The '15 Rebellion

However Jacobitism was still very dangerous. The promised benefits of the Union had failed to arrive for many people. Instead, heavy excise duty and increased tax caused much ill feeling. Added to these were humiliations at the hands of the English-dominated Westminster parliament.

Yet rebellion when it came, sprang from a most unexpected quarter. When George I of Hanover succeeded to the throne in 1715, he sacked one of Scotland's most influential politicians: John Erskine, Earl of Mar. Mar decided to retaliate by raising the standard for the house of Stuart. On one side of his banner he put the arms of Scotland and on the other 'No Union'. Thousands flocked to it. Soon almost the entire north of Scotland was in his hands. He did this without even bothering to warn the Jacobite court.

This was not a phenomenon of a backward rural people rising for archaic notions of loyalty to the king over the water. There was strong support for the Jacobite cause in the trading burghs of north-east Scotland, as well as in the Highlands.

Historian Bruce Lenman characterised the backbone of the rising as 'Patriotic Scots and Disgruntled Britons'. The government commander, the Duke of Argyll warned his own side that 'Beyond the Forth the rebels have a hundred to one at least against us'. The Union was in serious danger.

Argyll seized the strategically vital ground around Stirling, but he was heavily outnumbered. Then at the battle of Sheriffmuir, when all seemed lost, Mar lost his nerve and suddenly withdrew. The belated landing of the Pretender couldn't retrieve things, and the leaders of the rising fled ingloriously to France.

The 1715 was like no other Jacobite rising since Killiecrankie. It was totally indigenous to Britain and not started from abroad. It was also the only occasion when a sizeable rebellion also broke out in England - in heavily Catholic and financially broke Lancashire.

This was not a phenomenon of a backward rural people rising for archaic notions of loyalty to the King over the water.

The moment had passed, however, and the exiled Stuarts now became no more than useful pawns in foreign hands. The next European power to play the Jacobite card was Spain in 1719.

Unluckily for the Spanish, their main invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm before it ever set sail for England. Only a tiny diversionary force made it to the north-west of Scotland. There they garrisoned the ancient fortress of Eilean Donan but were scattered by the energetic response of the local Hanoverian commander at the battle of Glen Shiel.

Lowland Scotland had settled down under a Hanoverian regime, which though sometimes unloved, did not move it to outright revolt. Faced with the Stuart association with foreign enemies, most Scots preferred to keep a hold of their Hanoverian nurse 'for fear of finding something worse'. But what George II and his ministers could not inspire was enthusiasm, and this was to prove near-calamitous when the Jacobite card was played again.