'Jacobites' (from the Lat. Jacobus, 'James'), the name given after the Revolution of 1688 to the adherents of the exiled Stuarts—James II. (1633-1701) and his son and two grandsons, James Francis Edward, the Chevalier de St George (1688-
1766), Charles Edward (1720-88), and Henry Benedict, Cardinal York (1725-1807). Those adherents were recruited from the Catholics, the Nonjurors, the High Churchmen and Tories generally, discontented and place-seeking Whigs, the Episcopalians and Highlanders of Scotland, and the great body of the Irish people. Oxford throughout was a great Jacobite centre, a zealous upholder of 'passive obedience' and the 'divine right of kings'; whilst Cambridge, on the other hand, was all for a Protestant succession. First came the battle of Killiecrankie (1689), where fell Graham of Claverhouse, and the Irish campaign (1690-91), with its battle of the Boyne and the treaty of Limerick; next, in 1696, the Assassination Plot, the chief actor in which, Sir George Barclay, escaped, but for which Sir John Fenwick, Sir William Parkyns, and Sir John Friend were executed. Then in 1715 there was the twofold rebellion—one in the Highlands under the Earl of Mar, another in the Border country under Thomas Forster, M.P., and the Earl of Derwentwater. Both practically ended, in spite of the Chevalier's subsequent landing, on the selfsame day (13th November) with the indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir and the surrender at Preston, where nearly two-thirds of the 1500 prisoners were Scots. Seven nobles were sentenced to death, but only Kenmure and Derwentwater suffered, Nairn, Carnwath, and Widdrington being reprieved, and Nithsdale and Wintoun escaping from prison, as likewise did Forster. Not for the first or the last time, the inferior prisoners fared worse than the principals, twenty-six being executed, while over a thousand submitted to the king's mercy, and petitioned to be transported to the American plantations. Alberoni's expedition to the West Highlands (1719), with its 'battle' of Glenshiel, was a petty affair compared with the '15 or with the nine months' rebellion of the '45, whose hero throughout, as indeed of the whole Jacobite movement, was 'Bonny Prince Charlie.' It opened with his landing in the Hebrides (23d July), and closed with his crushing defeat at Culloden (16th April 1746), intermediate events being the victory of Prestonpans, the capture of Carlisle, the raising of the Manchester regiment, the turning at Derby (6th December), and the victory of Falkirk. This, more than the '15 even, was mainly a Scottish, mainly indeed a Highland, rebellion. The English Jacobites as a body held aloof; and of the chief victims beheaded, one only, Charles Radclyffe (Derwentwater's brother), was an Englishman. The others were the Earl of Kilmarnock, Lord Balmerino, Sir John Wedderburn, and Lord Lovat. The Earls of Cromartie and Traquair were let off, and nearly a thousand prisoners had their death-sentence commuted to transportation or forced enlistment; but fifty were hanged. In stout old Balmerino's avowal, 'If the Great Mogul had set up his standard I should have followed it, for I could not starve,' we see one type of the Jacobite; another, much baser, was Lovat, who played for a dukedom, whilst hoping to risk nothing, for he sent his son off to fight, and himself stayed at home. The last Jacobite hanged (on 7th June 1753) was Dr Archibald Cameron, brother to Locheil; and in 1772 the last of the Jacobite heads fell down from its spike upon Temple Bar.
This sketch by no means exhausts the list of notable Jacobites, which comprised at one time or another Jeremy Collier, Sacheverel, Charles Leslie, Bolingbroke, Harley, Ormond, Marshal Keith, Rob Roy, William Law, Bishop Atterbury, Carte, Hearne, Dr King, Patten and 'Murray of Broughton (the two Judases of the '15 and the '45), Flora Macdonald, Sir Robert Strange, and Samuel Johnson. One remembers the Doctor's words about his pension (1762): 'Now that I have it,
I am the same man in every respect that I have ever been; I retain the same principles. It is true that I cannot now curse [smiling] the House of Hanover, nor would it be decent for me to drink King James's health in the wine that King George gives me money to pay for. But, sir, I think that the pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover and drinking King James's health are amply over-balanced by three hundred pounds a year.' There spoke an honest Jacobite, and there too spoke the spirit of the age. Jacobitism might linger on as a tradition among the Nonjurors, the very last of whose bishops died in 1805; but as an active principle it had long since become extinct, the reason of such extinction being less the disasters of its adherents or the worthlessness of the cause than the growing prosperity of the nation at large. Beati possidentes had a double application, to subjects no less than to sovereignty.
The posthumous Jacobitism of the 19th century—'Charlie o'er the Water nonsense,' as Borrow terms it—was largely an outcome of Scott's splendid romance, Waverley (1814); and many, perhaps most of our best-known Jacobite lyrics were composed by post-Jacobite poets—Burns, Scott, Hogg, Lady Nairne, William Glen, Allan Cunningham, &c. This same 19th century, which has heard mass of requiem said for Prince Charles Edward by a Protestant minister (1888), and which has seen the Stuart Exhibition (1888–89), has not been without its two Stuart pretenders. They were 'John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, Count d'Albanie' (1795–1872), and his brother 'Charles Edward, Count d'Albanie' (1799–1880), who were certainly the sons of Lieutenant Thomas Allen, R.N., and who claimed that he was the son of the young Chevalier.
See the article STEWART (with works there cited) for the exiled Stuarts; other articles on persons and events mentioned above, and on William III., Anne, George I., II., III.; the histories of Macaulay, Stanhope, Hill Burton, Lecky, and C. S. Terry; the Culloden Papers (1815); Hogg's Jacobite Relics (1819); R. Chambers's Jacobite Memoirs (1834), and History of the Rebellion of 1745 (1828; 7th ed. 1870); Jesse's Memoirs of the Pretenders and their Adherents (1845); Mrs Thomson's Memoirs of the Jacobites (1845–46); Dr Doran's London in Jacobite Times (1877); W. K. Dickson, The Jacobite Attempt of 1719 (Scot. Hist. Soc., 1895); Bishop Forbes, The Lyon in Mourning (Scot. Hist. Soc., 3 vols., 1895–96); and A. Lang's Prince Charles Edward (1900).