The King Over the Water: A Complete History of the Jacobites

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Conversely, most Irish Protestants viewed his policies as designed to "utterly ruin the Protestant interest and the English interest in Ireland". Two events turned discontent into rebellion, the first being the birth of James's son on 10 June 1688, which created the prospect of a Catholic dynasty. The Irish war of 1689-91, the most ferocious of all Jacobite conflicts has been neglected, as has the long loyalty of Irishmen to the Stuarts – even in the 1790s France planned to make Henry IX King of Ireland.

Known to 19th-century Irish historians as the " Patriot Parliament", it opened by proclaiming James as the rightful king and condemning the "treasonous subjects" who had ousted him. As in England, throughout the 1720s, James' birthday on 10 June was marked by celebrations in Dublin, and towns like Kilkenny and Galway.Others argue riots were common in 18th-century urban areas and see them as a "series of ritualised clashes". Everything seemed lost, and the next four years saw Charles first in Paris (when he was dependent of his mother’s pension from the French Crown, plus any money offered by English supporters (see Tobias Rustat on this …), and fathering several illegitimate children.

One was Archibald Cameron, responsible for recruiting the Cameron regiment in 1745, who was allegedly betrayed by his own clansmen and executed on 7 June 1753. James II and VII, a Roman Catholic, was deposed, in what became known as the Glorious Revolution, when his Protestant opponents forced him to flee from England in 1688. As in England, some objected less to the Union than the Hanoverian connection; Lord George Murray, a senior Jacobite commander in 1745, was a Unionist who repeatedly disagreed with Charles, but opposed "wars [. Nineteenth-century Scots poets such as Alicia Ann Spottiswoode and Carolina Nairne, Lady Nairne (whose " Bonnie Charlie" remains popular) added further examples. James III and VIII (16 September 1701 – 1 January 1766), James Francis Edward Stuart, also known as the Chevalier de St.By 1748, food shortages among the French population made peace a matter of urgency, but the British refused to sign the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle while Charles remained in France. Since we are not overburdened by popular histories on Jacobitism, Seward’s lively book is a welcome addition. Such tactics broadened their appeal but also carried risks, since they could always be undercut by a government prepared to offer similar concessions. They were, firstly, the divine right of kings, their accountability to God, not man or Parliament; secondly that monarchy was a divine institution; thirdly, the crown's descent by indefeasible hereditary right, which could not be overturned or annulled; and lastly the scriptural injunction of passive obedience and non-resistance, even towards monarchs of which the individual subject might disapprove. As the author rather stylishly puts it: ‘the magic of divine right may have gone, but squatters’ rights have been transformed by the alchemy of long tenure.

Yet a Stuart rising in England was far from impossible until the 1750s when one in four landowners and many working men were Jacobites. Who does the tall, dark man on the left, with the elaborate wig, staring straight out at you, remind you of? I had not known, for instance, that, following 1776, Charles was touted as a potential ruler of the newly independent American colonies – though this was no more than a fantasy of some of the more-enthusiastic Boston Jacobites. Representing "pre-industrial paternalism" and "mystical loyalism" against forward-thinking individualism, this conception of Jacobitism was reinforced by Macaulay's stereotype of the typical "Tory-Jacobite squire" as a "bigoted, ignorant, drunken philistine". When Henry died childless, the Jacobite claim was then notionally inherited by Henry's nearest relative (a second cousin, twice removed), and then passed through a number of European royal families.Charles continued to explore options for a rising in England, including his conversion to Anglicanism, a proposal that had outraged his father James when previously suggested.