Jacobitism in History

Since Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1931, the end of such history has been frequently – if prematurely – proclaimed. Whig history is essentially a history which conditions its interpretation of the past by regarding it primarily as an explanatory prelude to the present: it is thus quintessentially a history written to glorify victors and marginalize losers, in the process converting a teleological premiss into a narrative which homogenizes distinction, difference and opposition into a simple central story (at its most simple, How We Became Top Nation) and closes down other avenues of enquiry by scorn, silence or ad hominem argument. In the United Kingdom, confronted with a multinational state, it has, in Gilles Deleuze's terms, sought to confirm the genesis of 'a unitary state apparatus' (in Ireland, the case is paradoxically opposite: Irish Jacobitism disrupts the national story by introducing apparent loyalty to a British dynasty).

This is often true of even recent and distinguished historical work which appears to transcend the Whig tradition. Linda Colley's Britons (1992), for example, stresses the achievement of a common Britishness through Protestantism, in the process eliding the deep divisions between the established churches and dissenters, and totally ignoring both the patriot parliament of Anglican Ireland and the radical nationalism of the United Irish Presbyterians. Britons proved to be an immensely popular study because it told a simple story – who we are and how we became us – in an apparently more sophisticated guise than its nineteenth-century predecessors. Silence about the realities of the past as it was experienced by its contemporaries is a very important part of Whig history, whether it is the 'enormous condescension of posterity' to the poor exclaimed against by E.P. Thompson or the alternative religious, political and cultural territories of high culture which are annexed and suppressed in the creation of the 'mythos' of history. The 'mythos' has dealt with Jacobitism through the repetition of romantic gestures and images concerning it, by silencing its ideology through sentiment or scorn, by ignoring much of the evidence for its importance as a movement, and by repeating the mantra of foundational modernity, that Jacobitism was backward, marginal and doomed, and that the new British eighteenth century was 'enlightened' (Enlightenment Jacobites such as Andrew Ramsay are one of the casualties of this assumption), 'improved' and modern. Jacobitism is the black sheep of the British family: romantic, glamorous, but on the edge in every sense, out on a limb or a 'fringe', not an ancestor.

In 1971, Sir George Clark could still describe the 1745 Rising as 'a year of Romantic vicissitudes'; in 1973 Charles Chevenix Trench described the Jacobite soldiers as 'as alien … as a war party of Iroquois'. Sir Fitzroy Maclean described the Rising as a 'Highland' 'raid'. Paul Langford, writing in the standard Oxford history in 1989, passes on without comment the view that 1745 saw 'the preservation of England against a Highland rabble', while Linda Colley herself tells us in Britons (1992) that 'only the poorer Highland clans ... rallied to the Young Pretender'.

There are dozens of other examples which are equally or more dismissive. In 2007, the new Culloden Battlefield Centre provides an interpretative facility which does more justice than in the past to the actual arms the Jacobites carried, but the accompanying video still shows hairy Highlanders waving swords, with nary a gun in sight. The view of the Jacobites as quasi-colonial primitives is persistent, indeed in popular terms remains dominant. It has nothing to do with the 39 battalions of foot, 9 horse squadrons (6 active) and approximately 85 cannon deployed in 1745 to challenge the Hanoverian dynasty and the British state. In almost every surrender or capture of Jacobite arms recorded, guns heavily predominate, but in the case of Jacobitism, facts are chiels that ding all too readily. In the Year of the Prince, the last centrally Scottish army mounted serious military opposition to the British government. The seriousness of Jacobitism is ignored because the power of the threat undermines the story of British unity. In the past, this was easy for British historians; in the era of a serious Jacobite history based on the documents it is more difficult, but the evidence for its ideological (as opposed to historical) importance is the zeal with which it continues to be attempted.

Murray Pittock
Bradley Professor of English Literature
University of Glasgow
M.Pittock @ englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Go to page 1. Or view the entire article.