“Cam Ye O'er Frae France?” Exile and the Mind of Scottish Jacobitism, 1716–1727

Abstract

On 14 February 1716 at Ruthven in Badenoch, the remaining officers of the Jacobite army in Scotland gathered to decide their next move. They had turned out the previous autumn in high hopes of restoring the Stuart dynasty to the throne it had lost in 1689 and forcing an end to the union with England, but their confidence and enthusiasm had long since evaporated in the face of the defeat of the English rising at Preston and failure on their own part at Sherrifmuir. Their king and his chief minister had fled the country just after the army began its retreat from Perth. Now the weather had deteriorated, and desertion had reduced their once impressive force to a shadow of its former self. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the officers drafted a letter to the duke of Argyll, the commander of the British army in Scotland, asking for an indemnity and ordered their men to make their own way home. Then they themselves dispersed. It was the final act in the botched complex of conspiracies and uprisings that has gone down in history as the Jacobite Rising of 1715.Reflecting on the consequences of the Jacobites' failure, the earl of Mar, by then the Old Pretender's secretary of state, sadly remarked: “I much doubt if ever a [rising] can be established there again.” It was a percipient observation. For over a generation, it was to prove extremely difficult to persuade most of the leaders of Scottish Jacobitism even to contemplate another uprising.