Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

  Claymores were not drawn. The loyal and neutral Scottish nobility were paralysed by the swiftness of William’s success in the south and increasingly anxious about their personal safety and political futures. James offered them no leadership, and, stunned by the spate of defections and the success of his enemies, he lapsed into melancholic resignation. In England and Scotland, the military and political initiative passed to William and the lords who were advising him.

  Everywhere, the nobility and gentry took the law into their own hands, formed posses and raided the houses of Catholics in search of arms. In Cheshire, Lord Delamare raised his tenants, local squires and the ‘richer tradesmen’ and, with a force of two hundred and fifty, rampaged through the county like a ‘mad man’, seizing arms and horses from Catholics and wrecking their chapels. One Catholic gentleman considered a counter-attack on Delamare’s house, but was checked by several thousand local people who rushed to defend it. James ordered the local Lord Lieutenant, the ninth Earl of Derby, to intervene, but after reading the letter, he smiled and remarked that the King ought to have sent his orders earlier. Derby’s crafty neutrality made sense in terms of his own safety: William’s supporters were gaining the upper hand everywhere and there were rumours that the Earl’s house at Knowsley might be attacked by Protestant mobs.9 A few months later Derby voted in the Lords to accept James’s abdication.

  While the North-West teetered on the edge of civil war, hair-raising reports circulated of James’s Irish troops running amok, and there were rumours that thousands more were on their way from Ireland, thirsting for Protestant blood. Yet the fighting was confined to a handful of skirmishes between William’s forces and Irish detachments. The Irishmen quickly recognised the futility of the royal cause and began to drift away and make for their homes. The King followed their example and set off for France, but was arrested and manhandled by Faversham sailors and brought back from London. His second escape attempt succeeded and James fled to France, but did this represent an abdication?

  This question and its corollary – who should replace the King – were resolved by the Convention Parliament that assembled early in 1689. It had been summoned at the very end of 1688 by William after consultation with an assembly of peers which requested him to take charge of the government. The Commons comprised 174 Whigs, 156 Tories and 183 new members whose sympathies were still unclear. Tories narrowly predominated in the Lords, which chose the bipartisan Halifax as its speaker. The Whigs in the Commons made the running: they proposed that James, like Richard II (whose deposition was cited as one justification for the present proceedings), had subverted the nation’s fundamental laws and liberties, and by cutting and running had dethroned himself. The crown should, therefore, be presented to his daughter Mary and her husband William.

  The peers and bishops found themselves in a quandary. They had been instrumental in James’s expulsion, but now had to confront its moral and political consequences. Whigs grasped the chance to affirm the principle that monarchs were subject to Parliament, which, acting for the country, could depose one and choose another without reference to the ‘natural’ bloodline. The bishops and Tory Anglican peers like Clarendon equivocated. By supporting the coup they had denied the doctrine of submission, and now they were being asked to cancel their oaths of allegiance. Worse still, in terms of impiety, they would allow Parliament to obliterate the rights of the infant Prince of Wales and dictate the succession.

  Voting figures indicated a divided and discomposed House of Lords. By a margin of eleven, the peers complied with the Commons’ charge that James had been guilty of misrule. Then followed several days of quibbling over terminology: over fifty peers refused to acknowledge that the King had abdicated and that the throne was now ‘vacant’. The impasse was broken by William’s threat to return to Holland if he was not offered the crown. The issue was now one of security: another civil war appeared imminent as James and his followers in Ireland and Scotland were planning a counter-revolution. To resist it, Britain needed a legitimate government with the authority to mobilise the resources of the state. Pragmatism triumphed over dogma and a number of Tories switched sides and, by the majority of twenty, the Lords agreed to offer the crown to William and Mary. The Scottish Parliament came to the same conclusion in a session held against the noisy background of further anti-Catholic riots in Edinburgh. The Protestant aristocracy had played kingmaker, but with varying degrees of enthusiasm and, in the final phase of the coup, with considerable nudging from a Whig House of Commons.

  After they approved the succession of William and Mary, the English and Scottish Parliaments resolved the fundamental issues which had divided both kingdoms for the past sixty years. The upshot was the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right, which defined the legal rights of subjects and imposed restraints on the Crown which were designed to prevent a recurrence of the arbitrary and overbearing use of the royal prerogative.

  The decisions taken in 1689 laid the foundations for that political stability and national unity essential for the economic miracles which transformed Britain into a global commercial and industrial power during the eighteenth century. The Whigs sensed this and were quick to claim the Glorious Revolution for themselves. Their views had prevailed (Whig peers and MPs dominated the committee which framed the Bill of Rights) and henceforward the Whigs projected themselves as both the saviours of the nation and the underwriters of its liberties.

  Congratulating his fellow peers on their part in the recent revolution, the Marquess of Atholl declared that they had been successful in ‘reducing our government to a just temper and balance’.10 Over one hundred and twenty years later, the Whig Lord John Russell praised the revolutionary settlement as ‘the triumph of enlightenment of the few over the bigotry of millions’, which, despite the inaccuracy of his mathematics, represented the subsequent Whig version of the event.11

  Supporters of the revolution emphasised continuity with past. In 1690 the Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire, the Earl of Stamford, praised the recent settlement in a speech to the local gentry who had gathered for the quarter sessions. Since the distant days of the ancient Britons, England had been a ‘limited monarchy’ and all who loved liberty and the rights of property should be grateful to William and Mary for preserving and defending both.12 A radical Whig, Stamford quoted John Locke’s recently published Two Treatises on Government to argue that ‘we are all equal in the state of Nature’ and inheritors of natural rights. Squires and jurymen regularly heard variations on this theme delivered by Whig Lords Lieutenants and judges. In 1709 the Norfolk magistrates were reminded that while Saul and David had been made kings by God’s will, ‘the people assembled and freely chose them’.13

  Having been the prime movers of the Glorious Revolution, the aristocracy and gentry proclaimed themselves its servants and guardians. The Whig John Hervey, later the first Earl of Bristol, assured the electors of Bury St Edmunds in 1694 that he would forever uphold the balance between ‘the just and necessary prerogatives of the crown and the inestimable happy privileges of the people’. Seeking re-election in 1698, Hervey promised that he had and would continue to do all in his power to preserve ‘the monarchy and hierarchy in their just legal rights’ so that ‘the people may be protected in their liberty and property’.14 The last two were now secure in the hands of men of superior rank and property whose estates gave them a stake in the nation and a permanent interest in its future tranquillity and prosperity.

  After over fifty years of turbulence, a new equipose had been established. An aristocracy which had been fragmented by political faction, endured a civil war and, under the republic, a brief expulsion from public life was now secure. It had regained all its former political powers, although the course of events during the winter of 1688–9 indicated that the driving force of the legislature was now the Commons. Given that the Commons contained a growing number of noblemen’s sons, there was no significant shift in the balance of political power between the two houses. What
did alter was the balance of power between Parliament and the Crown, which now played a subordinate but not impotent role in government. What was most significant of all for the future of the nobility was that it had emerged from an unquiet century as the collective protector of the nation’s liberties. On the whole, the country accepted this claim and, with it, the political ascendancy of the aristocracy. For the next century, the nobility enjoyed a near monopoly of all the major offices of state.

  13

  I’ll Share the Fate of

  My Prince: Jacobites

  Jacobites wanted to reverse the settlement of 1689, placing religion above political expediency, and, over the next fifty-six years, endeavoured to restore to the throne James II and then his Catholic son and grandson (the Old and Young Pretenders) because it was theirs on account of divine, hereditary right. There were Jacobite insurrections in Scotland and Ireland in 1689, and in Scotland in 1715, 1719 and 1745. All were crushed, although historians have been mesmerised by what might have happened if they had achieved success. Such speculation is entertaining, but it overlooks the cold fact that the Jacobites always lacked recruits, and this deficit in manpower was never adequately made up by their Spanish or French allies. Nevertheless, and out of all proportion to their numbers, the Jacobites possessed a capacity to unnerve the politico-economic establishment of Hanoverian Britain.

  The Jacobite leadership was confined to a tiny section of the Scottish aristocracy who, like its rank and file, were either Catholics, Episcopalians or High Church Anglicans who believed that the 1689 revolution had been inherently sinful. The English and Scottish Parliaments had usurped God’s prerogative to make kings and, after the Union of 1707, the British Parliament repeated this profanity by nominating a Lutheran prince, George, Elector of Hanover, as Queen’s Anne’s successor. His accession in 1714 was a signal for an outbreak of nominally Jacobite unrest. Analysis suggests that, then and later, those who took to the streets were Jacobites by adoption rather than conviction, and that their gripes were primarily about such domestic matters as high taxation.

  In 1715 the Jacobites played their military hand, conjuring up phantom armies in Wales and the South-West and mustering a real one of fourteen thousand in Scotland and another of about a thousand from the Catholic gentry of Northumberland and Lancashire and their servants. A jittery Whig government feared that the restlessness in the remote and economically depressed periphery of the country might prove contagious. The Marquess of Tweeddale, Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian, was warned to keep an eye open for crypto-Jacobites among his militia officers. Only men with the ‘greatest and most known zeal’ for ‘the Protestant succession’ were to be trusted with commissions.1

  The loyalty of the Lothian volunteers was not tested, which was just as well, for Tweeddale judged them a feeble lot. Two inconclusive battles at Preston and Sheriffmuir near Stirling severely shook Jacobite morale and their forces disintegrated. Blame was laid at the door of the Jacobite commander in Scotland, John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, but a more plausible explanation was that his army was in a perpetual state of deliquescence with clansmen who had been press-ganged by their chiefs sneaking off to tend and harvest their crops.

  Highlanders again deserted during the 1745–6 uprising. It was led by James II’s grandson, Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender and ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ of romantic legend. His cause may have thrilled skittish minds in later generations, but when he landed in Scotland, Highland lairds and chieftains had to use their customary clan and feudal authority to fill his army. A tenant of the seventy-five-year-old dowager Lady Nairne was warned that if he refused to take up arms, his livestock would be impounded. He later deserted, as did many others who been enlisted under physical and moral duress. Alan Cameron, an officer in Donald Cameron of Lochiel’s regiment, explained to an English jury that he had joined the uprising because ‘the right of [the superior] is always absolute’. So too were the ancient obligations of blood feud, which was why Camerons used the rebellion as an opportunity to sack and burn Campbell farms.2 The events of 1745 revealed that, despite two hundred years of official sanctions, the residual bonds of clan kinship and feudal obligation remained strong in the Highlands. Without them, the Jacobite aristocracy and its allies would have been powerless.

  Jacobite peers were outcasts. Defeats drove diehards into exile in France and a life of tedium, mulling over what might have been and dreaming of what might be. The third Earl of Balcarres, who had joined the Earl of Dundee’s failed rebellion in 1690, found émigré existence unbearable. After ten years of it, he returned home, lured by an annual pension of £500, and, in return, publicly declared that the revolution had been in ‘the interest of the country’.3 William Mackenzie, Lord Seaforth, was a hardier spirit. He raised three thousand clansmen in 1715, went into exile, returned to Scotland in 1719 for a brief uprising (backed by Spanish infantry) and again fled to France to continue his hand-to-mouth existence. His lands had been forfeit and his attempts to get cash secretly from his loyal tenants resulted in a corrective and predatory tour of his estates by General Wade’s redcoats in 1725. Rather than remain in penniless exile, Seaforth renounced Jacobitism in exchange for permission to reoccupy his lands.

  Inducing Jacobite peers like Seaforth to rejoin political society was the best way of neutering the movement. This policy succeeded, for Seaforth’s heir Kenneth Mackenzie stayed loyal in 1745 and was rewarded with an earldom the following year. In 1771 he raised the 78th Regiment from his clansmen for service in the colonies. He was following the example of previous generations of Scottish peers who, after the Union, had increasingly gravitated towards London for pleasure, politicking and, most tempting of all, patronage. In 1733 the Jacobite-inclining Tory James Erskine grumbled that ‘our peerage . . . [have] fallen into universal contempt for their low and slavish compliances to whatever was in power’. The independent spirit of the Scottish peerage had withered and its typical, modern representative was ‘a giddy, prating fellow . . . [a] self seeker and faction monger’.4 But he was making his way in the world and getting richer, while Jacobites had only fantasies for nourishment.

  Loyalty to the Crown gave Scottish peers what they craved: preferment and rewards. This was why the majority distanced themselves from Jacobitism and, in 1745, backed the government. On the eve of Prince Charles Edward’s return, the seventeenth Earl of Sutherland promised to have his servants ‘look out sharply’ for signs of a Franco-Jacobite landing on the Caithness coast. He also ran a voluntary intelligence network, which included two ‘gentlemen’ who used the pretext of visiting their kinsfolk to probe the sympathies of chieftain Donald Cameron of Lochiel, a suspected Jacobite. Sutherland’s agents augmented those employed by the Marquess of Tweeddale, now Secretary of State for Scotland. They included a spy who had once been employed by the Duke of Argyll and had a ‘great affection for our present happy establishment’. This supporter of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession was a mole in the household of the Jacobite Drummonds in Perth.5

  Sutherland’s agents may have found Cameron of Lochiel a lukewarm Jacobite, but he was also the heir in spirit to the culture and customs of his forebears. When Prince Charles Edward landed, Cameron spoke with the authentic voice of a clan chieftain: ‘I’ll share the fate of my prince; and so shall every man over whom nature or fortune have given me any power.’ Ancient concepts of honour overrode political and strategic common sense and propelled Cameron into the Jacobite army. He joined exiled noblemen like James Drummond, self-styled Duke of Perth, Lord George Murray, William Murray, Earl of Tullibardine, and James Drummond, Viscount Strathallan. Like the Prince, they were snatching at a chance to recover titles, prestige and power.

  What followed has often be written up as a romantic adventure. Rather, it was a desperate gamble undertaken by a band of filibusterers with delusions of hidden popular support. Prince Charles Edward’s army of four and a half thousand Highlanders and about two hundred Lancashire volunteers reached Derby
and gave the government a nasty turn, but it had had a dusty reception during its advance southwards, was suffering chronic logistical problems, and was outnumbered by approaching royal forces. Two fluke victories at Prestonpans in September and Falkirk in January did not influence the outcome of a campaign which ended decisively at Culloden in April 1746. Artillery and the disciplined firepower of a modern army destroyed a feudal host of axe- and swordsmen who charged in the obsolete, heroic manner of the clan warrior.

  His leaders suffered forfeiture and four peers were beheaded, the last aristocrats to suffer this punishment for treason. A government which now had fourteen thousand soldiers (including many Lowlanders) and a squadron of warships at its disposal systematically hammered the Highlands, using, paradoxically, that combination of fire and sword which had characterised ancient clan warfare. New laws finally completed the long-drawn-out process of cultural and political deracination which had been started by James VI. The clans were forcibly disarmed, Highland dress was outlawed and landowners were stripped for ever of their remaining military powers and private jurisdictions. Yet, ironically, the clan spirit of obligation survived and was profitably exploited by chieftains who proved their loyalty by raising regiments for the Crown.

  These soldiers were clothed in a version of the traditional costume of clansmen and their feats on the battlefield were blended into a highly romantic, alternative version of the history of the Highlands and the Jacobite movement in general. Jacobitism may have won over few minds, but, thanks to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, it seduced many hearts. Among them were those of the Scottish noblemen and their wives who congregated in exotic, and often invented, varieties of Highland dress to greet George IV when he visited Edinburgh in 1822. Scott acted as master of ceremonies and devised a spectacle which simultaneously celebrated the patriotism of Scotland’s aristocracy and its picturesque and stirring past. He urged noblemen to parade in pseudo-feudal splendour with trains of armed clansmen in tartans often contrived for the occasion. The King entered into the mood of the pageant by wearing Highland dress with pink tights under his kilt and drinking tumblers of Glenlivet whisky, which he found much to his taste.