Jacobites crop up with alarming regularity within the pages of my books. From the time when James (Jacobus in Latin) the Second went into exile with the so-called “Glorious Revolution”, to be replaced by William of Orange, Britain was awash with plots and open armed rebellions aimed at restoring the Stuart monarchs to the throne.
From a historical chronology point of view (rather than the order in which I’ve written about them), Jacobites first appear in Mistress Yale’s Diaries, The Glorious Return.
However, the politics behind the Jacobite saga actually appear in the first of the Trilogy, The Doubtful Diaries of Wicked Mistress Yale (2019) – in which, even in the far-flung English East India Company’s Fort St. George outpost in old Madras, during the 1680s, the tensions between loyal supporters of King James the Second and those opposed to his religious and political tendencies are openly evident.
But The Glorious Return (also 2019) is set in London between 1690 and 1700. The backlash of Bonnie Dundee’s rebellion, of Killiekrankie, of Glencoe and, of course, the Battle of the Boyne. But, nearer to home, the 1692 Ailesbury Plot, the 1695 Fenwick Plot (both supposed to coincide with planned but abortive French invasions), and then Sir George Barclay’s 1696 Assassination Plot.
The third in the Trilogy, Wicked Mistress Yale, The Parting Glass (2020), takes the story from 1700 to 1721.
It’s a tumultuous period: the succession of Queen Anne after William (and Mary) have died; the 1707 Act of Union; the 1708 failed attempt by the French to land the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, near Edinburgh; the 1710 Sacheverell Riots; the whole saga of Queen Anne’s death and the tentative but rebuffed attempt to offer the throne to the James Francis Edward Stuart if only he would convert to Protestantism; the eventual succession of the Hanoverian line, and the reign of George the First; further riots of 1715, and the major Jacobite Rebellion of that same year, culminating in the Battle of Preston (which features strongly in The Parting Glass); and, finally, the 1719 Rising involving Lord Tullibardine, a Spanish fleet with 5,000 Spanish soldiers and the Battle of Glen Shiel.
I have to stress that most of this stuff isn’t covered directly in The Yale Trilogy (apart from the 1715 Battle of Preston) but forms the main background to the stories, since it would have been impossible to be in Britain during those three decades without the entire issue of Jacobitism touching everyday lives – and as they so frequently touch the lives of my characters.
Then we jump to my début novel, The Jacobites’ Apprentice (2012), currently out-of-print.
I’d been working in Manchester and, between meetings, regularly came across lumps of Jacobite history – at St. Ann’s Church, for example. But I’d also come across the story of 18th century Manchester merchants’ involvement in tea smuggling. This in turn led me to some vague references about whether those merchants might have used the proceeds to help finance Bonnie Prince Charlie’s plans to seize back the thrones of both Scotland and England.
Similarly, in Wrexham, from about 1710 onwards, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (3rd Baronet) had established the Cycle of the White Rose, basically a dining club dedicated to raising funds and support among Welsh Jacobites.
So, The Jacobites’ Apprentice links those themes together and follows the progress of the 1745 Rebellion, through the Jacobite army’s arrival in Manchester, and up to the Siege of Carlisle at the end of that year. But it stops short of the closing months and the final defeat at Culloden.
Then, in 2024, I was writing a sequel to an earlier Victorian crime novel, set in Wrexham. This one was called Death Along The Dee (2024) and, while researching other events going on in the 1880s, up popped the Jacobites again.
As I already explained, the Cycle of the White Rose dining club had helped to raise funds for the Jacobite and, following Sir Watkin’s death in 1747, it was resurrected by his son and ran, pretty much uninterrupted, until the 1860s.
But then, in 1886, it was reformed, yet again, now as the Order of the White Rose, by Bertram Ashburnam, 5th Earl of Ashburnam – who broadly provided some of the inspiration for one of my characters in Death Along The Dee.
Ashburnam believed that Charles the First was a martyr and that the Stuarts were the rightful claimants to the British Crown. He was also an agent for the Catholic fanatics of the Spanish Carlists and a fervent supporter of Irish Home Rule. Weirdly, there was – and still is – a legitimate Jacobite claimant. In the 1880s, it was, indeed, Princess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, and there’s some documentation to show that the Order of the White Rose included extremists (though Bertram Ashburnam wasn’t one of them!) who planned a coup to put her on the throne, a scheme with which she would, herself, have absolutely no truck. But my storyline hence seemed not so outlandish after all!
In the 1890s, the Order helped to establish a whole artistic movement, with entire exhibitions dedicated to the House of Stuart. Mostly nostalgic and romantic, of course, but the movement sparked a couple of dedicated newspapers and new interest in the “political ideals” (whatever those were) of the Jacobite cause.
In 1926, the Royal Stuart Society and Royalist League was founded and continues to this day. Its members, at the time of writing, recognise the prétendant Franz von Bayern, Duke of Bavaria, as the current head of the Stuart Dynasty and, therefore, the rightful British monarch – a claim he does not himself endorse, naturally. But the society’s members also see themselves as natural successors to the Order of the White Rose. It has many supporters.
I suppose that should have been the end of it but, no, the Jacobites even managed to sneak into my Spanish Civil War novels, The Assassin’s Mark (2013) and Until The Curtain Falls (2017). Why? How? Because, during much of the skulduggery covered in the stories, a principal character is Franco’s personal ambassador to London. This real-life character was the 17th Duke of Alba (and 10th Duke of Berwick – Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó. Spanish peer, diplomat, politician, art collector and Olympic medalist. A fervent Jacobite, in his day he was the most senior surviving male-line descendant of James the Second, and despite having never made a claim, he was considered by some as the legitimate heir to the throne of Scotland.
For myself, as a staunch republican, I have no axe to grind for the Jacobite cause, and when writing about the various conflicts between competing royal dynasties, I tend to take a “plague on both their houses” stance. Such conflicts customarily result simply in devastation for the cannon fodder soldiers and ordinary citizens washed up in their wake. In the case of the 1745 Rising, the whole of the Highland clan and society systems were destroyed.
But I can’t deny that there’s something about the Jacobite story which continues to grab me – often, without me even knowing it!
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