How the Scots Invented the Modern World (21 page)

After a quarter-century of peace, Britain was about to enter into armed conflict with a fellow European power. It would not know peace again for a quarter-century more. The War of Jenkins’s Ear, as it inevitably became known, had reverberations far beyond Spain and the West Indies. It embroiled Britain in the political crisis simmering in central Europe, and by 1742 the kingdom found itself at war with Spain’s allies, including France.

Britain desperately needed soldiers for fighting on the Continent. Whitehall stripped garrisons in northern England and Scotland to the bare minimum. Realizing this, and examining its own options, France decided to take a new look at a plan it had not considered since 1719: dispatching an expeditionary force to land in Britain as a “second front” in support of James Stuart, now living in exile in Rome. What had seemed a permanently lost cause, restoring the Stuarts to the throne, now enjoyed a new lease on life—thanks to Captain Jenkins and his ear.

Jacobitism
¹⁵
and the effort to bring “the auld Stuarts back again” is forever linked to the history of Scotland and the Scots. But in fact Jacobitism was as much an English problem as a Scottish one. In Scotland it served largely as a vehicle for anti-English feeling, and xenophobia in general. Until 1745, however, the truly fanatical Jacobite supporters, those willing to throw their lives and fortunes away for a vanquished political ideal, tended to be English.

The Stuarts were, of course, originally a Scottish royal house. By 1688, though, when Parliament had deposed James II, the father of Queens Mary and Anne, who would succeed him, and of James, Prince of Wales, who would not, they had become very much part of the English scene—certainly far more so than their German cousins the Electors of Hanover. But Elector George, who barely spoke English, enjoyed one key virtue: he was a Protestant, whereas James Stuart (his father had died in 1701) was a Catholic. So, when Queen Anne died in 1714, Parliament gave George the crown.

Despite what English historians would later assert, it was not a popular decision. The late Anne’s leading ministers had to be driven into hiding in France in order to secure the Hanover succession. With French help they set about trying to undo what was, from the perspective of many, an illegal coup d’état. Their original plan called for landing at Plymouth, not in Scotland at all, and for James to raise his army in southwest England.

It might have worked, too, except for the British ambassador in Paris. This was none other than John Dalrymple, second Earl of Stair, son of the Lord Stair who had ordered the massacre at Glencoe and had died saving the Act of Union. The younger Stair established an efficient network of spies and sources at the French court, including someone who shared his mistress with the leading Jacobite conspirator. Thanks to Stair’s information, the government rounded up the ringleaders in England, and the revolt of 1715 began in Scotland instead, under the ill-fated and incompetent Earl of Mar.

Even after the collapse of the Fifteen, pro-Stuart sentiment in England remained strong, although harshly muzzled. Northwest England in particular was a bastion of Jacobitism, thanks to its active Catholic minority. It was not just Catholics who remained loyal to the Stuarts, however. Government spies managed to foil another serious plot in 1722, this one involving the Anglican bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury. Indeed, a large cross-section of the clergy of the Church of England leaned toward the Stuarts, as did many landowners and members of Parliament who described themselves as Tories, in opposition to the pro-Hanover Whigs. Historians are only now beginning to realize how important a political movement Jacobitism really was in eighteenth-century England, and how for nearly sixty years it remained a serious threat to the Whig regime.

What drew people to the Stuart cause? It certainly was not the diffident, lethargic figure of James Stuart—deemed James III of England and James VIII of Scotland by his supporters. Nor was the typical Jacobite a crude reactionary, as their Whig opponents liked to claim. Samuel Johnson, no friend to tyranny, expressed private support for the Stuart claim. So did Alexander Pope.
¹⁶
Lord Kames felt the pull of Jacobitism—it was probably the violence of the Forty-five that killed any lingering sympathy he had for it. Allan Ramsay wrote poems as a young man supporting the deposed Stuarts. When Prince Charlie’s army marched on Edinburgh in 1745, Ramsay chose to flee the city. But he did leave his house, with its strategic view of the walls of Edinburgh Castle, open to the Highland army when it occupied the town. It later provided a useful spot for snipers shooting at the royal garrison.

So what compelled sensible, law-abiding, and enlightened individuals to admire and sometimes even support a conspiracy to overthrow the existing government? In a word, nostalgia. Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society—except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.

The average Jacobite wanted to return to a community that was stable and harmonious, two qualities that eighteenth-century Britain notoriously seemed to lack. He extolled the virtues of a rural-based society and the authority of a traditional landowning class. He detested the new rising competitive capitalist society, with its getting and spending, its greedy merchants and vulgar upstarts, its contempt for the old rules, its creative destruction, as much as any Marxist. And like the Marxist, he cared deeply about “justice,” which in his mind meant inferiors willingly obeying their superiors: tenants obeying their landlords, the middle class obeying the nobility, the people obeying the king and the Church.

In England, and in much of the Scottish Lowlands by 1745, this longing for the security of a stable, hierarchical social order was largely, even self-consciously, a matter of nostalgia. Just as today we still have sentimental Marxists who put bumper stickers on their cars that say “No Peace Without Justice,” so eighteenth-century Englishmen were aware of sentimental Jacobites among their Tory neighbors, who secretly toasted “the king across the water.”

In the Highlands, though, Jacobitism was not nostalgia but reality. The Stuarts were not symbols of “a world we have lost,” but emblems of a power that existed here and now. For a century they had shored up and strengthened the authority of the clan chiefs—none of them needed reassurances from the Roman Catholic Church (very few chieftains or clans were Catholic anymore, anyway) to see the Stuarts as the only real kings they had ever known. A Stuart uprising in Scotland made sense, not just as good strategy but as an attraction of like to like. There was one person who understood that, and in the end he was the one who mattered.

Just before dawn on January 9, 1744, James Stuart’s son and heir, Charles Edward Stuart, left his house in Rome on the pretense of going boar-hunting north of the city at Cisterna. This was to throw English spies off the scent. Instead, his younger brother Henry went to Cisterna, while Charles made his way in disguise to the Tuscan coast. There he picked up a boat bound for Genoa, and then Savona, where a Spanish fishing smack slipped him past the watching British fleet to Antibes. Lyons was his next destination, and then on January 29 he reached Paris.

Prince Charles was twenty-three years old. In contrast to his father, he was charming, handsome, and personable. In normal circumstances he was exactly the kind of person one might want to succeed to a royal throne. That was how the French saw him: in February 1744 he had a big place in their plans.

The War of Jenkins’s Ear had gone well for the British, then badly. They had scored a major success against the outmanned and outgunned Spanish fleet in the Caribbean, which had satisfied the English thirst for revenge. But then things got stuck. Spain had found a capable ally in France, which was able to launch an invasion of Germany, threatening King George’s home territory in Hanover. Suddenly Britain had found itself drawn into a European land war it was neither prepared for nor wanted. As Britain’s war effort began to bog down, the French saw an opportunity to smash their ancient rival once and for all. This included putting their Stuart allies back in power.

By the end of the month, the French Crown put together an expedition of seven thousand men on transports at Dunkirk under the Marshal de Saxe to take Charles across the English Channel. The British, realizing what was coming, had put together a fleet in the Straits of Dover to block them. But then a storm scattered the French fleet and sank several of the transports. Charles himself managed to escape harm, but any invasion of England was now on hold.

The Dunkirk storm, “the Protestant wind” as gleeful English commentators dubbed it, did not just sink Charles’s transports. It also sank French confidence in Charles. New ministers stepped in, who believed de Saxe would be better employed fighting the British on land in Flanders rather than at sea in a risky amphibious landing on the English coast. Charles refused to give up hope, and for the rest of the year he continued to lobby for French help, but without results. In November he wrote to his father that his debts amounted to some thirty thousand crowns. “The more I dwell on these matters,” he confessed, “the more it makes me melancholy.” Isolated, frustrated by inaction, and furious with his French hosts, Charles had formulated a new plan: to land in Scotland with a small and trusted band of followers, and raise an army himself.

No one knows who first came up with the idea of Charles going to Scotland with no troops or resources, and with no real way out if the enterprise failed. But the notion of failure apparently never entered Charles’s mind. From the very beginning, a kind of headstrong, heedless optimism seems to have possessed him, goading him on when other, more experienced heads sensed disaster. When the first hint of his plan reached Scotland in the spring of 1745, even loyal supporters called it “the mad enterprise.” They hoped he could not be serious.

But he was serious. By May he had cobbled together enough money and arms from the French government to outfit two warships, the
Du
Teillay
and a sixty-four-gun frigate, the
Elisabeth.
On July 12 they set sail from Belle Île for Scotland. Bad luck dogged them from the start. A British man-of-war spotted them off the Lizard, and nearly sank the
Elisabeth,
forcing her and her consignment of seven hundred men, 1,500 muskets, and twenty small field pieces to turn back. The
Du Teillay
resolutely sailed on, carrying Charles and seven companions—two English, two Irish, and three Scots—for their destination on the Scottish west coast.

On July 23 they landed on the tiny island of Eriskay off South Uist, at a point still called Coilleag a Phrionnsa, or the Prince’s Shore. It was the first time Charles Edward Stuart had ever set foot in Scotland.

News of his arrival brought not joy and celebration, but shock and dismay. His first visitor was the chieftain Alexander MacDonald of Boisdale, who told him “there was nothing to be expected from the country” and that “not a soul would join him.” One of Charles’s companions noted that “everyone was struck with a thunderbolt, as you may believe, to hear that sentence.” They began to urge Charles to leave before it was too late. He refused, convinced that the Highlanders would stand with him. When Charles finally landed on the mainland at Borrodale, he organized meetings with the other branches of the MacDonalds. Charles asked about the strange Highland dress, which he had not seen before, and about the Gaelic language. He told them he intended to raise the royal standard and claim the crown of his ancestors.

The MacDonalds, like the Camerons of Lochiel and the Murrays of Atholl, listened with mixed emotions. For nearly one hundred years they had watched the Highlands, for all its continuing poverty and problems, grow more peaceful and secure. Incidents such as the Glencoe massacre notwithstanding, serious interclan feuds were largely a thing of the past. The British Crown left them alone to enjoy themselves as Scottish aristocrats and gentlemen. Now, Charles’s arrival endangered it all.

But they could not evade the thrust of his appeal, that if he returned empty-handed, he would be humiliated in front of a pack of foreigners (meaning the French), who would see that he had no friends. Out of a sense of honor, they reluctantly agreed to summon their clans to battle. But from the start they sensed their doom. Charles, and Charles alone, believed they had a chance of success. And to everyone’s amazement, the government of London, out of sheer incompetence and poor planning, was about to give it to them.

On August 19, at the northern end of Loch Shiel at Glenfinnan, Charles and the clans met. Cameron of Lochiel had summoned together seven hundred men; McDonnell of Keppoch fulfilled his boast of nearly five hundred. Charles ordered casks of brandy opened to allow the Highlanders to drink King James’s health. Then the assembled warriors cheered the royal standard of blue, white, and red silk and hailed their commander,
Thearlaich mac Sheumais,
or Charles, son of James.
Thearlaich
would sound to non-Gaelic ears like “Charlie.” Thus, the sobriquet that Charles would carry throughout the revolt and which history remembers as a dashing diminutive, Bonnie Prince Charlie, was in fact his name to the Gaels who now rallied to obey a prince they had never met, in order to serve a king who had never sat on any throne.

Charles waited two days until the MacDonalds of Clanranald arrived. Then he sent messages to the other clans between Glencoe and Glengarry to join him, and on August 21 started off to the east.