#jacobite.

On March 23rd 1708 a French fleet with James Francis Edward Stuart reached the Firth of Forth

where they tried to land James on the Fife shore at the head of a 5,000-strong French army. They were prevented from doing so by English warships under Admiral Byng combined with bad weather.

On September 16th 1701 James VII died in exile at St Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris.

James II was the brother of Charles II of England and shared in his government and many of his “adventures”. They were exiled to France during the Commonwealth, and during this time James served in both the French and Spanish armies. Soon after Charles II came to the throne, James was appointed Lord High Admiral and served in the Anglo Dutch Wars. Of the two brothers he was far more interested in military matters, and a competent and respected administrator.

The popularity of James however, was severely tried in 1673 after he publicly declared his conversion to the Catholic faith. This was a remarkable development because Charles II’s wife was known to be barren, and James was next in line for the throne. By declaring himself to be a Catholic he threatened the succession not only of himself but also of his children. He attempted to repair the damage by marrying his eldest daughter, to William of Orange, a highly regarded Protestant Prince. This partially appeased Parliament, but James was stripped of his Admiralty and even exiled for a time to Brussels.

Charles II, however, continued to support his brother and was able to fend off the ‘exclusionists’ in parliament that sought to deny James the right to the throne. Since James had not produced a male heir, and his daughters were both reliable Protestants, he was restored to his position as Lord High Admiral and permitted to ascend to the throne on the death of Charles. In his short reign as king, James sought to pass laws permitting religious tolerance, hoping to attract the support of protestant dissenters as well as Catholics. The Puritans however, were too rabidly anti-catholic to fall for such measures and preferred to support the Anglicans who opposed James, rather than permit the toleration of Catholics. Instead of dividing his protestant opponents therefore, his efforts at “toleration” ended up united them against him.

The situation did not become a crisis however, until his Catholic second wife produced a male heir, in 1688. This precipitated a succession crisis and James was quickly deposed in favour of his daughter and son in law, William III and Mary II. Although Ireland declared in his favour, he deserted their cause after the Battle of the Boyne, because he recognised that the Irish were too disorganised and ill-equipped to stand against William’s forces. He spent the rest of his life in exile in France.

4th October 1694 saw the birth at Huntingtower Castle near Perth of Lord George Murray.

George was the fifth son of John, 1st duke of Atholl by his first wife, Catherine, daughter of the 3rd duke of Hamilton.

He joined the army in Flanders in June 1712,  in 1715, contrary to their fathers wishes, he and his brothers, the marquis of Tullibardine and Lord Charles Murray, joined the Jacobite forces under the earl of Mar, each brother commanding a regiment of men of Atholl. Lord Charles was taken prisoner at Preston, but after the collapse of the rising Lord George escaped with Tullibardine to South Uist, and thence to France. 

In 1719 Murray took part in the Jacobite attempt in conjunction with the Spaniards in the western highlands, under the command of Tullihardine and the earl marischal, which terminated in the affair of Glenshiel on the 10th of June, when he was wounded while commanding the right wing of the Jacobites. After hiding for some months in the highlands he reached Rotterdam in May I720.

When Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland in 1745, Murray was appointed lieutenant-general in the Jacobite army. He played a large part in the defeat of General Cope's army at Prestonpans in September 1745.

Murray led the Jacobite army south through England to Derby, but was pessimistic about the chances of further success. He persuaded Charles to retreat on 6th December 1745. Murray led the right wing at the Battle of Falkirk in January and defeated Hawley's forces. He strongly advised against joining battle at Culloden in April 1745, but fought on the right wing. The day after the defeat, Murray resigned his command and wrote a reproachful letter to Charles.

The 1st of May 1690 saw Battle of the Haughs of Cromdale.

Jacobite Clansmen  were defeated by Government Forces under Sir Thomas Livingstone. Despite being a relatively minor encounter, this battle marked the effective end of this Jacobite rising.

By this point the Jacobites were led by Sir Ewen Cameron, who supported King James. The Jacobites requested aid from King James who was engaged in resisting a threatened invasion of Ireland. He sent arms, ammunition and provisions but also a few Irish officers including Major-General Thomas Buchan, who James instructed would led the Jacobite forces.

At a meeting at Keppoch of the Jacobite Clans in support of King James agreed to continue with the war but only after the spring. In the meantime Major-General Thomas Buchan and 1,200 infantry would attempt to weaken the British Government forces.

Major-General Thomas Buchan decided to march down through Strathspey in order to try to gain support from clansmen within the Duke of Gordon’s country in Moray. A number of his men deserted reducing his men to 800. A number of his Scottish officers advised him to not advance past Culnakill, however Buchan ordered his men to march down the Spey as far as Cromdale, where he encamped on the last day of April.

British Government forces and Clans in support of them, included a 600 strong contingent from Clan Grant, met the Jacobite forces at Cromdale. They were led by Sir Thomas Livingston who commanded a garrison at Inverness. As the British Government forces approached, the Jacobites made a brief stand, but on realising they were outnumbered they retreated. A mist came down from the hillside, which allowed most to make their escape resulting in 400 casualties.

James Hogg wrote about the battle in his “Jacobite Reliques” it went….

The loyal Stuarts, with Montrose, So boldly set upon their foes, And brought them down with Highland blows Upon the Haughs of Cromdale. Of twenty-thousand Cromwell’s men, a thousand fled to Aberdeen, The rest of them lie on the plain, They’re on the Haughs of Cromdale.

Of twenty-thousand of Cromwell’s men,

a-thousand fled to Aberdeen, The rest of them lie on the plain, They’re on the Haughs of Cromdale.

I’m not sure what Hogg was on when he wrote this as Montrose was long dead, having been hung in  Edinburgh in May 1650, Cromwell also died in 1658.  That aside it is a cracking song, if historically incorrect. Roy Williamson of the Corries tries to explain this before their rendition

The Scottish songwriter and song collector and poet Carolina Oliphant was born at Gask, Perth and Kinross on August 16th 1766.

Her songs have been sung around Scotland for hundreds of years. But, while her lyrics of loss, romance and rebellion have become part of the country’s cultural DNA, Carolina Oliphant is less than a household name.

Born into a staunchly Jacobite family (The Oliphants of Gask), Lady Nairne was one of the country’s leading songwriters. Carolina successfully adapted traditional Scottish airs, this wasn’t new, Burns and Hogg and even Walter Scott did the same in some of their work.  

Her father and maternal grandfather fought on the side of the Jacobites in 1745 and the family was exiled to France for 19 years, Carolina’s parents only returning two years before her birth.

Carolina kept her identity a secret writing as Mrs Bogan of Bogan, as  she wrote some of Scotland’s most beloved traditional songs.

Charlie Is My Darling, Will Ye No’ Come Back Again and Wi’ A Hundred Pipers are just a few of the enduring songs from Carolina, a contemporary of Robert Burns .Despite being just seven years Robert Burns’ junior, and writing songs throughout the same period as he did, the two would never have crossed paths, I personally put this down to Oliphant’s clandestine ways rather than anything else

While Rabbie is world famous, little is known or remembered about Carolina, yet her songs for the most, are well known, at least to those with a love of Scotland and a wee bit knowledge of folk music. Again I think the reason she isl not so well known is down to the extraordinary lengths she went to conceal her identity as a songwriter – not even her husband knew.

Her husband was Major William Nairne in, the couple married 1806,they had a son, born in 1808, when she was aged 43. In 1824, following a campaign by Sir Walter Scott, peerages and titles which had been forfeited as a result of the Jacobite Uprising were restored and she became Lady Nairne.

With Lady Nairn it wasn’t all about Jacobites though, she showed a love of the countryside in such songs as The Rowan Tree and The Pentland Hills and r poem The Auld House  s about her birthplace in Gask, she is sometimes called The White Rose of Gask, the rose being  a symbol of the Jacobite cause.

Her husband died in 1830 and she then travelled through Europe, returning to Gask two years before her own death on 26th October 1845. She gave permission at that stage for her collected songs. Two years after her death Lays of Strathearn, was prepared by her sister, but this time her name subscribed to the book. A granite cross was erected to her memory in the grounds of Gask House. 

Altogether, Carolina Oliphant wrote or adapted nearly 100 songs and poems in her lifelong endeavor. Lady Carolina Nairne deserves recognition today, because not only did she help to preserve many Scottish tunes, but also, at a time when women's talents were expected to be merely domestic, she managed to do her own thing.

The poem Jeanie Deans by Lady Nairne It eulogizes  the heroine of Sir Walter Scott's 1818 novel, The Heart of Midlothian. However, it appears to be unfinished as it ends with Jeanie 'wending' her way to London where she later obtains the pardon she seeks from the Queen for her sister and the story does not end there. For the full story see Jeanie Deans, check the link at the bottom. There’s a fine traditional bar named after her, fittingly at St Leonards on the Southside of Edinburgh.

Jeanie Deans

St. Leonard's hill was lightsome land, Where gowan'd grass was growin', For man and beast were food and rest, And milk and honey  flowin'. A father's blessing followed close, Where'er her foot was treading, And Jeanie's humble, harmless joys, On every side were spreading wide, On every side were spreading.

The mossy turf on Arthur Seat, St. Anthon's well aye springing, The lammies playing at her feet, The birdies round her singing.

The solemn haunts o' Holyrood, Wi' bats and houlits eerie, The tow'ring craigs o' Salisbury, The lowly wells o' Weary, O, the lowly wells o' Weary.

But evil days and evil men Came owre their sunny dwelling, Like thunder storms on sunny skies Or wastefu' waters swelling. What ance was sweet is bitter now; The sun of joy is setting; In eyes that wont to glance wi' glee, — The briny tear is wetting fast, The briny tear is wetting.

On January 31st 1788  Prince Charles Edward Stewart, “The Young Pretender”, died in Rome, he was 67.

With the disaster at Culloden unfolding before him and victory being torn the Jacobites, it must be noted that the Prince wanted to charge forward and save the day. Colonel O’Sullivan ordered Colonel O’Shea of Fitzjames’s to take Charles to safety. “They won’t take me alive!” he screamed, minutes before being led off the field, guarded by Glenbucket’s men and the soldiers of the Edinburgh Regiment. Still he tried to return to the fray, before an officer, Major Kennedy, “seized the bridle and led the prince firmly away from the scenes of carnage”. As he later said, “he was forced off the field by the people about him” After Culloden and his escape it has been largely told that the Bonnie Prince hit the bottle.

Now they say that history  is told by the victors, but Charles’s drinking was also written about by those closest to him, there is this extract “From a Journal by Young Clanranald - Lyon in Mourning,

"When in the forest house of Glencoridale in South Uist, he would step into a by-chamber, which served as a pantry, and, when he stood in use of it, put the bottle of brandy to his head without ceremony.”

This was when he was in hiding a large bounty on his head, but his drinking had been talked about since the retreat from Derby.

Truth be told Charlies father, James had been concerned about his sons liking for alcohol in 1744, before he even set out for Scotland, during his flight through the heather two years later he was drinking a bottle of brandy a day, and even engaging in drinking contests. His established liability to mood swings can only have been exacerbated by this.

Always irritable when thwarted, by 1750 he displayed signs of uncontrolled rage when his will was crossed; when women crossed him, they could experience physical as well as verbal violence: as Voltaire put it in 1763, George II secured Canada “at the very time the Stuart Prince was aiming kicks and blows at women” From the 1760s, except when hunting, Charles began to be almost perpetually drunk. His drinking and rages, which alienated his declining band of supporters, finally led to a parting of ways between himself and the last of his senior Scottish staff, Andrew Lumisden, his private secretary, in 1768. The severe stroke which brought Charles’ life to a close was no doubt linked to his drinking.

But it is not widely known that the prince, still in his twenties, made a secret visit to London in 1750 to stimulate another rising in England, which later became known as the Elibank plot, during which, it is believed, he converted to the Church of England. 

In reality, what completely put to bed any hope of a Stuart restoration was the removal of support by France. France had continued to toy with the idea of an invasion of Britain – as ever, a means of destabilising the British state, her trade and her colonial interests – during the Seven Years’ War, until major defeats meant abandoning any such attempt. Charles’s behaviour in the face of yet another crushing disappointment, in particular his drunkenness, disgusted the French and eventually he and his cause were abandoned for good.

This was followed, in turn, by the papacy. On the death of his father in 1766, Pope Clement XIII did not recognise Charles as the Jacobite king Charles III, de jure king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the peaceful accession of a third king George, in 1760, suggested that as an active, political cause, Jacobitism, along with its fundamental aim of a Stuart restoration, was effectively dead. Yes the Vatican put a roof over his head, but this was largely due to his brother Henry Benedict being a Roman Catholic Cardinal, rather than his heritage.

On Charles’s death in 1788, his brother, Henry Benedict, became the Jacobite Henry IX of England and I of Scotland. But, as a Roman Catholic cardinal, it was with him that the direct, legitimate line ended on his death in 1807. By this time the beleaguered cardinal, who had witnessed the French Revolution (and lost the financial support of his Bourbon cousin in the process) had begun receiving an annual pension of £4,000 from George III – yes, from the very Hanoverian monarch or, in Jacobite terminology ‘usurper’, that his father and brother had fought so hard, and at such great cost, to remove from the British throne. Henry, unlike his father and brother, did not press his claim.

However, the current official Jacobite claimant, according to the Royal Stuart Society, is Franz von Bayern of the House of Wittelsbach, a prince of Bavaria, as his name suggests, and the great-grandson of the last king of Bavaria, Ludwig III. Franz von Bayern – or, as Jacobites would call him, Francis II – became the Jacobite de jure king in 1996, and is descended from the youngest daughter of Charles I (Princess Henrietta-Anne) via the House of Savoy and the House of Este.

On July 13th 1807 Henry Benedict Stuart died, 

Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, to give him his full name, was the fourth and final Jacobite to publicly lay claim to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Born on 6th March, 1725, at the Palazzo Muti, Rome., he was christened the same day by Pope Benedict XII at the Pallazo Balestra.

Styled Duke of York from birth, Henry was an intelligent child and was reported to have written and spelled better than his brother “Bonnie” Prince Charlie.

 Henry Stuart was a good-looking young man, with the same dark eyes as his brother Charles, but lacked Charles’ height. In common with his father, he was more introverted, cautious and certainly less high spirited than his exuberant older brother.

During the ‘45 he travelled to France to petition Louis XV for funds to support the uprising, historians have said he was humiliated in doing so. Henry was present to greet Charles in France on his return from Scotland, the brothers embraced each other warmly and at first seemed to continue in the close and affectionate relationship which had previously existed between them. They were soon to find that they no longer had much in common and Charles’ supporters aggravated matters by complaining they felt that Henry not done enough to ensure that the French fleet sailed for England to support the rebellion. The sensitive Henry himself considered such criticism unfair as he had been appointed nominal commander of the French fleet but possessed no real authority.

After Charles’s death in January 1788 the Papacy did not recognise Henry as the lawful ruler of England, Scotland and Ireland, but referred to him as the Cardinal Duke of York.

He spent his life in the Papal States and had a long career in the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, rising to become the Dean of the College of Cardinals and Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and Velletri. At the time of his death he was (and still is) one of the longest serving Cardinals in the Church’s history.

Henry became known by Jacobites, and within his personal entourage, as Henry IX of England, although publicly he referred to himself as Cardinal-Duke of York nuncupatus, he did however sign his will Henry R. In the will he wrote he was to be succeeded in all his claimed rights by his friend and nearest blood-relative, Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia. But Charles never asserted nor renounced his Jacobite claims, nor have any of his successors to this day.

Henry Benedict, his brother, his father and his mother are buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. There is a monument to the Royal Stuarts designed by Antonio Canova in the basilica to their memory on one of the columns in the basilica

It may surprise some of you that King George IV contributed toward the cost of a memorial to the rival Stuart dynasty at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, as seen in the last pic.