The King Over the Water: A Complete History of the Jacobites

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English common law determined the line of succession based on male-preference primogeniture, [33] [34] and Scots law applied the same principle in relation to the crown of Scotland. Events also highlighted the reality that a low level, ongoing insurgency was far more cost-effective for the French than a restoration, a form of warfare potentially devastating to the local populace. Ireland retained a separate Parliament until 1800, but the 1707 Union combined England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain.

It was only in 1744 that France, now embroiled against Britain in the War of the Austrian Succession, finally decided that a Stuart restoration was a ‘sound investment’. In 1690, over 200 clergy lost their positions, mostly in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, a strongly Episcopalian area since the 1620s.After the Act of Settlement, Jacobite propagandists deemphasised the purely legitimist elements in their writing and by 1745, active promotion of hereditary and indefeasible right was restricted largely to a few Scots Episcopalians such as Lords Pitsligo and Balmerino. In 1822 he arranged a pageantry of reinvented Scottish traditions for the visit of King George IV to Scotland. Jacobitism was perceived by contemporaries to be a significant military and political threat, [16] with invasions and uprisings in support of the exiled Stuarts occurring in 1689, 1715, 1719 and 1745.

Jacobitism's main ideological tenets drew on a political theology shared by Non-juring High church Anglicans, such as the Hancorne family, and Scots Episcopalians. In June 1747, his brother Henry became a Catholic priest; given that Charles had no legitimate heir, this was seen as tacit acceptance by their father James that the Jacobite cause was finished. The British authorities enacted a series of measures designed to prevent the Scottish Highlands being used for another rising. The King over the Water, though, is his best work because it plays to his gifts of being largely persuasive and consistently employing a briskness in pace, a clarity of style and a genius for capturing the character of those long dead, long-forgotten and, perhaps, never remembered. After he fell into financial difficulty during the French Revolution, he was granted a stipend by George III.

Other however argue that it is hard to discern "how far rhetorical Jacobitism reflected support for the Stuarts, as opposed to discontent with the status quo". By 1745, fewer than 1% of Scots were Catholic, restricted to the far north-west and a few noble families.

To cut an increasingly fraught story short, the rest of 1649 was a disaster – Montrose’s army having been defeated in April and the marquess fairly summarily executed – and 1650 was worse. Following Charles's death, Scottish Catholics swore allegiance to the House of Hanover, and resolved two years later to pray for King George by name. Tyrconnell ensured a predominantly Catholic electorate and candidates by issuing new borough charters, admitting Catholics into city corporations, and removing "disloyal members".After he ignored requests to leave, the French lost patience; in December 1748, he was briefly jailed before being deported. Later historians have characterised Jacobitism in a variety of ways, including as a revolutionary extension of anti-court ideology; an aristocratic reaction against a growth in executive power; feudal opposition to the growth of capitalism; or as a product of nationalist feeling in Scotland and Ireland.

Others argue riots were common in 18th-century urban areas and see them as a "series of ritualised clashes". About 1,000 men were recruited for the French and Spanish armies annually, many with a "tangible commitment to the Stuart cause". The succession after Anne (who would die without leaving surviving children) was effectively settled on the Protestant House of Hanover.But a definite memorial of Charles’s stay is his granting, in 1666, of the Privilegie der Visscherie, which allowed fifty Bruges ships to catch herring and other fish in British waters in perpetuity.