The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The years 1646–9 undoubtedly constituted a revolutionary moment, a time when, in principle, momentous changes were possible. The Puritans broke through the ‘credibility barrier’ which had so afflicted Tyler, Cade and the Pilgrims of Grace and, by executing the king, demonstrated that they were not afraid to sail into uncharted waters. Whether significant social change really was feasible remains debatable, and part of the reason lies in the political, personal and ideological weaknesses of the Levellers themselves. After all their grandiose proposals, only trial by jury survived as a solid achievement; even the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, which seem to have been achieved by 1649, were later rescinded. Universal male suffrage did not arrive until 1918, and biennial parliaments have never been achieved in England. The mistakes of the Levellers were legion. They sacrificed the art of the possible for utopian and chimerical goals. One of the feasible reforms which they did not ask for was the secret ballot and this omission is very odd, since it was a prescription contained in all the best-known works of political theory, such as More’s Utopia or Harrington’s Oceana. They made their only serious move – trying to provoke mutiny and revolt in the army – much too late, in 1649, by which time large numbers of their comrades had already been sent to Ireland and a good deal of discontent in the ranks had been allayed by Cromwell’s use of Crown lands (in part) to settle the arrears of military pay (the other part was sold off at rock-bottom prices to land-grabbing senior officers and civilian property speculators). They were guilty of the besetting sin of the Left through the ages – internal factionalism and squabbling instead of concentrating on the common enemy. Here Lilburne, idiosyncratic, individualist and a non-team-playing prima donna must bear a considerable burden of blame; not only did he quarrel with his fellow Levellers but in his boastfulness and arrogance, which Thomas Carlyle so disliked, he often alerted Cromwell to Leveller intentions and strategy.85 At a deeper level, one can say that the Levellers had no awareness of the deeper currents of history or even the social and economic imperatives of their own world. Their economic theory was primitive and related to an ideal world of owner-occupiers, independent tradesmen and self-employed craftsmen, freed from the shackles of economic monopoly. Typically the ‘middling sort’ themselves – skilled craftsmen, cobblers, weavers, printers, lead miners, small traders, shopkeepers, etc. – still clung to a property qualification for the suffrage and had nothing to offer the agricultural workers, who, after all, made up three-quarters of the English economy.86 Most of all, they had no idea of the possibilities latent in capitalism and were lacking in revolutionary consciousness. Marxists would say they were premature revolutionary utopians, since capitalism could be overthrown only with the emergence of an industrial proletariat, and were thus vulnerable to Marx’s general critique of utopian socialism as mere wishful thinking.87 It should have been clear that the great land-owning classes would not give up their privileges without a ferocious struggle, inevitably involving armed conflict. Not only was the Left in the 1640s not ideally placed for this – the Diggers were actually pacifists – but they had not thought through the implications of their demands in terms of revolutionary violence. This was supremely ironic in light of the fact that they had just fought a bloody civil war to achieve lesser changes. However, it is possible to imagine, counterfactually, the England that might have emerged if the Levellers had had leaders of the calibre of Cromwell and their opponents lacked them. The likelihood is that the nation would not have acquired an empire but would have developed along the lines of Switzerland or Scandinavia.88 Certainly on the question of Ireland the Levellers had the best ideas. John Bull’s other island would not have been subjected to a further three centuries of repression, exploitation, bloodshed and famine. What the Levellers wanted from Ireland – partnership with a benevolent neutral, pledged never to sign up with England’s enemies, much as in the 1921 treaty granting independence – could theoretically have occurred in 1649.89

  Most of all, they underrated Cromwell and were no match for him in political terms. He was always a much more traditional figure than Lilburne, Overton and Winstanley imagined. The pre-1642 social system would have suited him well; it was only the autocracy of Charles I that was the problem. A deep-dyed, innate conservative wedded to private property, regarding social caste as just as much part of the natural order of things as the law of gravity, Cromwell never wanted manhood suffrage or religious toleration, and in foreign affairs was a throwback to Elizabeth I, basically an English anti-Spain imperialist. Clear-sighted, Cromwell saw that he had to defeat the royalists and the Presbyterians in Parliament before turning on the Levellers, which accounts for the apparent tolerance in evidence at the Putney Debates. It has been argued that for a short time after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 he seemed sympathetic to radical aims90 but, if this really was the case, his hesitation did not last long. His attitude to the Left is well summed up in another of his sayings: ‘It is some satisfaction if a Commonwealth must perish, that it perish by men and not by the hands of persons differing little from beasts. That if it must needs suffer, it should rather suffer from rich men than from poor men who, as Solomon says, “when they oppress leave nothing behind them, but are a sweeping rain”.’91 His essential problem, after the dismissal of the Rump Parliament in 1653, was that he ended in a political cul-de-sac. His Barebones Parliament, designed as a ‘house of godly men’, failed through lack of popular support and his general Instrument of Government declined into local military satrapies ruled by his major-generals. When asked to nominate a successor, he named his son Richard, who turned out an egregious failure. By the time of his death in 1658, Cromwell had solved not one of the nation’s essential problems and left it in a state of confusion paralleled in the modern era most closely by Marshal Tito’s legacy to the former Yugoslavia. Facing uncertainty and chaos, Cromwell’s lieutenants opted for the restoration of the Stuarts rather than the political equivalent of open-ocean navigation, which opened up the possibility of a resurgence of the radicals.

  From their own selfish point of view, the Grandees did well. The years after 1660 saw a notable return to power of the aristocracy, albeit modified by the post-1688 financial revolution. The ordinary man and the common people, so prominent in the 1640s, did not really revive for another 200 years. Cromwell understood the tides of history as the Levellers did not. To say that he was a mere ‘epiphenomenon’, as vulgar Marxists used to, and that he was simply the man required by a certain social situation of course begs the question; the only proof of the socio-economic requirement is the actual appearance of the man himself, so that the argument is circular. Sober historians are wary of ‘lessons’ taught by Clio, but the 1640s do seem to have reinforced two of history’s constants. One is that revolutionary turmoil, of our Categories Two and Three (see Appendix) inevitably ends with the man on horseback. Those, like Thomas Carlyle, fascinated by the parallels between the English and French Revolutions have constructed a fanciful scenario whereby the Presbyterians are the analogue of the Girondins, the Jacobins the equivalent of the Independents and the Levellers are paralleled 150 years later by Hébert and Babeuf. One adaptation of this thesis ends in absurdity, with Cromwell as the Directory and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 featuring as Napoleon.92 More convincing is the obvious parallel between Cromwell and Napoleon himself and with other ‘strong men’ or dictators who emerged from the chaos of real revolution: Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, even Álvaro Obregón and the PRI in Mexico in the 1920s. The other constant is that warfare and military defeat are the mothers of revolution. Apart from the parallel between the 1640s in England and the 1790s in France, there is the emergence of the Paris Commune after the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the 1905 rising in Russia following defeat by Japan, 1917 in Russia and the rise of the Communist Party in China after the failure of the Kuomintang in the war against Japan in 1937–45.

  8

  The Jacobite Rising of 1745

  THE JACOBIT
ES WERE the adherents of the Stuart dynasty exiled from England in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and so called from the Latin for James (Jacobus), since James II was the luckless monarch ousted that year. For seventy years (1689–1759), they sought the return of the Stuarts by means of armed insurrection, coup d’état or foreign invasion. Jacobitism was also an international movement, with tentacles in trade, finance, industry and, especially, the military, and many regiments of Irish and Scottish exiles were formed in France and Spain. The Jacobites’ military talents saw them employed by a wide range of foreign governments from Versailles to Moscow.1 Curiously, until the 1970s, historians refused to take Jacobitism seriously, regarding it as, at best, capable of fomenting ‘a little local difficulty’, to use Harold Macmillan’s famous phrase when he purged his cabinet in 1962. The usual view was to dismiss the Jacobite movement as a benighted anachronism, hopelessly wedded to the past and crippled by nostalgic hankerings for absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings. In fact Jacobitism was at once simple and highly complex.2 Simple because it had a clear, focused aim, unlike Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and the Pilgrimage of Grace. There was no ambivalence about the colossus standing in their path, such as the Levellers and Diggers entertained for Cromwell. The usurping foreign monarchs (first the Dutch William and Mary, then Queen Anne, finally the first two Hanoverian kings, George I and George II) were the enemy and had to be displaced by whatever means, including assassination. Complex, because Jacobitism evolved over time and took protean forms. Part of the muddle anti-Jacobite historians have got themselves into is to predicate attributes of the entire movement which can only be predicated in closely defined eras. In short, those scholars who take a cavalier view of Jacobitism commit the most basic fault in writing history: unawareness of chronology. What can be said about the movement in the years 1689–1715 cannot be said about the years 1715–45, and still less about 1746–59.3 There are complications in space, too, as well as time. From 1689 to 1713 James II and his son James Francis were domiciled at the Château Vieux at St Germain, outside Paris, running an ‘alternative’ court and constantly beset by money problems. When Louis XV was compelled by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht to expel the Jacobites, James and his courtiers flitted phantom-like to two different makeshift abodes, first Bar in Lorraine, then Avignon, and finally to the ducal palace in Urbino in 1717. Finding James Francis discontented here also, Pope Clement XI persuaded him to move to the security of the Papal States, using James’s marriage as the pretext. From 1719 until his death in 1766 James was ensconced in the unprepossessing Palazzo Muti, a step down from the grandeur of St Germain and Urbino but secure and permanent. From here James (by now ‘the Old Pretender’ to the Hanoverians) directed (or tried to) the heterogeneous Jacobite movement, attempting to draw together strands in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Russia and a host of minor states and principalities.4

  It is customary to say that there were four Jacobite rebellions in Britain, those of 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745, though 1708 does not really count as an authentic rising. In that year the Jacobites’ staunch ally, Louis XIV of France, sent the twenty-year-old James Francis Edward, son of James II, with 6,000 French troops to attempt a landing in Scotland. The half-heartedness of the French commanders ensured that the young man never even set foot on Scottish soil; the most he did was sight Edinburgh from the Firth of Forth before the Royal Navy chased the French flotilla away.5 In 1715 the Jacobites, this time on their own, since the French had signed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 bringing to an end the War of Spanish Succession, organised a rising which on paper was formidable, envisaging as it did simultaneous armed outbreaks in south-west England, northern England and Scotland. This time the main factor bedevilling the Jacobites was lack of a credible commander. The rising in the south-west collapsed ignominiously in September, but at first the Jacobite Earl of Mar seemed to carry all before him, and quickly had most of Scotland at his feet. In northern England the rebels were led by Thomas Forster, MP, and the young James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater. Both Mar and Forster proved hopeless as generals. On 12 November Forster and the English Jacobites confronted the Hanoverian enemy at Preston and at first gave a reasonable account of themselves. The arrival of a second loyalist army sealed their fate, and Forster surrendered on 14 November, without securing any terms or concessions for his men. 13 November was also the date of the battle that sealed Scotland’s fate. Mar brought the enemy to battle at Sheriffmuir, north of Stirling. Despite having a three-to-one numerical superiority, he botched the direction of the battle, which ended indecisively.6 At this setback Jacobite morale plummeted and there was mass desertion from the ranks. The cause of the Stuarts was all but extinguished in Scotland when James Francis (the ‘Old Pretender’ to the Hanoverians) landed in Scotland, intending to have himself crowned at the traditional site of Scottish coronations, Scone. Expecting to find Mar victorious and the Jacobites piling success on success south of the border, he was flabbergasted by the debacle he found. Never a tough or gritty individual, James cracked under the stress. Totally lacking in charisma, he depressed his Scottish followers rather than enthusing them. Even as he made futile attempts to rally them, news came in that his treasure ship, containing all the money to finance operations in Scotland, had run aground on the Dundee sandbanks. The Scottish nobles who supported James decided to melt away into the islands, effectively abandoning their leader, who embarked for France on 4 February 1716, a broken and disconsolate man.7

  The 1719 rising was nothing like so ambitious or elaborate as the ’15 but ended equally disastrously. This time the Jacobites had the nominal advantage of foreign backing. War had broken out between Spain and England in 1718 over the Spanish seizure of Sicily and Sardinia. Spain’s first minister Cardinal Alberoni endorsed a two-pronged Jacobite rebellion, with risings in England and Scotland. The Spanish fleet bearing the troops supposed to land in England was shattered by a force-twelve storm in the Bay of Biscay. The Spanish force for Scotland got through and rendezvoused with pro-Jacobite lords in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. But then the besetting sin of Jacobitism – factionalism – took a hand. The commanders could not agree a common strategy for Scotland. The Jacobite Earl Marischal, who had the ear of the Spanish, prevailed and landfall was made on the mainland at Eilean Donan opposite the Isle of Skye. Blockaded there, Marischal withdrew inland but was cornered by Hanoverian troops at Glenshiel. With overwhelming superiority in artillery, the Hanoverians won an easy victory and compelled the Spanish to surrender; Marischal and the other Jacobite commanders made good their escape.8

  For twenty-five years thereafter the Jacobite cause was in the doldrums. James Stuart kept hoping for the elusive ‘favourable conjuncture’ that would tempt a foreign power to aid the Jacobites in another rising, but no offers were forthcoming. Part of the problem was the long European peace between the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. There were minor wars, such as that of the Polish Succession in the 1730s, but a general conflict was avoided by the ‘peace at any price’ policies pursued simultaneously by Robert Walpole in England and Cardinal Fleury in France. Just when Jacobitism seemed doomed to euthanasia, a new star appeared. In 1719 James contracted a marriage with Clementina Sobieska, a fabulously wealthy Polish princess, granddaughter of the Jan Sobieski who had turned back the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683.9 Late the following year Clementina gave birth to a son, Charles Edward Casimir. Charles Edward Stuart was destined to be one of the great heroes of the age. To the Scots he was ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, to his admirers the Young Chevalier or the Young Adventurer, to hagiographers Ascanius – though since Ascanius’s father in the myth was Aeneas, who fled from Troy to found Rome, this was hyperbole pure and simple: the ineffectual James Edward was no Aeneas. From a very early age the young prince set himself to become a great warrior: he mastered firearms and swordplay, hunted assiduously, managed to serve in a campaign at Gaeta, Italy, at the age of thirteen and prepared himself like a
knight of old for the ordeal to come.10 The one defect in his character – and it was to be as significant a one as the hamartia or fatal flaw in all great tragic heroes – was an unintegrated ego. In times of good fortune, when his star was in the ascendant, the prince was brilliant, charming, charismatic, inventive, creative, even original. When things went badly, he fell apart rapidly, descending into illness, depression, rage and, in later years, alcoholism. He had no middle range, either of emotions or rationality, he was an ‘all or nothing’ personality, with all the problems such a psychology engenders.11 His mother was a neurotic and religious maniac, who mortified the flesh in hopes of salvation and posthumous canonisation. His father was cold, pious, timid and unemotional. The marriage was a disaster which it needed papal intervention to patch up. Charles Edward therefore lived his early years in an emotional cauldron and lost his mother when he was fourteen, when Clementina in an excess of pietistic zeal virtually starved herself to death and succumbed to scurvy. The loss exacerbated the instability and volatility in the prince, and helped to nurture a growing antagonism towards his father, at first unconscious, later manifest and overt. Charles Edward and James Francis seemed incapable to getting on at any level, personal, emotional, political. As he neared his twentieth year, Charles became almost visibly impatient with his father’s dedication to the ‘art of the possible’, his political naivety, his lack of worldliness and cynicism. One clear result of his distancing from both parents was the rejection of their religion. While James and Clementina were fervent Catholics, Charles Edward gradually rejected religion. Once the break with his father was complete, he threw off the mask and revealed himself as a freethinker and deist; some would say he went beyond this into outright atheism.12