During the Jacobite war in Ireland 1689-91, the regular army was supplemented by a number of auxiliary forces that operated with varying effect. Although each was distinctive, their identities, activities, and personnel frequently overlapped. All were distinct from the army, but each had an involvement with it. These were (i) a large militia, raised in 1689, which was poorly armed and led, and not very effective; (ii) Balldearg O’Donnell’s army of Ulster Gaels, which was ill-armed and supplied because of differences between Balldearg and the Jacobite leader, Tyrconnell. It did, however, guard the north-Connacht frontier for much of 1690-1; (iii) the rapparees, partisan bands, often with army leadership, that operated within the Williamite quarters in 1690-1 to considerable effect; (iv) large numbers of women who accompanied and supported the army and the auxiliaries, joining in the fight to defend Limerick by hurling broken bottles at the Williamites assaulting the breach. This keynote discussion explores the diverse range of auxiliaries who took part in martial Jacobitism during the wars in Ireland and contextualises them against the backdrop of Irish society in the late seventeenth century.

Harman Murtagh is a graduate of Dublin University (TCD), the National University of Ireland, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a former president of the Military History Society of Ireland / Irish Commission for Military History. He has written and lectured extensively on the war of 1689-91. His study  of the Irish Jacobite army will be published in September. It will be followed by a companion volume listing the regiments and officers of the army with accompanying biographical notes.

Although recognised as being the largest battle of the last Jacobite Rising, the Battle of Falkirk in January 1746 is often overshadowed in the popular history of The '45. This is in part because it is hard to reconcile an apparent Jacobite victory with an otherwise deteriorating strategic position, but it is also because understanding what actually happened at the battle can be confusing. Indeed, many of the participants were themselves confused even over such basic matters as who had won. Falkirk is, however, highly revealing as to the strengths and weaknesses of the Jacobite army and its approach to combat. In this talk, I hope to look through some of the confusion in the Jacobite accounts of the battle to examine the role of its senior officers, particularly the performance of Charles Edward, to pick out some of the reasons why the Battle of Falkirk remains worthy of careful attention.

Dr Arran Johnston is director of the Scottish Battlefields Trust and the consultant curator of the new Battle of Prestonpans Museum in East Lothian. With a primary interest in the military performance and leadership of Jacobite armies, Arran is the author of On Gladsmuir Shall the Battle Be! and The Battles of Bonnie Prince Charlie: the Young Chevalier at War.

This paper argues that the Jacobite court sustained a commitment to a Baroque form of artistic expression even as it was politically defeated and moved into exile. This ‘Jacobite Aesthetic’ found expression in a variety of forms but relied upon a commitment to analogy as an artistic gesture. It thereby connected local idioms to Classical allusions. This propensity to see the identity of one thing to another - rather than to accentuate specificity and, hence, difference - not only connected the Jacobite Aesthetic to continental artistic trends, it also made it prone to conceptualising politics in a conspiratorial manner.

Michael Brown holds a chair in Irish, Scottish and Enlightenment History at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of three monographs, most recently The Irish Enlightenment (2016). He recently co-edited with Jack Hill a volume of essays entitled Adam Ferguson and the Politics of Virtue (available in open access formats through Aberdeen University Press). He is currently writing a study entitled Making Up Britain in the Eighteenth Century.

Dr Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac, archiviste-paléographe, is head of the French military studies and archives at Service historique de la Défense. Since her PhD on the first generation of Jacobite exiles in Paris and Saint-Germain (Le Grand Exil, 2005), she has gone on to work on the connection between Stuart England and Europe (Jacques II, le roi qui voulait être saint, 2011) and the British catholic connections with Europe. A founding Trustee of the Jacobite Trust, she has taken part in all of the international conferences of the JST and organised its ‘Jacobites and Europe’ conference in Paris in 2013. She is currently finishing the biography of sir Daniel Arthur, the Irish banker of Saint-Germain.

Is it time for a paradigm shift in Jacobite studies, particularly for Scottish Jacobitism, away from Courts in exile, diplomacy and espionage towards the Irish example of in-depth scrutiny of Jacobite engagement in religious, military and commercial networks? The Scots did most of the dying in the risings between 1689 and 1746, but apart from their involvement in freemasonry, they moved from the centre to the periphery of activities at the Jacobite Court after the accession of James VIII & III. Engagement in networking was no less an integral aspect of Scottish than of Irish Jacobitism. Commercial networking, in particular, was transoceanic and extended from Mexican Campeche in the west to Chinese Canton in the east during the eighteenth century. Moreover, Scottish global adventuring had a distinctive moral dimension that linked Enlightenment to empire and enterprise on the one hand, and to patriotism fuelled by rational technology on the other.

Outwith Paris, Madrid and Rome, Jacobite commercial networks in Europe were clustered around coastal towns in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic that engaged in overseas trade. The one notable exception was St Petersburg from where commerce was pursued overland through the Levant and on to Persia. Jacobite networks were also embedded within the main European commercial hubs at London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Hamburg. In North America, Scottish Jacobites were active in the commercial hubs at Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston from the later seventeenth century and likewise among the planter communities in the southern American colonies and in the West Indies, especially in Barbados and Jamaica. Scottish Jacobites were sponsored to settle as frontiersmen to protect colonies in New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina and Georgia and were also forced to settle as indentured labour when shipped out as prisoners in the wake of the ’15 and the ’45 to North America and the Caribbean. That these settlements were predominantly in colonies producing tobacco, sugar, rum and indigo bound Jacobite adventuring to the exploitation of slavery. However, Scots carved out a specialist niche in trading with native tribes. Indeed, while some attention has been given to divided Jacobite loyalties during the American Wars of Independence, fugitives from Culloden were prominent as advisers and associates of the Cherokee nation in resisting incorporation into the United States.

Scottish Jacobites did not confine their activities to single continents with new commercial horizons opening up in Asia and Africa as well as Latin America. Indeed, some networks engaged profitably with the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and Russian as well as the British Empires. Monies made in Mexico and the Caribbean became seed funding for venturing in India and China, usually through free trading and tramp trading rather than through the auspices of the English East India Company. Capital accumulated from commodity trading in coffee, textiles, sugar candy and opium were reinvested in the West Indies to a greater extent than it was repatriated to transform rural and urban landscapes or support Jacobitism. However, such commercial engagement was high risk. The chances of an adventurer returning with a fortune from the East Indies were 1 in 500. Further adventuring as free traders as well as association with the Royal African and South Sea Companies led to Scottish Jacobites engaging in chattel slavery at source from Senegal through the Guinea Coast to Angola and on to Latin America by way of the Caribbean. But Jacobites, like other seafaring adventurers, also faced the prospect of white slavery if captured by Turkish or Barbary Coast privateers, a fate that led a shipload of clansmen who had fought at Culloden ending up on the island of Lemnoa in Ethiopia, where the local governor turned out to be a kinsman who had gone as a boy on the Darien expedition in the late 1690s and subsequently adventured in Africa and Asia.

Allan I. Macinnes is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde and Honorary Professor in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has written extensively on British state formation, Scottish Jacobitism and Highland clans and clearances. His current research interests are focussed primarily on Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire. His next book, Horizons Old and New: Jacobitism in Europe and Beyond 1688-1807, is due for publication next year.

This presentation offers a focus on one aspect of a larger study, examining the movement and use of British Army units, generally but not solely in the burghs, at the end of the 1740s. It suggests that the deployment of Crown forces implied a belief that Scotland was effectively ungovernable without military support, and that this view in part arose from the difficulty commanders had in separating the use of forces to contain Jacobite unrest and bring order to Jacobite areas from disorder more primarily caused by the increasing pressures of excise collection on local economies.

Murray Pittock is Treasurer of the Jacobite Studies Trust, of which he was a founding member in 2003. He is Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow with responsibility for early career development and a range of UK and international civic engagement and knowledge exchange activities, and also provides policy advice externally. He is a fellow of the European Academy/Academia Europaea and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a prize lecturer of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. Outside the university he is co-Chair of the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance and board member and Scottish History Adviser to the National Trust for Scotland. His most recent work on Jacobitism includes Material Culture and Sedition (2013) Culloden (2016; Folio Society, 2021), Scots Musical Museum (Oxford, 2018) and Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660-1750 (2019). His Global History of Scotland is due to be published by Yale in 2022 and he is currently beginning a detailed study of the British Army in Scotland in the years after 1746. He broadcasts widely, and has been termed (National Endowment for the Humanities annual seminar 2014, Notre Dame) 'Scotland's leading public intellectual'.

This focus of this paper is Father James Carnegy, a Roman Catholic priest in the Scots Mission. In many respects he was absolutely typical of the Mission’s recruits from Scotland’s heritor elite. He was devout, learned and self-sacrificing, with a genuine commitment to his calling. But that was just his day job; he was no simple cleric. For Carnegy was also unswervingly committed to the Jacobite cause and for more than twenty-five years was deeply involved in espionage and covert action on behalf of the exiled Stuarts. And it is this highly dangerous parallel career as a spy and secret agent that will be explored in this paper with a view to understanding how it was he managed to operate so successfully for so long. By doing so we can gain a new insight into the Jacobite milieu in Scotland and the flow of intelligence from that milieu to the Jacobite court and its continental allies. In addition, Carnegy’s career will be used to test our current assumptions about the surveillance and counterintelligence capabilities of the Scottish, then British, state. Only rarely can we even come close to tracking the underground activities of a man like James Carnegy, but when we can do this we are soon led into a perilous world far removed from the polite and commercial people of historiographical legend.

Daniel Szechi took his first degree at the University of Sheffield and his DPhil at the University of Oxford. Over his career he taught at St John’s College, Oxford, Auburn University, Alabama, and the University of Manchester. He retired in 2017 and is Emeritus Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, Honorary Professor of History at Aberdeen and Emeritus Professor of History at Auburn University Alabama. He continues to research and write and now also runs a historical consultancy business. He has written extensively on the history of Jacobitism and his latest book, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688-1788 (2nd ed., Manchester University Press) was published in May 2019.