Jacobites: a new history of the ’45 rebellion
JACQUELINE RIDING

It covers barely two years, and is over 600 pages long. So what prompted Jacqueline Riding to compile what is the most comprehensive account in modern times of the ’45 Jacobite rebellion? As she perceptively demonstrates, Jacobite concerns reflect three hugely contentious issues: Scottish opposition to the Union, Britain’s economic competition with the rest of Europe, and the ways an invading rebel army might maintain its hold on occupied territory.

Perhaps Riding, a former director of the Handel House Museum and curator at the Palace of Westminster who specialises in ­eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history and art, also felt her namesake, Richard Riding (a Lancashire weaver who joined the Jacobite Manchester Regiment, and no relation, as far as she knows) deserved some notice. He was sentenced to transportion to the West Indies after the failure of the ’45, but his ship was captured by a French privateer and escorted to Martinique. The prisoners were set free, but of what happened to Riding, there is no trace. He is the subject of the book’s brief Epilogue.

The Acknowledgements section is dated February 2016, when Jacobites everywhere were commemorating the 250th anniversary of the death of King James III. To Jacobites, the “Old Pretender”, who claimed the throne on the death of his father, James II, in 1701, and died in Rome on 1 January 1766, still remains England’s longest serving monarch. He is buried in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica, marked by the Monument to the Royal Stuarts. James III was duly proclaimed king at every Jacobite victory during the ’45 by his son, the ill-fated Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender”.