The Jacobite movement was always a fundamentally military phenomenon. Though there was a political wing operating in the English and Scots, and then British Parliaments, and courtier elements who at various times sought to work through high political intrigue, the common expectation among consenting Jacobites was that the exiled Stuarts would have to wage war to regain their thrones. Thus the mass of Jacobites were always in a sense an army in waiting. One day, they hoped, the king would come and all those male Jacobites fit enough to fight would join him and march off to war.

This is the basis of our perception of the Jacobite threat to the post-Revolutionary order. The implicit question is not whether the Jacobites could raise enough men to form an army (they did that on multiple occasions), but whether that army could ever have overcome the military might of the English/British state. And even if one is sceptical about the military value of the popular support the new order enjoyed in parts of the British Isles, it is indisputable that there was always a glaring disparity between the initial military capability of the Jacobite movement when it rose in rebellion and that of the regular army commanded by the government at Westminster. A poorly armed rabble of English, Irish or Lowland Scots Jacobite civilians was no match for the government's professional soldiers.