The Jacobite Risings & Culloden

1. Scope: a parallel thread in Scotland’s history

The Covenanters & Civil Wars and The Jacobite Risings & Culloden carried Scotland’s story through civil war, famine and the 1707 Union. This article runs alongside that thread, returning to the 1689 rising and Glencoe before tracing Jacobitism to Culloden and the punitive legislation of 1746–48. The later Highland Clearances and diaspora have their own place in the series; they were not simply an immediate consequence of one battle.

The risings were struggles over dynasty, religion and political power, with Scots on both sides and important international involvement. Opposition to Union was a significant strand of Jacobitism, especially in Scotland, but it does not turn these conflicts into a simple war between two nations.

2. The 1689 rising and Killiecrankie

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 deposed the Catholic James VII and II in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. When the Scottish Convention offered the crown to William and Mary in 1689, John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee — later mythologised by Sir Walter Scott as "Bonnie Dundee", and remembered by his Covenanter enemies as "Bluidy Clavers" — raised Highland clans loyal to James.

On 27 July 1689, Dundee's roughly 2,400 Highlanders met a larger government army (perhaps 3,500–5,000) under Major-General Hugh Mackay at the Pass of Killiecrankie near Blair Atholl. Dundee waited until the sun was out of his men's eyes, then unleashed the Highland charge — a rapid volley followed by a broadsword rush. Mackay's men, unable to reload in time and using plug bayonets that obstructed firing once inserted, were broken "in the twinkling of an eye". It was a striking tactical victory, but a ruinous one: the Jacobites lost around a third of their strength, and Dundee was killed at the moment of victory. Without his unifying leadership, the rising lost coherence.

3. The Battle of Dunkeld

Command passed to Colonel Alexander Cannon. On 21 August 1689, the Jacobites — numbering several thousand and heavily outnumbering the defenders — attacked the Cameronian regiment (the Earl of Angus's Regiment, raised from staunch Presbyterian Covenanters and named for the martyr Richard Cameron) holding Dunkeld under Lieutenant-Colonel William Cleland. In the town's narrow streets there was no room for the Highland charge that had won Killiecrankie. The Cameronians, fighting with pike and musket and setting fire to buildings to deny cover, held out; Cleland was killed but his regiment prevailed; losses on both sides are uncertain, with traditional estimates often giving around 45 government deaths and several hundred Jacobite losses. Dunkeld was left in ruins, but the first rising in Scotland had effectively ended. It is a telling opening to this whole story that the first two battles pitted Scot against Scot.

4. The Massacre of Glencoe examined (13 February 1692)

In August 1691 the government offered an indemnity to Highland chiefs who would swear allegiance to William and Mary before 1 January 1692; non-jurors would be treated as traitors. Many chiefs delayed, waiting to be released from their prior oath to the exiled James, whose permission arrived only in late December 1691.

Alasdair MacIain, chief of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, set out to comply but was undone by procedure and weather. He went first to Fort William, only to be told its governor, Colonel Hill, could not administer the oath — he had to reach the sheriff-depute at Inveraray, some 60 miles away, in midwinter. Delayed by snow, MacIain finally swore the oath at Inveraray on 6 January 1692, a few days late.

That technicality became a pretext. Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, the Secretary of State, saw an opportunity to "extirpate that sect of thieves" and make an example of a small, isolated and Episcopalian/Catholic-linked clan with few allies. Orders — carrying the king's signature — were issued. In early February around 120 soldiers of the Earl of Argyll's Regiment, commanded by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, were billeted in Glencoe and lived among the MacDonalds for about twelve days, accepting their hospitality. At about 5am on 13 February 1692, they turned on their hosts. Traditionally about 38 MacDonalds are said to have been killed outright, including MacIain; more — women, children and elderly among them — died of exposure after fleeing into a winter blizzard when the planned encirclement failed and many escaped. The killing violated the deeply held Highland code of hospitality, which is precisely why it caused lasting revulsion. A royal commission of inquiry, followed by Scottish parliamentary consideration in 1695, laid blame on Dalrymple, who lost office but faced no serious punishment; William himself escaped censure. Glencoe became — and remains — a byword for state treachery.

5. Bridging to 1715: dynasty, Hanover and the Union

When Queen Anne died on 1 August 1714 without surviving children, the Act of Settlement 1701 (which barred Catholics) passed the crown to the Protestant Elector of Hanover as George I, over the nearer-blooded but Catholic Stuart claimant James Francis Edward Stuart, "the Old Pretender". Lingering resentment at the 1707 Union (widely felt to have been carried against Scottish opinion), the arrival of an unfamiliar German dynasty, and the dismissal of Tory office-holders under the new regime combined to create fertile ground for a rising.

6. Who were the Jacobites? Faith, nation and need

Scottish Jacobitism mirrored Scottish society, so its leaders came from the Highland and Lowland elite. In 1715 James Maule, Earl of Panmure, called out his tenants, chose officers from the landed families tied to his house and marched at their head, in a way that the historian Daniel Szechi says "would not have been out of place four centuries earlier". But Szechi, writing in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), argues that the movement was not just lords and obedient followers. Most Jacobites were committed by belief and interest.

The Jacobites' "best recruiting sergeant" was the Episcopal Church. For at least two generations after 1688, Szechi estimates, it held the allegiance of about 30 per cent of Scots, and its ministers urged loyalty to the Stuarts for nearly a century. The small underground Catholic Church did the same. Both kept producing new generations of Jacobites until the late 1740s, when persecution broke the Episcopal Church's grip.

After 1707 a second motive grew: patriotism. If you wanted an independent Scotland, free of English influence, Szechi points out, "you really had nowhere else to go than Jacobitism". In 1715 an English clergyman, Robert Patten, met a group of ordinary Scots in Northumberland heading north. They told him: "We are Scotsmen, going to our homes to join our countrymen that are in arms for King James." Crowds at Kelso greeted King James's proclamation with cries of "No Hannoverian! No Popery! No Union!" Many Jacobites were Protestant, and suspicious of their own Catholic king.

Some joined simply out of need. Asked why he had fought for Charles Edward Stuart, William Boyd, Earl of Kilmarnock, said he cared nothing which king won: "I was starving, and, by God, if Mahommed had set up his standard in the Highlands I had been a good Mussulman for bread." The movement also had its internal tensions: Lord Elcho blamed Charles Edward's Catholicism and his Irish Catholic officers for the defeat of the '45, and some Lowland Jacobites disliked Highlanders.

7. One society, two loyalties

Despite the bitterness of the risings, Jacobites never separated from the rest of Scottish society. Kinship, friendship, business and marriage crossed the political line. Jacobite and Whig merchants in Aberdeen worked together. Sons of Jacobite families got jobs in the empire through Whig patrons, and Whigs with London connections lobbied for pardons for Jacobite friends and relatives after both the '15 and the '45.

Szechi sees a shared Scottish identity beneath the division. In 1716 about a thousand mostly Presbyterian, Whig citizens of Edinburgh attacked a party of drunken Dutch soldiers who had boasted of killing a Jacobite Highlander and cutting off his head. Flora MacDonald, who was neutral or even a Whig, helped Charles Edward escape in 1746, and she was far from the only Scot to help someone from the other side. This deep embedding, Szechi argues, is what let Scottish Jacobitism survive two crushing defeats before a third finished it.

8. The Fifteen

John Erskine, Earl of Mar — nicknamed "Bobbing John" for his habit of shifting political allegiance (Britannica notes the name arose "because Mar shifted his political allegiances frequently") — turned to Jacobitism after George I dismissed him. In September 1715 he raised the standard at Braemar for "James VIII and III". The Fifteen was far larger in scale than 1689; Mar quickly controlled much of northern and eastern Scotland and at one point commanded perhaps 10,000 men against the Duke of Argyll's 4,000.

At the Battle of Sheriffmuir (13 November 1715) near Dunblane, Mar's numerical advantage produced only an indecisive result — each wing broke the other's opposite flank. Mar is widely criticised for failing to turn his numerical advantage into a decisive victory. Whether a different commander could have won the campaign remains a counterfactual, not an established conclusion. At Preston in Lancashire, a separate Jacobite force fought on 12–13 November and surrendered on 14 November. James landed at Peterhead in late December 1715 but arrived too late to reverse the military collapse; he sailed back to France in February 1716, and Mar fled with him.

Rob Roy MacGregor's part at Sheriffmuir shows how loyalties blurred. Hanoverian accounts and a satirical ballad claimed he stood on a hill with his men waiting for plunder. The historian David Stevenson, in The Hunt for Rob Roy (2004), argues from a letter of Cameron of Lochiel that Rob arrived from Doune only as the Jacobite left was in retreat, and refused Lochiel's proposal to cross the Allan Water and attack Argyll's victorious wing near nightfall. A week later Rob was sending intelligence to Argyll, the Hanoverian commander. The Jacobites had already judged him untrustworthy and kept him on the fringes of the campaign.

9. The 1719 rising, briefly

The "Nineteen" was a small, Spanish-backed affair, launched amid the War of the Quadruple Alliance. The main Spanish fleet (intended for south-west England) was, like the Armada before it, scattered by storms; only a few hundred Spanish marines reached the West Highlands, basing themselves at Eilean Donan Castle (later destroyed by Royal Navy frigates). At the Battle of Glen Shiel (10 June 1719), a government force under Major-General Joseph Wightman, using mortars to devastating effect in the narrow pass, defeated the Jacobite–Spanish force. A peak above the battlefield is still called Sgurr nan Spainnteach, "Peak of the Spaniards". The rising collapsed at once.

Among the few Highlanders who turned out was Rob Roy MacGregor, paid by the Marquis of Tullibardine to raise about forty men. Held in reserve, they were sent forward only after the line had given way and joined the flight. Because his men were still together, Rob was ordered on 11 June to blow up the Jacobite magazine. Stevenson notes that the government treated the '19 as a mopping-up operation: unlike 1715, it brought no forfeitures, house-burnings or new barracks.

10. The exiles: help and hindrance

Defeat sent Jacobites abroad, but they were a small part of a much larger Scottish movement overseas. Szechi estimates that only four to five thousand Scots left because of Jacobitism, out of perhaps 200,000 who emigrated over the same period. What made them unusual was their rank: many were from the top of Scottish society and found themselves stranded abroad indefinitely.

Some built new careers. George Keith, Earl Marischal, rose high in Spanish and French service and became a trusted adviser to Frederick the Great of Prussia, but in doing so he lost interest in the cause and even discouraged new risings. Others stayed active: during the '45, Scottish exiles in Sweden persuaded the Swedish government to send about 600 officers and soldiers, who did not arrive before the rising was crushed.

Many exiles simply wanted to go home, and this quietly weakened the movement. John Erskine, Earl of Mar, leader of the '15, betrayed the English Jacobite leader Bishop Francis Atterbury to Robert Walpole in hope of a pardon. More often, exiles such as George Lockhart of Carnwath asked Whig relatives to arrange their return, on the understanding that they would keep out of plots. Most kept their word. Lord George Murray, who came out again in 1745, was the famous exception. By 1745, Szechi concludes, a whole network of returned ex-Jacobites was sympathetic to Charles Edward but did nothing substantial to help him.

11. Bridging to 1745: Rome, France and a gambled expedition

Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome in 1720 and raised in the exiled Stuart court. The decisive and often-omitted context of the Forty-Five is the failed French invasion of 1744: Louis XV assembled a large army under Marshal Saxe at Dunkirk to land in England and restore the Stuarts, and Charles travelled covertly to France to accompany it. The invasion fleet was scattered by ferocious storms in the spring equinox (the French lost around a dozen ships), and the plan was abandoned. Crucially, when Charles sailed for Scotland in the summer of 1745, he did so without the promised full French military backing — a gamble on his own initiative that his father's advisers and many Scottish Jacobites thought reckless.

12. The Forty-Five and the advance to Derby

Charles landed on Eriskay on 23 July 1745, then on the mainland at Loch nan Uamh, with only a handful of companions (the "Seven Men of Moidart"), no army and little money. Several chiefs urged him to go home; the rising was salvaged when Cameron of Lochiel committed his men. On 19 August 1745 the standard was raised at Glenfinnan before perhaps 1,200–1,500 clansmen, chiefly Camerons and MacDonalds.

The campaign then moved with startling speed. The Jacobites took Edinburgh on 17 September (though the castle held out), and on 21 September 1745 won a stunning victory at Prestonpans. There, guided by a local, Robert Anderson, who knew a path through the supposedly impassable marsh, the army executed a dawn flanking march via the Riggonhead Defile and fell on Sir John Cope's flank. The Highland charge shattered Cope's inexperienced troops in around ten to fifteen minutes; the Jacobites lost fewer than 100 men.

Charles pressed into England and the army reached Derby on 4 December 1745, roughly 125 miles from London. Its approach caused genuine alarm and financial anxiety in the capital. Stories of universal panic, closed shops, fleeing citizens and “Black Friday” became part of the campaign’s dramatic afterlife; they should not be treated as proof that the Hanoverian government was about to collapse.

13. The retreat and the Derby decision, debated

At Derby the Jacobite council confronted hard facts: very few English recruits had come in, the promised French landing had not materialised, and two government armies were in the field with a third believed to be defending London. Lord George Murray, the ablest Jacobite commander, argued forcefully for retreat; Charles wanted to press on. On 5 December the council overruled the Prince, and the retreat north began on 6 December.

One interpretation holds that the Jacobites had a real opportunity: their advance had met limited resistance and threatened a capital alarmed by invasion. Scholars including Murray Pittock challenge the assumption that the cause was doomed from the outset. But claiming that London would certainly have fallen, or the Hanoverian state certainly collapsed, goes beyond the evidence.

The contrary interpretation stresses the army’s small size, limited English recruitment, absent French landing and intact government forces. Advancing might have exposed the Jacobites to interception or encirclement without sufficient reinforcements. A successful march into London would not itself have guaranteed a lasting Stuart restoration.

There is no settled verdict, and honest histories flag it as one of the great "what ifs" rather than pretending certainty either way.

14. The Battle of Falkirk (17 January 1746)

Back in Scotland, the Jacobites won their last victory at Falkirk Muir on 17 January 1746, a narrow win over a government army under Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley, fought in failing light and driving snow. The armies were large — the Jacobites fielded around 8,000, their biggest force of the rising, against roughly 7,000 government troops. Lord George Murray commanded the right, dismounting to march with the MacDonalds and holding their fire until close range; Hawley's left was routed while his right held. Modern scholarship (Jacqueline Riding, Jacobites, 2016) puts Jacobite losses at about 50 dead and 80 wounded, and government losses at around 70 dead plus 200–300 wounded or missing.

Yet it was a "hollow" victory (the term used in the Historic Environment Scotland battlefield inventory). In the confusion — with heavy snow, gathering darkness and both sides initially unsure who had won — the Jacobites failed to follow up, allowing Hawley's men to regroup in Edinburgh. Recriminations among the Jacobite command (Murray, Lord John Drummond and O'Sullivan blaming one another), mounting desertion, and a fruitless continued siege of Stirling Castle dissipated any advantage. The siege was abandoned on 1 February and the army withdrew toward Inverness. As Arran Johnston of the Scottish Battlefields Trust has put it, Falkirk "was really the last chance for the Jacobites to reassert themselves."

15. The Battle of Culloden examined (16 April 1746)

By April the Jacobites were short of money, food and ammunition, facing Cumberland's larger, well-supplied and freshly drilled army. On the night of 15–16 April, Murray attempted a night march to surprise Cumberland's camp at Nairn (about 12 miles away) while the government troops slept off the Duke's 25th-birthday celebrations. The attempt failed: darkness, boggy ground and poor coordination broke up the columns, and with dawn approaching and surprise lost, the march was abandoned. The army straggled back to Drummossie Moor, exhausted and hungry — many had barely eaten in two days.

The chosen ground, associated with the deployment decisions of adjutant-general John William O'Sullivan, was open, flat and boggy moor — terrain that restricted movement and complicated the Jacobite attack; ground, deployment and command decisions remain subjects of historical analysis. Lord George Murray "did not like the ground" and pressed for a stronger position across the River Nairn, but was overruled. The government army, commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (son of George II), numbered around 8,000–9,000; the Jacobites perhaps 5,000–5,500.

The battle, on 16 April 1746, was short. Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "the battle, which lasted only 40 minutes, resulted in bitter defeat for the heavily outnumbered Jacobites"; the National Trust for Scotland says it was over in "less than an hour". A government artillery bombardment tore into the waiting Jacobite lines; when the charge finally came, it was through rain, smoke and grapeshot, into disciplined musket volleys and bayonets. Modern scholarship (Pittock) stresses that this was not a picturesque clash of primitive Highlanders against a modern army but a broadly conventional engagement. In his Culloden (Oxford University Press), Pittock argues the Jacobites were "in many essentials a regular army. Outnumbered but not outgunned, cavalry proved their downfall… it was not British ball that brought down kilted swordsmen as much as British dragoon blades that cut down Jacobite musketeers." Losses were grossly one-sided. The National Army Museum’s account gives between 1,000 and 1,500 Jacobites killed, against 50 government dead and 259 wounded. Larger figures appear elsewhere, and accounts differ in how they separate fighting from the killing of wounded and fugitives afterwards. Other historians distinguish deaths during combat from the subsequent killing of wounded and fugitives, using different totals and boundaries. The National Trust for Scotland calls it "the last major battle ever fought on the British mainland."

16. Aftermath and reprisals

Wounded and fleeing Jacobites were killed on and around the battlefield. Government troops were shown a supposed Jacobite order to give no quarter; its authenticity is disputed, and some historians regard it as fabricated. It cannot serve as an unquestioned explanation or justification for the killings. Cumberland’s responsibility for the brutal aftermath is central to his later reputation as “Butcher Cumberland.” He was initially celebrated by government supporters, but later memory was divided sharply along political lines.

The subsequent "pacification of the Highlands" was deliberate and severe. Some modern scholarship argues that more Jacobites died after the fighting than during it: in Culloden, Professor Murray Pittock estimates that around 3,000 men died in connection with the battle "but no more than a third in action" — meaning the wounded "were finished off where they lay" and killed in the immediate aftermath. Allan MacInnes has described the wider campaign as pursued with “genocidal intent.” That is an attributed historical interpretation, not a universally agreed legal classification. The Scottish History Society's The Prisoners of the '45 (Seton & Arnot, 1928) documents about 3,470 people taken into custody; of these roughly 120 were executed (including the executions in London of Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino and Lovat), about 88 died in prison, some 936 were transported to the colonies and 222 banished; the fate of nearly 700 is simply unknown. Summer 1746 saw the systematic burning of townships, seizure and driving-off of cattle, and destruction of crops and fishing boats in Jacobite districts, with continuing repercussions into 1747. Historians are careful here: precise death tolls for the wounded and non-combatants killed in the reprisals are not recoverable, and the honest account neither minimises the deliberate brutality nor inflates it beyond the evidence.

17. A European resistance movement

Szechi places Scottish Jacobitism alongside other eighteenth-century revolts against expanding great powers, by Ukrainians, Catalans and Hungarians. Like the Jacobites, these movements defended an old autonomy, were led by native elites but drew wider support, faced opponents among their own people, and sought help from the great powers. The closest parallel is Hungary. Prince Ferenc Rákóczi rebelled against the Habsburgs in 1703 under the banner "with God, for the homeland and liberty", got only token help from Louis XIV, and was defeated by 1711. All of these movements were crushed.

The Jacobites stood out because they kept going. Some Scottish Jacobites were still plotting in the early 1750s, and the last French invasion plan tied to a Jacobite rising was set for 1759, decades after the other rebellions had been subdued. Szechi explains this by geopolitics. Because Jacobitism reached into all three kingdoms, a Scottish rising could destabilise Ireland and even set off civil war in England. In his image, Jacobitism was a potential "nuclear weapon" against the British state, and the Scottish Jacobites were the trigger. In 1705 the exiled court's minister, the Earl of Middleton, called them "l'unique ressource", the only resource left to the exiled king.

France's handling of the '45 shows how this worked. In 1743–44 Louis XV prepared an invasion of England with a Scottish rising, then shelved it after the English Jacobites hesitated, storms struck and the Royal Navy blocked the way. The '45 itself cost France almost nothing at first: Charles Edward raised his first funds from Scottish and Irish exiles. Yet the victory at Prestonpans forced Britain to pull most of its troops out of Flanders, helping Marshal de Saxe's conquests there. Szechi argues that the Scots' successes also won Louis XV's emotional commitment: he sent troops and supplies and tried to organise a second invasion in December 1745. In December 1746 he offered to send the exiles and Charles Edward back to Scotland with 6,000 men. Charles refused and demanded 18,000–20,000 for an invasion of England. A group of exiles led by Donald Cameron of Lochiel tried to take up the offer on their own, but peace came first.

Szechi's verdict is that Scottish Jacobitism combined dynastic loyalty with something close to nationalism, with the balance probably on the patriotic side. Even Lord Lovat, a notorious schemer, went to his execution in 1747 quoting Horace: "sweet and seemly it is to die for one's country". It was "not a modern nationalist movement, but it may have been on the verge of becoming one".

18. Charles Edward Stuart's escape and the Flora MacDonald episode

Charles spent about five months as a fugitive in the Highlands and Islands, with a £30,000 bounty on his head. The best-known episode is well documented: in June 1746, on South Uist/Benbecula, the 24-year-old Flora MacDonald — whose own family largely favoured the government — obtained travel passes and conveyed Charles, disguised as her Irish maidservant "Betty Burke", "over the sea to Skye", landing on 27–28 June near Uig. The core of the story is historically solid (Flora was later arrested and held in custody in London before release under the 1747 amnesty); what has been romantically embellished is the tone — the sentimental "born to be king" gloss comes largely from the much later "Skye Boat Song", and details such as storms and the exact geography owe more to Victorian lyricists than to the record. Charles finally escaped aboard the French frigate L'Heureux from Loch nan Uamh in September 1746, never to return to Scotland.

His later life was an anticlimax. Expelled from France in 1748, he drifted between Italian cities, drank heavily, made an unhappy and childless marriage to Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, acknowledged one illegitimate daughter (Charlotte), and died in Rome in 1788 with no legitimate heir. With his brother Henry Benedict Stuart, a cardinal, dying childless in 1807, serious Stuart dynastic prospects were at an end.

19. The Act of Proscription and the Heritable Jurisdictions Act

The government moved to dismantle the clan system's legal and military foundations. The Act of Proscription (1746) incorporated dress provisions that took effect on 1 August 1747, commonly called the Dress Act, banning civilian wearing of "Highland Clothes" — the plaid, philibeg (kilt), trews and tartan — in Scotland, with penalties of six months' imprisonment for a first offence and seven years' transportation for a second. The dress clause expressly excepted officers and soldiers serving in the king’s forces. Exemptions in the Act’s wider disarming provisions should not be mistaken for a blanket gentry exemption from the dress clause. The ban was repealed in 1782. Note an important qualification often lost in popular accounts: the Act banned Highland dress, not the Gaelic language or bagpipes per se, and its practical enforcement was uneven.

The Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act 1746 (in force 1748) abolished the hereditary judicial powers that clan chiefs and other magnates had exercised, returning legal authority to the Crown's courts. Together with the Disarming provisions, these measures stripped chiefs of the legal, military and judicial powers that had made clan armies possible — turning chiefs increasingly into commercial landlords. That transformation set the economic stage for the Highland Clearances and the Scottish diaspora, which belong to a later and separate story told on Card #19.

20. Clan tartans are (very largely) a 19th-century invention

The idea that each clan has worn its own distinctive, ancient tartan "sett" in unbroken continuity is a Victorian construction, not Highland reality. Before the 18th century, tartan was woven locally from whatever dyes and patterns a district's weavers produced; people wore what was available, not a coded clan uniform. The modern system crystallised through two events. First, the stage-managed 1822 visit of George IV to Edinburgh, choreographed by Sir Walter Scott, in which chiefs were summoned in "clan" tartan and the king himself appeared in a kilt — generating a sudden demand for clan-specific setts that had not previously existed in systematic form. Second, the Vestiarium Scoticum (1842), produced by the Sobieski Stuart brothers (John and Charles Allen, who falsely claimed descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie), purporting to reproduce a lost 16th-century manuscript of clan tartans. No original was ever produced; it was denounced as a forgery, and yet many of its invented designs became the "official" clan tartans still sold today. Tartan is genuinely old; codified clan tartans are not.

This correction does not mean every pre-1800 association between a pattern and a family was invented. Earlier regional, military and family associations existed. What is later is the systematic commercial and cultural expectation that every clan possesses a single ancient, exclusive and continuously worn tartan.

21. The "Skye Boat Song" is Victorian, not Jacobite

For all its association with 1746, "The Skye Boat Song" was written in 1884. The lyrics are by the English baronet Sir Harold Boulton (1859–1935), set to a Gaelic air collected by Anne Campbell MacLeod (1855–1921) in the 1870s, and first published in Songs of the North (1884). Robert Louis Stevenson wrote alternative verses around 1885. It is a late-Victorian romantic composition — beautiful, evocative, and roughly 140 years younger than the events it describes.

22. It was not simply "Scotland versus England"

This is the single most important corrective. Jacobitism was a dynastic and religious conflict cutting across national lines. After the 1707 Union there were no separate "Scottish" and "English" armies, only a British one. On the government side stood Lowland Presbyterians, the Campbells and many other Highland clans, and Scottish regiments — several of which fought in the front line at Culloden itself. On the Jacobite side stood not only Highland clans but Lowland and north-eastern Scots, Episcopalians and Catholics, English and Welsh sympathisers, an Irish "Wild Geese" contingent in French service, and the backing of France and Spain. Pittock argues the Jacobite army at Culloden was in essential respects a regular army with Franco-Irish and Scoto-French allies, only about half of it Highland. The romantic "doomed Gaels versus England" image is precisely the propaganda-shaped memory that modern scholarship exists to correct.

23. Charles Edward Stuart was not the general the legend claims

Charles was an energetic and charismatic leader, but his military reputation cannot be inferred from later romantic portraits. Lord George Murray made major operational contributions; O’Sullivan and the other officers also had responsibilities that should not disappear into a simple hero-and-villain account. Charles’s relations with his commanders deteriorated, and his decisions before Culloden remain open to criticism. The relative responsibility of the Prince and his officers, and the wisdom of retreat at Derby, are debated rather than settled by song or legend.

24. After the cause was lost: the Jacobite cult

Murray Pittock argues that Walter Scott did not invent the romantic Jacobite Highlands. He took over and depoliticised a set of images and ideas that already existed. Tartan was already a patriotic badge in the Jacobite century. It was supplied to the English Jacobite Sir John Hynde Cotton in Edinburgh in 1744 and worn at Lady Bruce's dinner for Charles Edward's birthday in December 1746. Lord Balmerino was said to have pulled a tartan cap over his eyes on the scaffold in 1746. The armies of 1715 and 1745 were each around half non-Highland in origin, yet they were uniformed in Highland style; even the Manchester Regiment wore tartan. The last arrest for Jacobitism came as late as 1817. In 1822 Scott could rebrand the whole tradition for George IV, writing to Macleod of Macleod that "Arms and men are the best thing we have to show him."

Political Jacobitism had a surprising revival in the 1880s–1900s. The Order of the White Rose was founded in 1886. An "Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart" in London in 1889 put the names of post-1688 monarchs in brackets, and a Legitimist Jacobite League split off in 1891. Its Scottish secretary Theodore Napier began the annual pilgrimage to Culloden on the anniversary of the battle. His journal The Fiery Cross (1901–12) attacked the Boer War, and he was among the first to call for a "Scottish National Party". Napier claimed 104,000 signatures for an 1897 petition against the use of "England" for Great Britain. The white rose passed from dynastic to national symbol through Hugh MacDiarmid and The Scots Independent. Pittock notes that SNP members wore white-rose buttonholes at both the first sitting and the official opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.