The most recommended books about Jacobitism

The Jacobites and their cause were a global political phenomenon, celebrated from Madagascar to Latin America.

Rebecca Wills’ study is one of the few that examines the Jacobites in one country – Russia – which was a major destination of Jacobite exiles. Some of their service to the Tsar has a contemporary resonance-General James Francis Edward Keith (1696-1758) was both governor of Ukraine and Viceroy of Finland in the 1740s.

This book contains tough questions that I have struggled with in the past like, “Why would God allow this to happen?” “Does God see me?” “How can God use this for His glory?” I found comfort in these pages. I learned the struggle of many during the Jacobite uprising—something I knew precious little about, and I have Scottish heritage!

Laura always transports me into history, and I love how she combines stories of struggle with hope. I always walk away from her books with new knowledge of history and encouragement for my own life. Besides, I can never say no to a good romance!

A bracing tonic for anyone slogging through the Outlander—or Waverley—version of the Jacobite rebellions, Jacob's 1911 novel is beautiful, painful, and utterly unromantic (even though the deep attraction felt between the two main male characters is the driving force of much of the plot). It throws into sharp relief the ambiguities of civil war and the ways in which personal background, inclination, and affection play more of a role than principle ever could in determining an individual's place in such a conflict. Each year, my students are continually surprised by how much they enjoy it.

This was the fifth time I have read this book, and I swear I love it just as much every time I read it.

The book is about a writer who has a story come to her in waking dreams and flashes of vivid insight. The story of the past is one of her ancestors who lived near this place.

As a writer, this idea appeals to me. Some of my favorite ideas have come to me in the space between waking and sleeping. The dual timeline of present and historical mesh seamlessly so that the two pieces complement each other, and I love rediscovering all the ways the pieces connect.

Having met the author and taken a dozen workshops with her, I appreciate the craft that went into the writing. Plus, she’s a fellow Canadian.

In terms of Scottish political and cultural history, this is a hugely important book that will astonish and delight everyone engaged in the matter of Scotland. What impresses is the range and scope of Murray Pittock’s global vision for Scotland, but what engages is the minute human detail of the people in the diaspora that he reveals to us, positive and negative. This is the polar opposite of dry history, it is a magisterial work that Scots will actively return to again and again, as we redefine our role in Europe and the world in the 21st Century. I have interviewed Murray for several BBC programmes and he has always come across as a brilliant communicator, who like me, is passionate about Scotland.

Fun fact: in college, my specialty was 16th-century Scotland, which meant I spent several months living in Edinburgh doing research for my senior thesis. In this book, Susanna Kearsley brings to life a Scotland we seldom see in novels but which brings back the Edinburgh I lived in and studied more vividly than anything else I’ve encountered.

There are so many books about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but this book tackles the precursor to all that, the tangled politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, from the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution and the exile of James II to the ferment around the 1707 Act of Union in all its glorious complexity, through the life of one woman who finds herself—as one does—a normal person buffeted by larger events. Every time I open this book, I feel like I’m back in Edinburgh again. 

This is a collection of essays for a major exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland in 2017. It features essays on aspects of the endurance of the Jacobite cause, and objects associated with Jacobitism (like Bonnie Prince Charlie’s silver picnic set). It also has over 200 pictures. This myth has endured through the writings of Sir Walter Scott through Outlander, and this book presents the much, much larger, and more complex story.

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.

A forgotten gem of a book. Katherine Parker hasn't (yet) enjoyed the same revival of interest as Violet Jacob, but this volume alone should make us reconsider. Sitting somewhere between biography and novel, it teases us and makes us a little uncomfortable as it veers between fragments of dialogue—clearly invented, albeit very much in keeping with period language—and more obviously historical passages, telling the eventful life of Jean Cochrane, Viscountess Dundee (1662-1695) from her birth in the west of Scotland, through her marriage with the famous Jacobite general Viscount Dundee—"Bloody Clavers" or "Bonnie Dundee" depending on your political preferences—to her strange death, killed by a collapsing inn roof in Utrecht, and her stranger exhumation a hundred years later.