The best books about the Jacobite Risings

When Jacobitism comes up in films and television Scotland is almost invariably to the fore, and within Scotland it is the Highland clans who feature most prominently. 

This is entirely reasonable because they were the key military asset the exiled Stuarts possessed in the British Isles, and in 1745 Charles Edward initially built the army that marched south to Derby around his primarily Gaelic-speaking clan soldiers. But there was far more to them than the dumbly loyal stereotype of the clansman that is often found in popular books on the Highlands. 

Macinnes reconstructs the Jacobite clans’ economic, social, and historical backstory so well that you will never see them in the same light again.

This is simply the best biography of Charles Edward Stuart. It is meticulously researched and absolutely gimlet-like in its analysis of the man and his career. 

Yet though McLynn depicts the prince warts and all (and some of the warts, such as his propensity for domestic violence, are pretty disgusting), he retains a fundamental sympathy for the flawed human being.  In the larger sense it is very much an account, too, of the gathering degradation of a man who in other circumstances might have become a radical, reforming monarch.

One of the greatest ‘what-ifs?’ of the Jacobite movement centres on the English Jacobites and the fundamental question of why they were so politically important within the movement and yet so useless in terms of achieving a Stuart restoration. 

England was the most powerful of the three kingdoms of the British Isles and a major section of the Tory party, the most popular party in England, episodically developed a yearning for such a restoration. Yet it never took off. Monod’s classic book explores English Jacobitism in admirably fine and lucid detail and provides the best answer we are going to get.

In this book Ó Ciardha deals with the red-haired stepchild of the Jacobite movement. 

Despite the fact that support for the exiled Stuarts was strongest in Ireland and that the tens of thousands of Catholic Irish soldiers in European armies were a major military and diplomatic resource for the Stuart monarchs, Ireland got short shrift in all Jacobite policymaking. 

This is because Protestant religious prejudice meant Catholicism, and Catholic Irish soldiers in particular, were politically toxic in England and Scotland. To control the British Isles the Stuarts needed to control England and Scotland and so the Irish Jacobites were always on the backburner. 

Ó Ciardha unflinchingly presents the whole picture. To understand Jacobitism you have to understand the role of Ireland and this is the book that lays it out best.

This is one of the most important books on Jacobitism written in the last 30 years, and I am not recommending it simply because he is a personal friend! 

The book completely debunks the commonplace image of the Jacobite army as a purely clan phenomenon. Pittock proves it was a truly national Scottish army, drawn from almost every community in Scotland, with strong international connections and elements. 

Lowlanders served alongside Highlanders and a smattering of Irishmen and Englishmen in regiments with clan names but an increasingly professional military outlook. By doing so he permanently moves our understanding of the most famous of the Jacobite risings.