The White Rose of Scotland

Mary's father, James II and VII, last Catholic
monarch in the British Isles.
Portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, c 1686.

Continuing this month's theme of Law and Order the next three blog posts will cover insurrection.

The 18th century saw two armed insurrections in support of the ousted Stuart dynasty; one in 1715 and one in 1745. Both were unsuccessful but the re-establishment of order was different in the aftermath in each case.

The whole Jacobite movement started when the Stuart King James II was deposed in 1688 and Parilament gave the throne of Great Britain and Ireland was given to his daughter Mary II and her husband and first cousin William of Orange.

William III and Mary II

Rejected by Parliament the Stuarts left England and went into exile.

The Stuarts were not without their supporters however, and there were people who thought that Parliament had no business interfering with the natural line of succession.

These supporters of the natural line of kings were known as Jacobites, i.e. the supporters of James.

Jacobite support was strongest in parts of the Scottish Highlands, lowland northeast Scotland, Ireland, and parts of northern England mostly in Northumberland and Lancashire and there were pockets of support in Wales and southwest England.

To be a Jacobite supporter was a very dangerous game. The stakes were high and if you were discovered you would be guilty of treason, and the death penalty would undoubtedly await you. Expressing allegiance therefore had to be done covertly and through a series of rituals, symbols and secret messages.

The emblem of the Jacobites was the White Cockade. All 69 Scottish Nationalist Party members of parliament wore white roses in their lapels at the swearing in ceremony of the Scottish parliament a few years back. Rosa x alba grows all over Scotland.  It is a bushy, shrub like rose with dark, grey green foliage and a small five petalled flower, similar to a dog rose, which can be white or pale pink. They only flower in spring, and have a beautiful scent with notes of citrus.  The plants are hardy, thrive in poor soil, can tolerate shade and drought and are for the most part resistant to disease. The origin of the rose as a symbol are somewhat lost in myth and legend.  It is said that one of the earliest references refers to the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed King James II, who was born on 10th June in 1688, said to be “the longest day of the year in which the white rose flowers.

In the years leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Jacobites were forced to meet and plot in secret, and the white rose or white cockade (a flower made from ribbon, often worn on a hat) was a way of identifying those who supported the cause. The Jacobites had many other secret symbols, including the sunflower to symbolise loyalty, as a sunflower always follows the sun and moths or butterflies whose emergence from a chrysalis symbolised the hope for the return to power of the Stuart family. The Merovingian bee was adopted by the exiled Stuarts in Europe, and engraved bees are still to be seen on some Jacobite glassware.

Another legend tells how Bonnie Prince Charlie plucked a white rose from the roadside and stuck it in his hat as he made his way south from Glenfinnan to start the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

When asked about the significance of the Nationalists wearing of the white rose Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, denied that the flower was a reference to the Jacobites.  Instead he cited the poem “The Little White Rose”, written by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and claimed the rose stood for “all of Scotland”.  MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was a committed Nationalist and in 1928 helped found the National Party of Scotland, the forerunner of today’s Scottish National Party.

Jacobitism was attractive to members of the English aristocracy who had chosen to remain Catholic after the Reformation. About 2-3% of the English population remained practising Catholics at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 although there were more significant concentrations of Catholics particularly in the north of England. The movement also found support in the Catholic populations of Ireland and rural Scotland and Wales because they hoped the return of a Stuart king would end their exclusion from many aspects of civic and political life under the Recusancy Acts. The Catholic Irish supported James II due to his 1687 Declaration of Indulgence or, as it is also known, The Declaration for the Liberty of Conscience and because he promised an Irish Parliament.

In lowland Scotland, the Catholics tended to come from the gentry and formed the most ideologically committed supporters of the Stuart cause, drawing on almost two centuries of subterfuge as a minority persecuted by the state and rallying enthusiastically to Jacobite armies as well as contributing financial support to the court in exile.

Highland clans such as the MacDonnels and MacDonalds of Clanranald, Keppoch, Glengarry and Glencoe; the Clan Chisolm, and the Ogilvy were largely still Catholic. Other clans, such as the powerful Camerons, were Episcopalian, and as staunch in their Jacobitism as their allies the Catholic MacDonalds.

Scottish Episcopalians

Scottish Episcopalians provided over half of the Jacobite forces in Britain. As Protestants they could take part in Scottish politics, but were in a minority and were repeatedly discriminated against in legislation favouring the established Church of Scotland which was Presbyterian. However, many Episcopalians were quiet about any Jacobite sympathies the had and were able to accommodate themselves to the new regime. About half of the Episcopalians supporting the Jacobite cause came from the Lowlands, but this was obscured in the risings by their tendency to wear Highland dress.

Actor Sam Heughan as James Fraser
 in Outlander

In the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highland clans Jacobites were known as Seumasaich. The conflict between the clans was more about politics than religion. A significant factor was resistance to the territorial ambitions of the Presbyterian Campbells of Argyll. Another factor in Highland Jacobitism was James VII's sympathetic treatment of the Highland clans. Whereas previous monarchs since the late 16th century had been antagonistic to the Gaelic Highland way of life, James had worked sympathetically with the clan chieftains in the Commission for Pacifying the Highlands. Some Highland chieftains therefore viewed Jacobitism as a means of resisting hostile government intrusion into their territories. The significance of their support for the Stuarts was that the Highlands was the only part of Britain which still maintained private armies, in the form of clan levies. During the Jacobite Risings, they provided the bulk of Jacobite manpower.

Although most support for the Stuart cause came from Tories there were some notable Whig exceptions most notably the Earl of Mar most sympathetic Whigs were merely keeping their options open in case the Stuarts returned.

Jacobites were distinctly unenlightened and un-democratic. They believed in the:
• divine right of kings;
• "accountability of Kings to God alone";
• inalienable hereditary right; and the
• "unequivocal scriptural injunction of non-resistance and passive obedience” to the crown.

Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680), in which he defended the theory of Divine Right

The Stuarts mounted two military campaigns to regain the British crown and I will cover these and the law and order issues that arose in more detail in the next two blogs.


Sources:
Scotland, A Concise History, Fitzroy Maclean, Thames and Hudson
Bonnie Prince Charlie, Fitzroy Maclean, Canongate Books Ltd.
The Jacobites, Britain and Europe 1688–1788, Daniel Szechi, Manchester University
The Myths of the Jacobite Clans, Murray G. H. Pittock, Edinburgh University Press
Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–60, Hannah Smith, Cambridge University Press 2006
The Material Culture of the Jacobites, Neil Guthrie, Cambridge University Press 2014