Paul Monod Loyalty and Identity; Jacobites at Home and Abroad (2020)

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.50 Indeed, reallyapprehensive observers like the stalwart Whig and devout PresbyterianSir John Clerk of Penicuik immediately incorporated the phenomenon intotheir conviction that they were living at the end of days:All who formerly wrote on the Revelation, at least many of them, concurin this, that this year 1716 will be fatal to Antichrist.And as forerunnersthereof, there appears nothing all Europe over, but wars and rumors ofwars, with astonishing phenomena and signs in the firmament, andapparitions in some places, as at Ragusa on 18 February, and as an intes-tine, cruel war was kindled in Britan, so the like is suspected to be breed-ing in France.51This general anxiety at the signs of the times, moreover, particularly res-onated with those Whigs who feared that a new rebellion might break outor the old one recrudesce.52As is well known, one of the reasons the Jacobites were so resilient as acommunity was that were incurably optimistic and had a deeply ingrainedpropensity to talk away their defeats and speculate wildly, yet confidently,about how matters were about to turn their way.53 Thus Adam Cockburn ofOrmiston, the Lord Justice Clerk, wonderingly observed in mid-March,9780230_222571_06_cha04.pdf 10/21/09 2:27 PM Page 106106 Loyalty and Identity there appears most unaccountably a spirrit of disaffection in severall parts,pretending to take encouradgement from transactions both in England andbeyond sea, especially in France, and emissarys are very bussy. 54 Rumoursof terrorist Jacobite plots now fed directly on the Jacobites bravado.One ofRobert Wodrow s respondents told him in early April that the fourthJacobite attempt to set the town of Dumfries alight had just recently beenfoiled,55 and in December John Philp wrote to James Ogilvy, Earl of Findlater,graphically describing an attempt allegedly made on the life of the Princeof Wales at a London theatre.56Continued rumours and stories about Jacobite activity were not,however, the only source of alarm.The climate of fear and apprehensionwas intensified by a drumbeat of reports of cruel and rapacious behaviourby government troops.In an earlier letter to Findlater Philp reported that,One of the Dutch regiments at Royston on there way to London fella quarreling with that town about the payment of there quarters.Itchanced to be a mercat day and there happened an engagement.Therewere 7 or 8 killed on the spott, among whom was the master ofthe George Inn.The particulars wee have not yet clearly, being onlyreported by a passenger who came post and made haste, finding them insuch confusion.57And around the time of the mobbing of Captain Le Cocq and his men thatis the main subject of this essay, one Whig correspondent wrote fromEdinburgh that, Evry body belived for some days ther was a child killd atLeith.Evrybody belived my Lord Anandal s howse at Cragiehall was rifled,and all by foreners Duch or Swice.Ther are inumberable lies of plunders inthe north. 58 Unlike the reports of alleged Jacobite terrorism, however,reports of brutal behaviour on the part of government forces did actuallyhave a basis in fact, which in turn reinforced the credence given suchstories.Ross s killing of James Small (however much he may have been pro-voked) is one case in point, and even the ultra-Whiggish correspondentfrom Edinburgh cited above admitted that he knew of at least one authen-tic case where a denizen of the city had been nearly killed by two Dutchsoldiers whom he had challenged about the contents of their baggage.59 AsRobert Key, whose son was killed in a clash with soldiers in December1716, darkly observed in his information to the Court of Justiciary: theinsolency of the soldiers is of late gone to a very great height and thatthey take liberties to act, as if they were above the laws and secure againstpunishment.60What is, too, particularly striking about accounts of these incidents is thestrong hostility towards the military expressed by the crowd in each case.Early eighteenth-century Scotland was not a nation with a strong, popularanti-military tradition.Indeed, rather the reverse.The Scots had a long-9780230_222571_06_cha04.pdf 10/21/09 2:27 PM Page 107Daniel Szechi 107standing tradition of military service within and beyond the British Isles,and while this may have declined from its early seventeenth-centuryheights, it was still there in 1716.61 It is, of course, possible that these andother civil-military clashes were all manifestations of popular Jacobitism.And certainly the hostility manifested towards the soldiers at Haddingtonmight well fit into that category.Haddington was at the centre of a notor-iously disaffected area which probably supplied William Mackintosh ofBorlum s little Jacobite army with several hundred recruits after he crossedthe Forth in October 1715, and a year later the Forfeited Estates Commis-sion found that many of George Seton, Earl of Winton s tenants had beencomplicit in hiding his household goods to prevent their seizure by thegovernment, which suggests they had some sympathy with the earl andhis plight.62 Edinburgh, however, was a different matter.For though, inLeith and the Canongate, it had neighbours who were reputedly Jacobiteinclined, the good town had an exemplary record of loyalty during therebellion.This is not to suggest that there were no Jacobites in Edinburgh.Whereverthere were Episcopalians in any number there were bound to be Jacobitesand in 1716 there were at least thirty Episcopal priests ministering inEdinburgh.63 Yet when the city was threatened by Jacobite forces duringthe 15, which it was on at least three occasions, the response was over-whelmingly pro-government and there was little sign of substantial supportfor the Stuart cause.In the first case, the famous Jacobite attempt to captureEdinburgh castle by a surprise escalade on the night of 8 September, theconspirators were able to muster less than forty men, of whom 11 12 wereHighlanders infiltrated into the city by James Drummond, Marquess ofDrummond, specifically to take part in the attack.64 On the second occa-sion, at the end of September, the lineaments of the plot are not so clear,but the Jacobites appear to have aimed at a coup d etat within the cityproper with a, if not the, major role to be played by a surreptitiously mus-tered party of Midlothian gentry.65 The third occasion, when Borlum s littlearmy appeared before the walls of the city on 14 October, he was con-fronted by 200 Whig volunteers embodied for the duration under MajorJames Aikman, c.400 more Whig volunteers who immediately presentedthemselves for service with the small force of regulars Argyll rushed to thecity from Stirling, plus at least 160 more City Guards, purged and purgedagain to ensure their loyalty and a further 100 recruited specifically for thedefence of the city [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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