by Frank McLynn
The Hanoverians deeply feared the urban crowd and the secret political sympathies of the toiling masses and knew there was no love there for them. The government realised that if the status quo was in danger from the Stuarts, ordinary people could not be relied on to defend it – indeed that they would probably join the Jacobites once their cause seemed in the ascendant. For this reason the defence of England in 1745 against the Highland army was extraordinarily difficult.77 The militia was considered an unreliable body to call out, as it might take the wrong side; the political danger of this and thus the inoperability of the militia as a defence bastion is yet another reason why the ’45 rebellion could have been successful.78 In Scotland the militia idea was always opposed because disarming laws were thought essential against Jacobites. Such was the apprehension about popular Jacobitism that it was considered sinister that the militia idea had been popular in those areas where Charles Edward received support.79 The Hanoverians therefore faced a dilemma: either the militia could not be called out because of local reluctance or obstructionism during the rising or, if it was called out, it was to be feared as a potential Jacobite fifth column.80 Faced with all this, the only tactic for the Whigs to adopt was classic ‘divide and rule’: somehow to foment the masses against the Jacobites. As one pro-government correspondent in Staffordshire in 1745 put it: ‘I apprehend no tumult unless the common people should attack the papists, which they show some inclination to do, and should that ungovernable monster make the first move, it would be prudent to direct his head towards the cause of these our troubles.’81 Yet in most government quarters the fear was not so much that the common people would bring about a Jacobite restoration by their own spontaneous efforts as that local disorders would create chaos, allowing the gentry to rise and/or a foreign power to invade. In some ways what the Hanoverians feared most was not so much hostility from pro-Jacobite crowds as the apathy and indifference of the mass of the people as to who won the dynastic contest; this was particularly in evidence during the ’45 as, despite all the loyal proclamations, the local volunteer forces simply melted away as the Jacobite army marched further south.82 Indirect evidence for the apprehension entertained about the possible reactions of the ordinary man (and woman) to the Jacobite risings comes in the plethora of pamphlets directed to this class in 1745.83 The anonymous Drapier’s Letter of 1745 (which attempted to ape the more famous Drapier’s Letters of Jonathan Swift) contained some first-class propaganda directed at an audience of ‘Labourers, Farmers, Artificers and Tradesmen’, of which a few excerpts will suffice to convey the flavour. The author argues that the issue between Jacobite and Hanoverian should be a matter of concern for the gentry and aristocracy alone, and that for the working man to take part or show interest would be to manifest ‘false consciousness’:
What are the poorer sort the better all this while? Will the labourer get one farthing a day more? Will the farmer’s rent be allowed? Will the artificer be more employed or better paid? Will the tradesman get more customers or have fewer scores in his book? … If the poor labourer, when all is over, is to be a labourer still and earn his groat a day, as hardly as he did before, I cannot find why he should fancy it worth his while to venture a leg or an arm and the gallows too into the bargain, to be just where he set out … It well deserves your thought whether it is worth your while to beggar yourselves and your family that the man’s name upon the throne be James instead of George.84
Such propaganda would have been otiose if there were genuinely nothing to fear from popular Jacobitism.
The view, so widely held that until recently it has almost been a dogma among historians, that Culloden finished off the Jacobite movement for good, cannot be sustained and has recently been subjected to devastating analysis. To sum up: Ireland and Scotland remained in turmoil until Hawke’s victory at Quiberon in 1759, with Scotland in some ways even more pro-Jacobite than in 1745; the French planned to invade England with 100,000 men as against the 15,000 in 1745–6; the working classes had still not decisively shifted their allegiance to Methodism or the new radicalism of John Wilkes; and, as has been demonstrated above, large sections of urban England remained disaffected.85 It has been convincingly demonstrated that one in four of the aristocracy and gentry under George I and George II harboured Jacobite sympathies.86 Moreover the attachment to the House of Stuart by the gentry was not simply empty posturing, even though the record of the English Jacobite grandees, such as Lord Barrymore, Sir John Hynde Cotton and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn was not impressive.87 The most formidable of these was supposedly Williams Wynn, but history has been kind to the Welsh baronet, with no less than three separate explanations put forward to explain his non-appearance in the field with his feudal levies on Charles Edward’s behalf. One is simply that by pure bad luck he was in London when the prince invaded, was being tagged by government agents and could not get away.88 Another is that he sent a letter to Charles Edward at Derby, promising to join him with his men, but that the messenger got to Derby on 8 December, two days after the Highlanders had begun their retreat. Very convenient, the sceptic may mutter but, surprisingly Williams Wynn has found historians to believe him.89 Yet a third explanation is that Williams Wynn has been much maligned but was actually a victim of the yawning gap between the Whigs (representing financial interests) and the Tories (the landed interest). According to this view, which was circulated by Aeneas MacDonald, one of the Seven Men of Moidart, it so happened that when the prince crossed into England, Sir Watkins had just £200 in ready cash; his wealth was vast but his liquidity was low. MacDonald, always a treacherous acolyte of the prince, alleged that if Charles Edward had given the Welsh grandee adequate notice, he could have raised, not £200 but the £120,000 he had spent on the previous two general elections.90 However, it is important not to extrapolate from the disappointing behaviour of the three most important English Jacobite nabobs to the behaviour of the Tory gentry as a whole. Once again, more recent research establishes the bulk of them as sound, true and loyal to the Jacobite cause.91
Wherever one looks in 1745 one sees evidence of deep discontent with a dangerously narrowly based Whig/Hanoverian elite. It was part of Charles Edward’s revolutionary acumen to intuit how deep the malaise went, and it was not his fault that more was not made of this. To an extent he was right in his frequent fulminations against his father and the older generation of Jacobites, who tended to have a naive faith in the workings of providence whereby, in the case of the 1733 Excise Act, say, popular tumult was somehow supposed spontaneously to lead to a Stuart restoration without any effort on their part.92 The potential for an organic working-class Jacobitism did exist: the agitation against the Excise Act, the Porteous riots of 1737, the turnpike riots in Bristol and Hereford, to say nothing of the specific grievances of keelmen, colliers, weavers and miners already mentioned, could all have been mobilised and turned to advantage by skilful Jacobite agents. Sadly, men of the right calibre were usually lacking and, even when they were available, they did not receive enough encouragement from ‘King James’ and the other grandees.
Partly it was snobbery directed against too close an association with the lower orders and a fastidious distaste for the more unscrupulous methods sometimes proposed. For example, James specifically vetoed plans to counterfeit currency, to clip coins or indulge in other forms of ‘coining’ – which would, ironically, have produced a double charge of high treason under the Bloody Code, since the two offences expressly identified there as treason were denial of the validity of the Protestant Succession and tampering with coinage.93 Mainly, though, it was the absurd belief that revolutions can spontaneously generate themselves; James and his henchmen forgot the oldest wisdom of all – God helps those who help themselves.94 It does not pay to be anachronistic about revolution and the Jacobites. The organisation of a large number of men in the service of a proscribed organisation – when Tory ranks were honeycombed with spies and the Hanoverians had all manner of extra-legal weapons at their disposal, such as general
warrants and automatic suspension of Habeas Corpus – with the concomitant requirement of secrecy, was a tall order even for quasi-feudal lords like Sir Watkin Williams Wynn.95 This is quite apart from the fact that the kind of revolutionary consciousness which could direct a mass movement did not appear in Europe until the French Revolution. It would therefore be unreasonable and anachronistic to fault the Jacobites for not doing what it would not have occurred to anyone in the mid-eighteenth century to do.96 Yet these arguments cannot be pushed too far. Charles Edward proved that an alliance between the Stuarts and the dispossessed was not chimerical when, in 1759, hoping for a successful French invasion of Britain, he produced a manifesto of 107 clauses. This was a thoughtful tour d’horizon of the policies to be followed by a restored Stuart dynasty and had been written in close consultation with John Holker, ex-Jacobite officer in the Manchester regiment, founder of the French textile industry and currently the French inspector-general in charge of foreign manufactures.97 Much of the manifesto deals with subjects traditionally dear to Jacobite ideology – the corruption of the Hanoverians, the national debt, the issue of standing armies, even the prince’s own conversion to Protestantism in 1750. The truly original part of the document deals with socio-economic problems. Simplifying, we may say that Charles Edward threatened to dethrone the financial capitalism rampant in England since 1689 with a moderated industrial capitalism, centred on textiles, fisheries, the linen industries and export-led growth. Finally the prince ended with a flourish. He made the revolutionary promise to put the poor and needy under the protection of the State – a form of welfarism that would not be seen in England for another 200 years.
Is not the poor in a starving condition? But what makes poor but a neglected education of youth, or heavy taxes? Are these poor cared for, notwithstanding the large fund raised upon the nation for that purpose? … We shall take under the protection of the state the children of poor parents, whereby the latter may be encouraged to propagate, and the former be properly cared for and become as by nature they are intended, the fountain of wealth in an industrious nature.98
That the ’45 posed a revolutionary threat to eighteenth-century Britain should already be clear, making the rising that year an obvious candidate for a close encounter of rank one. James Francis and Charles Edward (his regent in the case of a restoration and, probably, soon-to-be king after James’s likely abdication) would have had debts to pay off and promises to keep, both to the gentry and to the toiling classes. Not only would the masses necessarily have been coopted in a way not seen hitherto, but there would be a clean sweep of the elite, with both the members of the prince’s council and the English Jacobites like Williams Wynn, Cotton and Barrymore jockeying for positions. There could thus be no question of a mere transfer of power or the continuity of the old elites. There could be no Marlboroughs (military victor under the Stuarts at Sedgemoor and later under Queen Anne at Blenheim), of Benjamin Franklin (trusted British agent, then cutting-edge ideologue of the US constitution) making a smooth transition into the new regime. The more problematical issue is whether the entire direction of British economic and foreign policy would have changed under the restored Stuarts and, thus, whether the entire course of British history would have been different. To an extent we are faced with the head-on collision of historical inevitability and counterfactual history. Would the Stuarts have been compelled by Parliament to carry on much as before or would they have had the power to take the nation in a new direction, possibly ending up like Switzerland or the Scandinavian countries? Unavoidably, then, we have to ask whether the rise of the British Empire was inevitable, with an unstoppable momentum beyond human agency.99 Any such argument has to be carried out with great care and nuance, steering a middle course between the reefs of ‘what if’ history and the wilder shores of historical inevitability. For example, it was a favourite motif of John Buchan that the restoration of his beloved Bonnie Prince Charlie would have meant that the loss of the American colonies would not have happened. Better by far is the famous argument by Tom Paine in his 1776 pamphlet Commonsense that for all kinds of reasons the separation of the American colonies from the mother country and their establishment as an independent nation-state was inevitable in an overdetermined way.100 The question of whether Britain and France were doomed to fight each other in the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ (1689–1815) is a fascinating one, all the more intriguing since it was the very issue posed by the French Ministers of Louis XV’s council in 1745–6 when they debated the nature and extent of their support for Charles Edward’s allegedly rash adventure.101
Jacobitism was always linked in Whig and Hanoverian minds with support for their commercial rivals: the establishment of the short-lived Ostend Company (1717–31) by the Austrian emperor, for example, was regarded as a device by the Jacobites to undermine the Protestant Succession.102 It was widely felt that the Stuarts could be restored only with French help, and that if a restoration was accomplished, the French would inevitably exact as their price commercial privileges which would lead to their victory over England in the worldwide struggle for economic supremacy. After all, it was reasoned, the early Stuarts had ended the ‘inevitable’ conflict with Spain, until this was revived by Cromwell in the 1650s, and the later Stuarts had both preserved pro-French policies (France having displaced Spain as England’s putative Public Enemy Number One after the great victory over the Spanish tercios at Rocroi in 1643) for political, fiscal and religious reasons, regardless of the commercial interests at stake.103 With the exception of the East India Company, which favoured trade with France as it needed French bullion, all sections of the Whig mercantile interest were opposed to France and identified her as the natural enemy. Anti-French policies were needed precisely because France was the chief competitor for world trade, and the idea of a commercial treaty with France after 1713 had been repudiated by Parliament through an alliance of Whigs and Hanoverian Tories.104 The principal prize in the global struggle was perceived on both sides to be the Spanish American colonies.105 As early as the War of Spanish Succession, Louis XV had made it clear that he intended to exclude English merchants from the entire Spanish Empire and to open it to French traders. But with the Treaty of Utrecht and its asiento provisions, the English seemed to have gained the upper hand in the struggle for the possession of the decaying Spanish Empire in the Americas. If the Jacobites were successful in restoring their king with French aid, France would certainly demand as a quid pro quo that the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht be undone.106 The Hanoverian pamphlet, A Calm Address, argued that if the Pretender succeeded in regaining the throne of England. he would be bound on principles of gratitude to cede to the King of Spain the important ports and fortresses of Gibraltar and Fort Mahon (Minorca). France would have to be given back the recently taken Cape Breton and in addition would demand the reduction, if not outright repeal, of the various heavy customs duties on French goods, especially wine; this would damage both the Portuguese trade and British commerce.107 The close identification of the exiled Stuarts with France lost their dynasty considerable support. At the trials of the defeated Jacobites in 1746, much bitterness was directed at their alleged treason in betraying English interests to the French.108 Sadly for the Stuarts, many French ministers and advisers doubted a Stuart king would be able to force through such concessions against a recalcitrant Parliament, and that the English projection of future benefits to France was chimerical. This was why many of them – the Duc de Noailles, the Comte de Maurepas and the foreign policy adviser Pierre André O’Heguerty advocated that Louis XV should strive to make Charles Edward king of Scotland or Ireland, but not of England, thus allying them with the clan leaders and against the wishes of the prince.109
Uncertainty over land and real estate is all but definitional of a revolutionary situation – it was, after all, worry and concern over this issue that swung the peasantry and the owners of so-called ‘national property’ (i.e. that confiscated from émigrés) away from revolution and into the
dictatorial embrace of Napoleon. Here again we see the revolutionary implications of the ’45, for the question of land titles was one of the hidden but profound issues in oligarchic opposition to Jacobitism in England.110 Many of the eighteenth-century Whig families, the Hollises, Pelhams, Russells (and dozens of other aristocratic families), enjoyed property which had once belonged to the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation – the so-called ‘Abbey Lands’. Naturally, they were fearful about what might happen to these lands if the Stuarts were restored. There even existed a special law, praemunire, second only to high treason itself in gravity, aimed at the pope and all his works. One of the factors constituting a praemunire was ‘to molest the possessors of Abbey Lands’.111 In the seventeenth century the political theorists Sir William Temple and James Harrington had drawn attention to this as a potentially contentious legacy in English politics, an unwelcome legacy from the Reformation.112 In 1687 James II went so far as to order his favourite physician Nathaniel Johnston to write a tract reassuring owners of ‘Abbey Lands’ about his intentions, even if the King of England (he presumably meant himself) were to return permanently to the Catholic Church.113 It is usually considered that these Whig fears were largely chimerical. It was already 200 years since the dissolution of the monasteries, and the ‘Abbey Lands’ had been sold and resold, divided and subdivided many times since. Even if the Jacobites had wanted to restore them, the task would have been impossible. But what counts most in a revolutionary situation is perception, not reality; what mattered was not that such fears were irrational but that they existed and could be exploited to make political capital. Nobody was unaware of the immense significance of the land issue to the outcome of the dynastic struggle between Stuart and Hanoverian. It was said that some Jacobite magnates drew back from outright rebellion in 1715 because of worries on this score.114 Louis XV’s agent James Butler pointed out in 1743 in his report to the French court that Cumberland was a county totally committed to the Hanoverians because former Crown lands had been alienated to the local aristocracy. Great play was made of the issue of ‘Abbey Lands’ during the 1745 rising.115 That masterly propagandist Henry Fielding devoted a good deal of attention to it in his Serious Address.116 Horace Walpole remarked to Sir Horace Mann in September 1745 that, with the Young Pretender already in Scotland, priests would by then have set out from Rome in expectation of repossessing the ‘Abbey Lands’.117 Such was the emphasis placed on this issue in government propaganda that Charles Edward himself wrote from Perth in September 1745 in great indignation that the Whigs should have attempted to smear him by imputing to him the intention of restoring Church land.118
