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1 - The First Jacobite and the Scottish Parliament

Alastair J. Mann
Affiliation:
Stirling University
Allan I. Macinnes
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
Kieran German
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
Lesley Graham
Affiliation:
University of Bordeaux 2
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Summary

James II and VII is one of those historical figures who has a contested reputation, one that brings forth exaggeration and polarization. For contemporaries this is seen in contrasting reflections on the political aptitude of the last monarch of the British Isles to be removed by revolution. James was, according to the Benedictine Joseph Johnston, ‘the Greatest Politician … mighty, carfull and laborious in all his affaires’ – ‘never was there such a prince in England these hundred years to be compared to him’. Meanwhile in ‘The Snare’, an anonymous rhymed verse from the late 1680s that emphasizes political weakness, James and the ghost of his elder brother are imagined to be in conversation, when Charles warns:

Brother, when I your name and place did bear

I sought the peoples love before their fear

And by that means both fear and love I gott

From the richer min to the ruffel coat

And now you find what I have oft declar'd

The vulgar must be loved or they'll be feared

They'll suffer long and much, but once enraged

Devouring flames more easy are asuag'd

I know it suits not with your haughty mind

To stoop to any thing of humane kind

But patience upon force has oft been known

To be endured, tho coveted by none

You see, while others run you prepare

Your self in headlong fall into the snare

In historiography the passage to that snare has had many strands or narratives.

Type
Chapter
Information
Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788
The Three Kingdoms and Beyond
, pp. 11 - 26
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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