1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (review)

The Fifteen, perhaps the last feasible rebellion aimed at restoring a Catholic dynasty in Britain, has been overshadowed by the Forty-Five: since 1900, I count only two previous books devoted to the first; very many to the second. Charles Edward Stuart's quixotic gamble captured imaginations in generations shaped by Romanticism, but Jacobite studies are increasingly dominated by hard realists, by archival scholars, and by serious students of the counterfactual. Of this school, Szechi is one of the leaders.

Much of the interest of the Fifteen, he argues, arises not from dramatic battles lost and won, but from the historical sociology of the subject: "how and why the Jacobite communities of the British Isles and diaspora generated this rebellion and what innate social and cultural dynamics within those communities trended the rebellion towards its eventual outcome."

The social constituencies of rebellion were often religious. In England, the leaders were often Catholics: although some 2 per cent of the population overall, they were concentrated in certain areas, like the North West, where they might have reached 25 per cent. In Scotland, the Tories "were routinely Jacobite," normally because they were Episcopalians (between 30 and 40 per cent of the population in 1715), attentive even to the signs and portents that linked this world with the next. Despite the domination of the book by military detail, it is clear that the Scots Jacobites took the decision to rise since they were "inspired by their conviction that God was telling them to seize the moment."

When a Scots Jacobite army finally managed to march south down England's west coast, its leaders were dismayed to find that the only local recruits were Catholics rather than the High Churchmen they had expected. One of the most interesting of Szechi's arguments concerns the "hidden uprising" within the Fifteen, the rebellion of Northern English Catholics: "There really was a secret Catholic army lurking in the remote fastnesses of northern England, waiting for the opportune moment to strike." Yet this thesis is not further developed.

Jacobite psychology soon takes second place to Szechi's account of strategic questions. Explaining how Scots Jacobites took the final step to armed rebellion, Szechi argues, "A deep unreality had taken hold of the community," their frenzy talked up by mutual encouragement. In England, Szechi downplays the extent of Jacobite support. The Nonjurors he estimates at less than one per cent of the population; of backing within the Tory party, "Image manifestly overmatched substance." Having begun the book with some attention to religious denominations as the catchment areas for political allegiance, the larger part of Szechi's discussion leaves that theme to present a detailed picture of political resentment, high-political manoeuvre, and military events. "English Jacobitism by 1715 arose primarily from dissatisfaction with broad economic, social and political developments since 1688."

Yet this book is chiefly about the Scottish dimension. Szechi, a notable historian of Scotland, is most at home in the Scottish archives, and perhaps takes the Scottish rising as his yardstick: by comparison, what actually happened in Northern England is disparaged. The English Jacobites emerge from this account as disastrously under-prepared; they sought "a convenient miracle" in the form of foreign intervention. Ireland merits even less attention. It remains for other historians to recover the potential for revolution in those two countries, had a substantial invasion force dedicated to a Stuart restoration actually landed. But for Scotland and for the European dimension, Daniel Szechi has produced undoubtedly the standard modern study.