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

在一个帝国突然崩溃和危机时期公民社会迅速解体的时代，我们应该对任何政体都是稳固和稳定的说法深表怀疑。然而，关于18世纪世纪不列颠群岛的教科书提供了这样一个舒适的愿景。因为詹姆斯二世党人和爱尔兰联合党人被击败了，美国爱国者可以从我们的岛屿故事中被抹去，一种令人窒息的正统观念占了上风。它反映了一个由“礼貌”和“商业主义”等舒适概念主导的时代，以及中产阶级朝着维多利亚时代命运的健康发展。但是，什么样的稳定政体在一百年内经历了两次革命，并在1688年至1803年期间七次陷入内战？乔治默里勋爵、乔治华盛顿和沃尔夫·托恩都是彬彬有礼的商业绅士，但他们尽了最大努力推翻现有秩序。阿伯丁和贝尔法斯特的许多健康的资产阶级断然拒绝了他们明显的--英国的--命运，去从事在当前范式下毫无意义的事业。那么，应该怎么办呢？这种观点根深蒂固，但其最薄弱的一点是无法科普詹姆斯二世党。通过恢复一个“失去的”詹姆斯二世党人的叛乱，有一个严重的机会引发一场革命一样席卷1688年，我将直接挑战范式。08年是唯一适合的任务，因为它断然矛盾的詹姆斯党人接受的智慧。1701- 1708年，旧英格兰霸权的崩溃和苏格兰假设主导地位，改变了詹姆斯二世主义。在反对盎格鲁-苏格兰联合的政治斗争中，苏格兰人与他们的过去决裂，发展了一种新的激进意识形态。其核心是对未来苏格兰的愿景，在这个愿景中，斯图亚特王朝的复辟与新宪法齐头并进，新宪法将使他们沦为统治一个高贵的苏格兰共和国的傀儡。它也将是一个在经济上直接依附于法国及其帝国的苏格兰，因此能够要求与英格兰建立一种更加平等的关系。他们的成功将极大地重新平衡不列颠群岛三个王国之间的权力关系。我们的幸福正统的礼貌和商业帝国是在悬崖的边缘。这个项目的关键来源将是纳撒尼尔胡克的报告和法国和英国档案中被忽视的材料。胡克是一名法国特工，他于1705年和1707年访问了苏格兰，然后对苏格兰詹姆斯二世党人的潜力写了两篇冷静的分析，并得到了詹姆斯二世党信件和备忘录档案的支持。这本书出版于19世纪，但大多数学者更喜欢阅读1760年的报告译本，而不是他们所依据的1,000页文件。这是一个重要的、缺失的来源。法国人还将胡克的分析与其他来源进行了核对，在法国产生了大量实际上被忽视的文件。它在英国档案馆中的遗产也没有得到系统的探索。传递的材料很普遍，国务卿的文件和许多苏格兰贵族和家庭文件都充满了未利用的材料。这些资料将为我们对苏格兰詹姆斯二世主义的解释提供一个全面修正的基础，我希望，这将打破范式，为我们对18世纪英国政体的理解的广泛修正开辟道路。

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.