Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History by Annabel Patterson (review)

87 gade abroad, conveyed by privateers on the coast often manned by IrishJacobites. Historians have dismissed the large numbers of recruits mentioned in contemporary correspondence, but Mr. Ó Ciardha persuades us that these numbers prompted ‘‘the more coercive aspects of the Protestant Ascendancy legislation .’’ Before 1715, it was reported that 17,000 Irish were in the service of France and that recruits werebeingpromised that they would return to Ireland in a year. In 1760, an Irish clergyman claimed that 450,000 Irishmen had died in the service of France since the 1690s, a number disputed by a modern historian, who puts the figure at 48,000. Even this number is impressive. No insurrection occurred in Ireland in 1745, Mr. Ó Ciardha explains, due to the famine of 1741, which ‘‘wiped out a quarter of the Catholics .’’ Among those captured in Scotland , the rank and file seemed ‘‘overwhelmingly Irish-born.’’ In 1685, a close tie was forged between theStuartsandtheCatholicChurchinIreland when Pope Innocent XI gave James II the right to nominate bishops. This right descended to his son, so that of 129 appointees to Irish sees from 1687 to 1765, all but five would be appointed by the exiled Stuarts. Aware of this tie, the Dublin government tended to respond to Jacobitism with anti-Catholic laws. When an invasion was in the offing, ‘‘the customary witch-hunt against the Catholic hierarchy, friars, and popish priests’’ would ensue. In 1745, faced with the prospect of a Franco-Jacobite invasion, the government offered bounties for the capture of priests, monks, Jesuits, and bishops. Catholic priests also ‘‘bore the brunt of government retaliation’’ for the rapparees, who could be seen as either a ‘‘Jacobite rearguard,’’or abunch of‘‘bandits ’’ bringing down vengeance on other Catholics. Mr. Ó Ciardha cites ‘‘reliable sources’’ from both sides who report that the government sometimes used the pretext of hunting down rapparees to cover ‘‘the systematic slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Irish Catholics .’’ Mr. Ó Ciardha extensively covers the Irish-Protestant Jacobites in Dublin. These High Church Protestants were typified by Dr. Charles Leslie and the Duke of Ormonde, both of whom joined the Stuarts in exile, and they included aristocrats , clergymen, literary men, printers, and some students of Trinity College (who once defaced a statue of King William ). A Dublin mob would celebrate the Pretender’s birthday by roaring, ‘‘High Church and Ormonde,’’ and the High Churchman Thomas Sheridan, a friend of Swift, was stripped of his chaplaincy for giving a sermon on George I’s anniversary on the text, ‘‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’’ High Church Jacobites tended to be anti-Dutch and antiPresbyterian , and tended to minimize the danger from Irish Catholics. The assembled evidence shows that Archbishop William King had good reasons to suspect Swift of sympathizing with the Jacobites . The Stuart claimant received a copy of Gulliver’s Travels from Michael McDonogh, Catholic bishop of Kilmore, and was assured that Swift’s satires were helping his cause. Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY ANNABEL PATTERSON. Nobody’sPerfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History. New Haven and London: Yale, 2002. Pp. xii ⫹ 288. $27.50. Ms. Patterson believes in progress and therefore in ‘‘a ‘whig interpretation of 88 history,’’’ ‘‘which allows us to acknowledge that modern society is better than pre-modern—more comfortable, more efficient, and infinitely more just to the majority of its members.’’ I am not sure she quite grasps what Butterfield meant by the ‘‘whig interpretation of history,’’ but she unquestionably studies the past with at least one eye—if not more than one—on the present; this leads her not only to writeanachronisticallyabout‘‘the problems of liberals’’ in the reigns of Charles II, George II, and George III, but to describe Thomas Erskine as an ‘‘animal-rights activist.’’ That, however, is the least of my concerns . Innocent of reference to Caroline Robbins’s seminal study The EighteenthCentury Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (1959), Ms. Patterson argues that, ‘‘when considering the origins of the liberal and social thought that today we take for granted, our...