Jacobitism

Jacobitism, support for the Stuart dynasty, following the revolution of 1688. James II and his son James Francis Edward (1688–1766), otherwise James III or ‘the Old Pretender’, maintained a court in exile while their supporters, relying on the backing of France or other sympathetic powers, plotted the recovery of the British and Irish thrones. There was a minor Jacobite rising in Scotland, the main centre of British Jacobitism, in 1708, a larger insurrection there and in northern England in 1715, and projected invasions, in each case aborted, in March 1719 and in early 1744. In July 1745 James III's son Charles Edward (1720–88), ‘the Young Pretender’, landed in Scotland and raised an army which marched south as far as Derby before retreating to Scotland, where it was crushed at Culloden (16 Apr. 1746).

A number of Irish Protestants were involved in Jacobite conspiracy in England. These included the 2nd duke of Ormond, James Barry, 4th Earl Barrymore (1667–1747), arrested in 1715 and again in 1745, and the 4th and 5th earls of Orrery (see boyle). In Ireland itself Tory and high‐church partisans, in particular students at Trinity College and some clergy of the Church of Ireland, indulged in an occasional rhetorical Jacobitism. Most Irish Protestants, however, saw the revolution settlement and Protestant succession as their only defence against renewed Catholic domination. Irish Catholics, by contrast, remained strongly committed to the Stuarts. Up to 1766 appointments to Catholic bishoprics in Ireland were made on the nomination of the Stuart court in exile, while recruitment in Ireland for the Irish Brigade provided potential military support for the Jacobite cause. Four of the ‘seven men of Moidart’ who landed with Prince Charles in 1745 were Irish; one of them, John William O'Sullivan (1700–c.1760), born in Co. Kerry, served as quartermaster and adjutant general of the prince's army, which was also reinforced by some 400 men raised from Irish regiments in France. Such connections, along with the perceived threat of invasion or insurrection, helped to legitimize the penal laws. In reality, however, Ireland, strategically peripheral and with its Catholic population disarmed and leaderless, played little part in Jacobite planning.

Following defeat in 1745–6, Jacobitism quickly lost credibility both in Britain and abroad. In Ireland too leading Catholics became from the 1750s notably more willing to offer declarations of unqualified allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty. At popular level, however, Jacobitism survived in poems and songs lamenting the exile of the rightful monarch and looking forward to his eventual restoration with the aid of France and other Catholic powers. There has been much speculation about how far this literary tradition contributed to popular disaffection, and receptiveness to French‐inspired radicalism, in the 1790s.

Bibliography

Lenman, Bruce , The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (1980)
Ó Buachalla, Breandán , ‘Irish Jacobite Poetry’, Irish Review, 12 (1992)