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.
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.
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.
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 explicable 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.
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.
"to the rotten Orange"
Yours Aye
John
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