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Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Buch 51 von 66: Early American Studies

Plank, Geoffrey

 
9780812238983: Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Early American Studies)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812238982 ISBN 13: 9780812238983
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

In the summer of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of England's King James II, landed on the western coast of Scotland intending to overthrow George II and restore the Stuart family to the throne. He gathered thousands of supporters, and the insurrection he led—the Jacobite Rising of 1745—was a crisis not only for Britain but for the entire British Empire. Rebellion and Savagery examines the 1745 rising and its aftermath on an imperial scale.

Charles Edward gained support from the clans of the Scottish Highlands, communities that had long been derided as primitive. In 1745 the Jacobite Highlanders were denigrated both as rebels and as savages, and this double stigma helped provoke and legitimate the violence of the government's anti-Jacobite campaigns. Though the colonies stayed relatively peaceful in 1745, the rising inspired fear of a global conspiracy among Jacobites and other suspect groups, including North America's purported savages.

The defeat of the rising transformed the leader of the army, the Duke of Cumberland, into a popular hero on both sides of the Atlantic. With unprecedented support for the maintenance of peacetime forces, Cumberland deployed new garrisons in the Scottish Highlands and also in the Mediterranean and North America. In all these places his troops were engaged in similar missions: demanding loyalty from all local inhabitants and advancing the cause of British civilization. The recent crisis gave a sense of urgency to their efforts. Confident that "a free people cannot oppress," the leaders of the army became Britain's most powerful and uncompromising imperialists.

Geoffrey Plank argues that the events of 1745 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the British Empire by creating a new political interest in favor of aggressive imperialism, and also by sparking discussion of how the British should promote market-based economic relations in order to integrate indigenous peoples within their empire. The spread of these new political ideas was facilitated by a large-scale migration of people involved in the rising from Britain to the colonies, beginning with hundreds of prisoners seized on the field of battle and continuing in subsequent years to include thousands of men, women and children. Some of the migrants were former Jacobites and others had stood against the insurrection. The event affected all the British domains.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geoffrey Plank is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Introduction

On July 23, 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the twenty-four-year-old grandson of England's long-dead, ousted King James II, landed in Moidart, on the western coast of Scotland, in the company of seven men. He intended to seize power in Britain, reverse the dynastic consequences of the Revolution of 1688, and on behalf of his father, who lived in Italy, restore the deposed Stuart family to the British throne. Before sailing for Scotland Charles Edward had been in correspondence with several British Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart dynasty, including prominent clan leaders and landlords in the Scottish Highlands. Some of these men greeted him near the coast, and with their help he raised a small army composed largely of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. By mid-August he and his men were marching south. In September they took the town of Edinburgh, leaving the government's garrison beleaguered in Edinburgh Castle. Gaining new recruits along their route, and winning nearly all of their engagements with the government's forces, eventually the Jacobite army proceeded as far south as Derby, in the Midlands of England, before Charles Edward reassessed his circumstances and decided to turn back toward Scotland.

While the Jacobites retreated, the government reassembled its available military forces and placed them under the command of the Duke of Cumberland, the second son of King George II. Cumberland pursued Charles Edward northward, finally trapping the main body of his forces at Culloden Moor, near Inverness, on April 16, 1746. The battle that day was a violent rout. Hundreds of Jacobite soldiers were killed in the field, and the rest were captured or scattered. Charles Edward escaped. It took him several weeks, but he managed to leave Britain and sail to France. Cumberland, in the meantime, led the government's forces on a punitive mission through Highland Scotland, disarming much of the population, burning crops, seizing livestock, and on occasion attacking entire communities, including old people and children, women and men.

While Cumberland was pursuing his military campaigns in the Highlands, he was struggling to restore order on the government's terms. Thousands of veterans of the Jacobite rising were brought into custody, and evidence was gathered against hundreds of them in anticipation of formal criminal trials. Trying all of Charles Edward's soldiers proved logistically impossible, however. More than three hundred trials were held, and over one hundred defendants were found guilty and executed for rebellion. A larger number of prisoners, perhaps as many as eight hundred, were induced to plead for mercy and accept transportation to the colonies, where they were sold as bound laborers.

In order to understand the violence of 1746 it is necessary to comprehend the character and scale of Charles Edward's aims. He believed that his father was the rightful monarch of all Britain and Ireland, and he came to Scotland with the ultimate purpose of asserting his family's claim to those kingdoms and the entire British Empire. As a result, the conflict had a powerful, almost intrinsically violent, moral component. Both sides accused the men in the opposing army of treason. As one writer with Jacobite sympathies put it, whenever a fighting man chooses the wrong side in a "civil or domestic" war, he puts "his soul in a most desperate issue," because "for every slaughter he makes of those on the right side, he is downright guilty of so many murders." Another, less ardently partisan pamphleteer described the result when soldiers conflate military conflict with treason and murder: "rancor, ill-nature, and malice usurp the place of a noble resentment, and the unnatural contest is carried on without either decency or charity." It is possible to go far toward explaining the violence of 1746 without mentioning that the fighting involved Scottish Highlanders.

Nonetheless, it is also clear that the army's operations were encouraged by a widespread antagonism toward the people and traditions of the Highlands. After the fighting had ended, one Lowland Scottish writer asked his readers to sympathize with the government's soldiers at Culloden by emphasizing the alien character of the Highlanders. The killing had been excessive, he acknowledged, "Yet one thing I own, that the rebels had enrag'd the troops; their habit was strange, their language still stranger, and their way of fighting was shocking to the utmost degree." Kilts, the Gaelic language, and the wielding of broadswords distinguished the Highland soldiers in Charles Edward's lines. These attributes also, especially in the minds of the government's supporters, helped mark the Highlanders as primitive, contemptible, and dangerous.

In 1745 and for years thereafter, an array of commentators suggested that the Gaelic-speaking people of the Highlands were isolated, impoverished, and slavishly devoted to their clan leaders. The Highlanders were also, almost incessantly, described as gullible and violent. They seemed quick to take up arms in insurrection, and from the perspective of the government, their home region appeared almost impossible to police. For many, the Jacobite rising served as an object lesson demonstrating the link between civilization and political stability. Charles Edward had succeeded, to the extent that he did, by exploiting the savagery of the Highlands.

Though Jacobites took up arms only in Britain, the rising was perceived as a crisis throughout the British Empire. Charles Edward's opponents emphasized the peculiar Highland character of the original Jacobite army, but they could not dismiss the insurrection simply as a local disturbance in northern Scotland. On the contrary, especially after the Jacobite forces reached England, the supporters of the government linked the Jacobite rising to global politics and trumpeted risks that they claimed the entire empire faced.

At the time of Charles Edward's landing, Britain was engaged in a long-running contest with the empires of France and Spain. In 1739 the imperial rivalry had turned violent, with the outbreak of war against the Spanish in the Caribbean. Over the next few years the fighting spread to engage most of the major powers of Europe, with combat on the European continent as well as in the Caribbean and in North America. By 1744 France had unambiguously aligned itself with Spain against George II. After Charles Edward landed in Britain one year later, his opponents suspected that the French were using him as a tool to advance their own imperial interests. Though France gave the Jacobites less support than they expected, a French ship had carried Charles Edward to Moidart, and later in the year a regiment of regular French troops landed in Scotland to fight for him.

Even before Charles Edward's arrival, many in Britain and the colonies had rallied to the ongoing war effort, believing that the British Empire was confronting the combined might of the world's major Catholic imperial powers. In actuality the war in Europe—known today as the War of the Austrian Succession—did not simply pit Catholics against Protestants, because Britain was allied with the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty in Austria. Nonetheless, for most Britons—at home and in the colonies—the Austrian dimension of the conflict was not the critical one. It mattered more that Britain's Spanish and French adversaries were Catholic. The religious element in the war increased in importance after Charles Edward arrived. Like his father and grandfather before him, Charles Edward was Catholic, and in Scotland, at least, he drew considerable support from fellow Catholics. In 1745 and 1746, nearly everywhere in the British Empire, Catholics were suspected of supporting the Stuart cause.

After Cumberland defeated Charles Edward at Culloden, many British colonists in North America rejoiced...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812238982
ISBN 13 
9780812238983
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
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