Jacobitism was the name for a political movement active from 1688 to the end of the 18th century. Its primary objective was the restoration of the exiled House of Stuart to the British throne. It was strongest in Ireland, the Western Scottish Highlands, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Wales, and Northern England.
In November 1688, the Glorious Revolution replaced James II of England with his daughter Mary II of England, and her husband William III. Jacobites argued that since kings held their office through divine right, the entire post-1688 regime was illegitimate. However, since Jacobitism served as an outlet for popular discontent, it contained a complex mix of ideas, many opposed by the Stuarts themselves.
In addition to the 1689–1691 Williamite War in Ireland and Jacobite rising of 1689 in Scotland, there were serious revolts in 1715, 1719 and 1745, French invasion attempts in 1708 and 1744, and numerous unsuccessful plots. While the 1745 Rising briefly seemed to threaten the Hanoverian monarchy, its defeat in 1746 ended Jacobitism as a serious political movement.
Political background
Jacobite ideology originated with James VI and I, who in 1603 became the first monarch to rule all three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Its basis was divine right, which emphasised the crown's descent by hereditary right, and represented an attempt by James to forestall controversy over his appointment by Elizabeth I as her successor. However, his concept of personal rule eliminated the need for Parliaments, and required political and religious union, concepts widely unpopular in all three kingdoms, but especially England.
As the first step towards union, James began standardising religious practices between the Church of England, Scotland and Ireland. After his death in 1625, this policy was continued by his son Charles I, whose assertion of Personal Rule in 1629 and enforcement of reforms on the Church of England led to a political crisis. Similar measures in Scotland caused the 1639–1640 Bishops' Wars, and installation of a Covenanter government.
This crisis was exacerbated by the October 1641 Irish Rebellion, a response by the Catholic Irish nobility to land confiscation, loss of political control, anti-Catholic measures and economic decline. Intended as a bloodless coup, its leaders quickly lost control, leading to atrocities on both sides. In May, a Covenanter army landed in Ulster to support Scots settlers. Although Charles and Parliament both supported raising an army to suppress the Rebellion, neither trusted the other with its control; these tensions ultimately led to the outbreak of the First English Civil War in August 1642.
In 1642, the Catholic Confederacy representing the Irish insurgents proclaimed allegiance to Charles, but the Stuarts were an unreliable ally, since concessions in Ireland cost them Protestant support in all three kingdoms. In addition, the Adventurers' Act, approved by Charles in March 1642, funded suppression of the revolt by confiscating land from Irish Catholics, much of it owned by members of the Confederacy. The result was a three-way contest between the Confederacy, Royalist forces under the Protestant Duke of Ormond, and a Covenanter-led army in Ulster. The latter were increasingly at odds with the government in London, and after the Execution of Charles I in January 1649, Ormond combined these factions to resist the 1649-to-1652 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.
In 1650, Charles II repudiated his alliance with the Confederacy in return for Scottish military support, and Ormond went into exile. Defeat resulted in the mass confiscation of Catholic and Royalist land, and its re-distribution among Parliamentarian soldiers and Protestant settlers. The three kingdoms were combined into the Commonwealth of England, only regaining their separate status following the 1660 Stuart Restoration.
Charles II's reign was dominated by the expansionist policies of Louis XIV of France, seen as a threat to Protestant Europe. When his brother and heir James announced his conversion to Catholicism in 1677, an attempt was made to bar him from the English throne. Nevertheless, he became king in February 1685 with widespread support from the Protestant majorities in England and Scotland. Accepting a Catholic monarch was seen as preferable to excluding the 'natural heir', and Protestant dissident rebellions in England and Scotland were quickly suppressed. It was also viewed as temporary, since James was 52, his second marriage was childless after 11 years, and his Protestant daughter Mary was heir.
His religion made James popular among Irish Catholics, whose position had not improved under his brother. Catholic land ownership had fallen from 90% in 1600 to 22% in 1685, partially due to Catholic landlords converting to the Protestant Church of Ireland. After 1673, a series of proclamations deprived Catholic gentry of the right to bear arms or hold public office. The Catholic Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1687, and began building a Catholic establishment that could survive James. Fearing a short reign, Tyrconnell moved at a speed that destabilised all three kingdoms.
When the English and Scottish Parliaments refused to remove civil restrictions on Catholics and Non-Conformists, James dismissed them and used the Royal Prerogative to force his measures through. These actions re-opened disputes over religion, rewarded the Protestant dissidents who rebelled in 1685, and undermined his own supporters. It also ignored the impact of the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked tolerance for French Protestants and created an estimated 400,000 refugees, 40,000 of whom settled in London. Two events turned discontent into rebellion, the first being the birth of James's son on 10 June 1688, which created the prospect of a Catholic royal dynasty. The second was James's prosecution of the Seven Bishops, which seemed to go beyond tolerance for Catholicism into actively attacking the Church of England. Their acquittal on 30 June caused widespread rejoicing, and destroyed James's political authority.
In 1685, many had feared civil war if James were bypassed. By 1688, even his chief minister, the Earl of Sunderland, felt only his removal could prevent it. Sunderland secretly coordinated an Invitation to William, assuring Mary and her husband, William of Orange (who was also James's nephew), of English support for armed intervention. William landed in Brixham on 5 November with 14,000 men; as he advanced, James's army deserted, and he went into exile on 23 December. In February 1689, the English Parliament appointed William and Mary joint monarchs of England, while the Scots followed suit in March.
Most of Ireland was still controlled by Tyrconnell, where James landed on 12 March 1689 with 6,000 French troops, but the 1689-to-1691 Williamite War in Ireland highlighted two recurring trends. For James and his Stuart successors, the main prize was to regain England, while the primary French objective was to tie down British resources, rebellions in Scotland and Ireland being seen as the cheapest option. Elections in May 1689 produced the first Irish Parliament with a Catholic majority since 1613. It repealed the Cromwellian land seizures, confiscated land from Williamites, and proclaimed Ireland a 'distinct kingdom from England', measures subsequently annulled after defeat in 1691.
A Jacobite rising in Scotland achieved some initial success but was ultimately suppressed. Several days after the Irish Jacobites were defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, victory at Beachy Head gave the French temporary control of the English Channel. James returned to France to urge an immediate invasion of England, but the Anglo-Dutch fleet soon regained maritime supremacy, and the opportunity was lost.
The Irish Jacobites and their French allies were finally defeated at the battle of Aughrim in 1691, and the Treaty of Limerick ended the war in Ireland; future risings on behalf of the exiled Stuarts were confined to England and Scotland. The Act of Settlement 1701 barred Catholics from the English throne, and when Anne became the last Stuart monarch in 1702, her heir was her Protestant cousin Sophia of Hanover, not her Catholic half-brother James. Ireland retained a separate Parliament until 1800, but the 1707 Union combined England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Anne viewed this as the unified Protestant kingdom which her predecessors had failed to achieve.
The exiled Stuarts continued to agitate for a return to power, based on the support they retained within the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Doing so required external help, most consistently supplied by France, while Spain backed the 1719 Rising. While talks were also held at different times with Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, these never produced concrete results. Although the Stuarts were useful as a lever, their foreign backers generally had little interest in their restoration.
Ideology
Historian Frank McLynn identifies seven primary drivers in Jacobitism, noting that while the movement contained "sincere men [...] who aimed solely to restore the Stuarts", it "provided a source of legitimacy for political dissent of all kinds". Establishing the ideology of active participants is complicated by the fact that "by and large, those who wrote most did not act, and those who acted wrote little, if anything." As a result, historians have taken different views on its primary driving force. These include being an aristocratic rejection of an increasingly unitary state, feudal opposition to capitalism, or Scots and Irish nationalism.
Jacobitism drew on elements of a political theology shared by mostly non-juring Tory elements within the Church of England, and members of the Scottish Episcopal Church. These were the divine right of kings, their accountability to God, not man or Parliament; secondly, that monarchy was a divine institution; thirdly, legitimism, the crown's descent by indefeasible dynastic right, which could not be overturned or annulled; and lastly the scriptural injunction of passive obedience and non-resistance, even towards monarchs of which the individual subject might disapprove.
Jacobite propagandists argued such divinely sanctioned authority was the main moral safeguard of society, while its absence led to party strife. They claimed the 1688 Revolution had enabled political corruption and allowed selfish opportunists, such as Whigs, religious dissenters, and foreigners, to take control of the government and oppress the common people.
However, views on the 'correct' balance of rights and duties between monarch and subject varied, and Jacobites attempted to distinguish between 'arbitrary' and 'absolute' power. Non-juring Church of Ireland clergyman Charles Leslie was perhaps the most extreme divine right theorist, but even he argued the monarch was bound by "his oath to God, as well as his promise to his people" and "the laws of justice and honour". Jacobite pamphlets often suggested domestic issues were divine punishment on the British for rejecting their rightful king, although after 1710 this was blamed specifically on the Whigs.
These views were not held by all Jacobites, while many Whigs argued the post 1688 succession was also "divinely ordained". After the 1701 Act of Settlement, Jacobite propagandists deemphasised the purely legitimist elements in their writing and by 1745, active promotion of hereditary and indefeasible right was restricted largely to a few Scots Episcopalians such as Lords Pitsligo and Balmerino.
Instead they began to focus on populist themes such as opposition to a standing army, political corruption, and social injustice. By the 1750s, Charles himself promised triennial parliaments, disbanding the army and legal guarantees on freedom of the press. Such tactics broadened Jacobite appeal but also carried risks, since they could always be effectively neutered by a government prepared to offer similar concessions; indeed, the Triennial Act and the lapse of the Licensing of the Press Act meant that regular Parliaments and (relative) press freedom were already in place after 1695. The ongoing Stuart focus on England and regaining a united British throne led to tensions with their broader-based supporters in 1745, when the primary goal of most Scots Jacobites was ending the 1707 Union. This meant that following victory at Prestonpans in September, they preferred to negotiate, rather than invade England as Charles wanted.