History Scotland Magazine: Review - Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A Fatal Attachment, amonn Ciardha

Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A Fatal Attachment

amonn Ciardha

Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2003. . ISBN 1-85182-534-7 468pp. 45

This is a splendid book. It should be taken as a complement not as a supplement to the magisterial work on Ireland and the Stuarts, Aisling Gharr: Na Stiobhartaigh Agus an tAos Leinn, 1603-1788 (Dublin, 1996), by B. Buachalla, which is accessible to few historians being written uncompromisingly in Irish Gaelic. Written in English, but making extensive and productive use of Gaelic poetry and other commentaries, Ciardhas analysis of the Jacobite cause overturns the canons of Irish historiography. He launches his assault on three fronts. Jacobitism was the main political culture on the island of Ireland for the greater part of the eighteenth century. Jacobitism was the ideology that prompted the imposition and intermittent enforcement of penal legislation against Roman Catholics between 1690 and 1760. Jacobitism, which was essential to the emergence of Irish nationalism in the later eighteenth century, was the cause which consistently sustained Irish Catholic identity between the Glorious and the French Revolutions. In short, Jacobitism was not so much part of hidden Ireland as a deliberately overlooked, yet central aspect of Irish history, that was as uncomfortable to republican ideologues as to Whiggish historians thirled to the Anglican ascendancy. Accordingly, Ciardhas work is not so much revisionist as demolitionist!

This penetrating analysis is developed primarily through narrative rather than thematic chapters, whose Gaelic titles are considerably more instructive than the prosaic English sub-titles chronologically demarcating Jacobitism in the eight chapters from 1685 to 1766. Thus, the first chapter Irish Jacobitism, 1684 (sic) 90, convincingly demonstrates that Jacobitism was established as a party allegiance during the reign of James II rather than on his removal in favour of William of Orange. However, the Gaelic title Caithrim Shamus agus Samas an Chaca (Jamess triumph and James the shit) conveys the ambivalence provoked by a monarch who tended to take Irish loyalty for granted. The second chapter, The Shipwreck, 1692-1701, the only one directly translated from the Irish An Longbhriseadh, takes to task the prevailing historiographic convention, even among previous historians of Irish Jacobitism, that the cause was washed up by the failure of the first Jacobite rising. In this chapter, Ciardha fully develops the essential and components of Irish Jacobitism the dispossessed landed elite, the clergy, the poets, the Irish brigades and the rapparees who sustained the cause. The interaction of these groups form the thematic sub-structure to the ensuing chapters on Irish Jacobites, 1702-16; Irish Jacobitism after the Fifteen; Jacobitism in the Doldrums, 1725-39; Ireland and the Forty-five and the Jacobite twilight, 1752-66. While it could be argued that thematic chapters would have offered a more sophisticated approach, this would not necessarily have been more constructive or perceptive. Ciardhas narrative structure allows for the differential loading of their respective importance to sustaining Irish Jacobitism and their comparative contribution to specific phases of Jacobitism. Moreover, each chapter is preceded by an informative setting of the contemporaneous European scene essential for any understanding of Jacobitism within all three kingdoms, not just Ireland.

As this book makes abundantly clear, Irish Jacobitism was not a smoothly functioning movement in which the component groups pulled selflessly together. Undoubtedly, the dispossessed elite became increasingly reconciled to the dream rather than the actuality of their restoration through Jacobitism. Even the clergy were not immune to empirical accommodations with the Hanoverian monarchy as the eighteenth century progressed. However, the influence of the likes of Cornelius Nary as Ciardha observes, must not be extrapolated from its Jacobite context. As evident from a Scottish contemporary, the Jacobite philosopher and soldier, William Forbes, Lord Pitsligo, adherents of the exiled Stuarts had to take account of the de facto exercise of monarchy by their supplanters for over three decades by the 1720s without compromising their belief in de iure kingship. In turn, James III was prepared by 1740 to put aside the prerogative powers to dispense and suspend laws that had occasioned the removal of his father in 1689. No less pertinently, the influence of both James II and James III on the Irish mission, especially in the appointment of Catholic bishops, meant that the distinction between de iure and de facto kingship was less marked in Ireland than in Scotland or England.

Irish Jacobitism, more so than their Scottish and English fellow travellers, had secure and reliable links to the Stuart Courts in exile through the Catholic clergy and the Irish brigades in French and Spanish service. While the former kept hopes alive persuasively through the pulpit, the latter offered the coercive promise of restoration by force, especially as the Stuart Courts expected migr officers to inculcate Jacobitism throughout the ranks. Recruitment to the brigades was often encouraged by the promise of release and assistance to effect a Jacobite restoration in Ireland. In turn, fighting against the British in French or Spanish service can be viewed as an aggressive assertion of Jacobitism. Thus, the cover of the book depicts the Irish brigades presenting tattered butchers aprons (Union Jacks) to Louis XV after the battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745, which was a signal defeat for British forces under the Duke of Cumberland. Eleven months later, Cumberland compounded his bloody infamy by his treatment of the Jacobite clans after Culloden when the Irish brigades were again in service as a disciplined backbone under the command of the Scottish noble, Lord John Drummond. However, the Irish brigades also served the purposes of the emergent British military-fiscal state in linking the French, as the external other, to the Irish and Scottish Jacobites as the enemy within. Accordingly, the brutality of the reprisals inflicted upon Ireland in the 1690s was at least replicated, if not magnified, in the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the 1740s. Jacobitism was indeed a fatal attraction in and for both countries.

Ciardha rather uncritically accepts the assertion that Scottish Gaelic poetry in comparison with the Irish propagated a narrowly conceived ideology founded on the single issue of dynastic loyalty. The nationalist dimension is certainly underplayed in relation to Irish poetry, but the Scottish Gaels were concerned about the misgovernment of Scotland, which could only be redressed through a Jacobite restoration. Moreover, the Scottish Gaels were not sympathetic to the cause being used as an excuse for banditry (Whig propaganda and historiography notwithstanding), whereas the attitude of Irish poets to the predatory activities of the rapparees, under the cloak of Jacobitism, was at best ambivalent where not contradictory. Nonetheless, the vernacular poets were able to reclaim the political high ground in advocating the centrality of hereditary right and divine providence for a Jacobite restoration and, indeed, for counter-revolution against the Whig usurpers and especially, the Anglican supremacy in Ireland. Indeed, the reclamation of the high ground for Jacobitism can be pushed further in terms of an ideology that offered an alternative path to modernity to Whig progressivism that was grounded in political exclusion and confessional oppression. The persistence of Jacobitism as a perceived, if rarely a tangible, threat after 1691 fed a Protestant siege mentality in Ireland that oscillated between triumphalism and paranoia. Irish Jacobitism affected the mind not just the heart.

Irish Jacobitism, though drawing predominantly on the confessional affirmation of Irish nationalism rooted in the Counter-Reformation of the early seventeenth century, was not just a Catholic concern. Ciardha is to be commended for drawing attention to the Protestant non-jurors who were particularly adept at using the printing presses of Dublin to Jacobite advantage. Unlike Scotland, where the non-jurors formed the bedrock of the Jacobite cause, these Protestants never seem to have been fully integrated into Irish Jacobitism and their influence would appear to have become subliminal by the 1720s. However, there is an Ulster dissenting dimension waiting to be explored, particularly among the Scottish Presbyterian settlers not reconciled to the erastian nature of the Revolution Settlements, who continued to flirt with Jacobitism in opposition to the Anglo-Scottish political union before and after its accomplishment in 1707.

A final vignette reinforces Ciardhas central contention about the popular appeal of Jacobitism in Ireland. The royal navy apprehended a transport snow, the Gordon, off the isle of Lewis in late May 1746. Having recently embarked from Dublin, where it had taken on over a hundred indentured servants for Virginia, the ship was taken over by a passenger mutiny west of Tory Island and sailed to the Western Isles in the hope of rescuing the fugitive Bonnie Prince Charlie. Although their enterprise was forlorn, the ringleaders avoided capture having managed to escape to Lewis where they were succoured and protected by the local population.

Irish Jacobitism, like its Scottish counterpart, involved more than blind loyalty to the Stuarts, however. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for both countries that Jacobitism endured despite, not because of, the exiled house of Stuart in appealing respectively to a patriotism that was grounded in confessionalism in Ireland and in anti-unionism in Scotland. The extent to which Jacobitism represented a cohesive movement rather than an episodic cause still remains problematic for both countries. However, Irish scholarship has now established a clear lead in the unravelling of this conundrum. It is to be hoped that Four Courts, who have mounted an impressive and illuminating production, have laid up sufficient stocks to satisfy future generations of scholars for whom this work will serve as a benchmark in Jacobite studies.

Allan I. Macinnes
Burnett-Fletcher Chair of History,
University of Aberdeen.