinting at the possibility of a ‘nationalist’ restoration in Scotland alone, the ‘ancestral kingdom’: and it is significant that such a restoration was planned at least once, in 1708. Using a Stuart restoration to destroy Great Britain was not merely the fantasy of disgruntled Caledonians, however: it intermittently remained French policy until the 1790s, for the French were well aware of the ‘hatred of the Act of Union in Scotland’. In 1747, the French Court examined a ‘serious plan to establish a republic in Scotland’ by using the Stuarts as a stalking-horse.6 Even before 1715, it was clear that anti-Union feeling was a major problem among the Scottish elites, and steps were taken to block the nomination of anti-Unionists per se (not just Jacobites) to key positions, such as the Privy Council and the magistracy. The popularity of texts such as the Declaration of Arbroath and Blin Hary’s ferociously patriotic Wallace increased markedly: the spirit of Wallace was invoked in the broadsheets. There were ‘numerous reports of pro-Jacobite demonstrations’ (Edinburgh, which ‘hes suffred more than all by the Union’ was especially active), English taxes were described as ‘tribute money’ and there was widespread support for ‘a memorial calling for the restoration of James VIII’ (the regnal number is significant, as is argued below). Measures which intensified the Union by abolishing the Scottish Privy Council and imposing English treason law in Scotland were widely disliked. In 1711, Mar noted that the Union was a ‘legal’ one only, not one of ‘affection’ or even ‘interests’. The ‘nationalist dimension’ of Jacobitism was manifest almost at once. There was a ‘growing desire in Scotland to dissolve the Union’; in 1714, it was said that ‘there is a mighty fervour about having the Union dissolvd . . . The Union Act is the foundation of the Hannover settlement’. Even at this stage, the Union ‘question was Jacobit or Whigg’, and the Jacobites were clearly aligned as the anti-Union party. ‘White gloves with ‘‘Liberty’’ printed on them’ were sold, white being the colour of the houses of Bourbon and Stuart, and it was remarked that ‘thus miserable is our Nation . . . in a worse state of slavery to England than ever Ireland was’.7 During the Rising itself, the motivation – in the Earl of Nithsdale’s words – ‘to deliver my native country from the oppression and misery under which it groans’ – was at least as strong as any desire to restore a Stuart to the throne, as was recognised in James’s declaration against the Union. ‘God bless King James the 8th’ was being

146

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

called in Edinburgh in the spring of 1714, and when the king was proclaimed at Dundee in 1715, ‘dissolving and putting an end to that unhappy Union’ was given joint billing. The cry ‘No Union’ was frequently heard (for example, from the Jacobite Army at Perth), and extended across language communities: Iain Lom’s ‘Oran an Agaidh an Aonaidh’ (Song Against the Union) and Sileas na Ceapaich’s punning reference to the Union as ‘uinnean’, the onion that makes one cry, are but two examples. Lochiel’s motto, ‘Pro rege et patria’ (for king and fatherland) would have been equally at home in the mouth of an Edinburgh lawyer as a Gaelic nobleman, and perhaps not the smallest element in Rob Roy’s evasive but never entirely detached approach to Jacobitism was his opposition to the Union, one also proclaimed on at least one of the Rising’s banners. Mar ordered ‘all the towns to pay the taxes and duties only on the old Scots footing’ (this also happened in 1745), and on offering Spalding of Ashentullie a commission, told him that ‘whether James landed or not the intention was to march south, dissolve the Union and redress the grievances of Scotland’. The Master of Sinclair, an ex-regular officer with a rather cynical attitude towards the Jacobite Army he had joined, none the less spoke of the ‘honourable and beautifull’ duty of resistance on the part of the Scots nation to British sovereignty. A ‘Coppy of a Letter from a Gentleman in the Earl of Marrs Camp to his friend in the West Country’ makes the nationalist dimension of Mar’s case very clear. Although ‘the Country People’ are ‘averse to the Union’ and would support its overthrow, ‘the [Presbyterian] Clergy took great pains to perswade them there was no such design in hand’. Mar confesses in the Letter that although ‘he himselfe had been very Instrumental in Carrying on the UNION hopeing it would have proven to the benefit of SCOTLAND . . . woefull Experience had taught him the Contrary’. The paper, ‘many Copies’ of which are alleged in circulation, goes on to say that Mar was now: . . . resolved at the Hazard of his Life and Fortune to do what in him lay for his Countrys Honour and to dissolve the UNION. That for this purpose . . . He had treated and entered into a Correspondence with King James from whome he had all assurances imaginable that he would contribute towards the dissolution of the UNION . . . and that SCOTLAND shall again be Restored to its ancient Rights and priviledges . . . His Lordship told me that he was instructed and ordered by King James as soon as possible to Emit and Publish a declaration against the UNION . . .

Nationalists or Jacobites?

147

As soon as the King: was in condition to protect a Scots Parliament, He would cal on to meet and act for the Safty and Honour of the Kingdome . . . most of the Nobility and Genttry . . . Concur in their Zeal and Resolutions against the UNION . . . I pray God blesse all their honest designs with Successe and inspire al SCOTS-MEN to concur with them . . . and that selfish ambitious men may not have Interest to divide or withdraw SCOTSMEN from their DUTY to themselves, their fellow subjects, & their POSTERITY.

It seems possible that, had James been crowned at Scone as was planned, a parliament would have followed there: there were calls for this in January 1716. This language was typical of the Rising. After Sheriffmuir, Mar’s proposed Association at Perth aimed of ‘Never . . . admit of Terms till the King was restored, the Union broken and the [Episcopal] Church established’. That Church itself, ecclesiastically unionist, but politically nationalist, was a major engine of patriotic feeling: for Episcopalians, the Union sealed their humiliation for all time by establishing a Presbyterian Kirk. In the pulpit at Aberdeen, Dr James Garden stated that the Presbyterians had ‘allowed and tamely permitted the Nation basely and shamefully to be sold and enslaved contrary to Express Remonstrances of most part of the Kingdom, under the specious name an pretence of an Union with England’. James himself wrote in a letter from Montrose on 4 February 1716 that ‘it was with the view of delivering this my Kingdom from the hardships it lies under and restoring it to its former happiness and independency that brought me into this country’. Loyalty to the Crown, the nation and Episcopalian resistance to Presbyterian simony (they were viewed as having sold Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I and national independence in turn) and slavery were interconnected: and they were Jacobite. As Michael Lynch puts it, ‘loyalty to an ancient monarchy and anti-Union feeling’ were ‘indistinguishable’ in much Jacobite thought. Even Lord Lovat, whose ‘stalwart Scottish nationalism . . . was perhaps . . . [his] strongest emotion next to megalomania’ spoke to Charles Edward in 1746 in terms of the immemorial history of the Scottish Crown which was defined in solely nationalist terms: ‘Remember . . . your great ancestor Robert Bruce, who lost eleven battles and won Scotland by the twelfth’. Lovat’s own forebears had fought for the Scottish cause in the Wars of Independence.8

148

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

In the aftermath of the 1715 Rising, it was clear to many that opposition to the Union had been a key motivating force in bringing out such large numbers of men to fight: ‘a major rising in Scotland, to break the Union’. Prisoners like John Nairn explicitly stated that they rose to ‘assist in dissolving the union and making Scotland a free nation’, while Argyll himself likened the situation in Scotland to ‘the Catalan revolt’, the resistance of the core territories of Aragon to a centralised incorporation under the Castilian crown. In Scotland and among Scots, there was widespread sympathy with the Jacobites even among those who could not accept the Stuarts: the dying Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun asked his brother to apply £200 sterling to the relief of the prisoners. It was argued – even by hardcore Unionists like Viscount Stair – that the ‘best way to prevent another Jacobite rising was not swingeing retribution but measures ‘‘to make the Union not grievous to Scotland’’ ’. None the less, opposition continued. In 1718, ’A speech without doors upon the present state of the Nation’ argued that ‘the union of our crown with that of England . . . was the first beginning of all the mischief’, and that ‘the black designs of the english’ brought about the 1707 Union, which ‘constrain’d us to depend upon a remote seat of government . . . this master piece of villany they call by the name of an incorporating union’. The ‘speech’ goes on to argue that the presence of ‘an arbitrary German prince unacquainted with our laws’ on the throne has made things worse, thus clearly demonstrating its Jacobite tendencies.9 Pressure to dissolve the Union continued through the 1720s, not just on the streets, but as a key plank of Jacobite policy. This was understood by government: in 1726, the possibility was bruited of ‘promoting discord among the Jacobites by widening the distrust between English Jacobites, and those Scottish Jacobites who hope for an independent Scotland’. Lockhart in particular, who had ‘an innocent but pervasive belief in Scottish ‘‘patriotic’’ values that at times is redolent of nothing so much as modern nationalism’, was at the heart of keeping opposition to the Union at the forefront of Jacobite policy. In 1725, the Malt Tax riots and general dislike of the impost led Lockhart, a senior figure in the Scottish group advising James, to write to the king noting that ‘aversion to the Union dayly encreases’. While it was clear that that ‘aversion’ was by no means always to be equated with Jacobitism, Lockhart clearly intended that non-Jacobite anti-Union feeling should be taken advantage of by the Jacobites. Christopher Whatley rightly admits ‘the great

Nationalists or Jacobites?

149

unpopularity of the union’ and states that ‘the great majority of Scots whose voices can be heard . . . were opposed to incorporation’. He doubts, however, that all these were Jacobites, even though some who were not regarded a Stuart restoration as preferable to Union, emphasising rather negative effects on key industries, such as ‘fishing, linen manufacturing, and also, in part, the salt industry’. There were also undoubtedly surviving – if isolated – instances of Cameronian Presbyterian anti-Unionism, such as that of William Wilson, a schoolmaster at Wanlockhead, who protested at Sanquhar against the proclamation of George II, criticising the lack of a ‘Scots Coronation Oath’ and, more generally, ‘the Black unhallowed unhappy Union’. On the other hand, it was clear by the time of the ’15 that the only political engine with the force to threaten the Union settlement was that of the Jacobites10. But then, what was a Jacobite? In the comfortable parlance of Whig historiography, a Jacobite was a believer in the divine right of kings who yearned for a vanishing age of absolutism in church and state with a futile troglodytic insistence right up to the verge of the age of Enlightenment. In more recent historiography, a Jacobite might be more than this, but could not be a nationalist, because it has become for many an article of faith – not one based on evidence, as I shall show below, and have discussed at much greater length elsewhere – that nationalism is itself the product of the very enlightenment the Jacobites existed to resist. The reality was that Jacobitism was very different in the three kingdoms. In England, it was strongly associated with country values, high Anglican royalism tending in some cases to caesaropapism, xenophobia, nostalgia and, on occasion, Catholicism. Its radical elements centred on cross-class alliances between the disaffected and the dispossessed; its ideology, songs and even dress were often borrowed from Scottish patriot historiography. The spread of tartan in England in the 1740s was a sign of the limited options available for a domestically English language of Jacobitism, which in its turn demonstrated the restricted and declining support mechanisms for English Jacobitism. Welsh Jacobitism was deeply engaged in the English political system, while Irish Jacobitism, with its emphasis on restored Catholicism, a just settlement for Ireland under the Stuart Crown, the end of the dominion of the stranger and close relations with France and Spain, was difficult to reconcile with the Anglican insularity of its south British counterpart. Irish Jacobitism was nationalist in tone: but often the nation it sought to restore had never existed.

150

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

In Scotland, things were different again. There was a messianic tone, as in Ireland, but also some clear-cut political thinking. Lockhart himself, as staunch a Jacobite as one might find, was a contractualist who owed more to the arguments of the Declaration of Arbroath than to those of Robert Filmer. ‘Though I own his right to rule over me’, he wrote of James, I deny that he or any power under God can dissolve the constitution of the kingdom. And therefore I might fairly oppose it in a lawfull manner, nay think my aledgiance loosed as to him my soveraign . . . as happened in the case of Baliol . . .

This argument was that of the Declaration of Arbroath: that monarchs who subverted the national interest of Scotland could be cashiered by the guardians of her people. The Declaration was first printed in 1689, and ‘another four printings’ appeared before the Union. Its arguments, if not already present in patriotic Jacobite circles, soon found their way there: in his ‘On Government’, written in 1720, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo, who suggested that if: God in his providence Dispossesses a Prince and sets up another in his stead and the people by themselves or their representatives revock the Title to Sovereignty they had given and confirm it upon the new set up Prince. The Persons Dispossessed may be truly said to have nor right nor title.

Public utility and popular sovereignty loom large in Pitsligo’s unpublished political theory, which sees notions of indefeasible right as an ‘airy shadow’, and in its stress on ‘Salus Populi Suprema Lex’ (‘the health/good/security of the people is the chief law) in contemporary political theory clearly anticipates Francis Hutcheson. The Scotland the Jacobites wished to see might have a Stuart monarch, a restored Episcopalian Church and an ‘ancient constitution’ restored, but it would not be a divine right monarchy. Indeed, in the event of a restoration in Scotland alone, it was inconceivable that the Stuarts would not be beholden to powerful magnate interests, while those same interests might expect to govern in the event of a restoration in three kingdoms and a rescinded Union. None the less, there might be different winners and losers at other levels of Scottish society11. The sentiments of Scots Jacobitism do not seem to have changed much by 1745. Although James in exile might describe himself as ‘truly English’ for the benefit of his southern supporters, he was

Nationalists or Jacobites?

151

equally clear where his support in Scotland lay, declaring on 23 December 1743 against the ‘pretended Union’ which had left Scotland, ‘a Nation always famous for valour, and highly esteemed . . . reduced to the Condition of a Province, under the specious Pretence of an Union with a more powerful Neighbour’. James was invoking the long tradition of Scots patriot historiography, where the existence of the nation was dependent on the ‘valour’ which guaranteed its right to exist. As the Chevalier de Johnstone put it, ‘the Scots, though much inferior to the English in numbers, had withstood them during a long and almost uninterrupted war of a thousand years, and had preserved their liberty and independence down to the union of the two kingdoms in 1707’. This was standard Jacobite rhetoric: in its connection to patriot ‘Republican’ values which resisted empire, wealth and corruption, it drew on Tacitus’ Agricola. Allan Macinnes has argued that this unity of patria and monarchy was a development of seventeenth-century political thought: but it is identifiable earlier in its broad contours, whatever its subsequent later refinements. Although not limited to Jacobitism, it came to be dominated by it as Scotland journeyed towards the integrationist language of the Enlightenment, which sought to give closure both to the Stuart cause and to the distinctive historiography of Scottish nationhood which underpinned it, for the idea that ‘territorial nationhood should take precedence over dynastic statehood’ had made Jacobitism particularly dangerous. Thus, James could state that ‘Our Progenitors have swayed the Sceptre with Glory, through a longer Succession of Kings, than any Monarchy upon Earth can at this Day boast of’, while at the same time emphasising a national commitment based on a history of armed resistance. In its turn, that armed resistance was made possible by the constitutional position of the Crown: ’the ancient line of kings supplied a vital counterweight to an English historiographical tradition which insisted that Scotland was and always had been a dependency of the crown of England’. This vision of nationality, where the kingdom was guaranteed by a legitimate kingly line, which provided the constitutional framework on which Scottish patriotism was founded and which it existed to defend, was also linked to the longstanding patriotic role of the Church in Scottish affairs, evident from before ad 1000, and particularly manifest in the Wars of Independence. In a post-Reformation environment, the Episcopalians (just like their Anglican brethren in the south with regard to English history) were much more comfortable with the pre-

152

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Reformation history of Scotland than was much Presbyterian opinion, which could see 1560 as a kind of Year Zero. As a consequence, the Stuarts tended to favour Episcopacy, while the Melvillian ‘twa Kings, twa kingdoms’ approach, which separated Christ’s kingdom and the duties owed to it from any obedience to the Crown, drew Presbyterianism further away from a role supportive of royal authority and the constitutional framework of a Scottish state than ever. In the era of Union, the Presbyterian Kirk was seen by many as driven by self-interest in its attitude to the measure: ‘only three presbyteries (less that 5 per cent of the total) and fifty-nine parishes (no more than 6 per cent of the total) actually petitioned against Union . . . the Kirk’s primary mission was not to protect the sovereign independence of Scotland’, but rather ‘its own institutional interests’. The Jacobite opposition to Union, Hanover and Presbyterianism in Scotland was thus powerfully intertwined: it was to all intents and purposes a united ideological front, one stronger than that which could be deployed by the Jacobites in any other part of their kingdoms. The repeated and emphatic use of James’s Scottish regnal number in correspondence and declarations relating to his Scottish kingdom was only one sign of the deeply national nature of Scots Jacobitism. On 19 August 1745, when James’s standard was raised at Glenfinnan, the cry was ‘King James the Eight . . . prosperity to Scotland and no Union’. Later that year, Lord John Drummond’s published declaration invoked the spectre of Anglo-Scottish war, declaring that he had come into Scotland, ‘to this Kingdom with Written orders, to make War against the King of ENGLAND’ on behalf of Charles, ‘Prince of WALES, Regent of SCOTLAND’. Scotland was a kingdom, and it was Lord John Drummond’s role to defend it as such. Another declaration was made on behalf of Charles as ‘Steward of Scotland’ calling on Scots to ‘fight for their freedom’. Oaths of allegiance to ‘James VIII’ – recognised by that number alone – exist, and James even made declarations on behalf of all his kingdoms using the Scottish regnal number alone.12 In the 1745 Rising itself, not only did most of the banners carried contain a saltire as their main or major component part, but individuals such as Arthur Gordon of Carnousie, major in Lord Forbes’ Horse, wore the saltire on campaign: even the Manchester Regiment do not seem to have carried the Union flag, and Beppy Byrom’s household in Manchester ‘made saltires for the troops’. Patriotic language was a feature of the army’s operation: ‘St Andrew and Scotland’ was the parole for 30 November (St Andrew’s Day –

Nationalists or Jacobites?

153

the same parole was used in 1715), while ‘Wallaces Oak’ was the parole on 14/15 January: the Wallace Oak at Elderslie was believed to have sheltered 300 of Wallace’s men from Plantagenet soldiery. Before the battle of Falkirk, the army was reviewed on ‘Bannockburn Moor’, surely a deliberate reminder of King Robert’s historic victory in 1314. The Prince, described as the ‘steward of Scotland’ rather than Prince of Wales in a number of contemporary documents, declared that he could ‘not possibly ratify’ the ‘pretended Union’, leaving future developments to a decision of future free English and Scottish Parliaments (Newcastle thought that Charles might try to call a Scottish Parliament when in Edinburgh, as Christopher Duffy has pointed out). It remained the case, though, that Charles was less of an enthusiastic anti-Unionist than many of his supporters. Chevalier de Johnstone, for example, thought the ‘sole consideration of being freed from the English yoke’ was the key to Scottish support, and that dissolving the Union would give ‘infinite pleasure to all Scotland’, while Charles might cut his cloth to suit his auditors, speaking of the ’Free Interest of Britain’ when addressing the Glasgow magistrates, for example. By 1753, Charles was considering the merits of a kind of Union for both Scotland and Ireland, but such views are not evident in 1745–6. Indeed, as the quotation at the head of this chapter suggests, Charles viewed Scotland in 1746 as suffering from English oppression. He was almost certainly more deeply affected by the suffering of Scotland than those entirely cynical about his character choose to entertain. Charles always resisted future restoration plans which would depend on the military potential of Scotland alone, and this almost certainly influenced his later views on the subject.13 Irrespective of the views of its leaders, throughout the eighteenth century the tone of Jacobite analysis remains the same, linked to a Scottish patriot historiography which the Enlightenment writers were to ignore, no doubt because its very strength made it difficult to refute. Writers like Allan Ramsay in ‘A Vision’ and William Hamilton of Bangour in ‘The Speech of Randolph’ aligned the Wars of Independence with contemporary Jacobite struggles: Hamilton, who planned an epic Bruce in which ‘the Saxons or English’ would be ‘identified as the common enemy’ (as they had been by Blin Hary), served in the Rising with Lord Elcho’s Lifeguards. ‘A Song, To the Tune of Auld Lang Syne’ (probably, though not certainly post-1745) is a dramatic monologue spoken in the persona of St Andrew, lamenting the loss of Scotland’s will to defend its ‘ancient

154

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Rights’ and ‘Liberties’, and ending with the hope that ‘the Scotish Nation’ may ‘shine/Illustrious as before’. As late as 1759, it was proposed that the planned Jacobite Rising of that year should ‘restore the Privy Council and Parliament of Scotland, and . . . re-establish the old laws, customs and privileges of that kingdom’. In 1785, at the funeral of William Lascelles of Buchan, whose family had fought in the ’45, ‘and who lived in hope of seeing a Scottish Parliament restored’, ‘a large gathering of fishermen and cottars’ accompanied the cortege, ‘many of whom carried banners depicting the lion rampant’. The apparently modern phenomenon of trivial or tokenistic nationalism was not unknown: some Jacobites were proud of writing on Scottish paper, others – such as the 6th Earl of Kellie – had ‘a patriotic taste for traditional plain Scots food’.14 Jacobitism in Scotland then was strongly rooted in Scotland’s sense of itself, its patriot historiographical tradition, its crown and its bishops. The Jacobite leadership acknowledged this, and they and even more so their supporters spoke of Scotland’s place and relation to the Stuarts in national terms. Were they nationalists? Many historians have no difficulty in using the term to describe the Jacobites, but there remains a core problem that for a theorised approach, it is important to acknowledge that the preponderance of modern studies of nationalism as a phenomenon view it as a creature of the Enlightenment and French revolutionary periods. Differing accounts of nationalism share this in common: Boyd Shafer in 1955, E. Kedourie in 1960, Kenneth Monogue in 1967 and many others broadly agree on this single era’s status as a watershed. Ernest Barker sees ‘the self-consciousness of nations’ as a recent growth, Peter Alter states that ‘received opinion holds that nationalism in the modern sense does not date back further than the revolutionary political turmoil that troubled the second half of the eighteenth century. It was born in France’, while Ernest Gellner viewed nationalism as ‘the inseparable ideological counterpart of modernization’. Perhaps most famously, for Benedict Anderson, the ‘imagined community’ of the nation is ‘made possible by the rise of print capitalism and new genres such as the newspaper and the novel’.15 Alongside this heavily theorised position, there is the Oxford English Dictionary approach, favoured by one or two distinguished historians. Here it is easy to discern (albeit by relying with utter conviction on the work of the Dictionary’s original researchers in a manner that such distinguished historians might be reluctant to do in their own field) that ‘nationalism’ can be cited only from 1836

Nationalists or Jacobites?

155

(admittedly as an established term). This looks interesting, but then we find that ‘nationalist’ is cited from 1715 and ‘nationality’ from 1691. In fact, ‘nation’ is the key term, and it is much earlier: ‘-ism’ abstractions in many fields are the product of the Enlightenment’s legacy, but they do not govern the views they characterise, any more than the existence of the Catholic Church should be predicated on the term ‘Catholicism’. So we read ‘Of England the nacion Es Inglis man thar in commun’ from 1300; ‘Be cause I am a natyff Scottis man’ comes from Blin Hary’s Wallace in 1470. In fact, as Susan Reynolds pointed out a number of years ago, the ‘real nation’ essentialised by those theorists whose claim is that the nation is imagined not essential, is equally present in ‘the medieval idea of the kingdom as . . . a people with a similarly permanent and objective reality’. Even leaving aside the inconveniently intractable findings of scholarship, it seems prima facie unlikely that say Catalan or Czech nationalism would exist on the basis of nineteenth-century ‘inventions’ alone, while Poland, which ceased to exist as a state before the French Revolution, never lost – rather than invented – the desire to reconstitute itself16. Scotland is an even clearer case, and not just because it possesses in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), an iconic document in nationalist history, one applied to Corsica by James Boswell in the 1760s and still with a resonance in the America of the 1990s, when it became the basis for Tartan Day. The patronising formulation that nationalism is in its origination an ideology ‘foisted on a credulous population by a self-serving political elite’ is one hardly supported by a wealth of evidence in the Scottish case. On the contrary, in 1435 the future Pius II ‘noted that the Scots liked nothing better than to hear abuse of the English’; in 1511, the burgh council of Aberdeen ordered the townsfolk ‘to liberate Richard Scheirly Englishman, from Prison, in regard he had only come to town to perform his pilgrimage to St. Ninian’, and Andrew Borde, an English student at Glasgow University in the 1530s, stated that: ‘it is naturally geuen, or els it is of deuyllysche dyspocion of a Scotysh man, not to loue nor fauour an Englyshe man. And I . . . dwellynge amonge them, was hated’. In 1661, John Ray remarked on a visit to Scotland that Scots ‘could not endure to hear their country or countrymen spoken against’.17 Unpleasant though these repeated statements of mindless antipathy and chauvinism are, they are perfectly consistent across time and place with a strongly developed sense of national identity,

156

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

attested by a number of internationally diverse observers. That that identity grew out of a unified monarchy governing diverse peoples is hardly controversial to mediaeval historians. In the Wars of Independence, the bishops of Moray and Glasgow told the people ‘that fighting for Scotland was as good a cause as fighting against the Saracens’, while the chroniclers described those Scots who fought against Robert the Bruce as ‘English’. The mediaeval identification of the Scottish Crown as Judas Maccabeus fighting against Seleucid tyranny was extended into the Jacobite period and used by James Boswell to characterise Pasquale Paoli while he was fighting for Corsican independence. In 1296, ‘William of Bolhope, a Scot long resident in Alnwick, refused to recognise Edward I as his overlord and was put to death; in 1384 a Scotswoman living in England and married to an Englishman’ was acquitted of warning her countrymen of an English raid. In 1385, an Act of the Scots Parliament ‘commanded soldiers to wear . . . the saltire’ of St Andrew and the nation rather than the ‘lion rampant’ of the royal standard.18 The aim of good history should be not to multiply examples, but to demonstrate the validity of arguments. Neither this book nor its author are equipped to break new ground in Scottish mediaeval history. But this was the context out of which Scottish Jacobitism grew, and Scottish Jacobites themselves made frequent allusions to the Wars of Independence as a parallel case to their own. What people value in their country and its institutions changes over time: but those who do value these things, defend their distinctiveness, celebrate them and even fight for them, deserve in every age to have the term nationalists applied to them in the spirit of William of Occam. If it looks like a nationalist, sounds like a nationalist and acts like a nationalist, that’s what it is. This was understood by contemporaries. In 1768, Giuseppe Marc’ Antonio Barretti wrote to James Boswell to say that if the Corsicans were successful in what Boswell had termed ‘fighting for liberty’, ‘they will be no rebels, and this will likewise be the case, when your Americans set up for themselves; not to say that it had been likewise the case, if your Scotch had succeeded in their last rebellions’. The reason that British propagandists south of the Border suspected all – or nearly all – Scots of treason was that the ’45 was a Rising in which the national and dynastic questions were inextricably interlinked. The repeated refusal to allow Scotland a militia in the eighteenth century was every bit as much borne of national questions as dynastic ones. The long struggle of Whig historiography in general and the Myth of the

Nationalists or Jacobites?

157

Jacobite Clans in particular to denationalise Jacobitism in Scotland is itself excellent evidence of its existence. That something so obvious, so frequently alluded to in the documents, should be so ignored and denied speaks a need: a need to assert the marginality of the Jacobite cause, its obscurantism, its futility, its backwardness. Nationalism, whether one likes it or not – and everyone with humanity must oppose its chauvinist and prejudiced manifestations – is undeniably modern, even if it is also ancient. It, therefore, represents a real cause and a valid threat, which at all costs many have determined that Jacobitism must not be admitted to be.19 In the fifth and last chapter, I turn to yet another manifestation of the Myth: that neatly encapsulated in the title of the 1996 National Trust for Scotland exhibition, ‘the Swords and the Sorrows’. We have seen that the Jacobite Army was regimented, organised and to a degree trained along conventional military lines. But this would be of little account if it fell on the government guns wielding sword and targe, as it is almost ubiquitously depicted as doing. In ‘Jacobite Weapons’, I will examine in some detail the evidence for the arming of Charles Edward Stuart’s army in 1745. NOTES 1 Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1989), 141; Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 193–4; Christopher Whatley, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 61; Stanhope, quoted in Margaret Sankey and Daniel Szechi, ‘Elite culture and the decline of Scottish Jacobitism, 1716–1745’, Past and Present 173 (2001), 90– 128, 109; for Charles’ memorandum, v. John Gibson, Lochiel of the ’45, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 157. 2 V. Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (London: Routledge, 1985); Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); other references are to J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Stability (1967) and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 3 John Young, ‘The Union unravelled’, Scottish Review of Books 3:1 (2007), 14–15, 15; Daniel Szechi and David Hayton, ‘John Bull’s other kingdoms: the English Government of Scotland and Ireland’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750 (London:

158

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Hambledon Press, 1987), 259; Macinnes, Clanship, 162; Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 9. 4 Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991), 288, 353; Hugh Ouston, ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the patronage of learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in John Dwyer, Roger Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d. [1983]), 133–55; Bruce Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 57; Murray Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 8, 15 for Wales; Aberdeen University Library MS 2740/4/18/1 (Pitsligo Papers); Allan Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4–5, 5n, 15, 17, 83, 85; BL Add MS 38145/5 (Tyrconnel’s Letter Book). 5 P. W. J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 204–5; James Allardyce (ed.), Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699–1750, 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1895), I: 177, 188–9; Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart (London: Routledge, 1988), 149; Allan Macinnes, Union and Empire, 249. 6 John Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: The Jacobite Rising of 1708 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 75ff, 93–4; ‘Scotland’s Ruine!’: The Memoirs of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.) with an introduction by Paul Scott (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1995); William Donaldson, ‘The Jacobite song in 18th and early 19th century Scotland’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 1974), 45; Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1989), 141; W. H. Langhorne, Reminiscences (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1893), 9; Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, 1715: The Story of the Rising (London: Thomas Nelson, 1936), 123, 311–14; Frank McLynn, ‘An eighteenthcentury Scots republic? – an unlikely project from absolutist France’, Scottish Historical Review 59 (1980), 177–81 and France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 69 for French understanding of Scottish opposition to the Union. For Union and taxes, v. James Hodges’ The Rights and Interests of the Two British Monarchies (1703), cited and discussed in Karin Bowie, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union 1699– 1707 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/Royal Historical Society, 2007), 75.

Nationalists or Jacobites?

159

7 Whatley, Scots and the Union, 90, 289, 331, 340–2; Letters of George Lockhart, 64; Clyve Jones (ed.), ‘Letters of Lord Balmerino to Harry Maule, 1710–1713, 1721–1722’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XII (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1994), 99–167, 136, 164; National Archives SP 54/26/720; Macinnes, Clanship, 162; News Letters of 1715–16, A. Francis Steuart (ed.) (London and Edinburgh: Chambers, 1910), viii, 13, 15, 16, 18; Bowie, Scottish Public Opinion, 80, 95; Neil Davidson, Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692–1746 (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 180. 8 National Archives SP 54/9/3B (‘Coppy of a Letter from a Gentleman in the E of Marrs Camp to his friend in the West Country’); Whatley, Scots and the Union, 277, 342; Nithsdale, quoted in James Bogle, Lord Nithsdale’s escape: a Catholic Cavalier at Preston and after, Royal Stuart Society Paper LXX, (Salisbury: Royal Stuart Society, 2006), 24; Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 106, 112, 114; David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myth (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004), 41, 79; Taylers, 1715, 116, 123, 311–14; National Library of Scotland MS 1012; A Fragment of a Memoir of Field-Marshal James Keith, Written by Himself 1714–1734 (Edinburgh: Spalding Club, 1843), 11 for taxation on the old Scots footing; John, Master of Sinclair, Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, MacKnight and Lang (eds.) with notes by Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1858), 2; Lynch, New History, 328; Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, 1650–1784 (London: Methuen, 1984), 163; Gibson, Lochiel; News Letters of 1715–16, 112 for possible parliament at Scone. For a detailed examination of attitudes to Presbyterian simony, v. Murray Pittock, ‘Johnson and Scotland’, in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (eds), Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), 184–96. For Lovat’s forebears, v. Fitzroy MacLean, Highlanders (London: Adelphi, 2007 [1995]). 9 Edward Corp, ‘The Jacobite presence in Toulouse during the eighteenth century’, Diasporas 5 (2004), 124–45, 127; Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 44, 93, 10; Scottish History Society Miscellany X, 170; Sankey and Szechi, ‘Elite culture’, 114; ‘A speech without doors upon the present state of the Nation’, National Library of Scotland MS 17498 ff. 145–6. 10 National Archives SP 78/184; Daniel Szechi, George Lockhart of Carnwath, (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 71; Letters of George Lockhart, 252 (Lockhart to James, 18 December 1725); Whatley, Scots

160

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

and the Union, 51, 55–6, 280, 344; ‘Protestation by William Wilson’, National Archives of Scotland GD 334/80 (Spens Papers). 11 Szechi, Lockhart, 209–10; ‘Scotland’s Ruine’, 277; Whatley, Scots and the Union, 94; Aberdeen University Library MS 2740/4/18/1/ esp. 14–16 (Pitsligo Papers); v. also Murray Pittock, ‘The political thought of Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’, Northern Scotland (1996), 73–86. 12 Whatley, Scots and the Union, 343; S. Bruce and S. Yearley, ‘The social construction of tradition: the Restoration portraits and the kings of Scotland’, in David McCrone, Stephen Kendrick and Pat Shaw (eds), The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 180, 183; Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, in Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 60; Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 101; v. also Pittock, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003) for a detailed examination of the evidence for the mutually supportive relationship of the Scottish Church and Crown; Michael Hook and Walter Ross, The ’45, (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1995), 26; National Library of Scotland MS 17498 f. 204; Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699–1750, James Allardyce (ed.) (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1895), 2 vols, I: 177, 188–9; Macinnes, Union and Empire, 17–18, 287 for Presbyterianism and Union; Chevalier de Johnstone, Memoirs of the ’Forty-Five, (London: Folio Society, 1958), 45; ‘Declaration of ‘‘LORD JOHN DRUMMOND Commander in Chief of his most Christian Majesty’s Forces in SCOTLAND’’ ’, National Archives of Scotland GD248/48/4/2 (Seafield Muniments); National Archives SP 54/26/720; ‘Oath of allegiance to King James VIII’, Perth and Kinross Archives B59/30/10; for 1714 declaration of ‘James the 8th by the Grace of God of Scotland, England, France and Ireland’, v. Taylers, 311 and Stirling Council Archives B66/21/8 (Burgh of Stirling Council Minutes 1739–45). 13 Christopher Duffy, The ’45 (London: Cassell, 2003), 87, 212; National Library of Scotland MS 17526 (Saltoun Papers), ff. 9, 18; NLS MS 7072 f. 118; National Archives SP 54/9/34 (‘Book of orders commencing September the 18th: 1715’); NA TS 20/88/52 (‘a Review of the rebel armie at Bannockburn Moor two days before the Battle of Falkirk’); Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period I: 188–9; F. J. McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 97–8 for Beppy Byrom; Johnstone, Memoir, 45; Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites (Manchester:

Nationalists or Jacobites?

14

15

16 17

18

161

Manchester University Press, 1994), 150–1 for Charles’ changing view on constitutional issues. Stuart Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 23, argues that the Manchester Regiment may have carried a red saltire and a cross of St George: not, significantly, the Union flag. Nelson Bushnell, William Hamilton of Bangour (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1957), 45; ‘A song, to the Tune of Auld Lang Syne’, University of Guelph Special Collections. Digitally available at http:// www.lib.uoguelph.ca/resources/archival_&_special_collections/the_collections/digital_collections/scottish/Jacobite_site_6.htm; Claude Nordmann, ‘Choiseul and the last Jacobite attempt of 1759’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 201–17, 204; Whatley, The Scots and the Union, 46; for Kellie, v. David Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Edinburgh and their Rituals (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), 165. John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 215–17; John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds), Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45; Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 54; John Hutchinson in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London: Routledge, 1996), 110. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), Reynolds in Smith and Hutchinson, Nationalism, 137–8. Brian C. J. Singer, ‘Cultural versus contractual nations: rethinking their opposition’, History and Theory 35: 3 (1996), 309–37; Aberdeen City Archives, Kennedy Index IX: 61, 362; David Ditchburn, ‘Who are the Scots? Some problems of identification and misidentification in later Medieval Europe’, in Paul Dukes (ed.), Frontiers of European Culture (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 89–100, 89–91; Edward Cowan, Scottish History and Scottish Folk (Glasgow: Department of Scottish History, 1998), 13. John Macinnes, ‘Gaelic poetry and historical tradition’, in Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981), 142–63, 160; Geoffrey Barrow, Robert the Bruce and the Scottish Identity, (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1984), 7; Barrow, Robert Bruce, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 177, 187; Norman Reid, ‘The kingless kingdom: the Scottish guardianship of 1286–1306’, Scottish Historical Review 61 (1982), 105–29, 105; Pittock, New History, 95, 97–8.

162

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

19 Murray Pittock, James Boswell, (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2007),48, 59; The General Correspondence of James Boswell 1766–69, Richard C. Cole (ed.) with Peter S. Baker and Rachel McClellan, assisted by James J. Caudle (Edinburgh and New Haven, CT: Edinburgh and Yale University Presses, 2000), 34.

5 Jacobite Weapons

In 1996, the BBC 1 programme Rebellion! portrayed Charles Edward Stuart’s army on the march south carrying their swords in grubby and hairy fists, while above them RAF jets roared. Knowingly absurd as it was, such an image represented only a highly coloured version of the Myth of the Jacobite Clans, pounding home as it did the old message: the Jacobite Army was a last flourish of social atavism in a world that had outgrown it. From Morier’s 1740s painting of An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745 to the present, the depiction of the Jacobite Army – visual or verbal – invites its audience to focus on this discourse, which in its turn is often brought to the foreground of image or argument by means of a single iconic visual trigger: the broadsword, with its 60–80cm blade and basket hilt. The double-edged broadsword cuts both ways: it symbolises bravery, and a willingness to engage the enemy at close quarters; it also symbolises futility in the face of modern firearms, which – with the exception of the odd pistol – are popularly depicted as the sole property of the British Army in 1745–6. Such swords, often with German blades attached to Scottish hilts, were indeed widely available and made in Scotland: for example, by the Allan armourers of Stirling, whose weapons bore ‘the common spurious inscription ANDREA FERRARA’ after the sixteenthcentury Bellino swordsmith. Such a mark was common on ‘German blades intended for the Scottish market until the early 19th century’, and indeed ‘Andrea Ferrara’ long remained a synonym for ‘sword’ in parts of Scotland. The broadsword, claidheamh mor – and the backsword, claideamh cuil, with only one cutting blade – are also part of the fabric of Gaelic heroic verse. The sword is the heroic weapon, the weapon wielded by those fit to lead, the fine of the clan. So in Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair’s ‘Oran do’n Phrionnsa/ Song to the Prince’, Charles Edward arrives in Scotland as a force of nature, carrying ‘a slim sword in his hand for battle’; in ‘Tearlach Mac Sheumais’, the very frail flesh of Scotland is forged into steel by the renewing presence of the Prince, which will deliver – as in the

164

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

days of Montrose – ‘the sword’s victory’ into the hand of the Gael. In ‘Oran Nuadh/A New Song’, the Gaels are ‘claidhmheach, sgiathach’ (‘sworded, shielded’), carrying Toledo blades and blue swords. The ‘standard brat-dhearg’ (red-decked standard) of the Royal House of Stewart becomes itself the killing field of judgement, covered with blood, brains and marrow by the swordblades of the Gael. These ‘sliocraich, slacraich’ (slashing, clashing) blades will deliver Scotland1. Such examples could be multiplied across a number of authors, although it is worth noting that in ‘Oran nam Fineachan Gaidhealach/The Song of the Clans’, MacMhaighstir Alasdair attributes skill with firearms to the Frasers and MacLachlans among a lengthy recitative of heroic skill with swords. None the less, the role of the sword as the heroic weapon of Gaelic poetry was predominant. It had a long and formulaic pedigree: the naming of swords was a ritual of the heroic warrior in other cultures too. In the Gaidhealtachd, songs named Fionn’s sword: it was a component element in his heroic status, the bestowal of a distinctive name on the guarantee of his personal valour. That image of the sword persists in the poetry of the eighteenth century, just as it is present in Iain Lom’s in the seventeenth. It fits the British historiographical portrayal of the Jacobite Army, as well as stressing the personal bravery of the Jacobites as later romanticism was to do. At Culloden, many of the exploits of the Prince’s forces on the day are characterised – as they are not in other Jacobite battles – as carried out by the sword, not least Colonel Alexander MacGillivray of Dunmaglass’s last stand at the Well of the Slain. Culloden captures both the bravery and futility – the Swords and the Sorrows – out of which both Gaelic poetry and Whig historiography make their unlikely alliance in depicting the weapons of the Jacobite cause.2 Surely if two such widely differing sources agree, is not what they say likely to be true? Weren’t the Jacobites armed with swords on Culloden Moor and everywhere else? Many of these swords survive. George Gordon of Glastirem’s sword, with its Elgin-made hilt and German blade,a prize at Huntly races in 1713, was no doubt out with its owner two years later. Lochiel’s own sword had figure-of-8 guards, no doubt symbolising King James VIII: it was probably a Stirling hilt, mounted by Colin Mitchell, a goldsmith in the Canongate. Lord Cromartie’s claymore (a broadsword, not the original hand-and-a-half or double handed overhead cutting blade last used at Killiecrankie), bears the mark of John Allan, the Stirling armourer

Jacobite Weapons

165

who lived in Doune: his father Walter had been a ‘journeyman’ to John Simpson, Hammerman of Glasgow, who had been ‘King’s Armourer’ in 1715. Later, Walter had invented the ‘Stirling hilt’, with its decorative screen in ‘the area between the side knuckle guards’.3 One thing we can notice about these swords is the international nature of the trade. The legends ‘God save/King James/thee 8’ and ‘Prosperity/to Scotland/and/no union’ are found on some blades: whether or not this is the exact legend (for example, ‘James III’ blades were produced for the English market), the spelling ‘Schotland’ or ‘Schotlandt’ indicates the German origin of both blade and legend. The survival of these and many other swords is surely indicative of the broad accuracy of the traditional picture, reinforced as it is by Gaelic poetry. In this area, then, should we account the Myth of the Jacobite Clans no myth?4 On the contrary, the paradox of the Swords and the Sorrows element of the Myth is that it depicts what in other contexts would have been regarded as merely conventional. The sword was carried by British Army officers on ceremonial occasions until the Second World War, and in action until the First World War. In 1914, French cuirassiers charged German artillery with sword and breastplate, their e´lan a model for the French Army. In 1854, the Charge of the Light Brigade itself was valorised by Tennyson as an exercise in bravery and futility where swords were levelled at cannon. The last cavalry sword pattern in the British Army was introduced in 1912, for the sword was the weapon of cavalry before infantry, of officer before private man, in major European armies long after 1745. So it was with the Jacobites. The heroism of the Gael (leaving aside the large Lowland composition of the army already dealt with), was primarily the heroism of the fine, the gentry, the officers. Swords could be expensive; they were a mark of status. Although a standard ‘brod Sword and belte’ (£8 10s. Scots) was cheaper than a cavalry pistol (£27 the pair) or carbine (£25 16s.), many of the swords manufactured were much more ornate than this, while old firelocks were cheaper than carbines. In 1715, pistols might be valued at £9 Scots the pair, and muskets at not much more. It was officers and cavalry who carried swords, and their use in equipping the independent Highland companies was surely a recognition of the prestige of those companies, who in any case also carried musket, dirk, targe and pistol in fulfilment of the traditional garb of the Highland gentleman: as did the Black Watch. The message of Gaelic poetry

166

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

was that these natural leaders would not let the Stuarts down: but the sword was specifically their weapon, it was not the weapon of the generality of the army.5 What weapons did the army as a whole have at its disposal? Arms captures and surrenders surely provide the best evidence. On Culloden battlefield itself and in the days afterwards, 2,320 muskets and 190 broadswords were recovered, together with thirty-seven barrels of powder and twenty-two ammunition carts; one blunderbuss alone was taken with eighteen ball in it. Accounts of the Jacobite battle line suggest that the second line was occupied by those ‘who have only guns’, indicating the carrying of swords in the front line, but also the possession of guns by that line too. Given that ‘at best only one in four of those killed or wounded on the moor itself was carrying a broadsword’, and that one would have expected heavier casualties among officers anyway as they led from the front, the case seems hardly to require further proof. None the less, it is available. On 5 May 1746, sixty-nine muskets, seven bayonets, thirty-four swords, four dirks and seven pistols were surrendered to the Laird of Grant; on 15 May, seventy-seven of Glengarry’s surrendered sixtyfive guns, twenty-six swords and four dirks, while ninety-eight of Keppoch’s gave up ninety-eight guns, twenty-two swords and one dirk. Including Clan Chattan and other surrenders, 206 muskets and sixty-four swords were given up to government in the aftermath of the battle. This pattern continued. On 17 May, forty-three guns, twenty-two pistols, twenty swords and three dirks were given in at three separate surrenders in the central Highlands. On 19 August, a list of materie´l ‘taken from the Rebells’ and now at Stirling lists five brass cannon, the largest an 18-pounder, seventeen iron cannon, up to 9-pounders, 1,365 roundshot for them, 430 muskets, 211 bayonets, forty-five swords, thirty-seven targes and five pair pistols. On 31 August 1746, Lord Sempill’s brought 295 firelocks (flintlock muskets), forty-five pistols, twenty-six bayonets and 144 swords into Aberdeen: and this is the highest proportion of swords known to me, except for the untypical capture of 561 pistols, 682 swords and twenty-nine unserviceable ‘musquetts’ from the Hazard. Surrenders continued over a prolonged period: on 11 April 1747, 167 muskets, thirty-two bayonets and twenty-two swords were received from Aberdeen. As late as May 1748, two surrenders at Stonehaven and Laurencekirk returned twenty firelocks, six pistols, seven bayonets, seven broadswords, five small swords and a hanger (the hanger was a sword which curved towards the point of about

Jacobite Weapons

167

75cm total length with a 60–cm blade. Native examples were known in Scotland from the 1680s). What is noticeable here is that the pattern of these north-east Lowland weapons surrenders is broadly similar to those secured from Glengarry’s and Keppoch’s shortly after Culloden. In every case, there are more muskets than swords.6 There are a number of things to remark on in these arms surrenders. The first is that the weapons were not always in good condition: this may, of course, be because the better arms were being hidden, or it may be a reflection of the general quality of the weaponry. It is hard to tell on a case-by-case basis. For example, on 23 April 1746, thirty-six firelocks, twelve without locks, ten swords and eight ‘baionets’ were surrendered to the Laird of Grant, together with a broken pistol and thirteen plow coulters! On the other hand, poor quality weapons were not unique to the Jacobites: as Daniel Szechi points out, there was less than ‘one serviceable flintlock’ to every seventy government fencibles in Midlothian in 1715, while J. A. Houlding observes that as late as the 1755–74 period, ‘two-thirds’ of the 55th had bad firelocks, while an incredible 351 of the 34th’s 390 stand of arms were defective, as were 331 out of 390 for the 57th and 328 from 377 for the 63rd. Throughout the British Army, ‘the condition of the arms carried in the regiments was frequently bad – often atrocious’. Intriguingly, firelock repair was apparently rare in Jacobite garrisons: I can find only one bill for it in three months of Laurence Oliphant’s accounts at Perth, 1s. 3d. for mending a MacLeod musket.7 The absence of swords may suggest that these – often treasured – items were hidden, but the disparity in captured weapons on the field at Culloden indicates that even if cherished swords were carried off (and being caught in possession of one near Inverness was hardly a recipe for health after lunchtime on 16 April 1746), they were still heavily outnumbered by muskets. The absence of pistols and dirks might suggest that many of these were hidden: but in some cases pistols at least may equally well have been thrown away given a lack of ammunition (dirks in all probability could be concealed). The almost total absence of pistols from the field surrenders of Glengarry’s and Keppoch’s is hard to explain otherwise, unless such weapons were genuine rarities: this seems unlikely, given the details of the campaign explored below. Other unexplained absences include the Lochaber axe, and the ‘bows, spears and axes’ claimed by an observer as the weapons of the rear ranks at Edinburgh in September 1745. It is possible that there is a confusion at some

168

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

points here. Grenadiers carried an axe as late as the 1680s, and it is possible that some Jacobites may have been thus conservatively equipped in 1745. There were also ceremonial positions, such as that of ‘Donald Roy McIlbrid Ardsheals Bowman’ to consider in reconciling accounts of Jacobite arms in the autumn of 1745 with the numbers returned in subsequent surrenders, which yielded – even from battlefield capture – few or none of these ‘primitive’ weapons. Scythes on poles or bludgeons, claimed as weapons by Chevalier de Johnstone at Prestonpans, were presumably discarded as better arms became available: a government source notes that ‘at the time of their overthrow’ the Jacobites ‘had Chiefly double Armes between their Homes & the Field’. By this time, apart from the ‘plow coulters’ handed into Grant, such basic weapons appear neither to have been surrendered nor captured in combat or storage in any significant numbers, though before Prestonpans it was reported that ‘a company or two had each of them in his hand the shaft of a pitch-fork with the blade of a scythe fastened on it’, while the presence of a disorderly variety of ‘muskits, fusees, and fowling pieces’ is also stressed. There are three possible reasons for the subsequent absence of poor quality cutting or piercing weapons in particular from surrenders: (i) they were dismantled or hidden; (ii) their presence was grossly exaggerated; (iii) they were discarded after Prestonpans. Since they are mentioned much less often after the Edinburgh City Guard armoury and captured British Army materie´l fall into Jacobite hands in September 1745, (iii), probably with an admixture of (ii), is the most likely explanation. I will return to this question below.8 BEFORE THE RISING One of the possibilities we may be required to consider by the evidence is that the ’Forty-five was the best-armed of all the Jacobite Risings. Although intelligence reports on the ’15 might claim that ‘5,000 stand of Arms’ had been ‘landed about Dunottar’ in 1714– 15, it is hard to find any corroborative evidence of this. A lack of expected French arms was strongly felt in 1715, and reinforcements sent subsequently tended to arrive in arrears of the need for them on campaign: the Jacobites had some 1,800kg of powder seized at Aberdeen, while in December 1715 there was ‘insufficient for even one day’s fighting’ at Perth. The cavalry were seen as inconsistently armed and mounted. On the other hand, the intelligence given to

Jacobite Weapons

169

Argyll at Stirling at the end of September suggested that Inverntyie’s, Panmure’s and Logiealmond’s battalions at least ‘were armed with Gun, sword Targe & most part side pistol sume had Bayonetts, but very few’, while 1,400–1,500 stand of arms was taken at Sheriffmuir by the government. The (more exiguous) data on arms surrenders in 1715 shows the presence of a significantly greater number of Lochaber axes (300 of which were requisitioned from Aberdeen) than in 1745, and sometimes more swords. For example, the surrenders at Banff and Cullen brought in 202 guns, eighty-nine pistols, twenty-six swords, eighteen targes, forty-one halberts (Lochaber axes) and three dirks, Robert Low at Inverness surrendered seventy swords, three guns, one pistol and a two-handed sword, while Glenbuchat gave up ‘a cache of 153 guns, 185 swords, 26 pistols and 19 targets’, and this proportion was roughly matched in a later surrender of Rob Roy’s after 1720. At Sheriffmuir, it was reported that there were pistols not muskets in use by Mar’s front line. This suggests some development in weaponry from the situation in 1638, when there were 30 per cent more swords than muskets in a Perthshire levy (there were two-thirds as many bows as muskets, interestingly enough), and from the 1670s: in 1679, the Macleans surrendered 185 swords, ninety-five guns, three pistols, five Lochaber axes and a two-handed sword (interestingly enough, however, Montrose’s forces in the 1640s seem to have carried heavy firepower, at least among the cavalry and MacColla’s Irish forces). In 1745, matters had moved on again, with far fewer swords surrendered and the Lochaber axe virtually absent from arms surrenders and battlefield encounters9. None the less, despite the more widespread appearance of swords and Lochaber axes in 1715, some units of the army were trained to firefight with musket volleys. What was clearly different in both Jacobite armies in the major Risings – more particularly that of 1745 – was the manner in which they had adopted the arms as well as the organisation of contemporary European warfare. The contrast with Ireland in 1798 is a striking one. In 1691, the Irish Committee sent more pikes (over 4,000) to Ireland to supply the Williamite war effort than any other weapon, and it was to the pike that the Irish insurgents of 1798 (and indeed 1803) returned; its iconic status in the French Revolutionary era no doubt had a part to play. By contrast, the Jacobite forces took major steps to match the weaponry of the British Army, and that it is quite likely on the evidence we have that there was a steady progress in the technological capability of the

170

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Jacobite forces throughout the trajectory of the Risings. This was probably important to them: they were in their own eyes no insurgents for a cause, but a royal army fighting for crown and kingdoms.10 Just as the Jacobite Army was not principally armed with swords, so its centres of arms supply were not thatched cottages in remote glens. Dundee, Edinburgh, Brechin, Edzell, Aberdeen, Oldmeldrum, Elgin, Inverness, Doune and Glasgow were all locations for the manufacture of firearms. If Stirling had its own sword hilt design, so eastern Scotland had its characteristic firearms pattern also, the ‘heart-butt pistol’, with a barrel varying between 16 and 36cm in length; McKenzie of Dundee made his pistols entirely of metal, while Doune pistols could have rams-horn butts. Celtic designs were found on Scottish pistols. Doune (where the Caddel gunsmiths were themselves ‘out’ in 1745) made pistols with 25–cm barrels and a bore was 13.5–14.5mm, though this could not be relied on to be matched by other manufacturers: Buchanan of Glasgow, for example, had a 28–cm barrel and 12.7–mm bore. Moreover, the importing of weapons was already going on in preparation for the Rising in the years before it took place. A glimpse of the international reach and diversity of this trade can be seen in the following report from March 1744: Mr Francis Sinclair has been Collecting Arms these several years; he got lately from Holland a good number of broad Sword Blades, And kilts from the South Country. His muskets were All Dress’d last week by a Smith in the Country, and his Swords by a Sword Shipper at Thurso. He has imploy’d a Second hand to buy two field pieces (three pounders) from one Williamson . . . There Came a good Deal of Gunpowder from Holland to this Country About the first of last winter, which the Thurso Merchants brought home.

Williamson’s guns may have been lying ‘in a yard of his above Forty years’ and, therefore, have been of limited use, but the vibrancy of the arms trade born witness to in the above report is none the less, striking, coming as it does from a part of Scotland hardly thought of as a Jacobite core area.11 There were certainly a large number of weapons in Scotland in Jacobite hands at the onset of the Rising, which indeed helped to make it possible. The ‘cargo for Scotland’ carried by Charles Edward’s expedition in the 16–gun frigate Du Teillay and the 64–gun man o’ war Elisabeth contained 3,500 muskets, 2,400

Jacobite Weapons

171

broadswords and twenty pieces of artillery, besides 4,000 louis d’or. The Elisabeth was forced to turn back with most of this and its picquets of Lord Clare’s, and it is not absolutely clear how many of the weapons got through. Early reports of the strength of Jacobite weaponry do stress the inadequacy and inconsistency of their military equipment: ‘many of their small Arms, both Guns & Swords, were of little use’ was the view given to the Lord Advocate on 7 September. However, there were clearly cannon already with the army: one is mentioned to the Lord Advocate on the 7th, while Lord Elphinstone wrote to Lord Stair on the 3rd that four cannon had been brought into Perth with the army, and that sixteen more were claimed. The Duke of Perth’s battalion (Perth’s 2nd battalion had not yet been raised) was estimated at 400, ‘finely armed’. These pieces of evidence are important in the context not only of early weapons supply, which was evidently sufficient to arm at least some units properly, but also of Jacobite artillery provision, discussed below, as it is often held that the Jacobites had no cannon before Prestonpans.12 After Prestonpans, matters certainly improved, although some units, like Struan’s battalion, ‘wants Guns, and most of them Swords and Pistolls’ into October. Probably they were supplied from the Montrose landing: this is the view of a somewhat gloomy intelligence report from Edinburgh on 29 October: Some of them seem not to be Arm’d but ’tis reported they are all to be Armd out o’ the Cargae imported at Monross [Montrose]. The rest seem all of them to be very well armd, Each having a Gun, a broad Sword, a side Pistoll & severall have each one, two – & some three pair side and packet [pocket] pistols – besides Durks, Target &c. It’s really thought the odds of the Arms, occasion’d lately the odds of fighting, the Regular foot having nothing but the-Gun and Bayonet to trust to which was of litle or [no] use to them when they were broke.

This is a very interesting report, as it confirms not only the high quality of Jacobite arms, but also confirms a much higher number of pistols than appear in any weapons surrender. The suggestion that the defeat at Prestonpans can be excused by the superiority of Jacobite arms may be routine, but it does just possibly beg the question as to the extent to which the army was well equipped going into that battle, from which many of its military supplies are usually adjudged to have come.13 Although the Royal Navy was effective at blocking the supply of

172

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

arms and troops from France (as McLynn points out, ‘out of eight French ships involved in crossing to Scotland in late November, only five arrived safely and two of these came within an ace of being taken’), much still got through. In October 1745 alone, 1,500–1,600 stand of arms were unloaded at Montrose, together with the feared ‘Swedish’ (in fact, French) guns: ‘six brass cannon of 4-pounders wch they say will fire 11 times in a minute’. Both French and Spanish ships brought weapons, and there were even plans afoot for expatriate Scots to supply guns and powder from the American colonies. Overall about 2,500–2,600 French muskets were landed in October, 2,500 1728–pattern Spanish firelocks in the west in autumn (the French and Spanish types were compatible with 17.5mm calibre), and another 2,500 in Peterhead in January: a total of 7,500 muskets landed after the campaign began, besides weapons captures and existing routes of manufacture and supply. Some 2,000 cheap broadswords were also sent from France. Single deliveries of guns to Jacobite units in the field could be both large scale and efficient: on one occasion 600 firelocks were delivered to Moir of Stoneywood for supply to his and John Gordon of Avochie’s battalions.14 Throughout the campaign, equipment and supply necessarily loomed large. In Edinburgh in the autumn of 1745, 1,000 tents, 2,000 targes, 6,000 shoes and 6,000 canteens were requested. As in the regular army, the need for boots was paramount (a need which, from the Crimea to Iraq, even the regular army has had difficulty in meeting). The requirement for good footwear intensified due to the incessant marching in winter, which also eroded clothing: ‘6,000 short coats, 12,000 linen shirts, 6,000 waistcoats, 6,000 pairs of shoes and 6,000 blue bonnets’ were ‘demanded from the authorities in Glasgow’ alone in December/January 1745–6; 1,000 pairs of shoes had already been required of Dumfries on the route north. Many of the army may have had to mend – or have mended by camp-followers – their own clothes on the march. John Anderson, a merchant in Perth, received in a single order from Donald Cameron, adjutant in Locheil’s, a batch of 300 yards of ‘Course harne six hindred of els of Corilage 45 [or 95] needles 6 ounces of Thread’. Equipment was patchy in more than one sense: the indications are that only some of the army had haversacks (though the plaid could stand in for this) and canteens. Evidence of serious generalship can be seen though: for example, in the Duke of Perth’s book order of 22 October at Edinburgh to Gavin Hamilton (printer to the University

Jacobite Weapons

173

from 1754) for Vauban’s Fortification and Memoirs and Barker’s Fortifications, together with maps of England, at a total costs of £4 8s. 6d.15 The accounts of the Jacobite administration at Perth contain many orders for boots and targes, but almost none for weapons, suggesting that these were normally in good supply. There were, however, interruptions as the campaign went on: in February 1746 the 2nd battalion Ogilvy’s were ordered by Lord George Murray to give up their arms to newly raised Frasers. They objected to this, and demanded a direct order from the Prince, plus a recall of the ‘four hundred Clanns that are lying at Dundee they being eating up our People’, thus revealing resentment on the part of a force raised in a locality currently occupied by another unit. Captain James Carnegie Arbuthnott, Deputy Lieutenant of Forfarshire, complained that he was paying soldiers out of his ‘private pocket’. At Perth on 15 November 1745, 120 targes were ordered from the wright (and gunsmith?) William Lindsay, at a cost of £30 14s. 6d. sterling. When another 120 were ordered in January, another supplier was sought, who did the job for £13 10s. On 19 November, 307 pair shoes were ordered for 3s. 6d. a pair, while on 25 November, 300 pairs were ordered from John Sturrock in Forfar for 2s. the pair. Further orders went in on 3 December (97 pairs), 10 December (170 pairs for Cromartie’s, at 2s. 6d. the pair) and 24 December (262 pairs). The Gask Papers also contain orders for 242 more targes for Strathallan’s command, ‘Officers targets’ at £1 the pair, and 87 pairs of shoes for the ‘Mackintosh Batalion’ at £13 18s. Intriguingly, there seems to have been some evidence that the Jacobites were considering holding Perth against attack: one of the last orders, of 31 January 1746, is for 1,360 ‘Palosads’ (palisades). The town was, of course, surrounded by water on three sides, and so a defence might have appeared possible.16 The effectiveness of targes was a moot point. It was alleged that good ones were effective in stopping musket balls at medium range: Henry Fletcher, writing to his brother Andrew on 21 January 1716, notes that a targe will stop a ball. On the other hand, Tony Pollard’s team at the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology in Glasgow have demonstrated that a ball will pierce a targe at 20–25m, going ‘most of the way through a sandbag behind’, and that any stopping of musket balls would probably be at ‘more than fifty yards’. Thus, if Christopher Duffy is right, and ‘most . . . [targes] had been discarded by the time the Jacobites came to fight at Culloden’, this may

174

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

well have been due to their perceived ineffectiveness in a campaign more dominated by firefights than any previous Jacobite rising.The targe was usually some 50–60cm across and weighed 2–3.5kg. It might be made of steel (as was Glenbuchat’s, for example), but was more usually composed of ‘two plies of thin oak or fir boards laid across each other for strength and covered with cowhide’, studded and ‘almost always’ with ‘a central boss of brass which may be pierced to take a spike’. It was sometimes coloured, and sometimes stuffed with wood or moss; sometimes too made of cork covers on steel plate sandwiching wood with leather nailed on as a cover.17 A number of regiments seem to have had particular features to their arms, as in their uniforms. Stuart Reid has argued that the carrying of blunderbusses was a distinctive feature of Perth’s regiment, while John Gordon of Avochie’s battalion, at least among predominantly ‘Lowland’, units appears to have been deliberately uniformed and armed as if they were members of the Independent Highland Companies, ‘with shoulder ball gun, pistols and sword’. Such pistols were often of Doune manufacture. Individuals were often more heavily armed than this, as indicated in the October report from Edinburgh: Major James Stewart of Perth’s had five pistols as well as a blunderbuss (senior officers were allowed to be eccentric in the weapons they carried, as Daniel Szechi notes). Throughout the army, twelve-ball was the standard issue of ammunition (twenty-four-ball was the government issue, though the Jacobite levels were commoner on the Continent, and eight-ball was the issue to the Argyll militia in 1715). Quartermasters ensured that the arms were carried and not on the wagons, in order to increase mobility and preparedness. Bullet ordering was heavy, with 100,000 in total ordered at Manchester alone. Fixed bayonets were also carried: the Jacobite front line at Culloden had its bayonets fixed, which is just one of the reasons for doubting that Cumberland’s new bayonet drill was the tactic that won the day. It is possible that some drill routines survive in Jacobite mantras: one in the Thriepland of Fingask papers climaxes with ‘Clap your left hand to your stock, and your sight to your fire lock. Make ready, present, Cock, Snap, Fire’, while the song ‘Here’s a Health to the King Sir’ in its call to ‘Up your sword and down your gun’ reiterates the actions a front line officer would take in preparing to charge at 50m.18 Some of the cavalry – for example, the Hussars – were among the best armed and equipped troops in the army, with ‘pistols in holsters on either side of the saddle pommel’, besides – if the Penicuik

Jacobite Weapons

175

drawings are to be believed – a rather accentuated hanger. It was not until the latter stages of the campaign that there seems to have been a major shortage of mounts: a report from Lancaster on 13 December notes that the southern army ‘have got more Horses than they had when they went South’. At Manchester, 180 horse were ordered for pressing and by this time there had been extensive opportunity to reinforce the position in Scotland. It was not until the last week in February that the 130 Fitzjames’s Horse, who landed at Aberdeen on the 22nd, had to be given the remaining mounts from Forbes of Pitsligo’s and Kilmarnock’s Horse: and by that time the Jacobite Army was retreating back to the high ground of the Gaidhealtachd, where fresh horses would in any case be in very short supply. It was only in this final phase that the quality of Jacobite arms dwindled decisively, although some supply may still have been possible from the Moray Firth. On 28 February/1 March, 367 muskets, 370 bayonets, 10,000 ball and ‘32 double barrels of ‘‘exceeding fine Spanish powder’’ ’ were recovered by British forces from the magazine at Corgarff Castle where they had been lodged by Forbes of Pitsligo’s men after having been ‘landed by a Spanish privateer at Peterhead’ in January: the muskets were the 1728-pattern Spanish firelocks with 17.5mm calibre. Another 131 muskets were brought to Aberdeen, which had been abandoned by Jacobite forces on 23 February19. It is usually thought that Charles Edward gained his first artillery by capturing Cope’s: Christopher Duffy lists six 1.5-pounders, two royal and two cohorn mortars taken after Prestonpans, and notes that artillery target practice started shortly thereafter. As we have seen, however, Jacobite sympathisers were already amassing cannon before 1745, and there is a clear report of them at Perth in early September. In October 1745, the French landed a ‘mysterious ‘‘octagon’’ gun of brass, and six light iron 4-pounders of French manufacture, the so-called ‘‘Swedish guns’’ ’ much feared for their frequency of fire. James Grante, the artillery colonel, came with twelve French guns, and swivel guns were landed from the Du Teillay. On 24 November, the 26-gun La Renomme´e brought two 18-pounders, two 12-pounders and two 9-pounders into Montrose harbour, ‘as well as a number of the ship’s cannon (which were formed into a shore battery)’. Some thirteen guns went south with the army, the largest a 4-pounder: but the southern army was a highly mobile force, and more heavy guns were now becoming available. At Falkirk, six ‘light pieces’ were taken from Hawley. On

176

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

their retreat north,the Jacobite army took seventeen small cannon, leaving thirteen 8- and 12-pounders and fourteen swivel guns at Perth. It was planned to use 4-, 6-, 8- and 9-pounders in the defence of Aberdeen, and these were taken up the east coast: others were spiked at Montrose. In the last phase of the campaign the artillery was deployed to some effect, particularly at Ruthven, Fort Augustus and Fort William (though not at Blair, to which Lord George Murray took two 8- (or just possibly 4-) pounders. At Fort William, the Jacobites (with artillery including a 14- or 12-pounder, five 6pounders, three(?) 4-pounders, two swivels and six to nine cohorn mortars firing under the supervision of Keppoch and Lochiel) used 16 to 18 lb bombs, ‘red-hot shot, cold roundshot, grapeshot, old nails and red-hot lengths of notched iron that were intended to lodge in timbers’, although their effort was damaged when one government sortie captured or spiked a 6-pounder, three 4-pounders and three mortars. Jacobite artillery proved less useful at Culloden, where there were eleven 3-pounders and one 4-pounder (one of the ‘Swedish guns’) on the field. On the other hand, despite the longestablished figure for Jacobite artillery deployment at Culloden, Cumberland’s forces captured thirty guns after the battle (three 1.5-pounders, eleven 3-pounders, four brass 4-pounders, four iron 4-pounders and eight swivels). Of these, there were ‘Six piece of Cannon’ captured in the rear line, which presumably went undeployed in the battle and thus are not counted among the twelve Jacobite guns in action.20 Christopher Duffy’s account of the artillery capacity of the Jacobites, as its author himself admits, leaves some problems: Many loose ends remain to be tied up,and not just concerning the artillery abandoned at Perth, but the origin of the Jacobite batteries on the Forth at Alloa and Elphinstone Pans, and the kind of ordnance the Jacobites captured at Fort Augustus and brought to their siege of Fort William.

There are certainly widely differing accounts of the presence and power of Jacobite artillery at different times. On 13 December, it was reported that the Irish Picquets had one 16-pounder and another smaller gun. On 23 January 1746, it was reported that the army had two brass 16-pounders, two 12-pounders and four 8-pounders; earlier in Glasgow, three cannon (4-pounders) and a mortar were identified. The same ‘Intelligence’also states that the battery at Alloa (or part of it) consisted of 3 12– pounders, and that

Jacobite Weapons

177

6-pounders from the Hazard were also being deployed on the north side of the Forth. There were rumours of big guns: ‘By last advises from Stirling . . . for certain these cannon that went up by water was full 9 foot long, and 5 inches Diameter in the Bore’.21 Putting these numbers together is hard. At one time or another, two 18-pounders, two 16-pounders, one 14-pounder, three 12pounders, two 9-pounders, thirteen 8-pounders, an unknown number of 6-pounders (but at least five), eight 4-pounders, eleven 3pounders, six 1.5-pounders, nine mortars and twenty-two swivel guns are mentioned, plus sundry others. In total, this would give the Jacobite Army – a highly mobile force – around at least eighty-five cannon and mortars in total, compared with the ten guns deployed by the Jacobites at Aughrim, the eleven or so heavy guns Mar had at Sheriffmuir, and the twenty-one left behind by the Jacobites at Perth in 1716. Sometimes the guns disappeared and reappeared, being transported along Jacobite supply lines or by sea: Lord George Murray shipped two 8-pounders from Montrose to Inverness, for example. What we can say for sure is that the Jacobite artillery, though biased towards light guns and never deployed in its totality, was a major and not entirely ineffective wing of the Jacobite Army’s war effort, possibly held back by a lack of trained crews.22 Such were the realities of the Jacobite Army in 1745. The 12,500 to 14,000 or so men who fought for Charles Edward Stuart, like the 20,000 or more who were out in 1715 were – it is increasingly agreed – the major military challenge faced by the eighteenthcentury British state. They came from throughout Alba, the ancient realm of Scotland north of Forth–Clyde: and in 1715,they came from south of it in numbers too. They did not fight for the right to have Jacobite clubs, to drink healths, to restore the Royal Touch or cast latitudinarian bishops from the bench of the Church of England – they did not even fight to restore the Tories to power. The Jacobites who wanted these things by and large did not fight. In 1745–6, as in 1715–16, the Scottish Jacobites who did fight fought for the Scottish kingdom and its king, for an end to Union and the restoration of Episcopacy. Some were forced; some came out because of old loyalties or new pressures. Not all their motives were patriotic: the mixture of human motives is part of the human condition. But the Jacobites preserved the historiography, values and sometimes the language and manners of the Scottish kingdom, while often being abreast or in even in advance of their contemporaries in many of their ideas. Their challenge was a threat to Great Britain itself. Even

178

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

in defeat, the existence of British history as a narrative of successful state formation depended in large part on the Myth of the Jacobite Clans to alienise, despise and later romanticise their cause. Just as Britain’s relationship with Ireland has contained many errors because Irish history has never been adequately incorporated into the British narrative, so we misunderstand the Jacobite cause as an expression of a Scottish threat to that narrative. If Jacobitism was merely a dynastic cause, it would not arouse the hostility and misrepresentation that its scholars are all too familiar with; if it was merely a dynastic cause, its songs would not be sung. The Wars of the Roses – even the wars of Charles and Cromwell – mean precious little to English identity compared with what the Jacobite Risings mean in Scotland. The reason is obvious: their aims were national at least as much as dynastic; their defeat had consequences for the future of Scotland as much as the Stuarts. That was why they were supported in such numbers, why even Scots who welcomed their defeat might also in a manner regret it, and why the saltires, muskets and bayonets of the Jacobite Army have been so long shrouded by British history in the Children of the Mist’s performance of the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. NOTES 1 William Reid, ‘Walter Allan, armourer in Stirling’, Scottish Weapons: Scottish Art Review Special Number (n.d.), 16–21; A.V.B. Norman, Catalogue to the exhibition: The Swords and the Sorrows (Inverness, 1996), 7–9; John Lorne Campbell, Highland Songs of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1933), 49, 53, 62, 64, 67, 68. V. Scottish National Memorials, 261 for broadsword size. 2 Campbell, Highland Songs, 72–85, 82–3. 3 Norman, Catalogue, 6, 9, 13, 17–18, 20. 4 Norman, Catalogue, 11, 14–15. 5 National Archives of Scotland GD 122/3/8 (Craigmillar Correspondence) for cost of equipment; Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape (eds), Witness to Rebellion: John Maclean’s Journal of the ’Forty-Five and the Penicuik Drawings, (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 12; Martin Kelvin, The Scottish Pistol (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 187, 190, 191; Peter Simpson, The Independent Highland Companies (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996); Stuart Reid, 1745: A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996), 205. 6 Sir Bruce Gordon Seton, Bart and Jean Gordon Arnot (eds), Prisoners

Jacobite Weapons

7

8

9

10

11

179

of the ’45, 2 vols, (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1928), I: 288–9; British Library ADD MSS 39954 f.18 for Jacobite battle lines, ff. 23–7 (‘Return of Ordnance and stores taken at and since the Battle of Culloden’) BL ADD MSS 39923 ff.129, 131 for Hazard and Aberdeen arms surrender; Stuart Reid, Highland Clansmen, 49–50; Scottish Jacobite Army, 47; National Archives of Scotland GD 26/9/498 (Leven and Melville Papers); National Library of Scotland ACC 5039 (Albemarle Papers); J. G. Smith, European Arms and Armour at Kelvingrove (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 1980), 32. National Archives of Scotland NAS GD 348/48/4/31 (Grant Correspondence); NAS GD 14/98 (Campbell of Stonefield Papers: ‘List of such of the Appin Men as have not yet given in their Arms July 6, 1746’); Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 131; J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service? The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000 [1981]), 137, 142; ‘Account Book of Laurence Oliphant, Governor of Perth in 1745’, Gask Papers, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 82.4.2. Stuart Reid, Highland Clansmen 1689–1746 (Oxford: Osprey, 1999 [1997]), 40, 50, 52; Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), 47; Brown and Cheape, Witness to Rebellion, 57; John Kinross, The Boyne and Aughrim: The War of the Two Kings (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1998 [1997]), 38; Chevalier de Johnstone, A Memoir of the ’Forty-Five (London: Folio Society, 1958), 34, 37; National Archives SP 54/38/5 for ‘double Armes’. National Library of Scotland MS 874 (‘Information of A.B. to J.C. regarding Jacobite plottings in Scotland in 1715’; National Archives SP 54/9/29 (‘Intelligence given to Argyll at Stirling by a very honest man’, 30 September 1715); NA SP 54/10/45B (‘An Account of the Engagement on the SheriffMuir’); Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 116; Kelvin, The Scottish Pistol, 180, 186, 187, 193; David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myth (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004), 197; Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, 1715: The Story of the Rising, (London: Thomas Nelson, 1936), xxi ff, 158; Szechi, 1715, 131, 132, 134; Reid, Highland Clansmen, 17. Szechi, 1715, 152; Kinross, The Boyne and Aughrim, 63; Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile, 2003), 77. William Reid, ‘The heart-butt pistols of East Scotland’, in Scottish Weapons, 26–30; Scott, European Arms, 35–6; National Archives of

180

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans Scotland Morton Papers GD150/3481/5 (‘Copie of a letter relating to the State of the North highlands March 1744’); Kelvin, Scottish Pistol, 81, 95, 97, 110, 127, 157–8; Scottish National Memorials, 268. F. J. McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 31; National Library of Scotland MS 7072 ff. 87, 91. Jacobite Correspondence of the Atholl Family During the Rebellion, 1745–46, Burton and Laing (eds), (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1840), 102; National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 56. McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising, 112; National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 57; Reid, Military History, 206, 210n; Scottish Jacobite Army, 46, 49; Christopher Duffy, The ’45, (London: Cassell, 2003), 464 for Robert Sinclair of Massachusetts’ plan to supply the Jacobites. National Archives SP 54/26/122/59 for Cameron’s order, NA SP 54/26/ 550 for Perth’s; Jean McCann, ‘The organization of the Jacobite Army, 1745–1746’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 1963), 161; Duffy, The ’45, 395, 399; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 58; Seton and Arnot, Prisoners of the ’45, I: 291–93. National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 82.4.1 (Gask Papers), ff. 120, 135, 156; NLS Advocates MS 82.4.2 (‘Account Book of Laurence Oliphant, Governor of Perth in 1745’); National Archives SP 54/26/ 498 for disarming order to Ogilvy’s 2nd. Duffy, The ’45, 114; Stuart Maxwell, ‘The Highland targe’, Scottish Weapons, 2–5, 2, 4, 33; Stuart Reid, Highland Clansmen 1689–1746 (Oxford: Osprey, 1999 [1997]), 31; Irene J. Murray (ed.), ‘Letters of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun to his family, 1715–1716’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society X (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1965), 143–74, 153–4; Tony Pollard, email to the author, 10 December 2007. Duffy, The ’45, 13, 114; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 48, 50, 59, 61; ‘March of the Highland Army, in the years 1745–46, Being the Day Book of Captain James Stuart,of Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment’, Spalding Miscellany I (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1841), 275–344 (291); Seton and Arnot, Prisoners of the ’45, I: 291–2; National Library of Scotland ACC 5039 (Albemarle Papers: ‘An Account of Ammunition wanting for the Regiments’); British Library ADD MSS 39923 f.33 (‘Accompt of Ammunition given out of the Castle of Inveraray for the use of the Militia of Argyle’ (26 September 1715)); Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign, (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 97, 105 for Manchester bullets; Perth and Kinross Council

Jacobite Weapons

19

20

21 22

181

Archives MS 169/7/3/7 (Thriepland of Fingask papers); Daniel Szechi, note to the author of 6 April 2008. Brown and Cheape, Witness to Rebellion, 54; National Library of Scotland MS 17514 f. 127 (Information to Lord Justice Clerk); Seton and Arnot, Prisoners of the ’45, I: 292–3; Duffy, The ‘45, 438, 459, 479–80; McLynn, Jacobite Army, 95; Reid, Highland Clansmen, 50. Duffy, The ’45, 120–1, 437, 455–6, 605n; McLynn, Jacobite Army, 24; Reid, Scottish Jacobite Army, 41–3; National Archives SP 54/30/3C for artillery deployed against Fort William; National Archives of Scotland GD 18/3260 (Clerk of Penicuik papers); British Library ADD MSS 33954 ff. 23–9 (‘Return of Ordnance and stores taken at and since the Battle of Culloden’). Duffy, The ’45, 121, 399; National Library of Scotland MS 17515 f. 30; NLS MS 17514 ff.126, 184–5. Duffy, The ’45, 121; for Mar’s guns, v. Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Jacobites and the Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 138n; New Letters of 1715–16, A Francis Steuart (ed.) (London: Chambers, 1910), 119; Trinity College Dublin MS 2199 (J. D. Mather’s Uncompleted History of the Irish Brigades) for artillery at Aughrim. I am obliged to Daniel Szechi for the suggestion that lack of experience may have been a deciding factor in preventing Jacobite gunnery reaching its potential.

Appendix The Jacobite Armies, 1688–1746

The maximal and minimal strengths of units in 1715 and 1745 in particular are variable because of the speed and irregularity with which these units were raised. There was also extensive turnover (see Chapter 2) which would indicate that higher figures were actually involved in the Rising from a number of units than are noted in any single muster. To this must be added the consideration that many Lowland forces appear to have been most active in the localities, and may not appear in musters of the army on the march at all. UNITS OF THE JACOBITE ARMY, 1689–91 In Ireland GOC: Captain-General the Duke of Tyrconnell. Generals of the French: Le Comte Lauzan, Mare´chal Rosen, Marquis de St Ruth. Lieutenant-Generals: Duke of Berwick, The Geraldine, Richard Hamilton, Patrick Sarsfield (General of Horse), Dominic Sheldon, de Tasse, D’Usson. Major-Generals: Lord Abercorn, Boisselau, William Dorrington, Anthony Hamilton, Leahy, John Parker, Prendergast, Lord Sutherland. Brigadier-Generals: Earl of Lewin, Lord Galmoy, John Hamilton, Thomas Maxwell, Nicholas Purcell, Francis Wauchope. Advocate-General: Sir Felix O’Neill. Muster Master General: Solomon Slater. Comptroller of the Muster: Robert Fitzgerald. Paymaster-General: Sir Michael Creagh. Receivers-General: Sir Henry Bond, Louis Doe. Surgeon-General: Patrick (or Robert) Archibald. Foot (36,000–40,000: total strength) 1st and 2nd battalions the King’s Regiment of Guards.

184

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

1st and 2nd the Queen’s Regiment of Guards: CO Major-General William Dorrington (1,639–2,400, company strength 69–92). Major-General Lord Abercorn’s. Earl of Antrim’s (Alexander Macdonell’s: 584, company strength 32–61). Earl of Clancarty’s (304, company strength 3–32). Earl of Clanricarde (773, company strength 45–70). Earl of Tyrone’s (910, company strength 59–75). Earl of Westmeath’s (828+). Lord Bellew’s (929, company strength 38–71). Lord Bulfin’s. Lord Galway’s (679, company strength 30–65). Lord Gormanston’s (619, company strength 28–59). 1st and 2nd battalions Lord Grand Prior’s Marine Regiment (812– 1,200, company strength 17–63). Lord Hunsdon’s. Lord Inniskillen’s. Lord Kenmore’s (835, company strength 58–71). Lord Louth’s (641, company strength 23–70). 1st, 2nd and 3rd Lord Mountcashel’s (433, company strength 12–67). Lord Slane’s (637, company strength 33–49). Lord FitzJames’s. Dudley Bagnall’s (542, company strength 12–71). John Barrett’s (690, company strength 31–58). Major-General Boisseleau’s (1,364, company strength 39–108). 1st and 2nd Walter Bourke’s Athlone Foot (1,200). Nicholas Browne’s (919, company strength 70–71). Dominic Browne’s (859, company strength 61–71). Edward Butler’s (788, company strength 39–71). Richard Butler’s (482, company strength 25–57). Thomas Butler’s (467, company strength 13–44). Charles Cavanagh’s (631, company strength 39–66). Charlemont’s. Couririssien (900). Sir Michael Creagh’s (674, company strength 40–60). Henry Dillon’s. Sir Maurice Eustace’s (826, company strength 31–61). Finaven’s (1,000). 1st and 2nd Sir John Fitzgerald’s (677–1,200, company strength 20– 79). John Grace’s (615, company strength 18–58).

Appendix

185

General Hamilton’s (394, company strength 10–57). Lamarche (900). Owen MacCarthy’s (601, company strength 28–49). Ist and 2nd Roger McElligott’s Clancarty Foot (831–1200, company strength 50–72). Dennis McGillicuddy’s. Cuconnagh MacGuire’s. Art and Hugh Mac Mahon’s (920, company strength 70–1). Meroje’s (800). Charles Moore’s. Richard Nugent’s (698, company strength 29–63). Charles O’Brien’s and Oliver O’Gara’s (1,004, company strength 66–75). Daniel O’Donovan’s (listed). Cormac O’Neill’s (1,355, company size 32–66). Felix O’Neill’s. 1st and 2nd Gordon O’Neill’s (441–1,200, company strength 18– 39). H. J. O’Neill’s. Oxburgh’s (590, company strength 24–68). 1st and 2nd John Power’s Dublin Foot (1,200). Edmund Riley’s (1,160, company strength 34–70). Lieutenant-General Sheldon’s. Zurlandren’s/Swiss Italian regiment (2,000). Hayes, Brown’s and Rutherford’s Free Companies (300). Dragoon Regiments (c. 5000: total strength) King’s Regiment (Colonel Viscount Kilmallock: 600–764, company strength 44–60). Queen’s Regiment (Colonel Lord Clare: 600). Earl of Limerick’s. Lord Dungan’s (569, company strength 51–69). Sir Neile O’Neile’s (434, company strength 26–53). Carroll’s. Clifford’s (361, company strength 29–61). Cotter’s (388, company strength 30–56). Simon Luttrell’s (396, company strength 53–59), later Colonel of the Guards Brigadier-General Thomas Maxwell’s (693, company strength 50– 60). O’Brien’s (also see Foot).

186

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Brigadier-General Nicholas Purcell’s (455, company strength 24– 48). Horse (2000 +: total strength) Duke of Tyrconnel’s. Major-General Lord Abercorn’s (232, troop strength 39–52). Brigadier-General the Lord Galmoy’s (370, troop strength 40–54). Irish Horse Guards (troop). Brigadier-General John Hamilton’s. Henry Luttrell’s (248, troop strength 35–95). Major-General John Parker’s (461, troop strength 55–60). Major-General Prendergast’s. Lieutenant-General Sarsfield’s (423, troop strength 36–57). Major-General Lord Sutherland’s (198, troop strength 44–58). Talbot’s. In Scotland GOC: Major-General the Viscount Dundee (to July 1689), Colonel Cannon, Major-General Thomas Buchan of Auchmacoy Foot (2,490–3,950: total strength) Antrim’s Foot (see Irish list – picquets of the three Irish units – c. 300). Cameron of Locheil’s (240–400). Farquharson of Inverey’s coy (50). MacDonald of Clanranald’s (200–800). MacDonell of Glengarry’s (300–400). MacDonald of Glencoe’s (100). MacDonald of Keppoch’s (200–700). MacDonald of Sleat’s (700). Sir Alexander MacLean’s (200–300). Cormac O’Neill’s Foot (see Irish list). Brigadier-General Ramsay’s Foot. Robertson of Struan’s. Stewarts of Appin (200). Horse Dundee’s Horse Troop (50) Some 250 additional horse at one point or another.

Appendix

187

UNITS OF THE JACOBITE ARMY IN FRANCE, 1692–8 Foot King’s Foot Guards (CO Lieutenant-Colonel William Dorrington). Queen’s Regiment of Foot (Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Wauchop and others). Foot Regiment of the Marine (Colonel Henry Fitzjames, Duke of Albemarle). Athlone Foot Regiment (Colonel Sir Maurice Eustace then Walter Bourke). Clancarty Foot Regiment (Colonel the Earl of Clancarty and others). Charlemont Foot Regiment (Colonel Gordon O’Neill). Dublin Regiment of Foot (Colonel Simon Luttrell and others). Limerick Regiment of Foot (Colonel Richard Talbot, then Sir John Fitzgerald). Dragoons King’s Regiment of Dragoons (Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Bellew and others: 600 men). Queen’s Regiment of Dragoons (Lieutenant-Colonel Francis O’Carroll and others: 600 men). Horse Duke of Berwick’s 1st Life Guard Troop. Earl of Lucan’s then Earl of Clancarty’s 2nd Life Guard Troop. King’s Regiment of Horse (Lieutenant-Colonel Dominick Sheldon: 600 men). Queen’s Regiment of Horse (Lieutenant-Colonel Piers Butler and others: 600 men). Notional strength: 12,160 (details from Guy Rowlands’ 2001 list). UNITS OF THE JACOBITE ARMY, 1715, AND THEIR REPORTED STRENGTHS GOC Scotland: the Earl of Mar. General in England: Thomas Forster. Lieutenant-Generals: Cullen, Ecklin, Fraser, George Hamilton. Major-Generals: Thomas Buchan, Gordon of Auchintoul. Brigadier-Generals: Campbell, Corbet, Lord Drummond, Mackintosh of Borlum, Hay, Marquis of Huntly, Viscount Kenmure, Marquis of Seaforth, Marquis of Tullibardine.

188

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Quartermaster-General (and Paymaster-General): William Tunstall. Adjutant-General: William Clephane. Assistant Adjutants-General: Alexander Ferguson, Peter Blair. Staff: Colonel John Beaumont, Colonel John Balfour. Foot GOC: Major-General Gordon of Auchintoul, 11,388–12,381, plus twelve to thirteen battalions for which no accurate strength can be given. Likely total = 14,000–15,000, given that some of these were brigaded with named units. Upper and lower figures for troop strength reflect different muster figures or information estimates (where these are available) indicative of maximal and minimal strengths. Brigades Huntly’s Brigade: 1,456–2,551 (four battalions and five horse squadrons, reported up to 2,000 foot and 500 horse, higher number probably includes Sinclair’s Horse). Glenbuchat’s Regiment (200–230). Leith’s Regiment (303). Innes’s (322). Macphersons (207–300, possibly up to 1,000). Glenbuchat’s Horse Squadron (100). Sinclair’s Horse Squadron (60–100). 1st, 2nd and 3rd squadrons Huntly’s Horse (264–500). Seaforth’s Brigade: 2,243–2,380 (five battalions plus at least two horse troops, reported up to 3,000 foot and 800 horse). Applecross (263–350). Fairbairn’s (400). Other (350). Fraser & Chisholm (500 + 30 horse). MacDonald of Sleat (650–700). Seaforth’s Horse Troop (50). Tullibardine’s Brigade: c. 1,000 (three battalions, but only 700 allowing for Lord Charles Murray serving with Mackintosh). Lord Nairne’s Regiment. Lord Charles Murray’s. Lord George Murray’s (230–343 at different musters). Atholl Brigade: 2,158–2,971 (eight battalions). Inverey’s (240).

Appendix

189

Thomas Drummond of Logiealmond’s (366–432). Ogilvy’s (336–352). Panmure’s (400–693). Robertson of Struan’s (203–300). Stewart of Invernytie’s (212–397). Strathmore’s (144–300). Strathallan’s (257). Mackintosh’s Brigade: 2,000–2,400 (four battalions and a cavalry brigade). Kenmure’s Horse Brigade (200–600). Lord Charles Murray’s (from Tullibardine’s) (c. 300). 1st and 2nd Mackintosh’s (1100). 2nd Mar’s (Farquharsons (300)). Douglass’s and Home’s horse troops (100) (see below). Marischal’s Brigade: c. 1,800 (two battalions and two cavalry squadrons, reported up to 1,500 foot and 300 horse). 1st and 2nd battalions the Earl Marischal’s Foot. 1st and 2nd squadrons Earl Marischal’s horse (120–300) (noted below). Other units: 4,006–4,594 plus others – c. 5,000 in all 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th battalions Breadalbane’s (253 (1st battalion only): total 600+). Brereton’s Foot (largely notional, untrained English unit: c. 600 men, possibly including Forster’s levies). Cameron of Lochiel’s (300–611). Forbes’ Foot. Glengarry’s (461). Grants of Glenmoriston (sub-regimental strength). Graemes & Macfarlanes (sub-regimental strength). Grants & Colquhouns. MacDonald of Glencoe’s (105–300). MacDonald of Keppoch’s (400). Clanranald’s (528–65). MacGregor’s (c. 250). Mackinnon and MacLeod of Raasay. Maclean’s (327–50). MacDougall’s Coy (35). 1st battalion Mar’s (400). Stewart of Grantully’s.

190

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Horse Peak strength: c. 2,450 cavalry (474–524 not brigaded elsewhere). Cavalry brigade: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th troops Viscount Kenmure’s (200) under Kenmure, Philip Lockhart, Lords Wintoun, Nairne and Nithsdale (600 including all attached horse). (See Mackintosh’s Brigade.) 1st, 2nd and 3rd squadrons Marquis of Huntly’s (264–500–see Huntly’s Brigade). 1st and 2nd squadrons Earl Marischal’s (120–300: see Marischal’s Brigade). 1st and 2nd squadrons Earl of Linlithgow’s (108: Stirlingshire alone counted as 77 on 13 October). Fraser’s Horse troop (30: see Seaforth’s Brigade). Glenbuchat’s squadron (100: see Huntly’s Brigade). Lord Rollo’s Perthshire Horse squadron (60–70). Master of Nairn’s Perthshire Horse squadron (96). Master of Sinclair’s Fife squadron (60–100: see Huntly’s Brigade). Earl of Southesk’s Angus squadron (70–100). Marquis of Seaforth’s troop (50: see Seaforth’s Brigade). Bannerman’s troop. Balcarres’ troop (James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres). Earl of Derwentwater’s troop (60 under Captain Charles Radcliffe). Robert Douglass’s troop of Border horse (c60: see Mackintosh’s Brigade). Hon. James Home’s Merse troop of horse (40: see Mackintosh’s Brigade). Lord Widdrington’s troop of horse (20–30 under Captain Thomas Errington). Nicholas Wogan’s troop of horse (c. 60) UNITS OF THE JACOBITE ARMY 1745, AND THEIR REPORTED STRENGTHS Staff officers GOC: HRH the Prince Regent and Stewart of Scotland, Charles Edward Lieutenant-Generals: James Drummond, Duke of Perth; Lord John Drummond, Lord George Murray, William Murray, Duke of Atholl. Major-Generals: William Drummond, Viscount Strathallan; John Gordon of Glenbuchat; Alexander Robertson of Struan.

Appendix

191

Brigadier-Generals: John Murray, Lord Nairne, Walter Stapleton. General of Horse: Alexander, Lord Forbes. Adjutant-General: Colonel John Sullivan. Quartermasters-General: Robert Anderson, Francis Gordon, Charles Fraser Commissary-General: Lachlan MacLachlan of Castle Lachlan. Muster Master: Henry Patullo. Inspector of Cavalry: Colonel Sir John MacDonald. Inspector of Ordnance: Colonel James Grante. ADCs: Colonel Donald MacDonald of Kinlochmoidart, Colonel Henry Kerr of Graden, Colonel Richard Warren. Foot (6,818–12,787) 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th battalions the Atholl Brigade (450–1,200). (Estimated at 1,000, October 1745, plus 200 in Nairne’s battalion; 450, c. January 1746, 500 at Culloden.) Brigadier-General Lord Nairne’s battalion (200–250+ MacLachlan’s coys). Lieutenant General Lord George Murray’s battalion (200–300). Lieutenant-General the Duke of Atholl’s battalion (200–300). Duncan Robertson of Drumachine’s battalion (200–300). Ashentullie (100 in November 1745)-Atholl Brigade. Grantully’s (190 in November 1745)-Atholl Brigade. Logiealmond’s (50 in November 1745)-Atholl Brigade. Bannerman of Elsick’s (100–160). (Possibly integrated into Kilmarnock’s Footguards, March 1746.) 1st and 2nd battalions Cameron of Lochiel’s (600–1,050). (Estimated at 650 in September1745 (1st battalion only), 740 in October (1st battalion only), 700 in c. January 1746, 600 at Culloden.) Donald Cameron of Lochiel’s bn (500–750); Lieutenant-Colonel Ludovic Cameron’s northern army battalion (200–300), estimated at 240, November 1745. Chisholm of Strathglass’s (80–150). Earl of Cromartie’s (160–400). (Estimated at 300, October 1745; 160, November 1745; 200 c. January 1746 plus 200 ‘Seaforth’.) 1st (Farquharson of Monaltrie’s) and 2nd (Farquharson of Balmoral’s) battalions Farquharsons (200–300). (Estimated at 300, November 1745; 300 c. January 1746, 200 at Culloden. Forbes of Pitsligo’s Foot (248–300). (Estimated at 300, c. January 1746 (figure possibly includes horse).)

192

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

1st, 2nd and 3rd battalions Frasers of Lovat (800–900). 1st battalion estimated at 220, November1745; total: 800 c. January 1746; c. 500 fought at Culloden.) Master of Lovat’s battalion (c. 200–300); Charles Fraser’s battalion (300); James Fraser of Foyers’ battalion (300). 1st, 2nd and 3rd battalions Lord Lewis Gordon’s (600–800 + Glenbuchat’s, Monaltrie’s on occasion). 1st battalion: John Gordon of Avochie’s (300–400); 2nd battalion Viscount Frendraught’s (150–200); 3rd battalion,Moir of Stoneywood’s. (Estimated at 1,000 together with Glenbuchat’s, c. January 1746. Monaltrie’s battalion were sometimes (as at Inverurie) brigaded with Lewis Gordon’s. (Frendraught’s 2nd battalion was possibly absorbed into Kilmarnock’s Footguards and should not be double counted with them.) Gordon of Glenbuchat’s (200–427). (Estimated at 427, October 1745.) Grants of Glenmoriston (60–100). (Attached to Glengarry’s (at different times to both the 1st and 2nd battalions), and should not be double counted.) Irish Picquets (Berwick’s (+ two taken prisoner, c. 100 men), Bulkeley’s, Clare’s Dillon’s, Lally’s, Rooth’s) (150–300). Estimated at 250, c. January 1746.) Kilmarnock’s Footguards (c. 200). (See Bannerman of Elsick, Lord Lewis Gordon’s 2nd battalion Kilmarnock’s (and possibly Forbes of Pitsligo’s) Horse.) MacDonald of Clanranald (200–350). (Estimated at 205, September 1745; 200 in October; 230 at Culloden.) MacDonald of Glencoe (100–200). (Estimated at 200, October 1745; 120, November 1745. Should not be double counted with maximum figure for Keppoch’s.) MacDonald of Keppoch (200–400–higher figure possibly includes Glencoe men and Mackinnons). (Estimated at 220, September 1745; 400, October; 300, c. January 1746 and at Culloden.) 1st (400–1,000) and 2nd (Coll of Barrisdale’s, 100–200) battalions MacDonell of Glengarry’s (500–1,200). (1st battalion estimated at 500, September 1745; 400, c. January 1746; 2nd battalion at 120, November 1745; 600 estimated at Culloden. Grants of Glenmoriston coy estimated at 60, c. January 1746; 87 surrendered in May. See Grants of Glenmoriston.) MacGregor of Glengyle (100 -300). (Estimated at 300, October 1745 and c. January 1746. Some were attached to Perth’s,

Appendix

193

Keppoch’s and to Lord Lewis Gordon’s 1st battalion, but high government figures exist for them as an independent unit.) Mackinnons (80–120). Attached to Keppoch’s, and should not be double counted against their maximal figure. Lady Mackintosh’s (200–500). (Estimated at 500 c. January 1746.) MacLachlan’s (40–260). (Estimated at 260, October 1745; 40, c. January 1746. Attached to 1st (Lord Nairne’s) battalion, Atholl Brigade. Their numbers possibly should not be counted separately from a maximal assessment of Atholl Brigade strength. Fought with MacLeans at Culloden.) MacLean’s (150–500). (Estimated at 400 at Culloden.) Macphersons (280–400). (Estimated at 400 c. January 1746.) Manchester Regiment (118–300). Major-General Alexander Robertson of Struan’s (140–200). Estimated at 200, October; 150, November 1745. Possibly should not be counted against maximal figure for Atholl Brigade as its men may largely formed the 4th battalion of the Brigade after Struan returned home. A company seem to have joined Perth’s. Lord Ogilvy’s (430–900) 1 & 2 Bn Forfarshires. (1st battalion estimated at 500, October 1745; 80, c. January 1746; 2nd at 350 c. January 1746.) Lieutenant-General the Duke of Perth’s (200–750): 1st battalion under Perth, 2nd under Stoneywood, deputed to Captain Robert Sandilands (120–200, or 400 including Pitsligo’s Foot). (An estimate of 750, where the 2nd battalion is Forbes of Pitsligo’s Foot, was made in October 1745. The 1st and 2nd battalions were estimated at 200 and 120, respectively, c. January 1746.) 1st and 2nd battalions, the Royal Scots (Ecossaises Royales) (250–400: CO Lieutenant-General Lord John Drummond). (1st battalion estimated at 200 (possibly including Fitzjames’ Horse), c. January 1746.) Stewart of Ardsheal’s (150–500). Estimated at 220, September 1745; 360, October; 200, c. January 1746 and at Culloden.) John Roy Stuart’s Edinburgh Regiment (200–450). (Estimated at 450, October 1745, including British Army deserters). Horse (estimated at 352–813) Lord Balmerino’s Lifeguard Troop (16–40). Lord Elcho’s Lifeguard Troop (30–125); up to 220 for the squadron. Estimated (with Kilmarnock’s troop) at 160, October 1745.

194

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Forbes of Pitsligo’s Horse squadron (100–200). Estimated at 140, October 1745. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th squadrons Fitzjames’ Horse (only 1st squadron evaded capture (70–131); other three squadrons some 359). The squadron is on occasion described as ‘three troops’ (for example, at National Archives of Scotland GD18/3256). Hussar Squadron under Colonel John Murray of Broughton (70– 80). Kilmarnock’s Horse Grenadier troop (30–100). Merged into Kilmarnock’s Footguards in order to provide horses for Fitzjames’s. Major-General the Viscount Strathallan’s Perthshire Horse squadron (36–82). Artillery Grante’s (c. 40–60 (plus secondments?)): at one time or another, eigty-five guns. Three companies seconded from Perth’s at one time or another.

Bibliography

MS SOURCES Aberdeen City Archives Burgess Register, 1694–1760. Burgh of Aberdeen Treasurer’s Accounts, 1725–50. Burgh of Old Aberdeen Minute Book, 1738–62. Burgh of Old Aberdeen Treasurer’s Accounts, 1660–1761. Dean of Guild’s Accounts, 1724–50. Inverbervie Burgh Court Minute Book, 1735–67. Kennedy Index IX. Parcel L (Jacobite Papers). L/A (‘Guard appointed to defend the town against rebels’). L/B (‘Papers generated by the rebel administration’). L/H (‘Prisoners in the Tolbooth’). L/I (‘Confessions and petitions of, and statements of evidence against, prisoners and suspected rebels’). L/J (‘Papers relating to the restoration of authority to the Town Council’). L/L (‘Papers relating to the riot in Aberdeen on 1 August 1746’). L/S (‘Miscellaneous’). Aberdeen University Library MS 2222 (Commonplace Book). MS 2740/4/18 (Pitsligo Papers).

Angus Archives A1/1/1 (Arbroath Town Council Minutes, 1727–40). A 1/1/2 (Arbroath Town Council Minutes, 1740–66). B1/1/2 (Brechin Town Council Minutes, 1713–59). B1/8/5 (Brechin Town Council, Documents relating to lands, rents). B 1/9/7 (Brechin Town Council Miscellany).

196

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

F1/1/4 (Forfar Burgh Minutes, 1737–58). M1/1/7 (Montrose Town Council Minute Books, 1730–57). MS 227/1 (Antiquities of Forfarshire). Bibliothe`que Universitaire de Poitiers Fonds d’Argenson X: 60 (‘volontaires e´cossais’).

British Library ADD MS 33050 ADD MS 33954 ADD MS 38145 ADD MS 39923

(‘Papers Relating to Scottish Jacobites, 1745–55’). (Relating to 1715 and 1745). (Tyrconnell’s Letter Book). (Jacobite Letters and Papers).

Dundee City Archives Dundee Council Minutes, 1743–1755. Dundee General Session Minutes, 1716–56. Treasurer’s Account Books, 1727–60.

University of Guelph ‘A Song, To the Tune of Auld Lang Syne’.

Highland Council Archives 1B1/1/3A (Inverness Town Council Minutes, 1720–49). BN/1/1/3 (Nairn Town Council Minutes, 1711–84). Inverness Treasurer’s Account Books, 1727–60.

National Archives SP 36/70. SP 36/79. SP 36/83. SP 54/4/73. SP 54/7/54B (Dundas of Arnistoun to Cockburne, 1715). SP 54/7/64. SP 54/8/27. SP 54/8/36. SP 54/9/2d (‘Intelligence Report from Perth, Stirling, 1715’). SP54/9/29 (‘Intelligence given to Argyll at Stirling by a very honest man’). SP 54/9/3B (‘Coppy of a Letter from a Gentleman in the E of Marrs Camp to his friend in the West Country’). SP 54/9/18C.

Bibliography

197

SP 54/9/34. SP 54/9/104. SP54/9/189. SP 54/10/45B (‘An Account of the Engagement on the SheriffMuir’). SP 54/10/54. SP54/10/62. SP 54/10/173 (‘To all True-Hearted SCOTSMEN’). SP 54/11/194A. SP 54/11/195A. SP 54/13/142. SP 54/15/33A. SP 54/16/62. SP 54/18/1. SP 54/18/55. SP 54/18/56. SP 54/26/54 (‘Information of Robert Boivey [Bovey]’, 4 October 1745). SP 54/26/122. SP 54/26/152. SP 54/26/240. SP 54/26/322B. SP 54/26/498. SP 54/26/514. SP 54/26/550. SP 54/26/720. SP 54/27/41C. SP 54/30/1B. SP 54/30/3C. SP 54/30/30F. SP 54/34/4F. SP 54/34/4G. SP 54/35/1. SP 54/35/8B. SP 54/35/23A. SP 54/35/31C. SP 54/35/50A. SP 54/35/53. SP 54/37/10C. SP 54/37/24. SP 54/37/36. SP 54/38/1A. SP 54/38/5.

198

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

SP 54/38/5A. SP 78/184. TS 20/83/4. TS 20/83/12. TS 20/83/13. TS 20/83/35. TS 20/83/36. TS 20/88/11. TS 20/88/16. TS 20/88/36. TS 20/88/38. TS 20/88/39. TS 20/88/52.

National Archives of Scotland (NAS) Miscellaneous collections GD 1/53/83 (‘A List of Gentlemen of Argyll shier in Rebellion’). GD 1/53/109 (Letters from William Home to John Home). GD 1/931/15 (Letters from Sir John Wedderburn to John Kinloch). GD 1/616/52 (‘Printed Information from H.M. Advocate about those accused of rousing mobs on the south coast of Fife’). Airlie muniments GD 16/34/347 (Letters of Lord Ogilvie from exile). Campbell of Barcaldine papers GD 170/943. Campbell of Stonefield papers GD 14/29. GD 14/98 (‘List of such of the Appin Men as have not yet given in their Arms’). GD 14/116 (‘‘List of Suspected Persons in the West Highlands of Scotland’). Clerk of Penicuik papers GD 18/3157. GD 18/3176. GD 18/3177. GD 18/3178 (Account of Casualties & prisoners at Sheriffmuir). GD 18/3256.

Bibliography GD GD GD GD

199

18/3260 (Account of Culloden). 18/4184. 18/4186. 18/4189.

Craigmillar correspondence GD 122/3/4–8. Cromartie muniments GD 305/1/170. Dalhousie muniments GD 45/1/201(’Returne of the Earle of Panmure’s Regiment of Foot’). GD 45/14/301 (Letters from Tullibardine in France). GD 45/14/859 (Letters from Charles Guthrie, writer in Edinburgh). GD 95/11/11. Gordon Castle muniments GD 44/17/26/1 (‘Information for his Grace the Duke of Gordon by James Milne’). Hamilton-Dalrymple of North Berwick papers GD 110/973. GD 110/1156 (Note of some Aberdeenshire gentlemen who had taken part in the Rising). Leith Buchanan of Ross and Drumnakil papers GD 47/363. Leven and Melville papers GD 26/9/490 (‘Notes on the regiments in Scotland and their stations’). GD 26/9/498. Mar and Kellie papers GD 124/6/135 (‘Note of evidence that James Walker and others attacked the town guard in Stirling’). GD 124/10/496 (‘List of the Armie at the Camp of Perth October 13th/ 1715’). GD 124/10/519 (‘Journal of the Scots Army Nov 16th 1745’). GD 124/13/68 (‘Private Arming & Mustering latter end of Q Anne’s Reign’).

200

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

GD 124/15/491/21 (Letter from Mar to James Erskine, Lord Grange, 9 August 1707).

Maxton Graham of Cultoquhy papers GD 155/856 (‘Letters to the Gask family from Duncan Robertson of Struan’). GD 155/900 (recollections of a Jacobite veteran, 1815). Morton papers GD 150/3481/5. Register House series RH 1/2/494 (‘List of noblemen and gentlemen taken prisoner at the battle of Preston’). RH 15/105/3. RH 15/201/8. Seafield muniments GD 248/48/4. GD 248/46/7. Smythe of Methven papers GD190/3/294/1 (‘Precept by Viscount Strathallan, ordering Cess from Methven heritors’). Society of Antiquaries papers GD 103/2/4/44 (Order of Highland Army). GD 103/210 (‘Original Receipts granted by parties for Arms . . . in the Year 1715’). Spens papers GD 334/80 (‘Protestation by William Wilson’). Sutherland of Forse papers GD 139/214/3. National Library of Scotland ACC 3412 (Jacobite Papers). ACC 5039 (Albemarle Papers). ACC 5820 (Leslie’s notebook). ACC 5982 (‘Weekly Returns of the Rebel Prisoners’). ACC 6446.

Bibliography

201

ACC 6849 (Blaikie Collection). ACC 8326 (‘Receipt Cess for Land Hadington 1745’). ACC 8611. ACC 9202 (Jacobite songs). ACC 9283. ACC 11736. Adv MS 22.2.20. Adv MS 23.3.26 (Eaglescarnie Papers). Adv MS 23.3,28 (Eaglescarnie Papers). Adv MS 23.3.29 (‘Peter Lindsay’s (autograph) Notes of Orders &c At Perth, Nairn House, & Dunkeld March 15–Ap 5 1746’). Adv MS 23.3.30. Adv MS 28.1.6. Adv MS 82.4.2 (Gask Papers: ‘Account Book of Laurence Oliphant, Governor of Perth in 1745’). Adv MS 82.9.2 (Gask Papers). Deposit 344/1 (Transcript of ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill’ by George Pratt Insh). MS 98 (Irish Brigade recruiting in Scotland). MS 280 (Behaviour of Governor at Stonehaven in 1715 and 1745). MS 290 (list of Jacobite officers in 1745 compiled by W. B. Blaikie). MS 293 (‘An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig . . . or . . . Jacobite Partie’). MS 300 (‘Rebellion – An MS. poem in Five books’). MS 874 (‘Information of A.B. to J.C. regarding Jacobite plottings in Scotland in 1715’). MS 1012 (sermon of the Reverend Professor James Garden, New Church of Aberdeen, 1715). MS 1498 (‘List of the King’s Army’[1715]). MS 1918 (‘Copes of Original Papers delivered to the Lord Justice Clerk’). MS 2092. MS 2910 (‘Choice Poems &c on Several Occasions preceeeding [sic] 1745’). MS 2960 (‘Jacobite song, from the recitation of Mrs McLehose’). MS 2965 (Culloden Papers). MS 2969 (Culloden Papers). MS 3114. MS 3135. MS 3142. MS 3740 (unrest in Northern Ireland, 1704–5).

202

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

MS 3741. MS 3787 (Order Book of Appin regiment-Stewart of Ardsheal’s). MS 6290. MS 7072 (Hay to Marquis of Tweeddale). MS 7073 (Yester Papers). MS 8027. MS 14260 (Lumisden Papers). MS 14261 (Lumisden Papers). MS 14262 (Lumisden Papers). MS 14265 (Lumisden Papers). MS 16971 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17498. MS 17503. MS 17505. MS 17514 (‘Intelligence Reports on the Rebellion’: Information to the Lord Justice Clerk). MS 17515. MS 17516 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17517 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17518 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17522 (‘Miscellaneous Documents’: Saltoun Papers). MS 17523 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17524. MS 17525 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17526 (Saltoun Papers). MS 17527 (Saltoun Papers). MS 21101 (Murray of Ochtertyre Papers).

Rosebery Papers National Library of Scotland Rosebery 1.236 (A letter in Latin and English, From the Nobility Barons and Commons of Scotland). Perth and Kinross Archives B59/30 (‘Documents Relating to Jacobites, 1715–1895’). B59/32 (‘Documents Relating to Military and Naval Affairs’), B59/33 (‘Documents Relating to the Monarchy’). CE52 (‘Customs and Excise–Perth Outpost’). JP20 (‘Records of the Justice of the Peace for the County of Perth’). Thriepland of Fingask Papers MS 169 (7/3/2–10, 32, 35–6; 7/4/14, 22; 8/1).

Bibliography

203

St Andrews University Special Collections Minutes of St Leonard’s and the United College, 1710–51. New College Minutes, 1736–74.

Scottish Catholic Archives BL3/293/11. MM 4/14.

Stirling Council Archives B66/16/37–40 (Burgh Court Minute Books, 1739–46). B66/21/8 (Burgh of Stirling Council Minutes, 1739–45). B66/21/9 (Burgh of Stirling Council Minutes, 1745–52).

Trinity College Dublin MS 2199 (J. D. Mather’s unpublished History of the Irish Brigades). PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES Abercrombie, Patrick, The Martial Atchievements of the SCOTS NATION. Edinburgh: Freebairn, 1711. An Account of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Estates in Scotland. London, 1689. The Albemarle Papers, Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), 2 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University, 1902. Blaikie, Walter Biggar, Origins of the ’Forty-Five: And Other Papers Relating to that Rising (Edinburgh: Constable, 1916). The General Correspondence of James Boswell 1766–69, Richard C. Cole et al. (eds) (Edinburgh and New Haven, CT: Edinburgh and Yale University Presses, 2000). Carlyle, Alexander, Autobiography. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1861. A Discourse of the Necessity and Seasonableness of an unanimous Address for Dissolving the Union, n.p., 1715. Elcho, Lord. A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746, Hon. Evan Charteris (ed.) (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1907). Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1643– 1747. Edinburgh: Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872. Forbes, Bishop Robert, The Lyon in Mourning, Henry Paton (ed.) 3 vols, (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1895). A Fragment of a Memoir of Field-Marshal James Keith, Written by Himself 1714–1734. Edinburgh: Spalding Club, 1843.

204

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

The Book of Glenbuchat, W. Douglas Simpson (ed.) (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1942). Hedman, Bruce A. (ed.), ‘Colin Maclaurin’s Journal of the ’Forty-five’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XIII. Edinburgh, 2004, 312–22. Highland Papers Volume III, J. R. N. MacPhail (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1920). Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699–1750, James Allardyce (ed.), 2 vols (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1895/6). The Jacobite Cess Roll for the County of Aberdeen in 1715, Alistair and Henrietta Tayler (eds) (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1932). Jacobite Correspondence of The Atholl Family During the Rebellion, 1745–46, Burton and Laing (eds) (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1840). Jacobite Memoirs of the Rebellion of 1745, Robert Chambers (ed.) (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1834). Johnstone, Chevalier de. A Memoir of the ’Forty-Five, Intr. Brian Rawson. London: Folio Society, 1958. Jones, Clyve (ed.), ‘Letters of Lord Balmerino to Harry Maule, 1710– 1713, 1721–1722’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XII. Edinburgh: SHS, 1994, 99–167. Letters of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, George Smythe (ed.) (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1826); also v. Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XI (Edinburgh: SHS, 1990). Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1989). List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion Transmitted to the Commissioners of Excise by the Several Supervisors in Scotland in Obedience to a General Letter of 7th May 1746 and a Supplementary List with Evidences to Prove the Same, Rev. Walter Macleod (ed.) with a Preface by the Earl of Rosebery. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1890. The Lyon in Mourning, by Bishop Robert Forbes, Henry Paton (ed.), 3 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1895. Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiell, Bindon Blood and James MacKnight (eds), (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1842). Memorials of John Murray of Broughton, Robert Fitzroy Bell (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1898). Millar, John. An Historical View of the English Government. London, 1787. Miscellany of the Scottish History Society IV. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1926.

Bibliography

205

Miscellany of the Scottish History Society V. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1933. Miscellany of the Scottish History Society XIII. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2004. Miscellany of the Spalding Club I. Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1841. Miscellany of the Spalding Club II. Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1842. Miscellany of the Spalding Club IV. Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1849. Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (tr. and eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Murray, Irene J. (ed.), ‘Letters of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun to his family, 1715–1716’, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society X (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1965), 143–74. Mystics of the North East, G. D. Henderson (ed.) (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1934). News Letters of 1715–16, A. Francis Steuart (ed.) (London and Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1910). Papers Relating to the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant. Ed. Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), 2 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1917. Pennant, Thomas. A Tour in Scotland 1769, Intr. Brian D. Osborne. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000. No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Army, 1745–46, eds. Alastair Livingstone of Bachuil, Christian W. H. Aikman and Betty Stuart Hart (eds) (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 2001 [1984]). Political Ballads Illustrating the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole. Milton Percival (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916). The Prisoners of the ’45. Sir Bruce Seton and Jean Gordon Arnot (eds), 3 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1928/9. Scotland’s Ruine! The Memoirs of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Daniel Szechi (ed.), Intr. by Paul Scott. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1995. Scottish Forfeited Estates Papers. A. H. Millar (ed.) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1909). Scottish National Memorials. Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1890. Selections from the Monymusk Papers, Henry Hamilton (ed.), (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1945). John, Master of Sinclair, Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, Knight and Lang (eds), Foreword Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1858.

206

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 [1976]). Witness to Rebellion: John Maclean’s Journal of the ’Forty-Five and the Penicuik Drawings. Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape (eds). East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES ‘The Aberdeen Doctors’, Aberdeen Journal Notes and Queries 4 (1911), 286–7, 290–1, 297–9. Allan, Stuart and Carswell, Allan, The Thin Red Line: War, Empire and Visions of Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, n.d). Ankersmit, F. R. (ed.), Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate (Wesleyan University: Studies in the Philosophy of History, 1986). Anson, F., Underground Catholicism in Scotland 1622–1878 (Montrose: Standard Press, 1970). Ash, Marinell, The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1980). Ash, Marinell, ‘William Wallace and Robert the Bruce: The Life and Death of a National Myth’, in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 83–94. Barrow, G. W. S., ‘The sources for the history of the Highlands in the Middle Ages’, in Loraine Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981). Barrow, G. W. S., Robert the Bruce and the Scottish Identity (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1984). Barrow, G. W. S., Robert Bruce, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998 [1965]). Baynes, John, The Jacobite Rising of 1715 (London: Cassell, 1970). Beddard, Robert (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688: The Andrew Browning Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Behre, Govan, ‘Sweden and the Rising of 1745’, Scottish Historical Review 51 (1972), 148–71. Behre, Govan, ‘Two Swedish expeditions to rescue Prince Charles’, Scottish Historical Review 59 (1980), 140–53. Benson, Lee, Towards the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972). Black, Jeremy, Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud: Sutton, 1990).

Bibliography

207

Black, Jeremy, (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984). Black, Jeremy, (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Black, Jeremy and Cruickshanks, Eveline (eds), The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). Blaikie, W. B., ‘The Highlanders at Macclesfield in 1745’, Scottish Historical Review 6 (1909), 225–44. Blaikie Murdoch, W. G., The Spirit of Jacobite Loyalty (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1907). Bogle, James, Lord Nithsdale’s Escape: A Catholic Cavalier at Preston and After. Royal Stuart Paper LXX (Salisbury: Royal Stuart Society, 2006). Bowie, Karen, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union 1699–1707 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/Royal Historical Society, 2007). Bowler, David, The Origins of Perth: A Medieval Royal Burgh (Perth: Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust, 2006). Boyce, D. George and O’Day, Alan (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London: Routledge, 1996). Bradshaw, Brendan and Morrill, John (eds), The British Problem 1534– 1707 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Braudel, Fernand, On History, Sarah Matthews (trans.) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). Broad, John, ‘Whigs and deer-stealers in other guises: a return to the origins of the Black Act’, Past and Present 119 (1988), 56–72. Broadie, Alexander (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Brocklehurst, Helen and Phillips, Robert (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004). Brown, Iain Gordon. ‘Modern Rome and ancient Caledonia: the Union and the politics of Scottish culture’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature Volume 2: 1660–1800, 4 vols, (general ed. Cairns Craig) (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 33– 50. Brown, P. Hume, The Legislative Union of England and Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914). Broxap, Henry, The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). Bruce, S and Yearley, S., ‘The social construction of tradition: the

208

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Restoration portraits and the kings of Scotland’, in David McCrone, Stephen Kendrick and Pat Shaw (eds), The Making of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 175–88. Buchan, David, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Burnet, George R., The Story of Quakerism in Scotland 1650–1850 with an Epilogue on the Period 1850 to 1950 by William H. Marwick (London: James Clarke, 1952). Burton, I. F. and Newman, A. N., ‘Sir John Cope: promotion in the eighteenth-century Army’, English Historical Review 78 (1963), 655– 68. Bushnell, Nelson S., William Hamilton of Bangour (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1957). Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History, (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1931) Campbell, John Lorne, Highland Songs of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1933). Campbell, R. H., Scotland Since 1707, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985 [1965]). Cannon, John, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Carmichael, Elizabeth, ‘Jacobitism in the Scottish Commission of the Peace, 1707–1760’, Scottish Historical Review 58 (1979), 58–69. Carr, E. H., What is History?, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1990 [1987]). Carter, J. J. and Pittock, J. H. (eds), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987). Cassell’s History of the British People 5: From the Revolutionary Settlement to Waterloo (London: Waverley Book Club, 1923). Chandler, David (general ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Chesterton, G. K., A Short History of England (London: Chatto and Windus, 1917). Childs, John, The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Churchill, Sir Winston, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Vols I and III (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956). Clancy, Thomas and Crawford, Barbara E., ‘The formation of the Scottish kingdom’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 28–95. Clark, Sir George, English History: A Survey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

Bibliography

209

Clarke, Tristram, ‘The Williamite Episcopalians and the Glorious Revolution in Scotland’, Scottish Church History Records XXIV (1992), 33–52. Clyne, Norval. The Scottish Jacobites and their Poetry (Aberdeen: John Avery & Co., 1887). Cohen, Sande. Historical Culture: On the Recording of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). Colley, Linda, In Defiance of Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1982]). Colley, Linda, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Conway, Stephen, War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Corp, Edward T. (ed.), L’autre exil: Les Jacobites en France au de´but du XVIIIe siecle (Les Presses du Languedoc: Montpellier, 1993). Corp, Edward T., ‘The Irish at the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-enLaye’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001, 143–56). Corp, Edward T., ‘The Jacobite presence in Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century’, Diasporas 5 (2004), 124–45. Corp, Edward T., ‘Jacobite books in Toulouse’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society 1 (2006), 71–85. Cowan, Edward, Scottish History and Scottish Folk (Glasgow: Department of Scottish History, 1998). Cowan, Edward and Finlay, Richard J. (eds), Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). Cronin, Rev. J. B., History of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Moray (London: Skeffington & Son, 1889). Cruickshanks, Eveline (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689–1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982). Cullen, Karen J., Whatley, Christopher A. and Young, Mary, ‘King William’s ill years: new evidence on the impact of scarcity and harvest failure during the crisis of the 1690s on Tayside’, Scottish Historical Review LXXXV: 2 (2006), 250–76. Currie, David, ‘The Jacobite lodge at Rome’, The Jacobite 92 (1996), 10–12. Dance, E. H., ‘Bias in history teaching and textbooks’, in Otto-Ernst Schuddehopf et al. (eds), History Teaching and History Textbook Revision (Strasbourg: Centre for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967). Davidson, Neil, Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692–1746 (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

210

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Davies, Norman, Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997 [1996]). Davies, Roger, Bishop Nathaniel Spinckes and the Non-Juring Church, Royal Stuart Society Paper LXXI (Sevenoaks, 2007). Davies, R. R., ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100–1400: II: names, boundaries and regnal solidarities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) V, 1–20. DesBrisay, Gordon. ‘ ‘‘The civill wars did overrun all’’: Aberdeen, 1630– 1690’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 238–66. Dicey, A. V. and Rait, Robert S., Thoughts on the Union Between England and Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1920). Dickinson, H. T., ‘The eighteenth-century debate on the Glorious Revolution’, History 61 (1976), 28–45. Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). Dickinson, H. T., Caricatures and the Constitution 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986). Ditchburn, David, ‘Who are the Scots? Some problems of identification and misidentification in later Medieval Europe’, in Paul Dukes (ed.), Frontiers of European Culture (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 89– 100. Dobson, David, Jacobites of the ’15 (Aberdeen: Scottish Association of Family History Societies, 1993). Dobson, David, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994). Donaldson, Gordon, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985). Donaldson, William, ‘The Jacobite song in 18th and Early 19th century Scotland’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1974. Donaldson, William, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). Duffy, Christopher, The ’45 (London: Cassell, 2003). Duncan, A. A. M., Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1978 [1975]). Elliott, Marianne, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile, 2003). Farquhar, Canon George, The Episcopal History of Perth (Perth: James Jackson, 1894). Ferguson, William, The Identity of the Scottish Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

Bibliography

211

Findlay, David and Murdoch, Alexander, ‘Revolution to reform’, in Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 267–86. Flinn, Michael et al. (eds.), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Fraser, Duncan, Montrose (before 1700) (Montrose: Standard Press, 1970). Fryer, Mary Beacock, Allan Maclean: Jacobite General (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987). Furgol, Edward M., A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies, 1639–1651 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990). Gale, Iain, ‘A nation divided’, Scotland in Trust (Spring 2007), 20–4. Gale, Iain, ‘Building on the past’, Scotland in Trust 25:1 (2008), 20–7. Gardiner, Samuel R., A Student’s History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of King Edward VII, New edn (London: Longmans, 1910). Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: The Cultivation of Hatred (New York: Norton, 1993). Gibson, John, Ships of the ’45 (London: Hutchinson, 1967). Gibson, John, Playing the Scottish Card (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988). Gooch, Leo, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-East England, 1688–1745 (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1995). Grant, Alexander. ‘ ‘‘Whither Scottish history? To the medieval foundations’’ ’, Scottish Historical Review (1994), 4–24. Gray, W. Forbes and Jamieson, James H., A Short History of Haddington (Edinburgh: Neill & Co., 1944). Green, J. R., A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1875). Hale, J. R. (ed.), The Evolution of British Historiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Harper, Marjory, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London: Profile, 2004 [2003]). Harris, Bob, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Harris, Bob and Whatley, Christopher A., ‘ ‘‘To solemnize His Majesty’s birthday’’: new perspectives on loyalism in George II’s Britain’, History 83 (1998), 397–419. Heeks, Peter, ‘Myth, history and theory’, History and Theory 33:1 (1994).

212

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

‘The Highlanders at Macclesfield in 1745’, Scottish Historical Review 5 (1908), 288. Henderson, G. D., ‘Ephinstone (sic) birthday celebrations in the eighteenth century’. Aberdeen University Review XVIII (1930–1), 255–7. Henderson, G. D., ‘The Aberdeen doctors’, Aberdeen University Review XXVI (1938–9), 10–19. Hill, James Michael, Celtic Warfare 1595–1763 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986). Hill, Patricia Kneas, The Oglethorpe Ladies (Atlanta, GA: Cherokee, 1977). Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Holmes, Geoffrey and Szechi, Daniel, The Age of Oligarchy (London: Longman, 1993). Holmes, Richard, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London: HarperCollins, 2001). Holmes, Richard, Dusty Warriors (London: HarperCollins, 2007 [2006]). Hook, Michael and Ross, Walter. The ’45 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1995). Hopkins, Paul. Glencoe and the End of the Highland War (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998 [1986]). Houlding, J. A., Fit for Service? The Training of the British Army 1715– 1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000 [1981]). Houston, R. A. and Knox, W. W. J. (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland (London: Allen Lane, 2001). Hutchinson, John and Smith, Anthony D. (eds), Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Inglis, Bill, The Battle of Sheriffmuir (Stirling: Stirling Council Libraries, 2005). Ingram, Mary, A Jacobite Stronghold of the Church (Edinburgh: Grant & Son, 1907). Innes, A. D., A History of the British Nation from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1912). Insh, George Pratt, The Scottish Jacobite Movement: a Study in Economic and Social Forces (London: Moray Press, 1952). Isaac, D. G. D., ‘A study of popular disturbances in Britain 1714–54’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1953. The Jacobite 97 (1998). Jacobites or Covenanters: Which Tradition? A Scottish Republican Debate( N.P: Scottish Republican Forum, 1994). Jarvis, Rupert C., The Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745 (Carlisle: Cumberland County Council Record Series no. 1, 1954).

Bibliography

213

Jarvis, Rupert C., Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972). Jones, Clyve (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London: Hambledon Press, 1987). Jones, Hilton, The Main Stream of Jacobitism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). Keith, Alexander, A Thousand Years of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1972). Kelvin, Martin, The Scottish Pistol: Its History, Manufacture and Design (London: Cygnus Press, 1996). Kemp, Hilary, The Jacobite Rebellion (London: Almark Publishing, 1975). Kenyon, John, The History Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983). Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kidd, Colin, ‘The canon of patriotic landmarks in Scottish history’, Scotlands 1 (1994), 1–17. Kidd, Colin, ‘Sentiment, race and revival: Scottish identities in the aftermath of Enlightenment’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles c1750–c1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 110–26. Kidd, Colin, ‘The rehabilitation of Scottish Jacobitism’, Scottish Historical Review 77 (1998), 58–76. Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Kinnaird, Joan, ‘Mary Astell and the Conservative contribution to English feminism’, Journal of British Studies 19 (1979), 53–75. Kinross, John, The Boyne and Aughrim: The War of the Two Kings (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1998 [1997]). Knights, Mark, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [2005]). Kybett, Susan Maclean, Bonnie Prince Charlie (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Langhorne, W. H., Reminiscences (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1893). Lathbury, Thomas, A History of the Non-Jurors (London: William Pickering, 1845).

214

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Lawson, John Parker, History of the Scottish Episcopal Church from the Revolution to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Gallie and Bayley, 1843). Leneman, Leah, Living in Atholl 1685–1785 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). Leneman, Leah (ed.), Perspectives in Scottish Social History: Essays in Honour of Rosalind Mitchison (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (London: Methuen, 1980). Lenman, Bruce, Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981). Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, 1650–1784 (London: Methuen, 1984). Lenman, Bruce, ‘A client society: Scotland between the ’15 and the ’45’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984). Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Cause (Glasgow: Richard Drew and National Trust for Scotland, 1986). Lenman, Bruce, ‘The Scottish nobility and the Revolution of 1688–90’, in Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Linklater, Magnus and Hesketh, Christian. For King and Conscience: John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee (1648–1689) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c1500–c1800 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum/Reaktion Books, 1991). Lochhead, Marion. The Scots Household in the Eighteenth Century: A Century of Scottish Domestic and Social Life (Edinburgh: Moray Press, 1948). Logue, Kenneth John, ‘Popular disturbances in Scotland 1780–1815’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1977. Lynch, Michael, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991). McBain, J. M., Arbroath: Past and Present (Arbroath: Brodie and Salmond, 1887). McCann, Jean. ‘The organization of the Jacobite Army, 1745–1746’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1963. McCarthy, Justin, A History of the Four Georges, 4 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1890). McCracken-Flesher, Caroline (ed.), Culture, Nation, and the new Scottish Parliament (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

Bibliography

215

McDonnell, Frances, Jacobites of Perthshire 1745 (Privately printed, 1998). McLynn, Frank, ‘An eighteenth-century Scots republic? – an unlikely project from absolutist France’, Scottish Historical Review 59 (1980), 177–81. McLynn, Frank, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). McLynn, Frank, ‘Reading history: Jacobites and the Jacobite Risings’, History Today (January 1983), 45–7. McLynn, Frank, The Jacobite Army in England: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983). McLynn, Frank, The Jacobites (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). McLynn, Frank, Charles Edward Stuart (London: Routledge, 1988). McLynn, Frank, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989). MacDougall, Hugh A., Racial Myth in English History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982). Macfarlane, Charles and Thomson, Thomas, The Comprehensive History of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackie, 1861). Macinnes, Allan, ‘Scottish gaeldom, 1638–1651: the vernacular response to the Covenanting dynamic’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d. [1983]), 59–94. Macinnes, Allan, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). Macinnes, Allan, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Macinnes, John. ‘Gaelic poetry and historical tradition’, in Loraine Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981, 142–63). Mackenzie, Niall, ‘The ‘‘poetical performance’’ between John Roy Stuart and Lord Lovat (1736), E´igse XXXIV (2004), 127–40. Mackintosh, Alexander, The Muster Roll of the Forfarshire or Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment (Inverness: Northern Counties Newspaper & Printing & Publishing Co., 1914). Mackintosh, A. M., Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum: Jacobite Hero and Martyr (Nairn: George Bain, 1918). Maclean, Sir Fitzroy, A Concise History of Scotland (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988 [1970]).

216

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Maclean, Sir Fitzroy, Highlanders: A History of the Highland Clans (London: Adelphi, 2007 [1995]). Maclean, Loraine (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981). MacNeill, Peter G. B. and MacQueen, Hector L., An Atlas of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1996). Mason, Roger A., ‘Scotching the brut: politics, history and national myth in sixteenth-century Britain’, in R. A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815( Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983). Mason, Roger A., Kingship and the Commonweal (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998). Mason, Roger A., ‘Civil society and the Celts: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the ancient Scottish past’, in Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (eds), Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 95–119. Mathieson, William Law, Scotland and the Union: A History of Scotland from 1695 to 1747 (Glasgow: John Maclehose & Sons, 1905). Mathieson, William Law, The Awakening of Scotland (Glasgow, 1910). Maxwell, Stuart, ‘The Highland targe’, Scottish Weapons: Scottish Art Review Special Number, n.d., 2–5. Meiklejohn, J. M. D., A New History of England and Great Britain, 17th edn (London: n.p., 1902). Millar, A. H., ‘Killiecrankie described by an eye-witness’, Scottish Historical Review 3 (1906), 63–70. Miller, John, ‘Catholic officers in the later Stuart army’, English Historical Review 88 (1973), 35–53. Mingay, G. E., English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). Mitchison, Rosalind, ‘Patriotism and national identity in eighteenthcentury Scotland’, in T. W. Moody (ed.), Nationalism and the Pursuit of National Independence (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978). Monod, Paul Kle´ber, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Monod, Paul Kle´ber, ‘Dangerous merchandise: smuggling, Jacobitism and commercial culture in southeast England’, Journal of British Studies 30:2 (1991), 150–82. Moody-Stuart, K. A., ‘Lieutenant-Colonel James Steuart: A Jacobite Lieutenant-Governor of Edinburgh Castle’, Scottish Historical Review 21 (1924), 1–25. Murdoch-Lawrence, R., ‘Aberdeen women as Jacobites’, Aberdeen Journal: Notes and Queries 1 (1908), 49.

Bibliography

217

Murray, W. H., Rob Roy MacGregor: His Life and Times (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993 [1982]). Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). Nicholson, Robin, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture, 1720–1892 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Nordmann, Claude, ‘Choiseul and the last Jacobite attempt of 1759’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982, 201–17). Norman, A. V. B., Catalogue to the exhibition: The Swords and the Sorrows (Inverness, 1996). Norton, David Fate (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1993]). O’Brien, Karen, Narratives of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). O’Brien, Karen, ‘Historical writing’, in David Womersley, ed., A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 522–35. ´ Buachalla, Breandan, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, EightO eenth-Century Ireland 8 (1993), 128–38. O’Connor, Thomas (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001). O’Donnell, Rua´n. Aftermath: Post-Rebellion Insurgency in Wicklow 1799–1803 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000). Oliphant, T. L. Kingston, The Jacobite Lairds of Gask (London: Griffin, 1870). Omond, G. W. T., The Early History of the Scottish Union Question (Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1897). Ouston, Hugh. ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the patronage of learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, n.d. [1983]). Perry, The Very Rev. W., The Oxford Movement in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Phillipson, Nicholas, Hume (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Pittock, Murray, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Pittock, Murray, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995).

218

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Pittock, Murray, ‘The political thought of Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’, Northern Scotland (1996), 73–86. Pittock, Murray, ‘The culture of Jacobitism’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 124–45. Pittock, Murray, Inventing and Resisting Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Pittock, Murray, Jacobitism( Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Pittock, Murray, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Pittock, Murray, ‘Jacobite literature and national identities’, in David Baker and Willy Maley (eds), English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 226–42. Pittock, Murray, ‘Johnson and Scotland’, in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (eds), Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), 184–96. Pittock, Murray, The Jacobite Relics of Scotland, James Hogg (ed.), 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002–3). Pittock, Murray, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003). Pittock, Murray, ‘Historiography’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 258–79. Pittock, Murray, ‘Enlightenment historiography and its legacy: plurality, authority and Power’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 33–44. Pittock, Murray, ‘Patriot dress and patriot games: tartan from the Jacobites to Queen Victoria’, in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 158–74. Pittock, Murray, James Boswell (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2007). Pocock, J. G. A., ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’, Journal of Modern History 47:4 (1975), 601–21, 626–8. Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The limits and divisions of British history: in search of an unknown subject’, American Historical Review 87 (1982), 328. Pollard, A.F., The History of England: A Study in Political Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.). Pratt, Rev. John, Buchan (Aberdeen, 1858). Prebble, John, Culloden (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961).

Bibliography

219

Prentis, Malcolm D., The Scots in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1983). Prunier, Clotilde, Anti-Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004). Rayner, Robert, A Concise History of Britain (London: Longmans, 1941). Reid, Norman, ‘The kingless kingdom: the Scottish guardianship of 1286–1306’, Scottish Historical Review 61 (1982), 105–29. Reid, Stuart, 1745: A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996). Reid, Stuart, Highland Clansmen 1689–1746 (Oxford: Osprey, 1999 [1997]). Reid, Stuart, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745–46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006). Reid, William, ‘Walter Allan, armourer in Stirling’; ‘The heart-butt pistols of east Scotland’, Scottish Weapons: Scottish Art Review Special Number, n.d, 16–21, 26–30. Riley, P. W. J., The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). Robertson, F. W., The Scottish Way 1746–1946: Freedom’s Declineand the Truth about the Highland Clans (Rothesay, 1946). Robertson, John. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). Robertson, William. The History of Scotland, intr. Dugald Stewart, 2 vols (London, 1827 [1759]). Robinson, Cyril, England: A History of British Progress from the Early Ages to the Present Day (London: Methuen, 1929). Rodger, N. A. M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: Norton, 1996 [1986]). Rose, Craig, ‘ ‘‘Seminarys of faction and rebellion’’: Jacobites, Whigs and the London Charity Schools, 1716–1724’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 831–55. Rowlands, Guy, An Army in Exile: Louis XIV and the Irish Forces of James II in France, 1691–1698 (Royal Stuart Society Paper LX: London, 2001). Sack, James J., From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c1760–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Samuel, Raphael (ed.), Patriotism:The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1989). Samuel Raphael and Thompson, Paul (eds.), The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990).

220

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Sankey, Margaret, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Sankey, Margaret, and Szechi, Daniel, ‘Elite culture and the decline of Scottish Jacobitism, 1716–1745’, Past and Present 173 (2001), 90–128. Schuddehopf, Otto-Ernst et al., History Teaching and History Textbook Revision (Strasbourg: Centre for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967). Scott-Moncrieff, Lesley (ed.) The ’45: To Gather an Image Whole (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1988). Selkirk, Malcolm G., ‘Hugh Mercer and Lord Pitsligo’s Horse’, The Jacobite 80 (1992), 4–7. Selkirk, Malcolm G., ‘Crieff in the ’45’, The Jacobite 76 (1991), 6–9. Seton, Sir Bruce, ‘Dress of the Jacobite army’, Scottish Historical Review 25 (1928), 270–81. Short, Agnes, Old Aberdeen in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Friends of St Machar’s Cathedral, 1985). Shuttleton, David E., ‘Jacobitism and millenial Enlightenment: Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’s ‘‘Remarks’’ on the mystics’, Enlightenment and Dissent 15 (1996), 33–56. Simpson, Peter, The Independent Highland Companies 1603–1760, foreword by Godfrey, Lord MacDonald (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996). Sinclair-Stevenson, Christopher, Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715 and 1719 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971). Singer, Brian C. J., ‘Cultural versus contractual nations: rethinking their opposition’, History and Theory 35:3 (1996), 309–37. Smith, Annette. ‘Dundee and the ’45’ in Lesley Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), The ’45: To Gather an Image Whole (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1988). Smith, J. G., European Arms and Armour at Kelvingrove (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 1980). Speck, W. A., Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1990 [1977]). Speck, W. A., ‘Will the real 18th century stand up?’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 203–6. Steele, Margaret, ‘Anti-Jacobite pamphleteering, 1701–1720’, Scottish Historical Review 60 (1981), 140–55. Stevenson, David, The Scottish Revolution 1637–1644 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973). Stevenson, David, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland 1644–1657 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

Bibliography

221

Stevenson, David, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Edinburgh and their Rituals (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). Stevenson, David, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myths (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004). Stone, Lawrence, ‘The revival of narrative: reflections on a new old history’, Past and Present 85 (1979), 3–24. Stone, Lawrence, ‘History and post-modernism’, Past and Present 131 (1989), 217–18. Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in EighteenthCentury Britain (London: Hambledon Press, 2004). Szechi, Daniel, Jacobitism and Tory Politics 1710–14 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984). Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Szechi, Daniel, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Szechi, Daniel and Hayton, David, ‘John Bull’s other kingdoms: the English government of Scotland and Ireland’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750 (London: Hambledon Press, 1987). Tayler, Alistair and Tayler, Henrietta, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five (Aberdeen: Milne and Hutchison, 1928). Tayler, Alistair and Tayler, Henrietta, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Rising of 1715 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934). Tayler, Alistair and Tayler, Henrietta, 1715: The Story of the Rising (London: Thomas Nelson, 1936). Tayler, Alistair and Tayler, Henrietta, ‘The Jacobites of Buchan’, in J. F. Tocher, (ed.), The Book of Buchan (Jubilee Volume) (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1943). Tayler, Henrietta, ‘John Gordon of Glenbucket’, Scottish Historical Review 27 (1948), 165–75. Taylor, Miles, ‘John Bull and the iconography of public opinion in England c. 1712–1929’, Past and Present 134 (1990), 93–128. Terry, Charles Sanford, ‘The battle of Glenshiel’, Scottish Historical Review 2 (1905), 412–23. Terry, Charles Sanford, (ed.) The Jacobites and the Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). Thom, Walter, The History of Aberdeen, 2 vols (Aberdeen: D. Chalmers, 1811). Thomson, James, The History of Dundee (Dundee: John Durkan & Son, 1874).

222

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Thorpe, Victoria. ‘The 1752 medal: promise of a new augustan age’, The Jacobite 85 (1994), 4–6. Tompson, Richard S., The Atlantic Archipelago (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen, 1986). Trench, Charles Chevenix, George II (London: Allen Lane, 1973). Trevelyan, G. M., England Under the Stuarts, 19th edn (London: Methuen, 1947 [1904]). Trevelyan, G. M., History of England, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, 1952). Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘The invention of tradition: the Highland tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15–41. Turner, Roger, Manchester in 1745 (Royal Stuart Society Paper XLIX: London, n.d.). Tyson, Robert E., ‘People in the Two Towns’, in Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 111–28. [Wall, Maureen], Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, Gerard O’Brien (ed.) (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1989). Watt, W., History of Aberdeen and Banff (Edinburgh and London: County Histories of Scotland, 1900). Welsh, Frank, The Four Nations (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Whatley, Christopher A., ‘Royal day, people’s day: the monarch’s birthday in Scotland, c1660–1860’, in Roger Mason and Norman Macdougall (eds), People and Power in Scotland: Essays in Honour of T. C. Smout (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 170–88. Whatley, Christopher A., ‘The Union of 1707, integration and the Scottish burghs: the case of the 1720 food riots’, Scottish Historical Review 78 (1999), 192–218. Whatley, Christopher A., Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards industrialisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Whatley, Christopher A., The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). White, Gavin, ‘The consecration of Bishop Seabury’, Scottish Historical Review 63 (1984), 37–49. Whitworth, Rex, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, (London: Les Cooper, 1992). Williams, A. M., ‘Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’, Scottish Historical Review 13 (1916), 138–48.

Bibliography

223

Williams, Basil, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 [1939]). Womack, Peter, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). Wood, Stephen, The Scottish Soldier (Manchester: National Museums of Scotland, 1987). Wood, Stephen, The Auld Alliance (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989). Woolf, D. R., ‘The ‘‘common voice’’: history, folklore and oral tradition in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 120 (1988), 26–52. Wootton, David, ‘David Hume, ‘‘the historian’’ ’, in David Norton (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hume, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1993]), 281–312. Young, James, ‘Forging the nation’, Cencrastus 49 (1994), 40–1. Young, John R., ‘The Union unravelled’, Scottish Review of Books 3:1 (2007), 14–15. Zimmerman, Doron. The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003).

Index

Abercrombie, Patrick, 11, 18, 39 Aberdeen, 50, 115, 130, 170 Covenanting army recruitment, 67–9 forcing in 1745, 88 Highland?, 34 Jacobite support in 1745, 74, 82, 112–14 occupation, 130–1 and Union, 53–4 Aboyne, 120 Act of Abjuration, 51 Act of Security, 51, 143 Act of Settlement, 44, 51, 52, 143 Alloa, 131–2 Anstruther, 88, 117 Arbroath, 82, 96, 119, 123 Jacobite support, 117–18 Atholl lands, Jacobite support in, 121–2 Banchory, 120 Banff, 71, 88, 130 Jacobite support, 119, 125 Barbour, John, 18 Barrow, Geoffrey, 35 Bisset, Baldred, 11, 18 Black Watch, 102 Boece, Hector, 11, 18, 39 Bower, Walter, 11, 18 Brechin, 71, 170 Jacobite support, 118 British Army Jacobite recruitment from, 91–2 occupation of Scotland, 128–31

strength, 102–3 support in Scotland in 1745, 74–5 Buckie, 88 Butterfield, Herbert, 1, 7–8 Callander, 121 Cameronians, 52, 144, 149 Campbell, R. H., 23, 83 Carlyle, Alexander, 17 Catholicism, 49–50 relations with Episcopalians, 132 Celts and Teutons, 11, 13, 21 Charles II, 43, 67, 142 Charles Edward Stuart, 40–1, 70, 71, 100, 101, 110, 121, 140, 143, 163 Chester, 71 Church of Scotland see Presbyterianism Clark, J. C. D., 4, 24 Colley, Linda, 8, 22–23, 50 Council of the North, 142 Council of Wales and the Marches, 142 Covenants (1638, 1643), 47, 52 strength of Covenanting armies, 65–9, 84 Crail, 117 Crieff, 121 Cromarty, 123 Cruickshanks, Eveline, 4 Culloden, 7, 14, 70, 72, 99 Cumberland, William, Duke of, 89, 111, 112, 118 Cupar, 117

226

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Davies, Norman, 23 Declaration of Arbroath, 57, 150, 155 Doune, 170 Dumfries, 74, 88, 144 Dundee, 50, 53–4, 71, 110, 130, 132, 170 Covenanting army recruitment, 68–9 forcing in 1745, 88 Jacobite support, 114–15 Dundee, Viscount (John Graham of Claverhouse), 39, 45–6 Dunfermline, 116, 130, 131 Dunkeld, 121 Duffy, Christopher, 5, 24, 73, 78, 81, 93, 97, 98, 153, 176 East Lothian Jacobite support, 17 Edinburgh (and Leith), 50, 53–4, 71, 74, 81, 130, 132, 170 forcing in 1745, 89 Jacobite support, 82, 110–12 Royalist capital, 142 and Union, 53 Edzell, 126, 170 Elgin, 54, 88, 170 Ellon, 120 Enlightenment, 9–10 Episcopalianism, 45, 47–53, 121, 131, 147, 177 relations with Catholics, 132 and the Union, 143 excise and the Jacobites, 116 Falkirk, Battle of (1746), 72, 99 Fife, 116–17 forcing, 86–93; see also Jacobite Army Fordoun, John of, 11, 18, 39 Forfar, 118–19 ‘Four Nations’ history, 23–4, 141

Fraserburgh, 88, 119, 120 Gaelic, 34–6 nationalism in Gaelic poetry, 146 weapons in Gaelic poetry, 97, 163–5 Gask, Laurence Oliphant of, 120–1 George III, 42 George IV, 19, 92 Royal Visit of 1822, 19, 39 Glasgow, 72, 74, 76, 123, 130, 170 Grant, Alexander, 36 Greenock, 122 Haddington, 117, 123 Hamilton, 122 Hamiton, William of Bangour, 153 Harris, Bob, 6, 24, 74, 131, 132 Highlands and Highlanders definitions, 31–8, 42, 53 Highland charge, 96–8 Jacobite support, 79–81 racism concerning, 16–17, 21–2 see also racism Hume, David, 9–12, 13 Huntly, 120 Independent Companies, 85, 91–2 Inverness, 75, 170, 177 Inverurie, 71, 120 Ireland, 3–4, 8, 17, 34, 44, 47 Irish brigade recruitment, 129–30 weapons of rebellion, 169 Jacobites and Jacobitism compared to Catalans, 148 definition, 149–51 diaspora, 128–9 historiography, 4–6, 8–9 ideology, 42–4, 149–51 national quality of movement, 4, 132–3, 141, 145–7, 152–3 radicalism and, 150 Rising of 1689, 46–8

Index Rising of 1715, 55–7, 145–7, 152 Rising of 1745, 70ff women, 127 Jacobite Army armies of 1715 and 1745, 169–70 arms, 166ff army of 1689–91, 46–7, 183–6 army of 1692–8, 187 army of 1715, 55–7, 69, 187–90 army of 1745, 71ff, 190–4 artillery, 100, 175–7 bayonets, 174 bullets, 174 cavalry, 99–100, 174–5 charge, 96–8 conventional armies, 84–6 drill, 95 equipment, 172–3 firearm accuracy, 97 forcing, 86–93 height, 95 language, 35–6, 41, 90–1 leadership, 82 lowland support, 3, 17, 70, 79–81 manoeuvres, 98–9 muskets, 172–4 national symbolism, 152–3 nature of, 37–8, 57–8 northern army, 15 officering, 85–6, 165 order books, 84 organisation, 84–6, 93–100 pay, 95 pistols, 170 recruitment, 45, 91–3, 123ff size in 1689, 46–7 size in 1715, 55–7, 69 size in 1745, 71ff social origins, 83–4 strategy, 100–2 swords, 163–5 tactics, 96–9 targes, 173–4 training, 93–100

227

uniforms, 39–41 weapons surrenders, 166–7 James VI and I, 142 James VII and II, 43, 44, 51, 142 James VIII and III, 43, 51, 53–4, 128, 151–2, 164–5 significance of regnal number, 152 Johnshaven, 118, 119, 130 Kearney, Hugh, 23 Keith, 120 Kidd, Colin, 13, 20 King’s Birthday celebrations, 114– 17, 132 Kirkcaldy, 88, 116, 130 Kirriemuir, 118. 131 Lanark, 122 Laurencekirk, 126 Leneman, Leah, 33 Lenman, Bruce, 5, 40, 110 Linlithgow, 74, 116, 130 Loudon, John Campbell, 4th Earl of, 75, 91, 113 Lynch, Michael, 48, 55, 142, 147 McCann, Jean, 78, 83 Macinnes, Allan, 5, 24, 39, 45, 50, 52, 66, 75, 77–8, 89, 127, 140, 141, 143 McLynn, Frank, 5, 24, 78, 141 MacMhaighstir Alasdair, Alasdair, 35, 37, 163–4 Macpherson, James, 11 Malt Tax Riots, 148 Mar, John Erskine, 22nd Earl of, 51, 54–6, 146–7 militia, 74–5 militia controversy, 3, 17 Moffat, 76 Monod, Paul, 4. 141 Montrose, 53–4, 71, 88, 117–18, 177 Jacobite support, 82, 119

228

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans

Morrill, John, 23 Murdoch, Steve, 5 Murray, Lord George, 93, 97, 100 Myth of the Jacobite Clans, 6–10, 14–25, 38–9, 44–5, 65ff, 141, 178 Nairn, 88, 120 National Trust for Scotland, 7, 14, 70, 157 nationalism, 43, 54–5, 132–3, 145, 151, 153–6 Norman Yoke, 10, 20 ´ Ciardha, Eamonn, 5 O Oldmeldrum, 120, 170 Orkney, 122, 170 Paisley, 74 Penal Laws, 48 Perth, 54, 115–16 Peterhead, 88, 120 Pitsligo, Alexander 4th Lord Forbes of, 48, 150, 152 Pittenweem, 116 Pocock, J. G. A., 23 population figures, 50 Porteous Riots, 116 Presbyterianism, 47–8, 50, 52, 147 Prestonpans, Battle of, 73, 99, 168, 171 Jacobite weapons after Prestonpans, 171 prisoners and petitions, 89 Prunier, Clotilde, 132 racism, 12, 16–17, 21–2; see also Highlands and Highlanders Ramsay, Allan, 37, 153 Ramsay, Andrew, 9 Reid, Stuart, 5, 43, 80, 85, 93, 141, 174

Renfrew, 74 Rob Roy, 16, 19 Robertson, William, 1, 3, 9–10, 12, 13 Sankey, Margaret, 6 Scotland, 122 anti-Englishness, 154–7 anti-Jacobite, 74–5 patriot historiography, 11, 18, 41–2, 57, 145, 151, 153–6 population, 50 Stuart policy towards, 142ff Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 18–20 Sheriffmuir, Battle of, 99, 157, 169 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 18 Speck, W. A., 22 Stannaries of Cornwall, 44 Statutes of Iona, 34 Stirling, 74, 81, 130, 132 Jacobite support, 89, 117 Stonehaven, 88, 119, 126, 130 Stuart, Charles Edward see Charles Edward Stuart Stuart, Gilbert, 11 Sullivan, John, 85, 93–4 Sutherland, 75 Szechi, Daniel, 4, 5, 6, 24, 55, 76, 85, 167, 174 tartan and the Jacobites, 40–1 symbolic importance of, 111 Teutonism, 11ff Trevelyan, G. M, 22 Turriff, 120 Union of England and Scotland, 51– 3, 144–5 Jacobite responses, 143–9 Usages controversy, 48–9 Victoria, Queen, 19

Index Whatley, Christopher, 116, 132, 140, 148 Whig history, 1, 7–10, 12–13, 156, 163–4

William III and II, 46, 50 Wills, Rebecca, 5 Zimmerman, Doron, 6

229