The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  9

  Evolutionary Jacobitism

  THE ’45 WAS a stunning demonstration of revolutionary voluntarism which failed only because of the human weakness of Charles Edward’s accomplices. But was it in the end anything more than a transfer of power within a given socio-economic system, a change of ruling dynasty, simply a violent version of the meaningless oscillation that takes place between two parties in a modern social democratic nation-state, at best a coup d’état against the ossified one-party system of the Whigs? The transfer-of-power view has been popular but it is heavily dependent on a perception of Jacobitism as purely a movement of nostalgic reaction, sustained by outmoded ideologies such as the divine right of kings. In fact, even at the level of ideology the Jacobite movement had undergone numerous transmogrifications, and once again it must be stressed how important is an awareness of chronology. Whereas divine right was important in the period 1689–1715, after the 1715 rising it was increasingly replaced by the ‘Country’ ideology, with its emphasis on government corruption and, in Scotland, by the mystical providentialism typical of the Episcopalian north-east. In the period 1745–59 the ideology of Jacobitism mainly focused on social grievances, anticipating John Wilkes and the radicals.1 Charles Edward, under the tutelage of men like Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees and the industrialist John Holker, held himself forth as the champion of the dispossessed and the wretched of the earth. Part of his high talent as a revolutionary was his understanding that a man who could raise the entire body of forty-odd Scottish clans under his banner would have an almost irresistible army of 30,000 men at his command. It was only clan Campbell, the richest, most populous and most powerful clan in the Highlands that stood in his way. It is significant that the Campbells were present in numbers at Culloden on Cumberland’s side and that their stranglehold on the Highlands was the very factor that persuaded most of the other clans either to declare for the Stuart prince or remain neutral.2 In short, anti-Campbell sentiment rather than pure ideological commitment to the Stuarts was the main spur in the Highlands, which was why chiefs with a lot to lose, such as Cameron of Lochiel and Cluny MacPherson took security for their estates from the prince and also why the struggle in the Highlands in 1745–6 so often took on the appearance of small clans ranged against the Campbells.3 It would become clear later that this was no accident, that Jacobitism as the shield and buckler of the weak and dispossed was an important part of its profile.

  The appeal of the Jacobites for what was usually referred to in the eighteenth century as ‘the lower sort of people’ is a complex issue to resolve, for three main reasons. The first is that the common people in the eighteenth century – whether we refer to them contemptuously in the manner of the Hanoverians as ‘the mob’, or more respectfully, following the example of George Rudé, as ‘the crowd’ – used Jacobite slogans to sanctify and legitimate riots about immediate and obviously economic issues: prices, turnpike roads, enclosures, the seizure of profiteerers’ goods, the introduction of a new industrial process, the curtailment of a traditional form of transport or any other customary right. The second is that the proscribed nature of the English Jacobite party on the one hand, and the passage of the Riot Act on the other, make the subject peculiarly difficult to explore, so that much work on popular Jacobitism is of a pioneering variety.4 The third is that economic and social issues which had a negligible or merely tangential relationship to Jacobitism were invariably associated with it by government propaganda – during the ‘Robinocracy’ (the twenty-year dominance of Sir Robert Walpole in English politics in the 1720s and 1730s) this was a reflex Walpolian ploy to try to discredit the opposition. The Jacobites were ‘fed back’ by black propaganda into any and every social disturbance, as can be seen in the agitation over the Excise Act in 1733.5 Despite the excesses of Walpole and his acolytes, anticipating in many ways the outrageous hyperbole of Senator Joseph McCarthy over communism in the USA of the 1950s, the Whig/Hanoverian ruling nexus was right to fear the appeal of Jacobitism for the common man and to identify a strong strain of Jacobitism in the Tory Party, which endured long years of exile in the political wilderness. The alleged Jacobitism of the Tory Party in 1715–45 is highly disputed academic territory,6 but the convergence of the principles and ideas of the banished Stuarts with political radicalism receives interesting confirmation from an examination of the personalities and electoral support of the Tories in this era, which make it clear that eighteenth-century Tories were already showing signs of the heterodox orientation Disraeli would urge on them in the nineteenth.7 In cases where we have a complete picture, as in Derby in the 1734 election, we see that Tory voters are frameworkers, knitters, butchers, tailors, brick-makers, wool-combers, blacksmiths and tanners, in contrast to those voting for the Whigs: lords, squires, aldermen and lawyers.8 This was in line with the general tenor of the Tory Party. Gilfrid Lawson, a Tory MP (for Cumberland) opposed Walpole’s 1732 Salt Tax on the ground that it would fall hardest on the poor. Thomas Brampton, who was to have led the Essex Jacobites in 1744 in an uprising to coincide with the French landing at Maldon, was clearly something of a radical.9

  Assertions that there was an attachment to the House of Stuart among the labouring classes were frequently made by Jacobite partisans, and in many cases they were strongly warranted. As often with Jacobitism, one of the principal sources is the Jacobite historian, Thomas Carte (1686–1754), though for obvious reasons his testimony has to be regarded with circumspection. In a lengthy report to James Francis (‘King James’) in 1739 Carte gave a list of working men who he declared would be ready, given leadership, to take up arms for the Stuarts. In the south-west he instanced clothing workers and colliers in Somerset and tin miners and fishermen in Cornwall (‘20,000 people employed in the pilchard fishery and 40,000 in tin and copper mines’) whose misery and exploitation could be turned to good advantage in a Jacobite rising.10 In the Midlands he pointed to the area around Birmingham and Wolverhampton: ‘in a tract of country but 24 miles in circumference, taking in Walsall and Dudley, there are above 80,000 fighting men, colliers and iron workers’. Another area worth the attention of Jacobite plotters, according to Carte, was the West Riding of Yorkshire, where the clothiers and colliers of Leeds, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Halifax were ideal Jacobite materal. Carte’s ideas were reproduced by Louis XV’s agent James Butler in 1743 following his reconnaissance trip to England and were taken very seriously in Versailles.11 One contingency plan for a French invasion stated that if no more than 5,000 troops could be spared for a descent on England, then landfall should be made in Dorset, where the French could expect to be joined by the discontented clothing workers. Likely Jacobite supporters were also assessed in terms of the kind of support they could enlist or levy among their workers. Henry Portman (an English MP) was said to be an important Jacobite because of the size of his estates and the number of his tenants employed in woollen manufacture.12 Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston, Derbyshire, was thought a significant figure because he had 10,000 miners in his employ.13 Similarly George Chaffin was thought an important Jacobite since his workers might assist a rising in Dorset.14

  Another of Carte’s ideas was that only a standing army stood between the Whigs and an angry populace, but that this was itself dangerous for the Hanoverians, since the rank and file of the army were drawn from the working people. In a letter to James Stuart on 9 February 1738, Carte attempted a ‘grand slam’ of arguments purporting to show that the English army was a negligible force to pit against a foreign invasion or a domestic rising. Without the army the Whigs ‘would else be knocked on the head by the people … the present number of forces is absolutely necessary for the support of King George and his government and if that army was once broke, he would be rooted out of the nation by the mob in three months’ time.15 Carte’s argument was that the army was composed of ‘Englishmen who conversed with the common people, imbibed the same sentiments and were full as dissented as they’. Moreover, he added, a standing army was in flat contradiction
to those liberties for which the 1688 Revolution had been ostensibly brought about; to get rid of a standing army, therefore, people would not mind whether they were ruled by a Catholic or Protestant king.16 It has been objected that Carte and other Jacobites were simply telling ‘King James’ what he wanted to hear and critics have been ready to pounce on his smallest slip. It has to be acknowledged that he was sometimes confused in his thinking, since we are told both that the working classes would rally to the Stuart standard at the request or their lords and employers and that the misery and exploitation they suffered (presumably caused by the activities of these same masters) would lead them to flock to the French if they invaded. Yet for all Carte’s exaggerations, the core of his analysis was sound: there was much working-class unrest which the Jacobites could have exploited to greater advantage. The proof came in 1745. It is sometimes overlooked that there was a strong proletarian element in the composition of Charles Edward’s army.17 Artisans, shopkeepers, farmers and labourers made up a large part of the non-clan element of the army, many of them holding commissions of company rank.18 Almost the whole of John Roy Stewart’s regiment was recruited from the slums of Edinburgh. The Manchester regiments, commanded by Francis Towneley, contained a strong component of weavers, drapers and apothecaries – exactly the kind of men who made up Wilkes’s supporters in the 1760s, and whose anti-Scottish and anti-Catholic sentiments are sometimes cited as conclusive evidence that the English mob could never have held Jacobite sympathies.19 And it is certain that the pitmen, keelmen and sailors of Tyneside, if mobilised, could have made up another regiment just as strong as the Manchester one – illustrating once again, to cite Sir Alexander of Sleat, that Charles Edward really was the best strategist in his army, and that the invasion of England should have aimed straight at Newcastle and Marshal Wade.20

  Yet another manifestation of ‘radical Jacobitism’ was the many covert and crypto-republicans who used the Jacobite movement as cover because an overt declaration of such principles was too advanced for eighteenth-century Britain. The prime example of such a disguised republican was George Keith, 10th hereditary Earl Marischal of Scotland, Charles Edward’s nemesis and bête noire and later confidant to such diverse figures as David Hume, Frederick the Great and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.21 One of the factors in this strange affair of lions in tigers’ clothing was that as the Whigs in the first half of the eighteenth century became clearly established as the party of finance, big business and the moneyed interest, the Tories swung left into the ground of earlier Whig republicanism. This swing has sometimes been dismissed as a purely negative phenomenon – an alliance of the two defeated classes, urban poor and backwoods gentry – but it bears closer examination. Surely no stranger political turnaround has been witnessed than that whereby the House of Stuart in the eighteenth century became in effect the standard bearer for the very ideas it had fought against in the Civil War of the 1640s. Jacobites in 1700–50 found support among the Derbyshire miners, framework knitters, wool-combers, butchers, tailors, brick-makers, blacksmiths and tanners, whose ancestors had been Levellers in 1649,22 and among the weavers of the south-west, who had supported Monmouth in 1685. John Burton of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a bitter enemy of Dr William King (who made a famous and vehemently pro-Jacobite speech at the dedication of the Radcliffe Camera in 1749), pointed out the similarities of that speech to 1640s republicanism; ‘What were republican principles in the last century are Jacobite principles in this.’ The London Evening Post endorsed Burton’s remarks and pointed out that had Dr King’s speech been published 120 years earlier, it would have been considered a republican libel.23 Something strange had happened to the Leveller and other radical movements of the 1640s. Anabaptists, Commonwealthmen and republicans supported Monmouth’s rebellion against James II in 1685 but showed little support for William of Orange in 1688.24 After the rise of Jacobitism and the coming of the Whig ascendancy, this radical political fringe seemed to lose its identity. Of the two radical tendencies, those of the Jacobites and the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen – who were left on the periphery of politics by the centripetal Whig/Tory struggle – only the Jacobites thrived. The Commonwealthman ideas of liberty of conscience, extension of the franchise, redistribution of parliamentary seats, rotation in office, separation of powers, and a federal United Kingdom, did not seem attractive in the eighteenth century and seemed to many Jacobites a luxury or an irrelevance, a case of fiddling while Rome burned.25 Also, non-Jacobite radicals were marginalised in 1700–50 because, in closing ranks against the Jacobites, the Whig aristocracy closed the door on other forms of ‘deviance’. The very existence of the Stuarts played into the hands of the Hanoverian Whigs, for they were able to stifle the Tories and muzzle republicans and Commonwealthmen by crying up the fears of foreign invasion, civil war and anarchy that the Jacobites were held to portend. The one place that remained for radical ideas was within the only effective opposition left – the Jacobites – who were also the only group prepared to resist the existing regime by force. So it is that a paradoxical link can be found between the radical Jacobites of the 1740s and the Levellers of the 1640s. It was no accident that in Scotland during the ’45 there appeared a pamphlet called Liberty and Right, which in its advocacy of payment of MPs, readjustment of constituencies, more frequent elections and the abolition of primogeniture was a harbinger of Chartism.26

  Jacobitism was also radical in its embrace of what in modern times would be called ‘social crime’.27 There are two aspects to this. One is the tenet that many ‘criminals’ were forced to defy the law simply because of the egregious injustice of eighteenth-century England’s ‘Bloody Code’ and the rampant corruption of central government. The other is that the Whig/Hanoverian ruling nexus designated as crime activities which had the sanction of social custom, ancient habit and local folkways. Whereas certain actions – murder, rape, infanticide, etc – are regarded as crimes by all societies, others are culturally defined or are simply the results of statutes issued by dictators or other repressive governments. The ideological stance of the Jacobites was that the epidemic of highway robbery in eighteenth-century England was directly caused by the gross inequality and misery deliberately produced by a narrowly based elite that had allied itself to usurping dynasties – initially the House of Orange, then (after the interim period of Queen Anne), the House of Hanover. For this reason there was a clear correlation between highwaymen and Jacobitism.28 The contrast between the fuss made over a highway robbery involving £10 and the insouciance with which society regarded the bribery and peculation of Sir Robert Walpole, involving hundreds of thousands of pounds, was a staple comment of the day and appears explicitly in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.29 The Jacobites encouraged this line of reasoning. Since the post-1688 regime was illegitimate, it followed that in a sense all its property relations were bogus, and that the highwayman was merely claiming back what had been stolen. Anticipating Proudhon, the Jacobites insinuated the idea that all Hanoverian property was theft. The proposition that crime was a function of destitution, and destitution was itself a direct consequence of Whig economic policies, was a hardy annual in the reportage of the Jacobite journalist Nathaniel Mist.30 A report to James Stuart at the end of 1728 (the year Gay’s opera appeared) made the point explicit:

  Highway robberies prevail in England more than in any other nation of Europe. Are not the persons who commit them frequently such as are unwilling to make their distress public, and, finding themselves sunk in spite of industry, grow desperate and run the risk of an ignominious death to satisfy these voracious harpies the Whigs that occasion all their misery.31

  There was a Jacobite flavour to several of the early eighteenth-century highwaymen. John Lunt moved from being a secret agent for James Francis in 1694 to becoming a ‘gentleman of the road’, and was one of several men at the time who made the transition from robber to Jacobite or vice versa.32 Thomas Butler (executed 1720) fought for the ‘Pretender’ and was employed as a spy in the 1715
rising by the Duke of Ormonde. When luxurious living exhausted his money on the continent, Butler came to England and took up highway robbery. He and his trusted servant lived a double life for years. They would alternate periods ‘on the road’ with residence in London, where they lived in some style and were received in polite society.33 Thomas Neale, a highwayman who was hanged in 1749, invoked the Jacobite martyr Lord Balmerino, beheaded two years earlier, as a fellow-sufferer; both were the victims of an illegitimate government.34 According to this line of argument, the highwayman was a political criminal; as Chevalier Ramsay, the Jacobite ideologue, argued, if you deny the hereditary principle in kingship, you cannot retain it in property. The highwayman, when taxed with his actions, can reply: ‘Rich men have violated this contract; they have seized upon everything, nothing remains for me. I will enter upon my natural right. I will take it and seize upon that which naturally belongs to me. The hereditary right of lands is a mere chimera.’35 To the Hanoverians, for the Jacobites to condone highway robbery was outrageous, and even more so was their fondness for pirates, for these were individuals, by definition, outlawed by the ius gentium or what we would nowadays call international law. The Jacobites replied that implicit in the ius gentium was the doctrine of divine, hereditary and indefeasible right, and that the ousting of the Stuart dynasty in 1688 was itself an act of piracy. And so it is not so remarkable to find, in the decade after the Treaty of Utrecht, that last flowering of piracy in the Atlantic, Indian and even Pacific Oceans, a close alliance between the Jacobites and some of the most notorious pirates of the age. French corsairs operating out of Channel ports in wartime under letters of marque did not always take the trouble to put their activities within a legal framework when they freelanced in peacetime in remote oceans.36 Not only did the Jacobites of the post-1715 period retain close contacts with the famous pirates of Madagascar and the Seychelles, but the pirates of the Bahamas offered to support ‘King James’ openly against the house of Hanover.37 Fully to explicate all the interlocking strands of Jacobitism and piracy would, however, take us very far from the world of the Jacobite rising of 1745. One example must suffice. Using as their military arm the pirates of Madagascar, James’s agents in the 1720s dreamed of a Jacobite commercial empire to rival the official one, based also on friendly relations with the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish both at Buenos Aires and in the Pacific. Once such a commerical bloc was established, the plan was to begin trading with China.38