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The JST Virtual Workshop Series returns with a new programme this spring, which features another excellent line-up of scholars sharing a wide array of their projects-in-progress. All workshops will take place on Zoom and last approximately 90 minutes. Admission is free and papers will be pre-circulated to our mailing list. Each session will consist of an informal 15 minute introduction by the presenter, and the remaining time is dedicated to space for questions, comments, sources, and suggestions by the participants. Our goal is to encourage growth of the discipline and the collegiality of its scholarly community in a safe, encouraging environment for postgraduates, ECRs, independent researchers, and established faculty alike. Project titles, abstracts, and presenter bios are listed below. Email darren@jdb1745.net for more info or to be placed on our list of contacts.

All workshop sessions are held on Tuesdays at 5pm UKT.

Download the Spring 2024 schedule here.

Spring 2024 Series


KEYNOTE LAUNCH
February 27

Dr Harman Murtagh

Military History Society of Ireland / Irish Commission for Military History


A Permanent Menace: Irish Jacobite Auxiliaries, 1689-91

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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.

WORKSHOP #1
March 12

Prof Catriona Seth

University of Oxford


Making a Career in the Arts as a Jacobite Woman:
Katherine Read (1723-1778)

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One of the most successful portrait painters in mid-eighteenth-century London was Katherine Read, niece of Sir John Wedderburn, a Scot from Dundee who trained in Paris and Rome. Read's Scottish and Jacobite networks were essential at various stages in her career, enabling her to study overseas, forming an important part of the contacts for her clientele in England, and supporting her move, towards the end of her life, to Fort St George (Madras).
Catriona Seth FBA MAE is the Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford. She works on the long eighteenth century dealing mainly with literature in French and cultural history. She has been looking at Read's networks as part of a project on the painter.

WORKSHOP #2
March 26

Dr Anita Gillespie

Independent Scholar


A Portrait of Scotland’s Unknown Jacobite Ladies

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This project has been a long time in the making. After many years, I have had the opportunity to present my research in print in the form of a new book. The monograph explores the once unknown activities of Jacobite ladies in Scotland and their support of the Stuart cause beyond the few who have become known mainly through anti-Jacobite propaganda. These ladies – directly and indirectly – supported Jacobite men, officers, and the Stuarts in general, but also participated in the opposition machinations over the course of the Jacobite era (1688-1766) themselves. They leant their ears, their pens, and their persons in support of Jacobitism and were involved in the sending of secret messages and correspondence, which comprises the main source of evidence for this research.

WORKSHOP #3
April 9

Dr Georgia Vullinghs

National Museums Scotland


The ‘Jacobite Challenge’
at National Museums Scotland

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‘The Jacobite Challenge’ is a part of Britain’s eighteenth-century past almost inseparable from the Scottish nation, and its surviving material history holds a significant place in the national collections. Georgia Vullinghs will share some of those collections, from the icons of moments and participants of that past, to some less-well research objects in the collection. She hopes to remind you of the research resource available in the collections, as well as discuss her future avenues for research and display.
Dr Georgia Vullinghs has been working with the NMS Jacobite collections since 2017, through her PhD research on the material and visual culture of Jacobite exile, and since 2020 as a member of the curatorial team at NMS. From mid-February 2024 she will take on the role of Curator of Renaissance and Early Modern Scottish History Collections at National Museums Scotland.

WORKSHOP #4
April 23

Ricky Pound

Independent Scholar


Sedition in the Shadows:
Rituals of Loyalty in Early Jacobite Portraiture

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Located over the doorway of the Green Velvet Room leading to the Gallery at Chiswick House is situated a triple portrait by the Swedish artist Michael Dahl (1659-1743) of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston (1665-1726), Charles Boyle, 3rd Earl of Cork and 2nd Earl of Burlington (1651-1704), and Admiral John Berkeley, 3rd Baron Berkeley of Stratton (1663-97). In this talk I show how all three sitters in the Chiswick portrait had either direct or indirect links to Jacobitism through family members, before explaining why Dahl would have willingly painted such a portrait with seditious content, having no love for King William III, his queen, or the later Hanoverian monarchs. I will place the portrait in a wider seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century context of dynastic loyalties, demonstrating how ritualistic practices of paying homage to the exiled King James II and his descendants was a revival of those first developed by cavaliers and the Stuart faithful from the time of the exile of Charles Stuart (King Charles II). Such rituals incorporated aspects of messianic belief and Divine Right, reinforcing the belief in the inevitability of the restitution of the Stuarts as kings of the realm.
Ricky Pound is an independent historian who has a particular interest in symbolism and meaning within architecture. Ricky was for eighteen years the manager of Chiswick House and Marble Hill House (English Heritage). Between 2019 and 2021 he was the House Director of J.M.W. Turner’s suburban villa at Twickenham. He is presently House Manager of the Twickenham Museum. He is the author of several published articles, including those in The English Heritage Historical Review (2009) and The Royal Stuart Journal (2018). He has spoken extensively on eighteenth-century subjects, including presenting a paper at the ‘Symbolic Visual Cultures of Jacobitism, 1688-1800’ symposium at Fairfax House in 2013. In 2020 Ricky became a founding trustee of the London Luminaries, a charity that has been responsible for delivering six series of Zoom talks to date from eighteen west London historic properties.

WORKSHOP #5
May 7

Dr Arran Johnston

Scottish Battlefields Trust


TBD

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TBD
TBD

Previous JST Workshop Programmes


  • Autumn 2023 Series

    Open or Close

    KEYNOTE LAUNCH
    September 5

    Prof Michael Brown

    University of Aberdeen


    The Jacobite Aesthetic and the Conspiratorial Mind

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    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.

    WORKSHOP #1
    September 19

    Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland

    Royal Conservatoire of Scotland


    Playing with Charles Edward Stuart:
    Domenico Corri and the Exiled Prince

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    In his 1810 singing treatise, The Singer’s Preceptor, Domenico Corri (1746-1825) claimed to have lived with Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788) at the Palazzo del Re for two years. During his stay, Corri said he conducted concerts and entertainments for the nobility and spent a great deal of private time with Stuart playing duos and composing ‘little pieces of music’ (1810: np). Corri’s anecdote, written sixty-five years after the Jacobite Rebellion, depicted the exiled prince as a melancholic figure, who used music to express his sadness following the unsuccessful Jacobite Rebellion. To an early nineteenth-century reader, Corri’s account was legitimate, and offered real insight into the Stuart's life in Rome. Several nineteenth and twentieth century publications, including John Heneage Jesse’s Memoirs of the Pretenders and Their Adherents (1845), John Frederick Smith’s The Chronicles of Stanfield Hall: The Young Chevalier (1851) and Charles Julian Downey’s The Last of the Stuarts (1905) cited Corri’s tale. Yet, Corri, who, at the time of the publication had lived in Britain for 39 years was writing for a British-audience who already had a Romanticised fascination with Stuart, and, indeed, Jacobites generally. To date there has been no investigation into whether Corri’s claims are true, but I have uncovered evidence that offers new insight into the musician's life in Rome, including his connections with the Palazzo del Re. In this paper, I will discuss this evidence, and will also consider Corri’s motivations for including the anecdote in his treatise.
    Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her first monograph, Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810), The Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons was published in 2022, and the paperback will be released in September 2023. She also co-edited with Murray Pittock a new edition of Allan Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

    WORKSHOP #2
    October 3

    Dr Harry Lewis

    Independent Scholar


    Imperial Conflict and the Jacobites in Peru,
    1701-c.1750

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    Yes, you read that right. This paper centres on the hitherto unstudied phenomenon of Jacobite activities in colonial Spanish Peru. The paper explores the political and commercial aims of the Jacobite diaspora and the impact of their Pacific expeditions on their activities across the world; from funding the 1715 rising in Scotland to challenging British naval incursions in the Pacific during the rising of 1719. Utilising previously untapped resources in the records of the exiled Stuarts and their followers, in conjunction with archival sources held in Britain, France and Spain, this paper reveals the importance of the Jacobite diaspora in the early modern struggle for empire.

    WORKSHOP #3
    October 31

    Tanner Ogle

    Texas A&M University


    Ruins and Remembrance:
    Jacobite Impressions in the British Landscape

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    This paper explores the popular British memory of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 on the eve of the American Revolution. Based largely on travel literature and its reception between 1769 and 1776, this paper contributes to scholarship on travel literature, memory, Jacobitism, and British imperialism. Tracing the ruins left in the wake of ’45, this paper emphasizes the traumatic nature of the ’45 and the lasting impressions it left on provincial landscapes and minds. Far from being an insignificant insurrection, the ’45 was a traumatic experience that many Britons would remember through the American Revolution. Although many Whigs and Tories sought to overcome the prejudice that accompanied memories of the ’45, topographic and human ruins helped keep memories of the rebellion alive as the empire incorporated former Jacobites and began using the ’45 to suppress a rebellion in the colonies. While elites read British travel accounts and debated their political merit, the stories preserved in travel literature also provide critical insight into the depth and breadth of British provincial memory. The Jacobite uprising in 1745 and 1746 may have been brief, but the experience of rebellion left lasting impressions on the built environment and the British psyche.
    Tanner Ogle is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University specializing in the political and cultural history of the Anglo-American Atlantic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has published in the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, and is the recipient of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era’s Crouch/Aaslestad Prize for best graduate student paper. His dissertation explores the origins of the American Revolutionary conflict by analyzing the influence of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 on perceptions and imperial policies on both sides of the Atlantic.

    WORKSHOP #4
    November 14

    Round-Table Discussion

    Various


    Losing the Argument:
    Jacobitism in Defeat – A Lost Cause?

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    Setting aside the ever-popular counterfactual framings of the broader Jacobite challenge, the theme of this workshop accepts the terminal path of Jacobitism in the years after Culloden and seeks to generate conversation about how we perceive the participants of both sides as ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In what ways have these archetypes affected psychological, cultural, and sociological judgement and self-perceptions of success, failure, endurance, and entitlement? Have our narratives and collective memories of the affair’s results imprinted bias upon our interpretations? How can Jacobitism be explained through game theory and what characteristics have been ascribed to its participants as ‘underdogs’ – and does such a status not only fit into martial and political frameworks, but also emotional and moral ones? Perhaps most relevant, can Jacobitism now be considered a Lost Cause in the same manner as other failed insurrections? The final workshop of this autumn’s term offers a bit of a different format: a panel of speakers will introduce the theme along with some points for consideration, and the floor will be open for robust discussion and interaction between anyone who might like to chime in.
    This weeks’s workshop will be a round-table discussion with numerous participants from different institutions across a variety of sectors and career paths.
  • Spring 2023 Series

    Open or Close

    KEYNOTE LAUNCH
    February 7

    Dr Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac

    Service Historique de la Défense


    A Different Kind of Perspective:
    30 Years of Using French Archives for Jacobite Studies, 1688-1715

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    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.

    WORKSHOP #1
    February 21

    Michael Ray Taylor

    University of Aberdeen


    The Liberalism of Defeat:
    The Liberal Jacobite Movement
    and Its Influence on the American Colonies

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    This presentation is an overview of the current state of my PhD thesis. I will argue that there was a strain of liberalism within Jacobitism which greatly impacted the course of history in Britain and her American colonies. By proving the above thesis, my dissertation will influence the current understanding of the religious, philosophical, and political history of both the United States and Britain. In religion, it will show that religious toleration was not the sole accomplishment of Protestants in the eighteenth century, as is often evinced, but included Catholic contributions. It will also reveal a new form of negative classical liberalism rooted in the Christian faith and paralleling, yet remaining distinct from, John Locke’s postulations. Philosophically, this new revelation will upset contemporary Whiggish understandings of British history. This is often conceived as a steady liberal progress beginning with the Glorious Revolution and following a carefully selected series of Whig thinkers until coming to fruition in the American and French Revolutions. The competitive political philosophy of Jacobites will demonstrate that they were not the regressive spirits of the traditional caricature. Rather, they offered a robust alternative to Whig thought and in many ways surpassed it in their anticipation of the future liberal order. Politically, the liberal Jacobite camp consistently threatened the potential of an alternative state which fuelled change within the British government in the long eighteenth century sometimes challenging but often integrating with the empire. They also constructively responded not to the exercise of state power but to the experience of political defeat, altering the perspective on the nature of individual liberties and the need for religious toleration. The thesis will also reflect on the extension of the Jacobite experience into the colonial orbit, with many Jacobites resuscitating their career by availing of imperial office. Thus, case studies will be incorporated which allow for reflection on how those who experienced domestic defeat reoriented themselves to interpret imperial state building. These case studies will reflect on the political thought of Jacobite women, as well as men, from various political parties. The effects of Jacobite understandings of liberty were thereby shaped by domestic and imperial experience and influenced Britain’s development of liberalism while also informing a colonial iteration of this ideology paving the way for the American Revolution.
    Michael Ray Taylor is a second year PhD Candidate in History at the University of Aberdeen. He holds a BA and MDIV from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is an Intellectual Historian specialising in the political philosophy and theology of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He is particularly focused on the Scottish influence upon the American colonies and young republic. His current dissertation traces liberal thought within the Jacobite movement(s).

    WORKSHOP #2
    March 7

    Cameron Fleming

    Lancaster University


    The Standish Family and the Walton-le-Dale Mock Corporation: Useless Cavorters or Functional Jacobite Underground? 1716-1762

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    The Standish family have contested Jacobite credentials. From the centre of a major plot in the 1690s, their interaction with Jacobitism seemed to collapse after the 1715 rebellion. By exploring the interaction between family members after the 1715 rebellion (particularly Ralph Standish and Cecilia Townley [née Standish]) and the Walton-le-Dale mock corporation and their reflections over this period preserved in their family records, this paper explores how the Standish interaction to Jacobitism developed over time. This places tenants, friends, and distant family at the centre, highlighting members of the Starkie and Townley family as key connections in the Standish network post-1715.

    Furthermore, the paper explores the contested memory of Jacobitism in the family archive. The discussions within the family surrounding what to do about the seditious material in the ‘hidden room’ and the eventual inclusion of the Standish Plot papers highlight the difficult relationship between family history, Jacobite loyalty, and contemporary politics. This involves tracing Jacobite culture expressed by the family such as their collection of Stuart hair and blood, the continued use of images of the exiled Stuarts, and their memory of family history.

    Likewise, the contested legacy of the Walton-le-Dale mock corporation enters the discussion. The organisation has often been categorised as a club more for ‘cavorting’ than serious Jacobite activity. Though more recent evidence challenges this notion with other homosocial clubs, what was the reality in Walton-le-Dale’s case and what do the new connections found between the organisation and the Standish family tell us about both groups?

    WORKSHOP #3
    March 21

    Steven Robb

    Historic Environment Scotland


    The Pestilent Jacobite Church: Non-Jurors in the '45

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    Non-jurors, the clergy and laity who refused to abjure their oaths to James II & VII, or to recognise William & Mary and their successors, formed a small, secretive, but often influential religious community within Britain. Initially containing up to 400 Anglican priests and the vast majority of Scottish Episcopalians, there was an ongoing association between non-jurors on both sides of the border between Scotland and England that eventually saw the tiny remnant of the English church absorbed by the Episcopal bishops. Many studies on the non-jurors, often written by the clergy, stress their passive obedience and play down any involvement in politics or Jacobite intrigue. However, although numbers diminished steadily throughout their eighteenth century, remaining non-jurors often maintained a more forthright support for the Stuarts. As Paul Monod has noted, non-jurors were ‘Jacobite by definition’ and many assisted the cause by preaching, printing, and publication, or with more active measures such as their contacts with the Stuart Court in exile, joining the ’45 rising or, on one occasion, setting off a bomb in Westminster Hall.

    I have been researching the role of non-jurors, especially the latter stages of the movement in Scotland, London, and Manchester and the links between these groupings. Much is still shrouded in secrecy in an age that saw harsh penalties for opposition to the British state, but I would like to touch on some involvement – primarily in England – that non-jurors had in the ’45 and its aftermath.
    Steven Robb is an independent researcher with a particular interest in the latter stages of the Jacobite movement and the role of both English non-jurors and Scottish non-juring Episcopalians. He has recently published a paper on Bishop William Cartwright and the Orthodox British Church (of Thomas Deacon of Manchester) in Shropshire History and Archaeology, and is currently researching the background and lives of the Kennington Martyrs with a study on Lt James Nicolson of Leith, due in 2023. He works as Deputy Head of Historic Buildings for Historic Environment Scotland, and also writes on architectural history.

    WORKSHOP #4
    April 4

    Dr David Parrish

    College of the Ozarks


    Commonplace Jacobitism:
    Commonplace Books as Jacobite Networks

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    This article uses commonplace books to investigate Jacobite intellectual networks. Commonplace books are an intriguing and underutilized source which provide a fascinating glimpse into the intellectual and cultural world of eighteenth-century Scotland. The disorganized, eclectic nature of the material captures something of the essence of Scottish Jacobitism’s untidy cultural landscape and shifting political contexts in which Jacobites lived. But these books also enable the identification of certain networks of beliefs and assumptions that shaped both the selection of materials that were read and the ways in which Jacobites might have approached and understood them. In conjunction with similar sources, commonplace books provide evidence that enables us to sketch a rough ‘map’ of Scottish Jacobite intellectual and cultural networks. Such a map, like any other, is imperfect, limited, and perspectival. But tracing the contours of these networks raises important questions regarding Scottish Jacobites’ engagement with the printed word and the relationship between commonplace books, bound pamphlets, and manuscripts. An examination of these themes illustrates the intellectual and print networks of Jacobites and illuminates something of both the extent and limitations of a Jacobite cultural world.
    David Parrish is Associate Professor of History at College of the Ozarks. His previous research examines Jacobitism and the Atlantic World. Previous publications include ‘A Party Contagion: Party Politics and the Inoculation Controversy in the British Atlantic World, 1721-1723’ and ‘“A Greater Revolution”: Anti-Jacobitism and the Hanoverian Succession in the British Atlantic World, 1702-16’. His current research investigates Jacobite historical cultures.

    WORKSHOP #5
    April 18

    Mark Robertson

    Independent Researcher


    Jacobite Atholl:
    The Heritor Families of Highland Perthshire

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    This project is for a book proposal and is centred on the history of twelve families in Atholl, in Highland Perthshire, during the Jacobite era, 1689-1746. The aim is for an accessible book suitable for the general reader but one that also fully meets acceptable standards of scholarship. Some of the Atholl families were committed Jacobites throughout the period, while others changed their allegiance or perhaps ‘hedged their bets’, with the heritor staying at home while sending his son out to fight. Two of the families consistently supported the British government. Each family’s story represents a different aspect or theme of Jacobitism or anti-Jacobitism in this part of Scotland.The book will cover an elongated period, harking back to the 1640s to allow consideration of traditional loyalties to the Stuarts during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and forward to the latter part of the eighteenth century to cover both the experience of Jacobite exiles after the ‘45 and the way in which subsequent generations embraced the opportunities provided by the British fiscal-military state.
    Mark Robertson has been researching families in eighteenth-century Atholl for the last five years. He first became interested in their history when he came across some of the traces they have left in the landscape while he was walking in the local hills. Mark is gradually compiling a relational database containing details of around 120 local families over the period 1689-1746. Having gained his first degree in 1979, he has returned to historical research after a long absence.

    WORKSHOP #6
    May 2

    Alanna MacTavish Khalil

    University of Aberdeen


    Roundtable: Why Does Jacobite Studies Matter?

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    Why does the field of Jacobite studies matter to you? After all, you join this Jacobite Studies Trust virtual conference and spend your days, your weekends – even your full careers – studying historical Jacobitism and Jacobite culture. Does this interest stem from a personal reason? A passionate academic pursuit? Or do you believe that Jacobite studies has a role to play in the wider sphere of Scottish and indeed global issues? At this session, you’ll hear about our presenter’s early research, which was prompted by the JST conference publications since 1980 as well as the volumes edited by Rosalind Mitchison and Ted Cowan, entitled respectively Why Scottish History Matters (1991) and Why Scottish History Still Matters (2012). Moreover, in this collaborative group session you will have an opportunity to express why Jacobite studies matters to you, what gaps in the research you still see, and what actions we might consider taking as an extended network for Jacobite studies. Come ready to reflect, share your story, and supportively debate.
    Alanna MacTavish Khalil received her Master’s in Social Work from the University of Tennessee and has spent her twenty-five year career in human rights and international development with organisations like Amnesty International and the United Nations. She has worked in many countries, and is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland with UNICEF. But while Alanna’s boots move around the world, her heart has always been in Scotland. To that end, she is currently a student in the Scottish Heritage MLitt programme at the University of Aberdeen, with plans to subsequently pursue a doctorate focused on Jacobite studies. This session is an extension of her research and part of her personal journey to find her place – and the places of many others – in keeping Jacobite studies alive for generations to come.
  • Autumn 2022 Series

    Open or Close

    KEYNOTE LAUNCH
    September 6

    Professor Allan Macinnes

    University of Strathclyde (Emeritus)


    Horizons Old and New: Jacobite Global Adventuring

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    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.

    WORKSHOP #1
    September 20

    Tanner Ogle

    Texas A&M University


    The ’45 in 75: Memories of Jacobitism and
    the Rebellious Turn in the American Revolution

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    Viewing the American Revolution through an imperial perspective, this paper explores how living memories of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 framed imperial perceptions and policies between 1774 and 1776. Months before the First Continental Congress convened and nearly a year before fighting began, Lord North’s administration took what I term a ‘rebellious turn’ by using the ’45 as precedent to support coercive policies in the colonies. While historians have suggested the possibility of the Jacobite Rebellion’s influence on a limited number of British imperial officials, this paper reveals broader patterns of remembrance. On the other hand, those who opposed Parliament’s measures employed memories of the ’45 in a different way. For many Whigs, Parliament’s increased aggression seemed to confirm pre-existing conspiratorial fears of Jacobite influence in the imperial government, which, in turn, increased colonial resistance to Parliament and those loyal to it. The prevalence of the ’45 in British memory not only demonstrates its significance as a formative moment in imperial history, but provides critical insight into why British efforts to deal with colonial resistance faltered in the earliest years of the conflict. Although historians have provided a host of reasons for Britain’s failure to restore peace, I argue that the experience of rebellion was central to policymakers’ misapprehension of their contemporary context which led to flawed policies that pushed the colonies toward revolution.
    Tanner Ogle is a third-year history PhD student at Texas A&M University. His research explores the intersection of religion, politics, and empire within British imperial memory. He recently published ‘Republicans Resurrected: Memories of the English Civil War and Peaceful Transatlantic Resistance in the Beginning of The American Revolution (1762–1765)’ in The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture. His current research focusses on how living memories of the Jacobite Rising of 1745 influenced perceptions and policies during the American Revolution, especially among the conservative elite.

    WORKSHOP #2
    October 4

    Bill Runacre

    Independent Researcher


    A Tolerated Minority? The Protestant Experience
    in the Irish Brigade of France

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    To date, little has been written on non-Catholics who served in the most durable of Jacobite military institutions: the Irish Brigade of France. Using datasets of deaths and conversions collected from French and Irish Catholic archives, as well as the records of the Irish Brigade, this paper will focus on their experiences and consider the extent to which tolerance of religious difference was practised within this formation. Comparison will also be made with the experience of Protestants within the Scottish regiments of Louis XV and the Irish Brigade of Spain, while also touching on the wider civilian community of women and children who accompanied the Brigade.

    WORKSHOP #3
    October 18

    Ralph Hoyle

    The Arts Society


    Jacobite Material Culture: Observations, Revelations
    and Probably Some Misapprehensions

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    Out of necessity, most Jacobite material culture displayed in museums has to be explicit; previously only to be seen in a safe place free from the risk of prosecution, the viewer has to be able to recognise the prompts. Roses, oak leaves, thistles, and the like seem pretty transparent, but what appeals to me are the ‘opaque to the law’ objects that require a greater understanding of more contrived associations, which must have existed in a world of heightened danger from exposure.

    Being interested in silver, it seemed to me that the medium was missing out on all the fun. Among domestic items, ceramics and glass were well represented among treacherous objects, but material that defined wealth, status, and good taste oddly seemed to be missing, apart from medals and touchpieces made of silver. Clearly if silver was used as a medium to convey Stuart sentiments, it was in the very ‘opaque’ category, and definitely at the elite end of the market. I decided to look again at some mid-eighteenth-century silver pieces through the prisms of allegory, biblical references, fables, contentious heraldry, and the like to see if I could winkle out a few suspects. Certainty is impossible due to the ambiguity required, and I leave the prospect of misapprehension open in the title! But I hope to show that silver items were included in the Jacobite vocabulary of ‘silent communication’ and the medium deserves a higher profile.
    Ralph Hoyle is an Accredited Lecturer for the Arts Society, an international group of some 380 affiliated societies that hold monthly lectures on cultural topics. He is interested in silver and rococo design as well as tracing the material culture of objects to provide a window into many aspects of eighteenth-century life. Ralph has collected antique and historical silver ever since he was a schoolboy.

    WORKSHOP #4
    November 1

    Dr Jérémy Filet & Dr Stephen Griffin

    Manchester Metropolitan University
    Université de Lorraine & University of Limerick


    Diplomatic Letters and the Decision-Making Process: The Forstner Correspondence and Anglo-Lorraine Relations, 1711-1713

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    This article aims to highlight untouched archival materials from the former Duchy of Lorraine in the period of Duke Leopold’s reign (1697-1729). Wolfgang Jacobus Forstner von Breitenfels was the duke of Lorraine’s envoy at the court of Queen Anne between 1710 and 1713. This period is of particular interest for historians of the early-modern period because it comprises the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and in particular the question of the place of residency of the Stuart Pretender to the thrones of Britain and Ireland: James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766). A monarch’s ideas of other rulers, their courts and other states in general are influenced by the correspondence they read from their representatives and what has been reported in it. Therefore, we will be using the Forstner papers as a foundation to explore the Lorrain perception of London during Anne’s reign and examining how his writings influenced the duke’s decision-making. By framing our analysis in terms of the new diplomatic history, this contribution will emphasise the importance of soft power and cultural patronage within diplomatic practice during the eighteenth century.
    Dr Jérémy Filet has been awarded a PhD in ‘littérature, langues et civilisation étrangères’ from the University of Lorraine and “Early-modern history” from Manchester Metropolitan University, where is currently a Lecturer. He has co-edited a book printed at the Presses Universitaires de Lorraine (2018) and has published several articles in Canada (2020), China (2019), and England (2018-2022), notably in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (JSECS).

    Stephen Griffin, PhD, is a graduate of the University of Limerick where he is currently a lecturer in History. He is a former recipient of the Richard Plaschka pre-doctoral fellowship, Austria (2017-18) and the Rev. Liam Swords Foundation Bursary, France (2019). He has published in the
    Historical Journal, Bulletin du Centre de recherche du chateau de Versailles and History Ireland, and has a number of papers and chapters both forthcoming and currently under review. He is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

    WORKSHOP #5
    November 15

    Dr Jacqueline Riding

    Jacobite Studies Trust


    Hogarth's Britons:
    The March of the Guards to Finchley

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    This presentation will introduce some new ideas on William Hogarth's iconic painting The March of the Guards to Finchley (1749-50, Foundling Museum), which is the centrepiece of a major exhibition Dr Riding is co-curating at Derby Museum and Art Gallery (March to June 2023). ‘Hogarth's Britons’ is the first exhibition to focus on images the artist created in response to the Jacobite challenge and the Stuarts’ chief sponsor, France, with an emphasis on those paintings and engravings associated with the 1745-6 Jacobite Rising, such as the etched portrait of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat (1746),The Gate of Calais: O the Roast Beef of Old England (painting 1748, engraving 1749), and The March to Finchley (engraving 1750). Connected themes include definitions of ‘Britishness’, Loyalism, English Jacobitism, and the relationship between Hogarth and Europe.
    Dr Jacqueline Riding, former Assistant Curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, is an author, curator, and consultant specialising in 18th- and early 19th-century British art and history. Her exhibitions include ‘Basic Instincts’ (Foundling Museum, Sept 2017-Jan 2018), ‘Between the Sheets: Turner’s Nudes’ (Turner’s House, July-Oct 2022), and ‘Hogarth’s Britons: Loyalty, Rebellion and the ’45’ (Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Mar-June 2023). She is also a historical advisor on feature films such as Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018). Her publications include Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (Bloomsbury 2016); Basic Instincts: Love, Passion and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore (Paul Holberton 2017); “His Little Hour of Royalty: The Stuart Court at Holyroodhouse” in David Forsyth ed., Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (National Museums Scotland 2017); Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre (Head of Zeus 2018); “Virtue Rewarded: Hogarth’s The Happy Marriage” in David Bindman ed., Hogarth Place and Progress (Sir John Soane’s Museum 2019); and Hogarth: Life in Progress (Profile 2021), the Sunday Times Art Book of the Year (2021) and a Times and Sunday Times Paperback of 2022. She is Books Editor at The Art Newspaper; a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Royal Historical Society; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Department of Art History, University of York; and Trustee of Turner's House and the Jacobite Studies Trust.

    WORKSHOP #6
    November 29

    Pamela Ahern

    University of Delaware


    Mary Stuart in Jacobite Memory

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    In 1752 David Hume began work on his History of England, in which he scrutinized Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots’ ‘atrocious crimes’ during her sixteenth-century reign. This line of argument fit into an eighteenth-century Marian debate over Mary’s complicity in the crimes that led to her controversial execution. A few years earlier during the ’45, a succinct account of some bloody principled embraced by papists was published in The Sinfulness of Compliance with the Rebels Detected. This work addressed Mary as a ‘Popish Princess’ whose ‘rage…was curb’d only by Protestants’ while relating values held by Jacobites with a heavily skewed depiction of Mary. The other side of the debate was often represented by those with known Jacobite affiliation, such as Alexander Murray, 4th Lord Elibank, of the Elibank Plot fame. Murray described Mary as ‘that most divine and most amiable creature’ while ardently maintaining her innocence. This research seeks to uncover the place of Mary’s memory within Jacobitism, arguing that it played a partisan role in Jacobite politics. It scrutinizes the different ways in which she was represented in popular print and performance – typically at two extremes: a naïve Catholic tyrant or a tragically wronged mother figure – and how these representations influenced perceptions of both Mary and Jacobites.
    Pamela Ahern is a doctoral candidate in European History at the University of Delaware with a certificate in Museum Studies from the same institution. Her current dissertation research considers how museums and other cultural institutions engage with historical memory studies. This project will culminate in a digital humanities website with multiple case studies examining how historical memory shapes our perceptions of the past as they are represented in museums and archives, with the first such study centering around the memory of Mary Queen of Scots within eighteenth-century Jacobitism.
  • Spring 2022 Series

    Open or Close

    KEYNOTE LAUNCH
    February 8

    Professor Murray Pittock

    University of Glasgow


    Rebellious Scots to Crush: British Army Deployment in Central and Southern Scotland, 1748-50

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    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'.

    WORKSHOP #1
    February 22

    Dr Harman Murtagh

    Irish Commission for Military History


    The Irish Jacobite Army 1689-91

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    The scale of the Williamite/Jacobite/War-of-the-Kings war in Ireland was immense, with more complex causes than often realised. It involved the presence of rival kings, large multi-national armies, major pitched battles, sieges and other military operations, and an estimated 100,000 casualties, military and civilian. The Irish Jacobite army that sustained this conflict over three years was largely recruited from Irish Catholics, but with some French and British officers. It was not a rabble, and after a difficult start, with strong French support it became an organised force of sixty regiments. Although ultimately defeated, it proved capable of giving a good account of itself. During and immediately after the war about 20,000 of its personnel went to France. It was supported in Ireland by several auxiliary forces, the most effective of which were the partisans, known as rapparees.
    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. He is currently completing a study of the Irish Jacobite army.

    WORKSHOP #2
    March 8

    Harry Lewis

    University of Edinburgh


    Forfeiture and Accommodation in St. Kitts, 1688-1732

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    Although the significance of the Jacobite forfeitures within Britain and Ireland is widely appreciated, research into the phenomenon has not been extended to the Caribbean where similar policy was carried out. This paper, based on a draft chapter of my thesis, expands the subject of the forfeiture of Jacobite estates to the small Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Here, a rising in 1689 by predominately Irish Jacobites helped deliver the island to French control. However, following the recapture of the island by supporters of William and Mary, those who had aided the French invasion found their properties forfeited. This chapter explores the long-term impact of this policy alongside the various attempts pursued by the island's government to prevent the return of Jacobites to St. Kitts.
    Harry is a third year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and his project looks at the Jacobite diaspora across the Greater Caribbean in the period 1688 to circa 1750. Seeking to understand the Jacobites as a global diaspora, his research investigates the Jacobites as they moved into and across the European empires in the Greater Caribbean (principally those of Britain, France and Spain) and how these Jacobites related to the diaspora and Stuart courts in Europe. He came to the subject after an MSc by Research in 2019 that looked at the links of the Stuart government in exile to three Jacobite 'projectors' who, with varying success, sought to align the movement and Stuart-allied governments with ostensibly Jacobite pirates in the Bahamas and Madagascar between 1718 and 1722.

    WORKSHOP #3
    March 22

    Dr Peter Leech

    Cardiff University


    Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Book and Print Culture Associated with Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807)

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    During the years 1747-1748, when Prince Henry Benedict Stuart was made a cardinal and ordained as a priest by Pope Benedict XIV, the focus of a life which (though according to some historians, hitherto lacked meaning and purpose), rapidly crystallized into one of sustained and passionate devotion to the Roman Catholic church through prayer, patronage, and reform. Henry's religious fervour, characterised by a daily routine of liturgical observances, interspersed with openings of new religious foundations, commissioning of sacred music, art, and architecture, and overseeing of synodal activity in Frascati and further afield, dominated almost every aspect of his life as a cardinal for sixty years. The example set by his devotion, coupled with his patronage and cardinal-protection of a vast number of churches, religious orders and artistic foundations led to his being the principal dedicatee of a great number of printed publications, encompassing poetry, liturgy, church history, architecture, patristics, synodal decrees, hagiography, and theology. This workshop explores examples of book and print culture associated with (and in many cases directly inspired by) Henry, through the lens of a private collection of artefacts assembled over the last twenty years and is a prelude to an article on the subject.
    A professional conductor, composer, and musicologist, Peter Leech is a specialist in the music and wider artistic culture of the British and Irish Catholic diaspora during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the last decade he has published several articles on music associated with the English Jesuits at St Omers, the Venerable English College, Rome, and the court of Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart in particular, revealing hitherto unknown composers and a wealth of artistic culture previously unexplored by mainstream music historians. Peter's identification of Sebastiano Bolis as Cardinal Henry's principal maestro di cappella (from 1778-c.1798) led to widely acclaimed world-premiere performances and recordings of Bolis's music (transcribed from archive sources), and several additional related projects are currently in the pipeline. A passionate collector and antiquarian, Peter has in recent times moved into the area of book history and is also working on a cultural biography of Henry Benedict Stuart after 1747. Peter has been a lecturer at the School of Music, Cardiff University since 2015.

    WORKSHOP #4
    April 5

    Prof Leith Davis

    Simon Fraser University


    Re-envisioning “The Lyon in Mourning” Through the Lenses of Digital Humanities and Book History

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    This presentation re-examines “The Lyon in Mourning,” a group of ten manuscript books compiled between 1747 and 1775 by the Episcopalian clergyman Robert Forbes as a record of Jacobite cultural memory following the defeat of the Jacobites after Culloden. I begin by providing an update on the “Lyon in Mourning” Digital Humanities project, a partnership between Simon Fraser University’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab and the National Library of Scotland. I then use current results derived from “The Lyon in Mourning” Project in order to intervene in two areas of scholarly study. On the one hand, I suggest that adopting a Book History approach to the work can offer scholars of Jacobite and British Studies a fuller understanding of “The Lyon in Mourning” manuscript as a medial interface, allowing us to consider the manuscript in relation to what scholars such as Margaret Ezell, Michelle Levy, Rachel Scarborough King and Betty Schellenberg have discussed as an ongoing and active culture of manuscript literature in eighteenth-century Britain. On the other hand, drawing attention to the way that the manuscript represents the different media ecologies and multi-lingual societies that exist in the geographically peripheral nations of the British Isles during the eighteenth century, I suggest that examining the intersections of the individual oral, manuscript and printed items contained in “The Lyon in Mourning” can contribute to the development of a more archipelagic approach to the History of the Book.
    Leith Davis is a professor in the Department of English and Director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford UP, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725-1875 (Notre Dame UP, 2005), as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2004), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012) and The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (ASLS, 2021). Her new book, Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion (Cambridge UP, 2022), examines media change and cultural memory in the British archipelago from 1688-1745.

    WORKSHOP #5
    April 19

    Prof Robert Frost

    University of Aberdeen


    ‘How did he turn up there?’: The Kielce Portrait of Henry Benedict Stuart

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    This paper is a spin-off project from my short book, entitled Identity Doubtful? The Polish Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, which will be published in Palgrave’s Pivots series in 2022. While searching the internet for a portrait of Jakub Sobieski, James III’s father-in-law, for a lecture I was due to give on the project, I came across an intriguing portrait on the website of the National Museum in Kielce, Poland. It was labelled ‘Portrait of Jakub Sobieski, anon. first quarter of the eighteenth century’. I immediately saw that it was not Jakub, but one of his grandsons. Consultation with Edward Corp rapidly confirmed my suspicion that this was a high-quality portrait of Henry Benedict Stuart, painted in the early 1740s. This talk will present the painting, ask how on earth it ended up in a museum in a provincial city in Poland, and say something about the Polish connections of the Stuarts, a topic that deserves far more attention than it has yet received from scholars of Jacobitism.
    Robert Frost is Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen. He grew up in Edinburgh and was educated in St Andrews, Cracow, and London. After teaching at King’s College London for seventeen years, he moved to Aberdeen in 2004. Primarily a historian of the Polish-Lithuanian union, since returning to Scotland, he has become increasingly drawn into exploring the Polish connections of the Stuarts. Having published on queenship and queens consort, he is particularly interested in Clementina Sobieska, who is so often caricatured as an obsessive religious hysteric. There was far more to her than her undoubted piety.

    WORKSHOP #6
    May 3

    Dr Graeme Millen

    University of Kent


    The First Jacobite Rising? The Case for a Re-evaluation of the Scottish Highland War, 1689-1691

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    This chapter, written for an upcoming edited collection, seeks to challenge our preconceptions surrounding the Highland War and the terminology of the conflict as a ‘rising’. Whilst historians continue to utilise the term, we risk viewing the Scottish Jacobites of 1689-91 purely as a ‘rag-tag’ band of Highland ‘rebels’ who only posed a threat so long as they were led by their charismatic, and yet of course, ill-fated leader, John Graham, first Viscount Dundee. Moreover, this terminology has, arguably, served to characterise it as a mere ‘sideshow’ of the ongoing European conflict, which was contemporaneously no less a distraction to William or his adjutants than the conflict in Ireland. Both were viewed, contemporaneously, as important theatres of the ongoing international conflict until the dissipation of the Jacobite threat. Viewing the Highland War through the ‘whiggish’ historical prism of insurrection, or worse yet rebellion, not only burdens the historiography with notions of illegitimacy of the Jacobite cause, and vice versa for their Williamite opponents, but downplays the threat they posed to the nascent regime in the Three Kingdoms. This chapter will argue for a re-evaluation of the war by examining competing terminologies within the historiography as well as the broader sphere. By conceiving of the Highland War as a precursor to the Jacobite risings that would follow, and as part of a broader conflict at the time, it hopes to provide a better framework in which to consider both.
    Graeme S. Millen has just completed his PhD thesis at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. His thesis is entitled ‘The Scots-Dutch Brigade and the Highland War, 1689-92’ and is a re-examination of the Highland War, or first Jacobite Rising, from the perspective of the Scots-Dutch Brigade; a Scottish unit in the service of the Dutch Republic. The thesis critically re-assesses the involvement of the Brigade in that conflict by studying their central role at the heart of the Williamite forces there and their contribution in the first campaigns against the Jacobites in Scotland.
  • Autumn 2021 Series

    Open or Close

    KEYNOTE LAUNCH
    September 7

    Professor Daniel Szechi

    University of Manchester (Emeritus)


    ‘Suppose I Should Lose my Life in the Quarrell, I do but my Duty’: Father James Carnegy, Espionage and Covert Action on Behalf of the Jacobite Shadow State 1697-1735

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    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.

    WORKSHOP #1
    September 21

    Professor Michael Brown

    University of Aberdeen


    A Union of Hearts and Minds: Conversion and Commitment in the British and Irish Union

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    This paper seeks to answer the question of why, given the extent of state support for the established churches in the eighteenth century from monetary endowment to punitive measures taken against competing confessions, the rate of conversion was so low. In addressing this issue, the paper addresses the capacity of the Stuart court to maintain political commitment despite the repeated failures of its revanchist ambitions. In so doing, it explores the culture of defeat, the politics of nostalgia and the stability of religious and political identity in the wake of the revolutionary settlements of the late seventeenth century.
    Michel Brown holds a chair in Irish, Scottish and Enlightenment History at the University of Aberdeen, where he is also a co-Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. He is the author of The Irish Enlightenment (2016) and of biographical studies of Francis Hutcheson and John Toland. He is currently writing a textbook for Routledge entitled A Cultural History of Europe, 1688-1914, and a study provisionally entitled Making Up Britain in the Eighteenth Century, from which this essay is taken.

    WORKSHOP #2
    October 5

    Dr Darren S. Layne

    The Jacobite Database of 1745


    A Farewell to Arms: The Statistics of Surrender in Jacobite Aberdeenshire

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    In the late summer of 1745, mere days after the last Jacobite rising had commenced, British government officials sought a suitable way to discourage as many of the common rank-and-file troops as possible as a means of halting the spread of open disaffection. They needed a plan that would quickly declaw and disperse the bulk of the Jacobite military, likely saving the precious time and enormous expense that otherwise would have been spent on prosecuting a significant population of plebeian combatants and their civilian logistical networks, should the rising be successfully crushed. The government's multi-pronged response was drafted from a fusion of debate and precedent concerning what actions were considered appropriately commensurate to the crimes and what regulations had already been established in the aftermath of the Fifteen. Citing widespread experiences of rebel plebeians going along with hereditary landowners by contract, and regular intelligence reports of Jacobite recruiters compelling commoners into the ranks with threats, the government's official de-escalation policy was designed around the promise of letting them off the hook.

    Field Marshal George Wade’s public declaration in late October 1745 and Cumberland’s ‘last-chance’ proclamation in February 1746 both promised blanket indemnities through generalised ‘mercy’ to any rebel participant below the ranks of officers and gentlemen who would submit their arms and surrender their identities to local magistrates or parish ministers. Estimations of the efficacy of these amnesties have been neglected by historians, and lists of the some 4500 participants who surrendered as a direct result of these government initiatives have neither been compiled nor analysed, yet a great deal of this raw data is present in the archives. Indeed, this remarkable number of capitulations represents roughly a third of total projected Jacobite army strength through the entire campaign.

    There is therefore still much to learn about the people who raised arms for the Jacobite cause outwith the extensive (and often specious) antiquarian analysis of known prisoners. The following forensic and prosopographical study of 123 voluntary surrenders in Crathie and Braemar, the spiritual heartland of Jacobite Scotland, is but an entrée to a much larger project. Yet it provides a sound methodological model to examine not only those who raised arms for Jacobitism, but those who put them back down again, choosing the government’s promises of clemency over persecution.
    Darren Scott Layne received his PhD from the University of St Andrews and is creator and curator of the Jacobite Database of 1745, a wide-ranging prosopographical study of people who were involved in the last rising. His historical interests are focused on the protean nature of popular Jacobitism and how the movement was expressed through its plebeian adherents. He is a passionate advocate of the digital humanities, data cogency, and accessible, open research for all.

    WORKSHOP #3
    October 19

    Dr Matthias Range

    University of Oxford


    A Jacobite ‘Swan Song’?
    The Atterbury Plot and Bononcini’s Anthem
    for the Funeral of the Duke of Marlborough, 1722

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    The so-called Atterbury Plot of 1722, named after Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, was effectively the last major Jacobite conspiracy before Walpole’s Whig supremacy changed the political landscape with its strong suppression of political opponents. The height of the plot coincided with the funeral of the Duke of Marlborough, at which Atterbury officiated. For the elaborate ceremony Giovanni Bononcini wrote his anthem When Saul was King. This anthem, neglected by musicians and historians alike, became an important part of the eighteenth-century repertoire; it circulated in printed editions and manuscript copies and was performed throughout the country, setting new standards for grand funerals.

    A new, detailed examination and contextualisation of the anonymous text of the anthem allows to suggest possible Jacobite contents with plausible references to the plot. These findings may contribute to the understanding of Jacobite ‘coded’ language and rhetoric in the first quarter of the century. In this context, this study also offers a re-appreciation of Atterbury’s well-known correspondence with Alexander Pope which allows for new readings and conclusions regarding Atterbury’s role in the plot.

    Considering the possible Jacobite references in the text of the anthem, emphasised in Bononcini’s dramatic setting, it would appear that the differentiation into Jacobite and Hanoverian was not easily clear-cut, let alone obvious at the time. These possible associations contrast with the well-known perception that the Whig government and establishment tried to claim Marlborough as their own. Originating at a time when the failure of the Atterbury Plot became apparent, the anthem at Marlborough’s funeral was not merely a commemorative piece for the great Duke; rather it was a ‘Swan Song’ for the unsuccessful plot and the whole of the Jacobite movement.
    Matthias Range is a post-doctoral researcher for the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. He studied Art History and Musicology at the Philipps-University Marburg/Lahn (Germany), before completing a DPhil thesis on British Coronation Music at Oxford University in 2008, followed by a postdoctoral position in early-modern history at Oxford Brookes University. His study on Ceremonial and Music at British Coronations was published in 2012, followed by a book on British Royal and State Funerals, published in 2016. He has just finished a similar, two-volume study on British Royal Weddings since the Stuarts. His main research areas are seventeenth to nineteenth century sacred music and culture, and the history of the monarchy.

    WORKSHOP #4
    November 2

    Dr Joseph Hone

    Newcastle University


    David Edwards and the Jacobite Press

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    This paper reconstructs the inner workings of a Jacobite press active in London during the decade following the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695. For ten years, David Edwards was one of the most prolific and controversial printers in London. A specialist in Jacobite books and pamphlets, he was frequently subjected to government searches and prosecutions. And yet his name has never featured in any previous study of Jacobitism. Using bibliographical and historical techniques of detection and analysis, this paper pieces together his varied career, his networks, and his output, much of which was produced anonymously.
    Joseph Hone is a literary scholar and book historian at Newcastle University. He is the author of three books, most recently a revisionist account of the early career of Alexander Pope. He is currently writing a full-length study of the clandestine book trade in eighteenth-century England.

    WORKSHOP #5
    November 16

    Dr Georgia Vullinghs

    University of Edinburgh


    Spare and Pair: The Material and Visual Culture of Henry Benedict Stuart, Jacobite Prince in Exile

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    The story of Jacobitism often revolves around a hero prince, Charles Edward Stuart, or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. Heir to the exiled Stuart dynasty, from the 1730s, Charles was the central figure of hope for a Stuart restoration. When he left Rome in 1744 to stage a French-supported invasion attempt, he was fulfilling his role as a martial prince. In all of this however, Charles had a shadow. His younger brother, Henry Benedict (1725-1807). As a medal of the two princes from 1731 declared, if Charles was the Christ-like prince who “shines amongst all”, Henry was “the next after him”: the devoted younger son of the dynasty who would loyally follow his brother, but also the ‘spare’, security for the Stuart lineage. However, the dominant image of Henry has come to be that of a Cardinal, after he took up the ecclesiastical appointment in 1747. Examining the material and visual culture of Henry Benedict Stuart pre-1747, this paper will consider his place within the Stuart dynasty as a prince in exile. It will discuss the extent to which a martial identity was created for Henry, and its limitation. Through letters exchanged between the royal brothers held amongst the Stuart Papers at Windsor, this paper also investigates the fraternal bonds between the princes and shows how dynastic hierarchies shaped Henry’s place in Jacobite history.
    Dr Georgia Vullinghs is a historian of eighteenth-century Scotland and Britain. She recently completed an AHRC funded PhD project, ‘Loyal Exchange: the material and visual culture of Jacobite exile, c.1716-c.1760’ with the University of Edinburgh and National Museum Scotland. In addition to Jacobite material culture, Georgia’s research interests lie in women’s histories, and Scottish cultural identity.

    WORKSHOP #6
    November 30

    Dr Samuel Fisher

    Catholic University of America


    'Universal Instruments of Tyranny'? The Scots, Jacobitism, and the American Revolution

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    This paper explores the intertwined Scotophobia and anti-Jacobitism of the American patriots. While many scholars have noted the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the founders, they themselves consistently depicted the Scots as enemies of the Revolution. I argue that this fear of the Scots and their (supposedly) Jacobite ways drew on a critique of Scots' role in reshaping the empire's approach to diversity – an approach American patriots associated with James II and the Stuarts.
    Sam Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His first book, Inclusive Empire, Exclusionary Patriots (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) offers a new explanation of the origins of the American Revolution. The project draws on Irish- and Scottish-Gaelic language and Native American sources to show how colonized peoples tried to reshape empires in their own image, and how their partial success convinced American colonists to leave the British empire. Fisher is also co-editor of the forthcoming anthology of Irish-language poetry Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern, to be published by Wake Forest University Press in 2022.

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