Opinion |

From Jacobites to populists

Drive northward in the United Kingdom, as I did with my family this past month, and beyond a certain latitude it becomes impossible to escape the Jacobites.

Not to be confused, as sometimes happens, with the rather different Jacobins, the Jacobites were the supporters of the exiled Stuart dynasty during its failed attempts at restoration, the sequence of unsuccessful “risings” that followed James II’s ejection from the British throne by the Glorious Revolution in 1688.

Tour Lyme Park, the gracious estate just southeast of Manchester that stood in for Jane Austen’s Pemberley in the Colin Firth version of “Pride and Prejudice,” and you will note that one of its owners, the 12th Peter Legh, was imprisoned in the Tower of London in the 1690s for allegedly conspiring to restore James II to the throne. Sweep northeast to Bamburgh Castle, a splendid bastion overlooking the Northumbrian beaches, and you will note that the family that held the castle in the 18th century produced a Jacobite general in the 1715 rebellion, as well as the sister who helped him escape from Newgate Prison after his military efforts came to grief.

Continue on to Edinburgh and a tour of Holyroodhouse, the royal family’s Scottish palace, will quite overwhelm you with Stuart memorabilia – including a well-placed Victorian painting, “Bonnie Prince Charlie Entering the Ballroom at Holyroodhouse,” a romanticized portrayal of Charles Edward Stuart’s 1745 almost-successful rebellion, now proudly displayed by the descendants of the very royal family that he was attempting to displace.

Then the Highlands – well, the Highlands are a vast monument to Jacobite defeat, their gorgeous emptiness partly a creation of the ruthless late-18th- and early-19th-century “clearances,” which drove out small farmers, finished off the clan culture of the region and replaced many of the restive Scots who rose for the Stuarts with a more tractable population of, well, sheep.

Among conservative nerds of a certain kind, the Stuart cause has long been a secret handshake or an inside joke. But the normal way to discuss the Jacobites is to portray them as a political anachronism, royal absolutists backing a Catholic king in a Protestant and liberalizing Britain, whose rebellion became a cultural phenomenon as soon as its political chances went extinct. Doomed but glamorous, the Jacobites were destined to be rediscovered by romantics in every generation, from Sir Walter Scott’s novels in the early 19th century to the “Outlander” saga in the early 21st.

This specifically British story, in turn, is a type of the larger pattern of politics in Europe and the United States, where the gap between thriving capitals and struggling peripheries, between a metropolitan meritocracy and a nostalgic hinterland, has forged a right-wing politics that sometimes resembles Jacobitism more than it does the mainstream conservatisms of the late 20th century.

As Frank McLynn points out in his history of the Jacobites, whatever specific designs the Stuarts had in mind, their movement always included a variety of competing ideological and religious tendencies. There were English Jacobites who wanted to see the Stuarts enthroned over all the British Isles. There were Scottish and Irish nationalists who wanted their nations severed and independent. There were Irish republicans as well as divine-right true believers. There were Catholics seeking toleration and Anglicans seeking religious uniformity. There were deep-dyed reactionaries and modernizers, mystics and partisans of the Enlightenment.

There were also plenty of opportunists, familiar from the grifter politics of our own day – smugglers and privateers seeking relief from a centralizing British state, bankrupt gentry seeking relief for their accumulated debts. But at the same time there were many sincere adherents of what came to be called the Country ideology – defined by opposition to high taxes, a soaring national debt, a standing army and various corruptions associated with the swamp and the deep state (if you will) of early-18th-century London.

You did not need to be a Jacobite outright to be a member of the Country party. Rather, the Stuart cause existed in a dynamic and ambiguous relationship with the more respectable and non-treasonous conservatism of the early-18th-century Tories – again, much like populist parties interacting with the center-right establishment in Western Europe, albeit with armed insurrection as a more consistent aspect of the dance.

A contemporary liberal might take a certain comfort in this analogy, given the eventual fate of Jacobitism; perhaps populism is just another foredoomed revolt against the march of modern progress. Certainly it can seem sleazier and more self-parodic than its antecedent: McLynn emphasizes the high moral character of many of the Jacobites, whereas in today’s populism the grifters are more often in the vanguard – and whatever their faults, the Stuart claim to the throne was much, much more defensible than Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election.

There was no plausible world in which the Stuarts could have achieved all of their objectives, assumed all the powers they aspired to hold, or steamrollered the political and religious realities of Parliament or Protestantism.

But given the complexity of their movement and the contingency of their defeats, it’s easy enough to imagine a world where that painting in Holyroodhouse depicts a triumphant Great Man of History rather than a doomed pretender, and where a Jacobite restoration – in some no doubt complex form – pushed Britain and modernity onto a meaningfully different path.

In the same way, the often inchoate and self-contradictory goals of contemporary populism cannot all be triumphantly achieved. But that doesn’t mean that today’s populism will simply and inevitably lose or that our self-doubting, superannuated Whiggism still has history on its side.

Fortune almost favored Charles Edward Stuart. It might still favor Donald Trump, even as he’s pursued by prosecutors the way Bonnie Prince Charlie once was pursued by redcoats. And the close-run aspects of the past stand as a perpetual reminder of just how many different futures might await us.