Twilight and Tartan: The Jacobite Rising of 1715
In the autumn of 1715, Scotland once again raised the standard of the Stuarts—once again turned to the myth of a king across the sea, once again poured blood into the soil for a crown that no longer fit the head for which it was forged. The Jacobite Rising of 1715, or The Fifteen as it came to be known, was a war not born of clear ambition but of resentment, loyalty, and the fatal delusion that time could be turned backward. It was a rising full of hesitation and gallantry, led by a man too mild for war and concluded not with triumph, but with surrender on a fog-wrapped field in Perthshire.
The origin of the rising lay in the bitter aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. When James II and VII, the last Catholic monarch of England and Scotland, was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange, the Stuart dynasty went into exile. The supporters of James—Jacobites, from the Latin Jacobus—did not forget. Nor did they forgive. “Jacobitism was not a party,” writes historian Bruce Lenman, “it was a faith—a belief in a divinely ordained monarchy, unjustly removed” (The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746, 1980, p. 83).
After James II’s death in 1701, his son—James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called Old Pretender—became the focus of hope for the exiled dynasty. The 1707 Act of Union, which merged the Scottish and English parliaments, further enraged many Scots, particularly Highlanders and Episcopalians, who felt they had been sold to London for English coin. Tensions rose again in 1714 when George I, a German prince with little English and less charm, ascended the British throne under the Protestant succession. For many, it was an insult too far.
In Scotland, resentment simmered into action under the leadership of John Erskine, Earl of Mar. Once a loyal servant to Queen Anne, Mar had been cast aside by George I and found himself on the outside of the new Whig establishment. In September 1715, without consulting the exiled Stuart court, Mar raised the royal standard for James VIII of Scotland at Braemar, deep in the Highlands. It was a strange rebellion—declared without the presence of its would-be king, launched by a courtier with little military experience, and manned by a patchwork army of Highlanders, Episcopalian gentry, and disaffected lairds.
Yet Mar gathered strength quickly. Within weeks, he had nearly 10,000 men, the largest Jacobite force ever raised. Towns like Perth fell with barely a shot. But the army was slow to move, and Mar—indecisive and paralyzed by caution—missed the chance to strike at Argyll, commander of the government forces. “Mar could raise a rebellion,” writes Daniel Szechi, “but he could not lead one” (1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion, 2006, p. 141).
The defining moment came at the Battle of Sheriffmuir on 13 November 1715. Argyll’s government forces, numbering around 3,000, faced Mar’s much larger Jacobite army near Dunblane. But what should have been a decisive victory turned into a chaotic melee. The Jacobites routed the government’s left wing but collapsed on the right. By nightfall, both sides claimed victory, but it was Argyll who held the field—and the initiative.
Meanwhile, in northern England, another Jacobite force under Thomas Forster and James Radclyffe, Earl of Derwentwater, rose in Northumberland. But this English rising was poorly armed, loosely coordinated, and easily crushed at the Battle of Preston on 14 November 1715. Forster surrendered. Derwentwater was captured and would be executed months later, his title and lands lost in the hangman’s shadow.
By the time James Francis Edward Stuart finally landed at Peterhead in December 1715, the rising was already spent. He was pale, sickly, and hopelessly indecisive. After a few miserable weeks in Scotland, he fled back to France, writing farewell letters while his supporters braced for reprisal.
The results were swift and harsh. Several leaders were executed; others fled into exile. Government troops burned out rebel strongholds and disarmed Highland clans. The Whig government used the rebellion to justify further centralization and crackdowns. Yet, surprisingly, the rising did not entirely extinguish Jacobite hopes. It was failure, but not finality.
The Jacobite Rising of 1715 was, as might have written, “a war waged in the mirror of a lost age, where men died for a memory and crowned a ghost.” It was doomed not by lack of courage, but by a surplus of illusion—a belief that the ancient loyalties of clan and crown could still rally a modern world. The Jacobites would rise again in 1745, with another Charles and another charge, but The Fifteen would remain the heartbreak of the cause—its greatest opportunity, squandered not in battle, but in delay.
References:
- Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746. Eyre Methuen, 1980.
- Szechi, Daniel. 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion. Yale University Press, 2006.
- Pittock, Murray. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans. Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
- Plank, Geoffrey. Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
- Prebble, John. Culloden. Penguin Books, 1961.