Jacobite council of war at Edinburgh: decision to march south, 1745
Who Fought
Jacobite field army of roughly 5,500 men; council of 15 to 20 senior leaders dominated by Highland chiefs
History & Significance
The Jacobite rising of 1745 was an attempt to regain the British throne for the exiled House of Stuart. The last in a series of Jacobite risings that began in March 1689, it proved to be the end of Jacobitism as a major factor in British politics.
The uprising was formally launched by Charles Edward Stuart on 19 August 1745 at Glenfinnan in the Scottish Highlands, with the rebels capturing Edinburgh and winning the Battle of Prestonpans in September. In early November, the largely Scottish Jacobite army invaded England, expecting to be joined by English sympathisers and a French landing in Southern England. This failed to materialise, and after reaching Derby on 4 December, their leaders voted in favour of retreat.
Although supported by the vast majority of the Scots who formed Charles' army, the decision caused an irretrievable split within the Jacobite senior command. Despite winning a narrow victory at Falkirk Muir in January 1746, defeat at Culloden in April ended the rebellion. Charles escaped to France, but was unable to win support for another attempt, and died in Rome in 1788.
The 1688 Glorious Revolution replaced the Catholic James II & VII with his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, who ruled as joint monarchs of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Neither Mary, who died in 1694, nor her sister Anne, had surviving children, leaving their Catholic half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart as the closest natural heir. Since the Act of Settlement 1701 excluded Catholics from the succession, when Anne became queen in 1702, her heir was the distantly related but Protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover. Sophia died in June 1714, two months before Anne, and her son succeeded as George I in August.
Louis XIV of France, the primary source of support for the exiled Stuarts, died in 1715 and his successors needed peace with Britain in order to rebuild their economy. The 1716 Anglo-French alliance forced James to leave France; he settled in Rome on a Papal pension, making him even less attractive to the Protestants who formed the vast majority of his British support. Jacobite rebellions in 1715 and 1719 both failed, the latter so badly its planners concluded that it might "ruin the King's Interest and faithful subjects in these parts". Senior exiles like Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke accepted pardons and returned home or took employment elsewhere. The birth of his sons Charles and Henry helped maintain public interest in the Stuarts, but by 1737, James was "living tranquilly in Rome, having abandoned all hope of a restoration."
At the same time, by the late 1730s French statesmen had come to see British commercial strength as a threat to the European balance of power, and the exiled Stuarts a potential option for weakening it. However, financing a low-level insurgency was far more cost-effective than an expensive restoration, especially since the Stuarts were unlikely to be any more pro-French than the Hanoverians. The remote and undeveloped Scottish Highlands were an ideal location for launching such an attempt, while the feudal nature of clan society made it relatively easy to raise troops. However, even Jacobite sympathisers were reluctant to support an uprising they recognised could be devastating for the local populace.
The ground they fought on
The site of Jacobite council of war at Edinburgh: decision to march south, 1745 lies on Unnamed Extrusive Rocks, Dinantian, bedrock that formed in the Mississippian. The rock here is mafic lava and mafic tuff.
The Council of War that sanctioned the march south was a body Charles Edward Stuart had been compelled to accept under pressure from his Scottish commanders, who from the outset were uneasy about his autocratic manner and his reliance on Irish exile advisors. Consisting of 15 to 20 senior figures and dominated by the Highlanders who furnished most of the fighting men, the council's decisions reflected Highland priorities above all others, creating a divided leadership that competed with a separate civilian Privy Council drawn more heavily from Lowland gentry.
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