Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 0:51:35 GMT 1
Jeremy Black marks the bicentenary of the '45 Rebellion by assessing how close Bonnie Prince Charlie came to making his father James III of England.
On July 25rd, 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the 'Seven Men of Moidart' reached Eriksay in the Western Isles of Scotland. On the afternoon of December 4th, 1745, en route for London, the now victorious prince entered Derby at the head of an army. Two days later, this force began its retreat to Scotland and on April 16th, 1746, it was crushed by the Duke of Cumberland on Culloden Moor. It was unclear to contemporaries whether the prince could have taken London had he pressed on from Derby or indeed had he followed a different strategy in 1745. This can be regarded as one of the great might-have-beens of history.
The '45 was the highpoint of a mid-eighteenth-century crisis caused by the interaction of conflict with the Bourbons, the Jacobite challenge and ministerial instability after the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. Its eventual resolution in terms of the destruction of Jacobitism was not obvious in the December days of 1745. A Jacobite Britain would probably have been a very different state internally. In addition, restored with French support, the Stuarts would have been unlikely to challenge the Bourbons for global maritime hegemony, and the history of both North America and India would have been very different.
It is easy to suggest that the '45 was doomed. It failed after all, and the basic precondition of Jacobite plans over the previous fourteen years – the landing of a supporting French army in southern England – was not achieved. The British navy did not lose its superiority in home waters. Within England few rose for the prince and his Scottish supporters were demoralised as a result. At the Jacobite Council meeting at Exeter House, Derby, on 'Black Friday', December 5th, 1745, Lord George Murray pressed, in the absence of English and French support, for retreat. Under pressure, the prince was forced to admit that he had no promises of support from the English Jacobites and no idea of when the French would invade. The situation seemed even worse when the council was told by Dudley Bradstreet, an English spy, that a larger army of 9,000 blocked the route to London at Northampton, a deliberately misleading report. The decision was taken to retreat.
Leaving aside government disinformation, the factors mentioned at Derby were pertinent. The lack of English support ensured that the Jacobite army had received few reinforcements in its march south. The French had not landed and thus divided the government forces. Aside from these points, the eventual failure of the Highland charge at Culloden in the face of the disciplined fire- power of Cumberland's army suggested that Jacobite tactics were anachronistic.
Against this must be set Jacobite success prior to Derby and the strategic situation at that juncture. A Highland charge at Prestonpans on September 21st, had crushed Sir John Cope's force, the sole royal army in Scotland. Cope's army had not simply been defeated; it had been shattered and the government had to move troops back from the war with France I in the Low Countries to confront the Jacobites. An army under Field Marshal Wade assembled at Newcastle, but on November 5th, the Jacobites, about 5,500 strong, crossed the Esk into England. By striking to the west of the Pennines they gained the initiative. Carlisle castle, with its weak defences and small garrison, surrendered on November 15th, and the Jacobites pressed south. Wade's attempt to relieve the castle had been thwarted by the weather and his own sloth.
After Carlisle the Jacobites encountered no resistance on the march south. Penrith fell on November 18th, to be followed by Kendal, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester. The fragility of the Hanoverian state was brutally exposed. The speed of the Jacobite advance thwarted governmental plans to have their troops in southern Lancashire first, while the local resistance was derisory. The Lancashire militia was disbanded and the magistrates at Lancaster wisely abandoned their plan to defend the castle. The Earl of Cholmondeley, Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire and Governor of Chester Castle, felt that it would be impracticable to raise the county militia and was pessimistic about his chances of holding the castle. Until the Jacobites turned back, the situation was comparable to the Bosworth campaign of 1485 with most of the political nation inactive; whatever their intentions, they were in effect sitting on the side- lines and awaiting the outcome of a trial by battle between the two claimants. The stability of the political culture established by the first two Georges and by Walpole had collapsed with the first serious challenge.
The defence of the Hanoverian regime had to rely on regulars, but Wade moved south through Yorkshire only slowly: he did not leave Newcastle until November 26th, and had only reached Wetherby by December 6th. The crucial force was therefore Cumberland's army, which marched from Lichfield on November 28th. Cumberland was, however, misled by deliberately circulated reports that the Jacobites intended to advance on Chester and North Wales, and responded to the feint by a Jacobite detachment to Congleton, leaving the road to Derby clear.
Thus the campaign hitherto had revealed that the Jacobites could expect little resistance except from regulars and that these could be out- manoeuvred. The sole battle, Prestonpans, had suggested that the fire-power of the regulars was of little value unless the Jacobites fought on their terms, as they were to do at Culloden.
When the Jacobites entered Derby they held the strategic initiative. Cumberland's army was exhausted by its marches in the West Midlands. The 2nd Duke of Richmond, commander of the cavalry, claimed 'these dreadful fatiguing marches will make them [the troops) incapable of fighting'. On December 4th, Cumberland wrote to explain his failure to try to intercept the Jacobites at Derby after he had discovered their feint:
troops that had scarcely halted six hours these seven days, had been without victuals for twenty-four hours, and had been exposed to one of the coldest nights I have ever felt without any shelter ... were not able to march without a halt and provisions, so we immediately came to a resolution of intercepting them at Northampton.
It is by no means clear that he could have done so and he might have exposed his army, strung out on the march, to attack. The duke was more realistic when he assured Wade that he would be able to get to Finchley 'with the cavalry'. On Finchley Common the government was trying to assemble a new army to protect London. This force of about 4,000 men was, however, far smaller than Cumberland's army, which contained most of the good units. The Black Watch, one of the units ordered to Finchley, was of questionable reliability. Signs of pro-Hanoverian enthusiasm in London were of limited military value. The London weavers offered 1,000 men but the experience of the campaign hitherto did not encourage the use of poorly-trained volunteers.
London itself would have been a formidable task for the Jacobite army. On November 28th, Lieutenant-General Sir John Ligonier emphasised the problems that the Jacobites would have encountered had they attacked Chester:
Is it possible for them to fly over the walls? ... Three pounders neither can make a breach in a thousand years, or make a garrison uneasy behind their walls, who on the contrary can slaughter everything that approaches from behind their sand bags.
Lacking heavy artillery, the Jacobites might have made as little impact on the Tower of London as they did on Edinburgh Castle. Yet the fall of the towns of Carlisle and Edinburgh was scarcely an encouraging omen for the defenders of London. Furthermore, the War of the Austrian Succession on the Continent revealed the possibility of a successful storming of even a well-fortified and defended position, as with the Franco-Bavarian-Saxon capture of Prague in 1741 and the French capture of Bergen-op-Zoom in 1747.
What if London had fallen? During the War of the Spanish Succession Philip V has lost Madrid to the British- supported claimant 'Charles III', but he was able to fight on, supported by the troops and the proximity of his grandfather, Louis XIV. Frederick the Great lost Berlin temporarily during the Seven Years' War, but fought on successfully. Would Britain have been different? Some of George II's supporters would have probably fought on, especially in Ireland where there were both troops and concern about the maintenance of the Protestant ascendancy. It is unclear whether George II would have been prepared to lead his troops into battle as he had done only recently on the Continent in the Dettingen campaign of 1743, or whether he and the rest of the Royal Family would have bolted back to Hanover if the Jacobites had seriously menaced London. Certainly George II lacked popularity in 1745, not least because of the strident criticisms made in 1744 that he was devoting British resources to Hanoverian ends.
It is difficult to envisage Cumberland accepting Jacobite success without a battle. However, without London, the logistical and financial infrastructure of the military establishment would have collapsed. Pay and supplies would have become a serious problem for Cumberland, probably encouraging desertion among his soldiers and helping to dictate his strategy. It could be argued that there would have been a measure of activity from the English Jacobites once London had fallen. Possibly some of the Tories would have revealed their hands as Jacobite activists, thus repeating the pattern of Whig activity in 1688 once William of Orange's invasion appeared successful. Even without that, a weakened regular army might not have been able to obtain victory had there been a battle. The Jacobite success at the battle of Falkirk on January 17th, 1746, revealed the vulnerability of Hanoverian cavalry to Highland infantry.
The fall of London would also probably have affected the British fleet, disrupting its supplies and influencing the determination of some officers. This might have lessened the chances of a successful resistance to a French invasion. On October 3rd, the French council decided to send 6,000 men to invade England as soon as seemed propitious. On November 5th, the naval minister, Maurepas, ordered his protege, the Jacobite shipowner, Antoine Walsh, to assemble the ships for the crossing. On December 2nd, the Irish Brigade began to move towards Dunkirk, and the embarkation of cannon and supplies there began on December 12th.
Admiral Vernon, the commander of the British fleet in the Downs, considered his force small and outnumbered, and feared that the French invasion would be covered by a squadron from Brest, the scheme the French had attempted in 1744. That year the French had planned to send the Brest fleet to cruise off the isle of Wight in order to prevent the British from leaving Spithead or, if they did, to engage them in the western Channel. Five of the Brest ships were to sail to Dunkirk to escort the invasion force under Maurice of Saxe to the mouth of the Thames. The plan was, however, thwarted by delay and storms.
That did not mean that French naval power was not a threat. On December 16th, 1745, the ever-complaining Vernon wrote from the Downs:
... with a southerly wind it was very practicable for them to get by unobserved by our ships to the westward, and, if the others were ready to sail with them when they had slipped by, and they too strong for me, they might execute their descent before their Lordships [of the Admiralty] could have time to provide a preventive remedy against it ... My particular province ... is to watch the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and therefore, if with a southerly wind we should put to sea, without certain advice of the enemy being at sea, and which way they were gone, if it comes to overblow for one night southerly we must be driven to the northward by it, and of course, leave the coasts of Sussex and Kent exposed to the enemy's attempts, which their constant spies the smugglers would not fail to give them advice of.
Unlike the next invasion attempt, in 1759, which was to be smashed by Hawke's victory at Quiberon Bay, there was no close blockade of Brest, while Forbin's success in taking an invasion squadron from Dunkirk to the Firth of Forth in 1708 indicated the problems of blockading that port successfully.
On December 17th, 1745, the Marshal-Duke of Richelieu, the commander of the invasion force, reached Dunkirk and considered an embarkation that day: the winds were favourable but he decided that not enough cannon had yet arrived. The British government was very concerned about the danger of an invasion. Had Richelieu's force embarked en the 17th they could probably have reached England. Amphibious operations in this period were far from easy, but, like William Ill's successful landing in Torbay in 1688, this would have been an unopposed landing. Richelieu was to be successful with his next amphibious operation, the invasion of British-ruled Minorca in 1756.
Had the French landed in 1745-46 they would have been able to defeat whatever irregular forces the local authorities had raised and they would have outnumbered the regular troops in and around London. The speed of the French advance would have been affected by their ability to obtain horses, on their choice of route, on the weather and on whether they decided to march straight on London or to seize local ports in order to open communications with France. In 1745 they planned to transport horses, once Dover or Dungeness had been seized.
The threat to the Hanoverian regime was therefore serious. Separately, both a Jacobite advance from Derby and a French invasion in the south were serious challenges. In combination they could each contribute to the threat posed by the other Jacobite forces in the London area could have handicapped any attempt to mount coherent opposition to a French advance. The French could offer the Jacobites what they lacked: siege artillery, regular infantry able to stand up to British regulars in a firefight, and a secure logistical base.
Speculation on this theme can be, and has been, dismissed as pointless hypotheses or the revisionist obscurantism and nostalgia that interest in Jacobitisrn has been held to display, but such arguments are of value only if the options facing individuals in the past are ignored and it is assumed not only that the path of history is pre-ordained and obvious but that the past belongs to the victors.
A Jacobite or Franco-Jacobite victory would have been a major triumph for one important tendency of the early 1740s: the attempt to reverse the European order that had stemmed from the developments of the 1680s. That decade had led to a shift in relative power away from France and towards Austria and Britain. In Eastern Europe the period from the 1680s until 1721 had seen the defeat of Sweden and the Turks and a collapse in Polish strength, cause and consequence of the rise of Austrian and Russian power.
The success of the 'Glorious Revolution' in Britain was thus an important aspect of a new European order that had been contested unsuccessfully by Louis XIV, his allies, including the Jacobites; and a number of other powers. The 1740s saw a renewed struggle. War broke out between Sweden and Russia in 1741, France and her German allies sought to overthrow Habsburg power from 1741, and from 1744 France provided support for the Jacobites. To contemporaries, it was far from clear who would triumph, and the eventual limited territorial and political outcome of the War of Austrian Succession seemed far from likely earlier in the struggle.
A full range of hypothetical phrases is called for when discussing what would have happened in Britain. It is unclear how far the restored Stuarts would have respected the position of the Church of England and the constitutional changes since 1688. Their impact on the situation in Scotland and Ireland is open to discussion. The degree of their unpopularity is unclear. Jacobitism represented an attempt to challenge developed and strengthening patterns on control: of Ireland by England, of Scotland by England, of northern Scotland by the Presbyterians of the Central Lowlands, of northern England by the south; and indeed of the whole of Britain by its most populous, wealthy and 'advanced' region: south-east England.
Jacobitism thus represented an attempt to reverse the spatial process of state formation that had characterised recent (as well as earlier) British history. Proximity to centres of power, such as London, the Ile de France, and the Scottish Central Lowlands, brought a greater awareness of the political reality of 'England', 'France' and 'Scotland' than life in many regions that were far from being economically and politically marginal. Such proximity was crucial to processes of state formation and resource mobilisation.
At one level Jacobitism sought to resist this process in Britain. It was the expression of the desire for High- land and Irish autonomy. Culloden ensured that the new British state created by the parliamentary union of 1707 would continue to be one whose political tone and agenda were set in London and southern England. This was the basis of British consciousness, a development that did not so much alter the views of the English political elite, for whom Britain was essentially an extension of England, but, rather, that reflected the determination of the Scottish and Irish Protestant elites to link their fate with that of the British state.
William III's defeat of Jacobitism in Ireland in 1690-91 ensured that the Catholic challenge to this process was defeated in Ireland, and this result was sustained by Culloden. In strategic and geopolitical terms this was of tremendous importance: an autonomous or independent Ireland would probably have looked to the major maritime Catholic powers, France and Spain, rather than Austria, and this challenge to English power within the British Isles would have made it difficult to devote sufficient resources to the maritime and colonial struggle with the Bourbons.
Jacobitism was also, particularly in England and at the court of the exiled Stuarts, an attempt not to dismember Britain or to alter the spatial relations within the British Isles, but rather to restore the male line of the Stuarts. The degree of their unpopularity is unclear. Most of the evidence commonly cited for anti-Stuart feeling in 1745 relates to the period after the retreat from Derby and offers little guide to the likely response to a successful invasion. In England neither side appears to have enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the bulk of the population; and certainly not to the extent of action. Possibly we need to rethink views of political culture in this period to take note of this quiescence, and to appreciate that the political structure of Britain was based on the successful use of force.
For Further Reading:
W.A. Speak, The Butcher, The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression on the '45 (Basil Blackwell, 1981); F.J. McLynn,The Jacobite Army in England (John Donald, 1983); J.M. Black, Culloden and the '45 (Alan Sutton, 1990).
All dates in this article are given in Old Style.
• Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Durham and author of European Warfare, 1660-1815 (UCL Press, 1994).
On July 25rd, 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the 'Seven Men of Moidart' reached Eriksay in the Western Isles of Scotland. On the afternoon of December 4th, 1745, en route for London, the now victorious prince entered Derby at the head of an army. Two days later, this force began its retreat to Scotland and on April 16th, 1746, it was crushed by the Duke of Cumberland on Culloden Moor. It was unclear to contemporaries whether the prince could have taken London had he pressed on from Derby or indeed had he followed a different strategy in 1745. This can be regarded as one of the great might-have-beens of history.
The '45 was the highpoint of a mid-eighteenth-century crisis caused by the interaction of conflict with the Bourbons, the Jacobite challenge and ministerial instability after the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. Its eventual resolution in terms of the destruction of Jacobitism was not obvious in the December days of 1745. A Jacobite Britain would probably have been a very different state internally. In addition, restored with French support, the Stuarts would have been unlikely to challenge the Bourbons for global maritime hegemony, and the history of both North America and India would have been very different.
It is easy to suggest that the '45 was doomed. It failed after all, and the basic precondition of Jacobite plans over the previous fourteen years – the landing of a supporting French army in southern England – was not achieved. The British navy did not lose its superiority in home waters. Within England few rose for the prince and his Scottish supporters were demoralised as a result. At the Jacobite Council meeting at Exeter House, Derby, on 'Black Friday', December 5th, 1745, Lord George Murray pressed, in the absence of English and French support, for retreat. Under pressure, the prince was forced to admit that he had no promises of support from the English Jacobites and no idea of when the French would invade. The situation seemed even worse when the council was told by Dudley Bradstreet, an English spy, that a larger army of 9,000 blocked the route to London at Northampton, a deliberately misleading report. The decision was taken to retreat.
Leaving aside government disinformation, the factors mentioned at Derby were pertinent. The lack of English support ensured that the Jacobite army had received few reinforcements in its march south. The French had not landed and thus divided the government forces. Aside from these points, the eventual failure of the Highland charge at Culloden in the face of the disciplined fire- power of Cumberland's army suggested that Jacobite tactics were anachronistic.
Against this must be set Jacobite success prior to Derby and the strategic situation at that juncture. A Highland charge at Prestonpans on September 21st, had crushed Sir John Cope's force, the sole royal army in Scotland. Cope's army had not simply been defeated; it had been shattered and the government had to move troops back from the war with France I in the Low Countries to confront the Jacobites. An army under Field Marshal Wade assembled at Newcastle, but on November 5th, the Jacobites, about 5,500 strong, crossed the Esk into England. By striking to the west of the Pennines they gained the initiative. Carlisle castle, with its weak defences and small garrison, surrendered on November 15th, and the Jacobites pressed south. Wade's attempt to relieve the castle had been thwarted by the weather and his own sloth.
After Carlisle the Jacobites encountered no resistance on the march south. Penrith fell on November 18th, to be followed by Kendal, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester. The fragility of the Hanoverian state was brutally exposed. The speed of the Jacobite advance thwarted governmental plans to have their troops in southern Lancashire first, while the local resistance was derisory. The Lancashire militia was disbanded and the magistrates at Lancaster wisely abandoned their plan to defend the castle. The Earl of Cholmondeley, Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire and Governor of Chester Castle, felt that it would be impracticable to raise the county militia and was pessimistic about his chances of holding the castle. Until the Jacobites turned back, the situation was comparable to the Bosworth campaign of 1485 with most of the political nation inactive; whatever their intentions, they were in effect sitting on the side- lines and awaiting the outcome of a trial by battle between the two claimants. The stability of the political culture established by the first two Georges and by Walpole had collapsed with the first serious challenge.
The defence of the Hanoverian regime had to rely on regulars, but Wade moved south through Yorkshire only slowly: he did not leave Newcastle until November 26th, and had only reached Wetherby by December 6th. The crucial force was therefore Cumberland's army, which marched from Lichfield on November 28th. Cumberland was, however, misled by deliberately circulated reports that the Jacobites intended to advance on Chester and North Wales, and responded to the feint by a Jacobite detachment to Congleton, leaving the road to Derby clear.
Thus the campaign hitherto had revealed that the Jacobites could expect little resistance except from regulars and that these could be out- manoeuvred. The sole battle, Prestonpans, had suggested that the fire-power of the regulars was of little value unless the Jacobites fought on their terms, as they were to do at Culloden.
When the Jacobites entered Derby they held the strategic initiative. Cumberland's army was exhausted by its marches in the West Midlands. The 2nd Duke of Richmond, commander of the cavalry, claimed 'these dreadful fatiguing marches will make them [the troops) incapable of fighting'. On December 4th, Cumberland wrote to explain his failure to try to intercept the Jacobites at Derby after he had discovered their feint:
troops that had scarcely halted six hours these seven days, had been without victuals for twenty-four hours, and had been exposed to one of the coldest nights I have ever felt without any shelter ... were not able to march without a halt and provisions, so we immediately came to a resolution of intercepting them at Northampton.
It is by no means clear that he could have done so and he might have exposed his army, strung out on the march, to attack. The duke was more realistic when he assured Wade that he would be able to get to Finchley 'with the cavalry'. On Finchley Common the government was trying to assemble a new army to protect London. This force of about 4,000 men was, however, far smaller than Cumberland's army, which contained most of the good units. The Black Watch, one of the units ordered to Finchley, was of questionable reliability. Signs of pro-Hanoverian enthusiasm in London were of limited military value. The London weavers offered 1,000 men but the experience of the campaign hitherto did not encourage the use of poorly-trained volunteers.
London itself would have been a formidable task for the Jacobite army. On November 28th, Lieutenant-General Sir John Ligonier emphasised the problems that the Jacobites would have encountered had they attacked Chester:
Is it possible for them to fly over the walls? ... Three pounders neither can make a breach in a thousand years, or make a garrison uneasy behind their walls, who on the contrary can slaughter everything that approaches from behind their sand bags.
Lacking heavy artillery, the Jacobites might have made as little impact on the Tower of London as they did on Edinburgh Castle. Yet the fall of the towns of Carlisle and Edinburgh was scarcely an encouraging omen for the defenders of London. Furthermore, the War of the Austrian Succession on the Continent revealed the possibility of a successful storming of even a well-fortified and defended position, as with the Franco-Bavarian-Saxon capture of Prague in 1741 and the French capture of Bergen-op-Zoom in 1747.
What if London had fallen? During the War of the Spanish Succession Philip V has lost Madrid to the British- supported claimant 'Charles III', but he was able to fight on, supported by the troops and the proximity of his grandfather, Louis XIV. Frederick the Great lost Berlin temporarily during the Seven Years' War, but fought on successfully. Would Britain have been different? Some of George II's supporters would have probably fought on, especially in Ireland where there were both troops and concern about the maintenance of the Protestant ascendancy. It is unclear whether George II would have been prepared to lead his troops into battle as he had done only recently on the Continent in the Dettingen campaign of 1743, or whether he and the rest of the Royal Family would have bolted back to Hanover if the Jacobites had seriously menaced London. Certainly George II lacked popularity in 1745, not least because of the strident criticisms made in 1744 that he was devoting British resources to Hanoverian ends.
It is difficult to envisage Cumberland accepting Jacobite success without a battle. However, without London, the logistical and financial infrastructure of the military establishment would have collapsed. Pay and supplies would have become a serious problem for Cumberland, probably encouraging desertion among his soldiers and helping to dictate his strategy. It could be argued that there would have been a measure of activity from the English Jacobites once London had fallen. Possibly some of the Tories would have revealed their hands as Jacobite activists, thus repeating the pattern of Whig activity in 1688 once William of Orange's invasion appeared successful. Even without that, a weakened regular army might not have been able to obtain victory had there been a battle. The Jacobite success at the battle of Falkirk on January 17th, 1746, revealed the vulnerability of Hanoverian cavalry to Highland infantry.
The fall of London would also probably have affected the British fleet, disrupting its supplies and influencing the determination of some officers. This might have lessened the chances of a successful resistance to a French invasion. On October 3rd, the French council decided to send 6,000 men to invade England as soon as seemed propitious. On November 5th, the naval minister, Maurepas, ordered his protege, the Jacobite shipowner, Antoine Walsh, to assemble the ships for the crossing. On December 2nd, the Irish Brigade began to move towards Dunkirk, and the embarkation of cannon and supplies there began on December 12th.
Admiral Vernon, the commander of the British fleet in the Downs, considered his force small and outnumbered, and feared that the French invasion would be covered by a squadron from Brest, the scheme the French had attempted in 1744. That year the French had planned to send the Brest fleet to cruise off the isle of Wight in order to prevent the British from leaving Spithead or, if they did, to engage them in the western Channel. Five of the Brest ships were to sail to Dunkirk to escort the invasion force under Maurice of Saxe to the mouth of the Thames. The plan was, however, thwarted by delay and storms.
That did not mean that French naval power was not a threat. On December 16th, 1745, the ever-complaining Vernon wrote from the Downs:
... with a southerly wind it was very practicable for them to get by unobserved by our ships to the westward, and, if the others were ready to sail with them when they had slipped by, and they too strong for me, they might execute their descent before their Lordships [of the Admiralty] could have time to provide a preventive remedy against it ... My particular province ... is to watch the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and therefore, if with a southerly wind we should put to sea, without certain advice of the enemy being at sea, and which way they were gone, if it comes to overblow for one night southerly we must be driven to the northward by it, and of course, leave the coasts of Sussex and Kent exposed to the enemy's attempts, which their constant spies the smugglers would not fail to give them advice of.
Unlike the next invasion attempt, in 1759, which was to be smashed by Hawke's victory at Quiberon Bay, there was no close blockade of Brest, while Forbin's success in taking an invasion squadron from Dunkirk to the Firth of Forth in 1708 indicated the problems of blockading that port successfully.
On December 17th, 1745, the Marshal-Duke of Richelieu, the commander of the invasion force, reached Dunkirk and considered an embarkation that day: the winds were favourable but he decided that not enough cannon had yet arrived. The British government was very concerned about the danger of an invasion. Had Richelieu's force embarked en the 17th they could probably have reached England. Amphibious operations in this period were far from easy, but, like William Ill's successful landing in Torbay in 1688, this would have been an unopposed landing. Richelieu was to be successful with his next amphibious operation, the invasion of British-ruled Minorca in 1756.
Had the French landed in 1745-46 they would have been able to defeat whatever irregular forces the local authorities had raised and they would have outnumbered the regular troops in and around London. The speed of the French advance would have been affected by their ability to obtain horses, on their choice of route, on the weather and on whether they decided to march straight on London or to seize local ports in order to open communications with France. In 1745 they planned to transport horses, once Dover or Dungeness had been seized.
The threat to the Hanoverian regime was therefore serious. Separately, both a Jacobite advance from Derby and a French invasion in the south were serious challenges. In combination they could each contribute to the threat posed by the other Jacobite forces in the London area could have handicapped any attempt to mount coherent opposition to a French advance. The French could offer the Jacobites what they lacked: siege artillery, regular infantry able to stand up to British regulars in a firefight, and a secure logistical base.
Speculation on this theme can be, and has been, dismissed as pointless hypotheses or the revisionist obscurantism and nostalgia that interest in Jacobitisrn has been held to display, but such arguments are of value only if the options facing individuals in the past are ignored and it is assumed not only that the path of history is pre-ordained and obvious but that the past belongs to the victors.
A Jacobite or Franco-Jacobite victory would have been a major triumph for one important tendency of the early 1740s: the attempt to reverse the European order that had stemmed from the developments of the 1680s. That decade had led to a shift in relative power away from France and towards Austria and Britain. In Eastern Europe the period from the 1680s until 1721 had seen the defeat of Sweden and the Turks and a collapse in Polish strength, cause and consequence of the rise of Austrian and Russian power.
The success of the 'Glorious Revolution' in Britain was thus an important aspect of a new European order that had been contested unsuccessfully by Louis XIV, his allies, including the Jacobites; and a number of other powers. The 1740s saw a renewed struggle. War broke out between Sweden and Russia in 1741, France and her German allies sought to overthrow Habsburg power from 1741, and from 1744 France provided support for the Jacobites. To contemporaries, it was far from clear who would triumph, and the eventual limited territorial and political outcome of the War of Austrian Succession seemed far from likely earlier in the struggle.
A full range of hypothetical phrases is called for when discussing what would have happened in Britain. It is unclear how far the restored Stuarts would have respected the position of the Church of England and the constitutional changes since 1688. Their impact on the situation in Scotland and Ireland is open to discussion. The degree of their unpopularity is unclear. Jacobitism represented an attempt to challenge developed and strengthening patterns on control: of Ireland by England, of Scotland by England, of northern Scotland by the Presbyterians of the Central Lowlands, of northern England by the south; and indeed of the whole of Britain by its most populous, wealthy and 'advanced' region: south-east England.
Jacobitism thus represented an attempt to reverse the spatial process of state formation that had characterised recent (as well as earlier) British history. Proximity to centres of power, such as London, the Ile de France, and the Scottish Central Lowlands, brought a greater awareness of the political reality of 'England', 'France' and 'Scotland' than life in many regions that were far from being economically and politically marginal. Such proximity was crucial to processes of state formation and resource mobilisation.
At one level Jacobitism sought to resist this process in Britain. It was the expression of the desire for High- land and Irish autonomy. Culloden ensured that the new British state created by the parliamentary union of 1707 would continue to be one whose political tone and agenda were set in London and southern England. This was the basis of British consciousness, a development that did not so much alter the views of the English political elite, for whom Britain was essentially an extension of England, but, rather, that reflected the determination of the Scottish and Irish Protestant elites to link their fate with that of the British state.
William III's defeat of Jacobitism in Ireland in 1690-91 ensured that the Catholic challenge to this process was defeated in Ireland, and this result was sustained by Culloden. In strategic and geopolitical terms this was of tremendous importance: an autonomous or independent Ireland would probably have looked to the major maritime Catholic powers, France and Spain, rather than Austria, and this challenge to English power within the British Isles would have made it difficult to devote sufficient resources to the maritime and colonial struggle with the Bourbons.
Jacobitism was also, particularly in England and at the court of the exiled Stuarts, an attempt not to dismember Britain or to alter the spatial relations within the British Isles, but rather to restore the male line of the Stuarts. The degree of their unpopularity is unclear. Most of the evidence commonly cited for anti-Stuart feeling in 1745 relates to the period after the retreat from Derby and offers little guide to the likely response to a successful invasion. In England neither side appears to have enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the bulk of the population; and certainly not to the extent of action. Possibly we need to rethink views of political culture in this period to take note of this quiescence, and to appreciate that the political structure of Britain was based on the successful use of force.
For Further Reading:
W.A. Speak, The Butcher, The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression on the '45 (Basil Blackwell, 1981); F.J. McLynn,The Jacobite Army in England (John Donald, 1983); J.M. Black, Culloden and the '45 (Alan Sutton, 1990).
All dates in this article are given in Old Style.
• Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Durham and author of European Warfare, 1660-1815 (UCL Press, 1994).