Britain's Lost Revolution? Louis XIV, the Scots Jacobites and the French Invasion Attempt of 1708

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In an era confounded by the sudden collapse of empires and the rapid dissolution of civil societies in times of crisis, we should be profoundly sceptical about claims that any polity is solid and stable. Yet textbooks on the 18th century British Isles offer just such a cosy vision. Because the Jacobites and the United Irishmen were defeated and the American Patriots can be written out of our island story, a suffocating orthodoxy prevails. It projects an era dominated by comfortable concepts such as 'politeness' and 'commercialism', and the wholesome march of the middling sorts towards their Victorian destiny. But what kind of stable polity undergoes two revolutions within one hundred years and lapses into internal war on seven occasions 1688-1803? Lord George Murray, George Washington and Wolfe Tone were all polite and commercial gentlemen, but they did their best to overthrow the existing order. And many of the wholesome bourgeoisie of Aberdeen and Belfast spectacularly rejected their manifest - British - destiny to take up causes that make no sense within the current paradigm. What then must be done? This vision is deep-seated, but one of its weakest points is its inability to cope with Jacobitism. By recovering a 'lost' Jacobite rebellion that had a serious chance of triggering a revolution as sweeping as that of 1688, I will directly challenge the paradigm. The '08 is uniquely well fitted to the task because it flatly contradicts the received wisdom on the Jacobites. Jacobitism was transformed 1701-08 by the collapse of the old English hegemony and the Scots' assumption of the dominant role. In the course of the political battles against Anglo-Scottish union the Scots then broke with their past and developed a new, radical ideology. At its core was a vision of a future Scotland in which a Stuart restoration went hand-in-hand with a new constitution that would have reduced them to mere figureheads presiding over a noble demi-republic. It would also have been a Scotland directly economically attached to France and its empire, and thus able to demand a far more equal relationship with England. Their success would have drastically rebalanced power relations between the three kingdoms in the British Isles. The polite and commercial empire of our happy orthodoxy was on the edge of a precipice. The key sources for this project will be the reports of Nathaniel Hooke and overlooked material in French and British archives. Hooke was a French secret agent who visited Scotland in 1705 and 1707 and then wrote two cold analyses of the Scots Jacobites' potential, backed up with an archive of Jacobite letters and memoranda. This was published in the 19th century, but most scholars have preferred to read the 1760 translation of his reports rather than the 1,000 pages of documents on which they were based. These constitute a major, missed source. The French also checked Hooke's analysis against other sources, generating a further mass of documents in France that have virtually been ignored. Nor has its legacy in British archives been systematically explored. Passed-over material is widespread and the papers of the Secretaries of State and numerous Scots noble and family papers are full of unexploited material. These sources will provide the basis for a complete revision of our interpretation of Jacobitism in Scotland, and this, I hope, will fracture the paradigm and open the way to a broad revision of our understanding of the British polity in the eighteenth century.