Due to seeing the first episode of the TV show, The Outlander, I am curious about how the Enlightenment and the Jacobite uprising interrelated (if at all)?
The Wikipedia largely presents these as two separate things with no mention of the other in either article (unless I missed it). It seems strange for a war between England and Scotland to have no particular impact on the intellectual and financial centers. But (I hypothesize), maybe it really was just the religious nutters out in the sticks fighting the English, and the humanist, reasoned Scots in the cities had better things to do.
But it seems to time out well for a rebellion to foment at the same time as Scotland is beginning to grow financially and industrially, at an exponential rate. It seems like a good time for the Scots to back a power play that would favor themselves, even if they didn’t do so openly.
Or, conversely, for them to work against the highlanders as well, so they wouldn’t disrupt trade.
I’m curious which, if any, of the above might have been the reality?
Ir wasn’t a war between Scotland and England, it was at least two differing ideologies — there were Jacks strictly for the good old ways, and humanist rationalist Jacks; there were money-making grubsters among the Government supporters and the same vicious puritan presbyterian savages as in the previous century — most of the Government forces at Drumossie were Scots.
The Enlightenment was tangential to this struggle, which was basically between those who loved the Revolution and abhorred the Divine Right of Kings, Whigs, and those who abhorred them.
After which the American Whigs, who had oath-taken to the usurper George the hireling, rose up against the triumphant British Whigs. And so it goes.
The 18th century rebellions didn’t last that long really, and it’s not like the Jacobites razed the Scottish cities that they briefly occupied. The intellectual life of the ancient universities in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews (and the various societies around them) was pretty much undisturbed.
For a general history of the Scottish Enlightenment, see: How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
Most reviewers felt that the book is a good history of the period, but that the overall thesis of the book (that the Scottish Enlightenment was largely responsible for the modern outlook) was over-reaching (or, dare one say it, “not proven”).
For an example of a money making grubster, I give you Sir Lawrence Dundas, Bart. born a humble rascal willing to sell out everyone else by supplying Cumberland as Commissary, he parlayed that into a baronetcy, incredible wealth and the founding of a magnificent lordly dynasty, the Earls, now Marquesses of Zetland.
Plus although the French invented Steam Boats, his heir of the same name and Councillor of State was greatly involved in the Symington trials along the Forth and Clyde around 1800.
A true Enlightenment family who rejected their King. The Wages of Sin is more Wages.
As others have said, this was not about England vs. Scotland. The Jacobites were trying to restore the House of Stuart to the throne of both England and Scotland. If Bonnie Prince Charlie had been successful, he would have been based in London like his ancestors.
Most Scots didn’t support the Jacobite uprisings.
In the 1745 uprising, Bonnie Prince Charlie himself said that he faced more open hostility in Glasgow than he had anywhere in England. After the battle of Prestonpans, when the Jacobites were at height of their success, they tried to recruit as many people as possible in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas. Only 200 people joined up - and they were mostly beggars and unemployed. More Englishmen joined his army in Manchester (300) than Scots in Edinburgh.
Even in the Highlands, several clans fought against the Jacobites - notably the Campbells and the McLeods, and even more remained neutral.
Most Scots were doing pretty well from the Union with England, which had opened up trade with the English colonies to Scotland. And we should remember that, despite some opposition, Scotland had entered into the Union voluntarily.
The Enlightenment was the time Scotland was thriving and reaching out to the world. The last thing they wanted was instability and conflict.
The relationship between Jacobitism and the Scottish Enlightenment just happens to have been the occasion for one of the most notorious academic spats over Scottish history in modern times.
In the late 1960s Hugh Trevor-Roper, later of *Hitler Diaries *fame, argued that far from being antithetical to it, Jacobitism had been the direct cause of the Scottish Enlightenment. Specifically, he pointed to the intellectual traditions of north-east Scotland which were Episcopalian, Arminian, quietist, Latinate and cosmopolitan and which he presented as offering the vitally fruitful critique of the insular, Calvinist establishment.
This however did not go down well with most Scottish historians, who viewed Trevor-Roper as a Tory, Northumbrian-born Scotophobe who was aiming to be as offensive as possible. It did not help that over the next few decades Trevor-Roper continued to poke them with several other big sticks.
More recently, Colin Kidd, arguably now the most distinguished historian of eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual thought, has taken a more nuanced line. He thinks that Trevor-Roper was mostly wrong, but that his critics now look equally dated. Trevor-Roper had at least drawn attention to one strand that did feed into certain elements of the Scottish Enlightenment to an extent that had previously been overlooked. His biggest mistake was probably that, as an ardent anti-clericalist, he was too quick to see this as a chance to give the Scottish Presbyterians a good kicking. Had he been less of an academic bruiser, Scottish historians might not have taken quite so long to accept that he was making one or two good points.
The consensus now is probably that neither ‘Jacobitism’ nor ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’ are simple categories that can be easily contrasted or conflated.
