Jacobitism

Jacobitism was a political movement that lasted from 1688 until the late 1700s. Its main goal was to bring back the exiled House of Stuart to the British throne. The movement had its strongest support in Ireland, the Western Scottish Highlands, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Wales, and Northern England.

In November 1688, the Glorious Revolution removed James II of England and replaced him with his daughter Mary II and her husband William III. Jacobites believed that kings ruled by divine right, so they considered the entire government set up after 1688 to be illegitimate. However, Jacobitism also became a way for people to express various grievances, so it included a complicated mix of ideas, many of which the Stuarts themselves disagreed with.

Besides the Williamite War in Ireland (1689–1691) and the Jacobite rising of 1689 in Scotland, there were major revolts in 1715, 1719, and 1745. There were also French invasion attempts in 1708 and 1744, plus many failed plots. The 1745 Rising briefly looked like it might threaten the Hanoverian monarchy, but its defeat in 1746 ended Jacobitism as a serious political force.

Political background

The ideas behind Jacobitism began with James VI and I, who in 1603 became the first monarch to rule England, Scotland, and Ireland together. The core idea was divine right, which stressed that the crown passed by hereditary right. James used this to avoid arguments over his appointment by Elizabeth I as her successor. But his concept of personal rule made Parliaments unnecessary and required political and religious union—ideas that were deeply unpopular in all three kingdoms, especially England.

As a first step toward union, James started standardizing religious practices among the churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. After his death in 1625, his son Charles I continued this policy. Charles’s assertion of Personal Rule in 1629 and his enforcement of reforms on the Church of England led to a political crisis. Similar actions in Scotland caused the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–1640 and the installation of a Covenanter government.

This crisis worsened with the October 1641 Irish Rebellion, which was a response by Catholic Irish nobles to land confiscation, loss of political control, anti-Catholic measures, and economic decline. It was meant to be a bloodless coup, but leaders quickly lost control, leading to atrocities on both sides. In May, a Covenanter army landed in Ulster to support Scots settlers. Although Charles and Parliament both wanted to raise an army to suppress the Rebellion, neither trusted the other to control it, and these tensions led to the start of the First English Civil War in August 1642.

In 1642, the Catholic Confederacy, representing the Irish rebels, declared loyalty to Charles. But the Stuarts were unreliable allies, because giving concessions in Ireland cost them Protestant support in all three kingdoms. Also, the Adventurers’ Act, approved by Charles in March 1642, funded the suppression of the revolt by confiscating land from Irish Catholics—much of it owned by Confederacy members.

This created a three-way struggle among the Confederacy, Royalist forces under the Protestant Duke of Ormond, and a Covenanter-led army in Ulster. The latter increasingly clashed with the London government. After Charles I was executed in January 1649, Ormond combined these factions to resist the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland from 1649 to 1652.

In 1650, Charles II broke his alliance with the Confederacy in exchange for Scottish military support, and Ormond went into exile. Defeat led to mass confiscation of Catholic and Royalist land, which was given to Parliamentarian soldiers and Protestant settlers. The three kingdoms were merged into the Commonwealth of England, only regaining their separate status after the 1660 Stuart Restoration.

Charles II’s reign was dominated by the expansionist policies of Louis XIV of France, seen as a threat to Protestant Europe. When Charles’s brother and heir James announced his conversion to Catholicism in 1677, an attempt was made to block him from the English throne.

Still, he became king in February 1685 with widespread support from Protestant majorities in England and Scotland. Accepting a Catholic monarch was seen as better than excluding the “natural heir,” and Protestant dissident rebellions in England and Scotland were quickly crushed. It was also viewed as temporary, since James was 52, his second marriage had been childless for 11 years, and his Protestant daughter Mary was his heir.

Ireland

James’s religion made him popular among Irish Catholics, whose position had not improved under his brother. Catholic land ownership had fallen from 90% in 1600 to 22% in 1685, partly because Catholic landlords converted to the Protestant Church of Ireland.

After 1673, a series of proclamations took away Catholic gentry’s right to bear arms or hold public office. In 1687, the Catholic Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and began building a Catholic establishment that could survive James. Fearing a short reign, Tyrconnell moved so quickly that it destabilized all three kingdoms.

When the English and Scottish Parliaments refused to remove civil restrictions on Catholics and Non-Conformists, James dismissed them and used the Royal Prerogative to force his measures through. These actions reopened disputes over religion, rewarded the Protestant dissidents who had rebelled in 1685, and undermined his own supporters. It also ignored the impact of the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked tolerance for French Protestants and created an estimated 400,000 refugees, 40,000 of whom settled in London. Two events turned discontent into open crisis.