Epic story of the Jacobites
The story intrigue, corruption, betrayal and espionage of how the failure of Jacobites to restore the house of Stuart to the British throne, change the course of history.
The book brings to life by spanning lives of mercurial Viscount Bolingbroke and stiff Lord George Murray to the half-mad Charles XII of Sweden and the suave cardinal Alberoni, Bonnie Prince Charlie,
Imagine if the revolution of 1688 had never happened and if William of Orange had never ousted James II and Parliament an ancient vestige where, as James I once said nothing was to be heard “but cries, shouts and confusion” and Protestantism would have yielded to Catholicism and an absolute monarch would have consolidated under Stuart Dynasty.
The Revolution of 1688 drove James II into exile to the death of his grandson, Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, in 1807. The Battle of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight through the heather are well known, but not the other risings and plots that involved half of Europe and even revolutionary America. Desmond writes “ Few causes have aroused a more gallant response from the peoples of these islands than the Honest Cause, whether they were fighting for it at Killiecrankie, Prestonpans or Culloden, at the Boyne Aughrim or Fontenoy or dying for it on the scaffold”.
Jacobites a band of Stuart devotees continued fighting for the cause for most of the next century, guided by a single aim: a Stuart restoration. The Jacobites were accompanied by the wheezing of bagpipes, demanded as “kilted anachronisms” who spent most of the 18th century sulking in Scottish highlands. Cambridge educated Desmond Seward describes them as multi-faceted and multinational bunch, united by a common vision of alternative future.
The King over the water is the story of a lost cause that lingered and written from the Jacobite perspective, not as apologia but through the eyes of the “Kings” who never were James III, Charles III, Henry IX – the heirs in exile to the Stuart dynasty. The Jacobites looked to an alternative universe where 1688 had gone the other way, they did so by glancing towards the pretenders who had sought refuge in France, Russia, America, The Vatican. The Jacobites were looking forward to build the very federal nature of Britain today, with legislatures in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast and London, is not unlike the multinational form of monarchy that the jacobites longed to build.
The King Over The Water: A Complete History of the Jacobites by Desmond Seward, Birlinn £25, 384 pages.