Leith Davis (Simon Fraser University)

Mediating Jacobites in Cultural Memory: From the 1745 Rising to Waverley.

In his History of the Rebellion in the Year 1745 (1802), John Home reflects back on the 1745 Jacobite conflict in a way that will be familiar to readers of Walter Scott’s Waverley.  While he conveys the deep anxiety experienced by all the “inhabitants of Britain” during the time, he also writes reassuringly of the disappearance of the threat of Jacobitism at the turn of the nineteenth century: 

More than half a century has elapsed since the battle of Culloden was fought, in which the rebel army was defeated and dispersed, never to make head, nor appear in force again; but no history has yet been published of a war in which the inhabitants of Britain were so much interested, that, as long as it lasted, they thought and spake of nothing else. 

Home was right in one regard; the uprising was the focus of every private thought and every public discussion at the time. But Home was also being disingenuous in suggesting that thoughts and conversations lasted only “as long as [the war] lasted.”

In fact, accounts of the conflict were printed and reprinted in locations including London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Boston from 1746 steadily up to the time of Home’s own History and well into the nineteenth century – along with other popular print items: trials of the rebels and the rebel lords; engravings; maps; narratives concerning the escape of Charles Stuart.  Far from being a unique publication in 1802, Home’s History was only the latest of a multitude of mediations that helped to turn “the ‘45” into a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s terms.

In this paper, I consider a number of the popular narratives of the 1745 Rising that were published immediately after Culloden, focusing on their representation of the Jacobite cause. These accounts generated a narrative arc depicting the events of the rebellion leading inexorably to the defeat of the Jacobites. They served to knit events together into a specific chronology, and they constructed a geopolitical account of the British nation that both exoticized and absorbed the Highlands and its inhabitants, regulating both the time and the space of the rebellion. Through the selective curation of cultural memory and the exercise of cultural amnesia, these accounts also paved the way for a rehabilitation of the Jacobites and the Jacobite cause in the Romantic era, a rehabilitation that can be seen in novels such as Scott’s Waverley and Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale, but also in poetry such as Thomas Campbell’s “Lochiel’s Warning,” Anne Grant’s “The Highlanders” and even Wordsworth’s The Excursion.   

But at the same time, as I will argue, these earlier representations of the Jacobites and the 1745 Rising also frequently troubled the history that they sought to create. Through their recycling of events gleaned from the periodical press, documents such as the manifesto of the Charles Edward Stuart and sympathetic biographies of the Jacobite prisoners, they bear the traces of the earlier heteroglossic unfolding of events. They construct a cultural memory of the nation that is at once dominated by Hanoverian and Whig perspectives, but that is also overwritten with counter-memories so as to create what Michael Rothberg, amending Nora’s term, describes as noueds de mémoire (“knots of memory”).[1] Viewed retrospectively, these works can be seen as constituting a pre-mediation of the historical novel as it would emerge from the pen of Walter Scott.