Why am I passionate about this?
I am a retired history professor with over forty years experience working in the field of eighteenth-century history and Jacobitism in particular. I got interested in Jacobitism when I was an undergraduate and the more I have researched and written on the subject the more fascinated I have become with it. By reading about it you can glimpse the alternatives to the present that might have been. What if the great Jacobite rising of 1715 had succeeded? What if Bonnie Prince Charlie had marched south from Derby and captured London in 1745? The permutations are endless and will certainly keep me engaged for the rest of my life.
Daniel's book list on the Jacobite Risings
Why did Daniel love this book?
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.
2 authors picked Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This book offers the first analytic study of Irish Jacobitism in English, spanning the period between the succession of James II (1685) and the death of his son 'James III', 'the Old Pretender', in 1766. Two crucial features are the analysis of Irish Jacobite poetry in its wider 'British' and European contexts and the inclusion of the Irish diaspora as a pivotal part of the Irish political 'nation'. Both Jacobites and anti-Jacobites were obsessed with the vicissitudes of eighteenth-century European politics, and the fluctuating fortunes of the Stuarts in international diplomacy. European high politics and recruitment for the Irish Brigades…