The Jacobite period has been strongly and systematically misremembered within historiography in order to emphasize a secure framework for the development of a British habitus. A history which threatened the very existence of the state has been presented in terms which are designed to foreground it as a foundational part of the success of that state, technologically, financially, culturally and militarily. Michel Foucault identified as the loi de rareté, the principle of rarity, the point where a diverse set of data and possible memories or histories are "condensed through the selectivity of recall. the convergence of memories, the recursivity in remembrance, the recycling of models of remembrance and memory transfers.’ Anaphoric historiography, which feeds on itself and repeats its own secondariness rather than identifying fresh primary resources, has been a feature of the treatment in British history, whose modeling up to recent times has been brutally binary. Just as Horace Walpole represented the feudal past haunting the usurpation of the present in The Castle of Otranto (1764), so British history modeled its own Gothic chiaroscuro on to the complex realities of the Culloden battlefield and the forces engaged on it.
The key oppositions in Jacobite history were in
place from an early date as shown in Table 1.m (click for full image)
The supposition that Jacobitism was oral and antiquarian is linked to long-standing omission by many to consult a wide range of readily available primary sources (for example) Jacobite regimental and military organization. In a related vein, the idea that the Jacobite Army or militant Jacobite support was largely Catholic disappears when the context alters, for example, in respect of Highland regiments in the Seen Years War of 1756-63 and subsequently, alleged Catholicism mysteriously vanishes though no mass conversion is ever recorded. The need to brand them as ‘other’ has simply disappeared.
A similar schema can be seen operating in analysis of the Jacobite Army in Table 2.
Jacobite Army British Army
Clannish and tribal State and patriotic
Swordsman & individual warriors Muskets and collective drill
Savage amateurs Civilized professionals
Hillmen and troglodytes Bourgeois and propertied interest
Rural and barbaric Urban and civilized
Until quite recently, historians have been content to frame the Rising in these strong and oppositional primary colors. In the 19th century this was linked to a division of Scotland into two quasi-separate ethnic and cultural (and at times political) entities: the “Highlands’ and the ‘Lowlands’ This division is still in frequent and popular use today, even though, as the leading historical geographer Charles Withers reminds
‘ a separateness between Highlands and Lowlands did
not exist. In economic relations, in tenurial practices, in marriage patterns,
and in the routines of seasonal migration, the Highlands and Lowlands were
closely connected . . .in explaining the geography . . ,.we should not suppose
the Highlands and the Lowlands separate regions.’
As with the battle itself, the actual evidence of Highland-Lowland economic and
social integration presents a much more complex and integrated picture than a
stark binary oppositionalism promoted in cultural memory, and until recently by
much historiography.
From the 1740s, historians often took their cue from the language of
anti-Jacobite propaganda. There were some unsurprising exceptions: for example,
James Macpherson, a Jacobite sympathizer from a Jacobite family, asserted ‘the
racial and ethnic superiority of the Celts to the English,” and made it clear
that Jacobitism had a clear political goal, as the Scottish Jacobites were
resolved to risk everything to prevent union.’
There were also some unusually fair-minded writers like Henry Hallam.
However, the general framework of Culloden as the victory of progress over
backwardness was clearly visible from the loyal addresses of the 1740s to the
historians of the 19th century. Even the not unsympathetic Robert Chambers,
writing in 1827, saw the Jacobites as deriving from ‘the rudest and least
civilized part of the nation’, addicted to a ‘patriarchal society,, and thus
primitive in stadial terms. These ‘children of the mountains’ were in their
‘vigor’ (a term which bears out the language of Morier and the cartoon
tradition) ‘willing and ready as ever to commence and civil war.’ Though some
historians, such as Catherine Macaulay, were sufficiently radical to be
relatively positive on Jacobitism in the face of Whig corruption, the general
Whig interpretation held. It has been recently stated that the term Whig
history ‘lacks specificity and historians should no longer use this prejudicial
title’, but the application of stadialism to historical study, the assumption
of teleological progress toward the
condition of modernity, and above all the conflation of victory and chauvinistic
pride with moral categories can be characterized by no other term so well.
In the middle of the 19th century, Henry Buckle saw the 1745 Rising as ‘the
last struggle of barbarism against civilization’. While Macfarlane and Thomson
in 1861 sneered at the very notion of a Jacobite chain of command, and Justin
McCarthy in 1890 noted that the ‘clansmen’ were ‘as savage and desperately
courageous as Sioux or Pawnees’. In 1899, Sir John Fortescue’s magisterial
history of the British Army noted (perhaps
with the more recent conflicts on the Northwest Frontier in mind) that ‘the
campaign ended, as victorious campaigns against mountaineers must always end,
in the hunting of fugitives, the burning of villages, and the destruction of
crops’. For Fortescue, Culloden meant that Jacobitism . . .the curse of the
kingdom for tree quarters of a century, was finally slain, and the Highlanders,
who had been a plague -. . .were finally subjugated’, being ‘little else’ than
‘half-savage mountaineers’. Here the history of the conclusion of the Rising is
presented in away which barely veils the subtext of Jacobitism as an avatar of
the challenges faced by British imperialism.
In 1939, Basil William took A slightly different tack, personalizing the Rising
as a misadventure, ‘which appealed to the romantic Scots’, despite the Prince’s
lack of ‘character or strategy’. The ‘romantic attachment’ which led to the
unfortunate Rising was itself a character flaw of course, one of fey
individualism and the triumph of sentiment over rationality. No evidence of
course was adduced for these sweeping ethno-cultural judgments or personality
assessments; and William’s point was simply repeated in 1974 by John Owen, who
noted that ‘the romantic appeal and personal charm of Charles Edward had proved
no substitution for judgement and leadership.’ Cumberland put down the Rising
with a firm hand, it was true, but ‘scarcely . . .savagery.’
At the same time, the imperialist metaphors of the Jacobites as ‘backward
colonials continued to be reiterated. The image of Morier’s picture, drawn as
its gaze was from the expectations of political cartoon propaganda, presented
the Jacobites as virile and sexually charged ( the upraised leg and naked
thigh), savage and violent. If their attachment to their “Bonnie’ prince was a
sign of the sentimental over-emotionalism that made them in darker contexts
irrationally and animalistically sexual so their violence and savagery aligned
them with Britain’s global; struggles against tribal societies, built- like the
victory at Culloden as depicted by Morier – on technical and moral superiority.
As the empire decayed, these tropes lingered. In 1952, G. M. Trevelyn
identified the Rising as a ‘fantasia of misrule . . . in defiance of Parliament
and its laws . . .an Afghanistan . . .within fifty miles of the ‘modern Athens’.
The ‘immemorial zest for plunder’ of the ‘hill tribesmen’ was Churchill’s view
in 1956, while in 1973 Charles Chevenix
Trench proclaimed the Jacobite army to be ‘ savage Highland horde, as alien . . . as a war party
of Iroquois. J. H. Plumb’s approach in 1950 was somewhat different: in England in the Eighteenth Century,
Jacobitism is apparently irrelevant enough note even to appear in the index –
this is loi de rareté at its most acute, scarcity translated into
absence. John Prebble’s very popular study Culloden, first published in 1961,
presented Jacobitism as a backward ideology of ’A race of tribesmen’ whose
chiefs were ‘civilized savages’ defending a
society ‘as obsolescent’ as the Jacobite cause itself. In 1981, J. A. Houlding
noted that ‘not only were many of the clansmen Catholic . . . but they were a
primitive people whose tribal organization was utterly archaic’. Paul Langford
noted ‘the preservation of England against a Highland rabble’ in 1989, while
Rex Whitworth in 19902 characterized the army and its leaders as ‘the upstart
and his rabble of ferocious Highlanders.’ In the same year, Linda Colley
utilized the motive of bankruptcy rather than that of charisma to explain way
Jacobite support- economic rather than rational incompetence – while noting
(incorrectly) that ‘only the poorer
Highland clans’ supported Charles. While more balanced accounts began to
increase as we near the present day (although American historiography remains
more resolutely Whiggish and still often reacts in a hostile way to the very
mention of Jacobitism,), the fundamental account we inherit is based on this
narrow and highly binarized version of the victory – and indeed the teleology –
of civility over barbarism.. It may have begun to pass from academic to popular
history, but its power remains. It was just as well in the terms of this
construction that what it identifies as Charles Edward’s band of deluded and
sexually incontinent savages were ‘cut to pieces by the withering artillery’ on
Culloden battlefield.
The same kind of strongly framed accounts have traditionally prevailed with
regard to specific issues relating to the Rising and Culloden. To take only one
example, Charles Edward’s conduct in the battle has long been characterized by Lord
Elcho’s reputed words on his unavoidable flight after defeat, terming him ‘an
Italian coward and a scoundrel sometimes popularized as ‘There you go, you
cowardly Italian’. This account has long seemed to carry more weight than the
alternatives, where a cornet in the Horse Guards noted that the Prince wanted
to charge forward and saved the day, while Sullivan ordered Colonel Colonel
O’Shea of Fitzjames’s to take Charles Edwards to safety. ‘They won’t take me
alive!’ he screamed, minutes before
being led off the field, guarded by Glenbuchat’s men and the soldiers of
the Edinburgh Regiment. Still he tried to return to the fray, before a Scottish
officer, Major Kennedy, ‘seized the bridle and led the prince firmly away from
the scenes of carnage.’ AS Charles Edward later noted, ‘ he was forced off the
field by the people about him. This is especially interesting as the sources
for the latter account are Sullivan, Elcho, the Stuart Papers, and the
Historical Manuscripts Commission papers; there is strong corroboration. And
yet the source for the former account is not Elcho himself (though he loathed
Charles Edward and had little motive to conceal it), but an article by Sir
Walter Scott. Scott’s account was was comprehensively rebutted by A. C. Ewald
in 1875, who noted that it was not in Elcho’s Manuscript Journal and was
inconsistent with other accounts. It is not the only piece of Scottish history
for which Scott is the uncorroborated source. Yet, despite quite the
comprehensive documentation available elsewhere, this characterization of
Charles’s cowardice is frequently alluded to, even if the original source is
forgotten. It is a powerful denominating line in Peter Watkin’s influential
film of 1964, even though modern historians are careful to describe it as a
‘tradition.’
This episode typifies the persistence of un-evidenced allegation and
imprecision in describing Culloden; to take one other example, the National
Trust for Scotland at the Visitor Center still describe Elcho’s and Balmerino’s
Life Guards, Bogot’s Hussars, and
Strathallan’s Pershire Horse as ‘Highland Horse’, though there was nothing “Highland’
about any of them. Morier’s depiction, reinforced by Gaelic romanticism,
continues to frame events strongly is such repetitive and limited ways, just as
it is telling how many of the more serious historians quoted above virtually
repeat each other word for word in their re-inscriptions of the permitted,
defined and authorized portrait of Culloden.
The outer parts of this frame were the first to get damaged. History from below
and the reassessment of the degree or urban and rural unrest in an age of
stability seemed to have little to do with Jacobitism, but began to open up the
possibility of considering it in a similar light: it was no coincidence that E.
P. Thompson recognized the unacknowledged social; strength of Jacobitism, for
example.
[ e.g. “The Tory tradition of paternalism, which looks backward to the Stuart ‘Book
of Sports’, and which extends either patronage or permissiveness, remains extremely
vigorous even into the nineteenth century. This theme is too large to betaken into
this chapter, but see R. W. Malcolmson, Popular
Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution; E.
P. Thompson, page 76 note 2, Customs in
Common ]
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The politics of Jacobitism has been strongly framed as primitive because of the threat it posed, and the function of the defeat of that threat has in the national narrative of foundational reconciliation. However regular were the Jacobite armies, however well armed and decently led, however welcome their officers in the courts of Europe, the framing power for both British state teleology and Scottish patriot nostalgia relies on a image, ultimately Morier’s image and that of the cartoonists of his era. This is the framing story of dirty badly armed primitives sacrificing themselves with pointless nobility to the orders of an Italian princely, but in the end not contemptibly as they were in reality defending an ancient way of life. Arguably no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely. ON Culloden Moor on 16 April 1746, what was in some ways the last Scottish army- construction so, paid so, drilled so- with its Franco-Irish and Scoto- French allies, sought to restore Charles Edward’s father to a multi-kingdom monarchy more aligned to European politics than colonial struggle. They were in many essential a regular army; if they had not been, they would not have have to fight, nor would the Prince willingly have led them. Outnumbered but not outgunned, cavalry proved their downfall. Ironically, it can be argued that it was not British ball that brought down kilted swordsmen as much as British dragoon blades that cut down Jacobite musketeers. The effect of flanking cavalry on an over-extended infantry formation with little effective reserve was a constant in warfare for centuries, and it is the key to Culloden. The traditional qualities of the battle are as much British as Jacobite. Culloden as it happened is in fact much more interesting than Culloden as it is remembered. It was neither a sacrificial hecatomb of Highland history nor a catalyst for the triumph of British modernity. It was the last battle fought on British and ended the last armed conflict in which the nature of Britain – and indeed its existence- were at stake. But it no more ended Scotland and Scottish identity than it encapsulated it.
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