Re: Jacobites

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@quarterman.org>]

>As I'm in the mood here is a reply I posted a few weeks back. Its in reply to 
>discussion about the Jacobite risings .The e-mail didn't appear on the list.

There's no record of it being submitted to the list.
Sounds like a mail problem somewhere.

>Some on the list and many others have swallowed the Whig history of the
> last two hundred years. This is a history which has tried and succeeded to
> both romanticise and marginalise the Jacobite movement. Its been portrayed
> as the poor Celt heroically and yet ultimately doomed to failure taking on
> the established regime. This suited the Whigs with there policy of divide
> and conquer make it all tartan and Celtic hero's and it will gradually
> wither into insignificance.

The Old Pretender was recognized by Louis XIV, and supported by the French
in Ireland and somewhat in Scotland.  One could argue that what really
killed the Jacobite cause was the Act of Union of 1707, and that what
caused the Scots to agree to that Union was the failure of the Darien
settlements, on which they had spent so much that the commercial advantages
of union with England seemed more attractive than supporting Queen Anne's
Catholic half-brother to succeed her.

> Only since the 1980's has proper academic research began to reveal the
> significant international, and political backing that the movement had. It
> was not just a few nostalgic Scots dreaming of restoring "Bonnie Charlie"
> but a movement combining both anti Hanovarian, ant Whig, anti Union,
> Nationalist and Pro Stuart factions. The movement very nearly succeeded.

And for that matter William of Orange might easily have failed to land
in England if not for the weather that held off the English fleet.
History turns on curious chances.

>The middle ground has moved and we must now endorse the thesis of the
>importance of Jacobitism without subscribing to a romantic reaction or
>antiquarian impracticability. From once being a remote , isolated and hardly e
>xplicable discourse, Jacobitism has come into focus as one side of a coin that
> has is opposite as the orthodox Whig discourse. 
>The real achievement of modern research has been to remove Jacobitism from the
>misty glens and tartan clad nostalgic ideal to the analogue of Whig ideology.

Are you sure the tartan nostalgia isn't more a concoction of Sir Walter Scott
than of historians, Whig or ortherwise?  For example, the current British
royal web pages about Jacobites never mention tartan once:
 http://www.royal.gov.uk/history/scotland/jacobite.htm

>I fear the damage done over the last 200 years to our comprehension of the
>Jacobite movement will take a long time to change.
>
>We must put away our tartan tinted spectacles and research the real history of
> the Jacobite movement and not the history that others want us to accept.

Tell us more about this recent research.

>"to the rotten Orange"
>
>Yours Aye
>
>John

John S. Quarterman <jsq@quarterman.org>
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