Sheriffmuir 1715

The Jacobite War in Scotland

Stuart Reid

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473838734
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna temprana

Sheriffmuir 1715 is the military history of a doomed Jacobite rising in Scotland, which enjoyed far more public support and arguably far more chance of success than Bonnie Prince Charlie's attempt 30 years later. Unlike the '45, the uprising which culminated in the brutal battle of Sheriffmuir was very much a Scottish affair, fought without either French troops or assistance, and unashamedly aimed at reversing the hated Union with England and re-asserting Scotland's independence.However, in this lively new study by acclaimed military historian Stuart Reid, a completely fresh look is taken at the campaign, while the battle is reassessed in the light of a thorough knowledge of the ground and the armies which fought there.

Chapter 1

A Parcel of Rogues

AS WITH ALL INSURRECTIONS, the background and the chain of events that led to the Jacobite rising of 1715 were complex and the rebellion itself by no means inevitable. Nor were those ultimately engaged in it united in their ideals or in their motives. It would probably be true to say, however, that straightforward loyalty to the Stuarts as the rightful lawful kings of Britain did not figure highly, if indeed it figured at all as a significant factor in bringing men out.

For some it was a matter of genuine political or religious conviction, but often enough that conviction had more to do with party or family loyalty, or with deep-rooted personal antipathies rather than properly reasoned consideration. Moreover political opposition or a simple unhappiness with the status quo was one thing; actually taking up arms against the state with all the awful penalties for rebellion which would follow failure was quite another. The question of exactly why men chose or were at the very least compelled by one means or another to ‘come out’ is therefore a worthy subject of study in itself, beyond the scope of a military history of the rising. Nevertheless the course and nature of that campaign was in some measure dictated by those factors.¹

The Stuart Kings of Britain

The early background at least is straightforward enough. In the year of our Lord 1603, James VI of his name, King of Scots by the grace of God and the will of his people, found himself served heir to the aged Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, and her twin kingdoms of England and Ireland. He was thus the first king – or more accurately emperor – of all the islands of Britain, for in practice and law there was then no such kingdom. He was at one and the same time King of Scots and, as James I, also King of England and Ireland, but they were still two entirely independent realms – as his son Charles I discovered to his cost.

Religion, or rather its practical application, was at the root of the troubles. Belief in God was absolute and governed the lives of great and small, but the devil as always lay in the detail. Early in the sixteenth century Henry VIII of England had embraced the Protestant reformation primarily in order to abrogate to himself supreme authority over the English church, and ultimately its lands and its revenues. With religious and secular life so closely intertwined at every level it was regarded as essential that the church should be the mouthpiece of the state rather than of the papacy in Rome. No monarch could afford to be preached against or have defiance urged from the pulpit. Church and state needed to be as one, and there was a perceived danger that Catholics might not only attempt to overthrow the state in order to restore the authority of the papacy, but would also make common cause with their co-religionists abroad in order to accomplish it.

In Scotland there was a similar but subtly different dimension to this potential for conflict, in that the Protestant reformation, modelled in this case on the teachings of John Calvin, in Geneva, was not sponsored by the Crown but carried through in defiance of it. Unlike Calvin’s Geneva there was no question of establishing a theocratic republic, but nevertheless the Scots Kirk would soon prove to be an extremely powerful force in secular as well as religious life. Therefore, when Charles I decided to remodel the Scots Kirk on Episcopalian or High Anglican lines, reimpose a hierarchical structure of bishops and repossess the former landholdings of the old Catholic Church in order to finance these reforms, he not only alienated the Kirk but also managed to upset a substantial proportion of the laity as well.

In 1638 a National Covenant was widely signed throughout the country, pledging a substantial part of the population, both great and small, to opposing the king’s religious reforms. In two short wars in 1639 and 1640 the king’s attempts to reassert his power in Scotland were not only decisively rebuffed, but his authority in his other kingdoms was also thereby fatally weakened. A calamitous civil war or rather series of civil wars then followed in all three kingdoms, and by the time they all ended twenty years later Charles I was dead – executed by his own subjects – and men had died on battlefields as far apart as the Orkneys and the Scillies, and from Flanders to Virginia.

In England the bloodless restoration of Charles II in 1660 was brought about through a pragmatic reconciliation of the religious and secular issues, which had led to the civil wars. While many differences remained, English politicians on all sides were heartily united in a near-paranoid desire to re-establish stability at all costs and avoid a similar rupture in the future.

In Scotland unfortunately the position was rather different, in that there had been no reasoned resolution of the political divide. Peace between the various factions had in effect been imposed by Oliver Cromwell’s army, and while the return of the king saw the restoration of independence to a conquered Scotland it also meant a resumption of unfinished business.

The Episcopal hierarchy desired by the king’s father (Charles I) was duly reimposed on the Kirk, whereupon the stauncher Presbyterians, or Covenanters, responded by establishing conventicles. These were alternative services conducted, often in the open air, by those ministers ejected from the official Kirk for refusing to acknowledge the authority of the bishops. When the authorities inevitably attempted to suppress the conventicles, they were met with armed resistance, which soon developed into a counter-insurgency campaign chiefly in the Ayrshire and Galloway hills. The so-called ‘Killing Times’ was a vicious and protracted struggle, which at one point saw a Highland Host unleashed on the Covenanters to plunder and intimidate the refractory in a conscious imitation of Louis XIV’s dragonnades. More seriously civil disobedience and occasional acts of terrorism on the part of the Covenanters was also punctuated by two major uprisings in 1666 and 1679, crushed in full-scale battles at Rullion Green and Bothwell Brig, respectively. A third rebellion in 1685, led by the 9th Earl of Argyle in concert with the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated bid for the English throne, was also summarily dealt with, but by now Charles II had been succeeded by his brother James VII and II, and that meant trouble.

It was not simply that James VII and II was openly Catholic, although that certainly provided the public justification for his eventual downfall. Rather he was altogether far too able an administrator. Being anxious ‘not to go on his travels again’, Charles II had managed the two realms well enough by adopting what might be described as a policy of masterful indolence, while affairs of state were actually delegated to a succession of all too expendable favourites. James VII and II was different; not only did he incline to despotism, but he also possessed the organisational talents and energy to exercise it efficiently with the aid of an army, which he expanded at an alarming rate. It was this combination that so terrified the increasingly marginalised political establishment on both sides of the border.

Characteristically, when the crisis came with with the landing of James’s Dutch son-in-law, Prince William of Orange, in Torbay late in 1688, James offered his Scottish subjects no concessions. Instead a promise of pardon to all returning to their duty by 31 March was accompanied by threats of ‘infamy and disgrace … in this world and the Condemnation due to the Rebellious in the nixt’.² Unfortunately James himself, instead of fighting, had already fled to France. Not surprisingly on 4 April 1689 the Scottish Estates, or Parliament, responded to his ill-timed bluster by unambiguously declaring that James had ‘forfaultit the Croun’. A week later they underlined the fact by the formal adoption of the Claim of Right, a declaration which asserted that, by transforming what was a limited legal monarchy into an arbitrary and despotic power, James had violated the Scots’ constitution. What his royal grandfather, James VI and I, would have made of that might easily be imagined, for it was his formulation of the doctrine of the divine right of kings which had indirectly led to that earlier civil war. The Claim of Right firmly repudiated that particular notion, for it harked back to the foundation of the modern Scottish state and the Declaration of Arbroath, in 1320, which asserted that the king ruled only by the will of his people and that, if he abused the power thus entrusted to him or otherwise failed them, he could be set aside and the Crown offered to another.

In this case of course that alternative was James VII and II’s undoubtedly Protestant daughter Mary, and her husband Prince William of Orange – or, as he was more familiarly known, Dutch William. The fact that William had not and never was to set foot in Scotland was probably no bad thing, for the Scots had long been used to going their own way. When Charles I made his own disastrous experiment in benevolent despotism, the result was the emergence of a Scots republic in all but name. Now once again the real power rested or appeared to rest with the Scots Parliament, backed up by a militant Kirk, shorn once more of its bishops.

Revolution and Rebellion

The transfer of power from James VII and II to William II and III, although in the end surprisingly smooth, was not by any means a foregone conclusion. In the early months of 1689 the streets of Edinburgh were thronged in traditional Scottish fashion with the armed supporters of the rival factions, each seeking to intimidate the other. In a dramatic replay of the old Whiggamore Raid, in 1648, thousands of Covenanters from the southwest were joined by the clansmen of the Earl of Argyle, all urging recognition of Dutch William as their lawful sovereign. James’s few remaining supporters on the other hand were notably fewer in number, disorganised and demoralised, especially after the arrival of that hectoring letter on 16 March. The Duke of Gordon still held Edinburgh Castle in James’s name, but that seemingly was their sole advantage.

With the capital becoming increasingly unsafe, talk turned to establishing a rival ‘convention’ of James’s supporters at Stirling. On the evening of 18 March 1689, one of his last remaining loyal officers, John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, led a little troop of fifty men out of the West Port and headed for Stirling only to find the gates barred against him. At that point Claverhouse returned home, but when news arrived of a declaration of forfeiture against him, and rumours of a warrant for his arrest, he decided to fight and defiantly raised the royal standard outside Dundee.

Raising an army to follow that standard soon turned out to be a vastly discouraging business. The truth of the matter is that the Scots were never at that time sentimental about the Stuarts, and even in the northeast of Scotland he found few volunteers. Although the area had been the Royalist heartland during the civil war in the 1640s and was again to be a hotbed of Jacobitism in the later risings of 1715 and 1745, its people were sharply divided. The fact that the Duke of Gordon was supposedly still a committed supporter of King James might have counted for something if he had not been rather too conveniently shut up in Edinburgh Castle. Even if the Gordons were for the king, all too many of the other local families were for the Protestant succession, if only to spite the Gordons.

Nevertheless Claverhouse eventually found sufficient of the Highland clans willing to follow him and in the summer of that year won a stunning victory just above the Pass of Killiecrankie. With the Scots government’s only field army lost there, victory might have beckoned, but Claverhouse himself was among the dead, and without him the cause was lost. Indeed it is questionable whether it could have succeeded even if he had lived, because, notwithstanding his bright new title as Viscount Dundee, he was still at bottom just John Graham of Claverhouse, a minor laird and colonel of horse of no consequence beyond his loyalty to his king. There was simply put no appetite for an uprising in the name of King James either among the traditional leaders of the country, or among the common people.

The Union

That there should apparently be such a dramatic alteration in attitude by 1715 was down to a number of interdependent factors, largely centring on the Act of Union in 1707.

The scheme of uniting the two kingdoms originated with Dutch William. He had no children, and following the death of his wife, Mary, an Act of Settlement was passed in June 1701. This laid down a Protestant line of succession to the English throne, first through James’s surviving daughter, Anne, and then failing any heirs of her body, through her aunt, Sophia of Hanover, and her heirs.³

This Act of Settlement obviously had no legal or practical effect in Scotland for so long as it remained a separate kingdom. Notwithstanding, Anne Stuart was indeed duly proclaimed Queen of Scots on William’s death in the following year, but there was no guarantee that her northern subjects would be equally complaisant when she in turn shuffled off her mortal coil. A full union between the two countries was therefore seen as necessary to ensure both the Protestant succession and the continued political stability of the two kingdoms.

A step of this magnitude naturally took some time to achieve, but by 1706 Queen Anne was able to appoint thirty-one commissioners on either side, who after nine weeks of discussion arrived at a workable if far from satisfactory settlement. Subject to ratification, which in Scotland at least took place against a somewhat tumultuous background, the two kingdoms were to be united under the style of Great Britain on 1 May 1707, with a common flag, coinage and legislature, and the Protestant succession was assured in accordance with the English 1701 Act of Settlement.

Although Scotland was to retain its own laws and legal system and the established (Presbyterian) church, turning the country into North Britain was a deeply unpopular move. Ironically those Scots politicians who had most eagerly supported the Union found their influence and consequent prestige dramatically diminished in the much bigger British parliamentary theatre. The hoped-for benefits at first proved largely illusory, and conversely English interference in Scottish affairs was greater than had been anticipated. The Scottish Toleration Act of 1712 for example dismayed the Presbyterians by legally sanctioning Episcopalian worship, and in the following year an alteration in the malt tax applied the same rate across both kingdoms. In principle this ought to have been beneficial. Indeed, the proposers’ intention was that in England it should be brought down to the then lower Scottish rate. Instead somehow the reverse occurred, and Scots farmers found themselves paying the higher English rate – which would prove a significant grievance factor in 1715. On the other hand the benefits offsetting these and other examples of a casual disregard for Scottish interests were hard to find, save for the ultimate justification of ensuring the Protestant succession.

Yet even that was by no means inevitable, for in some quarters both north and south of the border hopes remained that Anne, who disliked her aunt Sophia, might yet be persuaded to allow the throne to revert to her Catholic half-brother – the would-be King James VIII – at her death.

Whigs and Tories

The nuances need not detain us here. Suffice to say that broadly speaking there were two political parties with the capacity to form a government. In England, the Whigs, while including a significant number of aristocrats, were largely made up of lesser landed gentry and businessmen, who were strongly Protestant in faith and outlook, and sometimes consciously saw themselves to be the successors of the Parliamentarians of the Civil War. Conversely the Tories saw themselves both as monarchists and supporters of an established Church of England, perceived to be under threat from Presbyterians and other schismatic dissenters. Fear God, honour the king, might not unfairly be taken as their watchword. Nevertheless, although they were accused not always unfairly of leaning towards Jacobitism, fundamentally they were not so very far apart from their Whig opponents, colleagues and neighbours. Their differences were more a matter of party than principle and, had the incoming George I seen fit to favour them, the overwhelming majority were prepared to accommodate rather than oppose him.

Scotland, not surprisingly, was a different matter. Once again party accounted for much, but the religious divide was sharper and unreconciled bitterness remained. For the most part the Whigs were at one with their English colleagues. However, while they largely accepted the Union, their Tory counterparts perceived that its dissolution would require King James to be sitting on the throne. Thus almost by default Scottish Tories, more than their English counterparts, inclined to Jacobitism. Nevertheless this was by no means an inevitable position because it was not a question of a sentimental desire to see the Auld Stuarts back again, but a complex series of economic, political and religious issues for which James represented a possible solution.

Further complicating the issue, and at the same time offering a means of facilitating that particular solution, was the continuing war with France. Although periodically punctuated by short-lived peace treaties, this had been waged for decades against a background of Louis XIV’s largely successful aim of turning France into the foremost power in Europe. Indeed Dutch William’s principal aim in securing for himself the twin thrones was to bolster Holland’s position by bringing Scotland and England into the Grand Alliance against King Louis. In this, despite the distraction of a prolonged campaign in Ireland, he was spectacularly successful both in the short term and in ensuring that the alliance survived his death. It did more, for it also paved the way for the Duke of Marlborough’s great victories over the French at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, between 1704 and 1709.

Against that background, Louis XIV was prepared to offer first the exiled King James VII and II and then his son more than just sympathy, for a Stuart restoration would at the very least take Britain out of the alliance. The best opportunity to do so came in the immediate aftermath of the Union, when popular o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 A Parcel of Rogues
• 2 The Crown Gathers its Forces
• 3 The Jacobites
• 4 The Rebellion Begins
• 5 Round the World and the Kingdom of Fife
• 6 Across the Forth
• 7 Nithsdale and Northumbria
• 8 Into England
• 9 The Battle of Preston, 12 November 1715
• 10 A Time to Dance
• 11 Approach March
• 12 Come Ye Here the Fight Tae Shun? Sherrifmuir Part 1
• 13 A Battle Lost and Won: Sherrifmuir Part 2
• 14 Arrivals and Departures
• 1 The Jacobite Regiments
• 2 The Government Forces
• 3 A Particular List of the Names of the Gentlemen Prisoners, Brought to the Castle of Stirling, 14 November 1715
• Notes
• Bibliography