The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Perhaps the closest of all convergences between Jacobitism and crime was that with smuggling. Many observers, most of them very far from being Jacobites, inveighed against eighteenth-century fiscal policy in England on the grounds that the extremely high level of contraband – one estimate is 20,000 persons employed full-time in the trade in a century when the population rose from 6 to 8 millions – was a direct consequence of punitive levels of taxation and could be halted if governments would content themselves with modest tax yields. One such critic was Adam Smith, whose ‘take’ on contraband was devastating. He defined a smuggler as

  a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently capable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant it to be … To pretend to have any scruple about buying smuggled goods would in most countries be regarded as one of those pedantic pieces of hypocrisy which, instead of gaining credit with anybody, serve only to expose the person who affects to practise them to being a greater knave than most of his neighbours.39

  The Jacobites took up the theme of high taxation with gusto, alleging that the main reason they were high was the need to pay bondholders of the national debt. Jacobite contacts with smugglers were partly for reasons of opportunism and financial self-interest by the latter, but there is also much evidence of sincere ideological commitment to ‘King James’. The exiled Jacobites maintained regular contacts with smugglers – hardly surprising since many Jacobite ship-owners were specialists in privateering, outright piracy and even the slave trade.40 Smugglers were also instrumental in the many Jacobite schemes (and some actual enterprises) for landing arms in the Highlands. In 1727 the Jacobite David O’Brien wrote James a long memoir, explaining how arms bought in Holland could be taken to the Western Isles with the help of their smuggler friends. The memoir reveals a deep knowledge of the entire contraband trade from Barbados to Hamburg.41 Smugglers were also invaluable in providing information on the strength and disposition of British forces when the French were attempting to launch invasions on behalf of the House of Stuart. The Irish Jacobite Comte de Lally, who commanded a regiment of the Irish brigade in both the 1744 and 1745 invasion attempts, was the directing force behind the smugglers and would go on to become the hidden hand behind the most notorious band of Sussex desperadoes, the Hawkhurst gang.42 He it was who arranged for the French expedition of 1743–4 to be piloted by two masters of contraband vessels, Thomas Harvey and Robert Fuller. In 1744 the smugglers took several officers of Lally’s regiment over to England to spy on the troops guarding London.43 Lord Caryll, later Prince Charles Edward’s private secretary, was another Jacobite grandee who was a vital link in a broad smuggler–Jacobite nexus.44 This Jacobite–smuggler symbiosis continued into the Seven Years War. When yet another French invasion was broached in 1755, Duncan Robertson, 11th Laird of Struan suggested to James Francis that the obvious thing to do was use the many friendly smugglers as pilots for the invading fleet.45

  The Jacobites were also behind the most daring exploit by the Hawkhurst gang. When a revenue cutter intercepted their vessel bringing 30 hundredweight of tea, value £500, and took it to the customs house at Poole, the Hawkhurst men decided to break into the customs house and regain the loot. A raid by 60 armed men on 7 October 1747 easily achieved its objective: in triumph the raiders divided up the spoils and gave each participant 27 pounds of tea. Unfortunately, careless talk in an inn allowed a shoemaker to identify the gang. He made contact with a minor excise official, and the 2 men set out for Chichester to make a formal deposition before a Customs and Excise board. Alerted about this by a sympathetic publican, the smugglers ambushed the 2 men on the road, beat them up, murdered and then mutilated them.46 This was direct defiance of the government, and one of the most notorious Whig hard liners, the Duke of Richmond, determined that the culprits should be brought to book and turned the hunt for them into a personal crusade. He offered a huge reward for information, human nature duly asserted itself, and the Hawkhurst men were identified, arrested and brought to trial. The ringleaders were hanged at Tyburn and, by the time of his death, Richmond’s almost monomaniac crusade, plus his largesse, had secured 45 deaths among the Hawkhurst gang: 35 executions and 10 more smugglers who died in jail while waiting for the hangman’s rope. Richmond’s pogrom against the Hawkhurst gang has puzzled many historians, who can see no clear motive for the money and energy he was prepared to expend on his campaign except an (unexplained) hatred of smugglers.47 Yet the hidden motive was almost certainly his fanatical anti-Jacobitism. Richmond had been a creature of the Duke of Cumberland’s during the ’45 and was a close friend of the Pelham brothers (Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle), who between them virtually ran the Whig government during the 1745 rising. Pelham’s papers explicitly reveal that fear of the Jacobites was one of the prime motives in the unprecedented campaign against the Sussex smugglers.48 When the purge of the Hawkhurst gang finally ended, Horace Walpole (Sir Robert’s son) thought that their extirpation came about because Newcastle managed to ‘turn’ rival gangs in Sussex against the exiled Stuarts.49 Scholarly research has revealed that the mastermind behind the entire daring escapade of the raid on the Poole customs house that triggered the great crisis for the Hawkhurst gang was none other than the dauntless Comte de Lally.50

  Whereas the connection between smugglers and Jacobites is clear, that between poachers and the House of Stuart is not only turbid but has generated a variety of interpretations, mainly centring on the issue of the poachers of Berkshire and Hampshire (and especially the royal forest at Windsor) – the so-called Waltham Blacks, from their habit of blacking their faces while illegally taking deer and rabbits. There are three main views of the Blacks. One is that they were simply ordinary criminals and cut-throats whose importance has been blown out of all proportion. Another is that they were the ‘social criminals’ par excellence, defending customary rights to take game against a repressive and draconian legal system. The third is that the poachers were mainly crypto-Jacobites, and that this explains Walpole’s obsession with them in the 1720s.51 The existence of the Waltham Blacks gave Walpole the excuse to enact one of the most notoriously catch-all penal statutes in English legal history – the Waltham Black Act of 1722. Together with the Riot Act, this legislation gave Walpole and the Whigs virtually unlimited powers to proceed against suspected poachers, abolishing all pre-existing legal safeguards; the two statutes were the centrepieces of eighteenth-century England’s notorious ‘Bloody Code’. 1722 was also the year of one of the most complex Jacobite conspiracies, the Layer–Atterbury plot, and in Walpole’s mind the Black Act was probably mainly conceived as his ultimate deterrent against Jacobitism. Other Whig ministers thought the Jacobite threat overrated and perceived the greatest menace to be that from the ‘lower orders’. Much unnecessary academic debate has arisen concerning which of these two motives was primary, yet there is no law of excluded middle that prevents us from saying that both were important. The other impassioned debate concerns the identities of the Waltham Blacks: were they Jacobites, non-political or even anti-Jacobite? Certainly some Blacks bitterly objected to being called Jacobite,52 but that is not necessarily the end of the matter. As one historian of the subject has rightly commented, ‘The issue of Jacobitism is complicated and made immensely more so by the double talk of the times and by a press blanketed with censorship.’53 In Windsor the correlation between Blacks and Jacobites was particularly strong; and although the property of Jacobite sympathisers was sometimes attacked, it must be allowed that this could well have been camouflage. Walpole’s branding of all political opponents, of whatever hue and from whatever stratum, as Jacobite was a classic of crying wolf but, as in the original fable, there was a wolf: some of the Blacks were Jacobite sympathisers. There was in particular a ‘crossover’ between poaching, smuggling and acting as a pro-Stuart agent.54 The convergence of the
Waltham Blacks and Jacobitism was most clearly seen in March 1746, when Prince Charles Edward’s adventure was on its last legs in Scotland. Suddenly there was a re-emergence of the Black phenomenon, which Walpole thought he had destroyed forever in the 1720s.55

  Yet of all species of criminality, whether we regard the offences as crimes against humanity sub specie aeternitatis or the bogus delinquency of men who were really primitive rebels or ‘social criminals’, the manifestation most clearly linked with Jacobitism was rioting. It is a commonplace that eighteenth-century England was a turbulent society where rioting was rampant, and it has been argued that the rioters of that era, seldom mindless hooligans but usually ‘other directed’, were really the unleavened raw material that in a later era would have been processed through trade unionism or socialist politics.56 The link between rioting and popular Jacobitism is so intimate that in the period 1689–1715, the two phenomena virtually operated as synonyms.57 Even in 1716–44, when the Jacobite movement was supposedly moribund, and in 1747–54, when Charles Edward’s defeat was supposed to have killed it off for good, the level of convergence between rioting and Jacobitism was astonishing. It is important to be clear: not all post-1715 rioting was actuated by pro-Stuart sentiment or used Jacobitism as a legitimating cloak. Sometimes rioters and strikers refused to have their activities politicised, as in 1719 when a Stuart sympathiser tried to turn a weavers’ strike into an insurrection in support of the ’19 rising in Scotland.58 It is perhaps not so surprising that ‘between 1715 and 1722, popular Jacobitism disturbed the peace of almost every important town’.59 The aftermath of the ’45 in England showed clearly that, as all contemporaries felt, Jacobitism had not been dealt a death blow at Culloden (which is what most modern historians, with the benefit of hindsight, now allege). Pro-Jacobite riots and strikes were at a new high in 1747–54 and continued even into the first three years of the Seven Years War. In 1747–54 there were pro-Jacobite riots and demonstrations in all the following cities: Manchester, Lichfield, Oxford, Bristol, Newcastle, Walsall, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Leicester and Exeter.60 Staffordshire was always a Jacobite stronghold, and Lichfield saw major demonstrations in support of the exiled dynasty at both the by-election of 1747 and that of 1753. At Lichfield races in 1747 the overt contempt for the Hanoverian dynasty would certainly have merited prosecution under Hanoverian treason laws, which might have netted some very big fish, since both Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, supposedly the doyen of English and Welsh Jacobites, and the ‘Bonnie Prince’s’ confidant Sir James Harrington were present. Some claim that only the timorousness of the Tory baronets prevented a spontaneous Jacobite uprising there and then.61 On this occasion the Whig authorities decided to let sleeping dogs lie. They were not so accommodating in 1750 on the occasion of a serious riot in Walsall, when six troops of cavalry were needed to quell the disturbances.62 Yet the most amazing proof of the durability and survival of popular Jacobitism is provided by the outbreaks that occurred in England as late as 1756 and 1757, when the Hanoverian state was once more engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Ancien Régime France. Election riots in Tamworth (Staffordshire) in 1756, and in Harrogate and Halifax the following year had a clear Jacobite tincture. In 1756 food rioters in Warwickshire invoked ‘the Pretender’ and refused to disperse until ‘King James’ came to stop them.63 The ill-considered idea of rushing through a Militia Act in 1757 as additional security against foreign invasion inflamed a volatile population, particularly disgruntled after the poor showing of the nation in the first two years of the war, with severe setbacks at Minorca and Fort William Henry in North America. The Militia Act was perceived by ordinary people as a typically dishonest Whig wheeze to try to get the unwilling to fight overseas. Opposition was ferocious, and many localities expressly invoked the Jacobites as the legitimate sovereigns and guarantors of the legitimacy of their own disaffection.64 Not until the annus mirabilis of 1759, when Britain won a string of military victories worldwide, did the tide of Jacobite sentiment ebb.

  It should not be thought that popular Jacobitism manifested itself only in areas which the Hanoverians could subsume under the rubric of criminality. Certain regions evinced a persistent Jacobitism which only the defeat of the French fleet at Quiberon Bay in 1759 could extinguish entirely. One such area was Tyneside, where a new class of Jacobites had arisen in the shape of keelmen and colliers. Troops were used against the keelmen’s strike in Newcastle in 1710 and again in 1719, while there was a particularly bloody clash between the Hexham colliers and the army in 1761. These two groups were the most active of proletarian dissidents. The authorities could never quite make up their minds whether the colliers were actuated more by levelling or Jacobite principles.65 As for the keelmen, their grievances were legion: seasonal employment, erratic relief ‘charity’, being in bond to fitters but having coal owners as their masters, annual indentures, and much more.66 Small wonder that one of their favourite pastimes was proclaiming ‘King James’, which they continued to do as late as 1750. In that year, however, they slightly muddied the waters by proclaiming Charles Edward king (James did not die until 1766) and then confusingly adding: ‘King of England, France [italics mine] and Ireland’.67 A combination of keelmen’s action and a Jacobite rising could have paralysed Newcastle and cut the coal lifeline, as was feared in 1716–18 and could easily have happened in 1745 if the members of the prince’s council had heeded his advice and taken the eastern route for a showdown with Wade. In 1715 the keelmen’s rising had come within an ace of securing the city for the Jacobites and would have done so but for the ambivalence of the faint-hearted Jacobite Sir William Blackett.68 In 1745–6 the keelmen were again to the fore, and in April 1746 the city authorities had to act fast to nip in the bud a plot to spike the cannon in Newcastle and raise 1,500 recruits for the house of Stuart – and this was at the very moment of Culloden.69 What made the situation on Tyneside in 1745–6 so dangerous for the Hanoverians was that there is strong evidence of significant aristocratic and gentry support for the keelmen. Displaying the customary class prejudice, government sources ignored the fact that the heart and mind of the conspiracy was provided by the keelmen and preferred to concentrate on the ‘15 or 16 gentlemen’ actively involved in the plot.70

  Manchester was another urban centre with strong Jacobite sympathies, strong enough to provide 200 or so volunteers for Charles Edward’s Manchester regiment in 1745. As against those who claim that Jacobitism was a movement of benighted reaction, the evidence rather is that it appealed to the new kind of social grouping that arose with the northern textile industry; the officers of the Manchester regiment were weavers, drapers, dyers and mercers. Other members came from a new kind of middle class, dependent on the wealth and consumer tastes generated by the textile industry, apprentices to professions such as pharmacy, medicine and the law.71 It was a staple part of Whig propaganda to make ‘Jacobite’ and ‘Catholic’ synonymous, despite the fact that most Jacobite supporters, and even soldiers in Charles Edward’s army, were not Catholic, but Scots Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and non-juring members of the Church of England.72 It was not the shires, presided over by claret-swilling squires like those portrayed in Fielding’s Tom Jones (especially Squire Western) but the cities that provided Jacobitism’s cutting edge, proving over and over again that the conflation of ‘Jacobite’ with ‘reactionary’ simply will not hold water. Around 1715 the Jacobite propensity of the City of London was undoubted.73 The question that has been debated is how much of this sentiment survived in 1745? The conventional view is that London Jacobitism was still a considerable force in 1745, and the perception has not been seriously shaken.74 Certainly the Duke of Newcastle’s secret agent Dudley Bradstreet, who caused such havoc at the council at Derby on 5 December 1745 and was unusually well informed, was convinced that the mob would have joined the Stuart army once it reached London.75 And perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the likely scenario had Charles Edward reached London was provided by William Pitt the Elder, a fervent anti-Jacobite
: ‘If the rebels had made themselves masters of London, I question if the spirit of the population would not have taken a different turn.’76