MURRAY G. H. PITTOCK: THE MYTH OF THE JACOBITE CLANS (1995)

INTRODUCTION
British Histories and Scottish Myths

It is astonishing to what an extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and Whig... Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by making the past our present. - Herbert Butterfield

On the whole, it was found that the books of the smaller countries were less biased than those of the great Powers what English historians have come to call the 'Whig interpretation of history' has fastened itself too securely on historical studies in England and elsewhere. - E. H. Dance

'Scientific' pleading is meaningless in principle because the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with one another. - Max Weber

History is always written . .. in the name of a unitary state apparatus. - Gilles Deleuze 1

This is a book about Jacobitism. But it is a study with a difference, I seeking neither to romanticise its subject nor to demythologise it, but instead to examine the motivations behind the histories which do these things, and to provide further evidence to buttress the revisionist case which has been taking shape over the last twenty years. Its task is twofold: to explain why the Jacobite cause has been (and to an extent still is) so clouded by myth and romanticisation; and to consider in detail the evidence for the nature and extent of Jacobite support among the people of Scotland in the eighteenth century. All the Jacobite risings are considered, but the centre of discussion is the Year of the Prince, 1745-6, as it is here that the clouds of myth are darkest and the romantic light shines brightest. As much as, or more so than, any other movement in British history, the Stuart cause attracts sentimentalists, romantics, 'what if' optimists and debunkers. There are many books from the last school which seek to demythologise Jacobitism; but that is not what is intended here. Rather, it is my contention that Jacobitism has not been demythologised, only remythologised. Those who strive to undermine its myths usually merely offer a different rhetoric of taking sides - which is fundamentally what much of Jacobite history is about: and that itself is interesting. What follows here, then, is not simply a reinterpretation of Jacobitism and the '45: it also assesses the agenda behind the main existing interpretations which we inherit, both romantic and sceptical, showing how both habitually fail to take account of significant facts concerning this Rising. Some of these facts are newly adduced here on the basis of fresh evidence; some have been in circulation, but are often passed over. In Chapters r and 3 in particular, I trust they show that our understanding of Jacobitism has often been significantly flawed. Meanwhile, in this Introduction and the following chapter, some of the main interpretations of Jacobite activity come under scrutiny.2

      One central myth stands as a paradigm for both sceptical and romantic readings: the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. This idea is present in accounts of all the major risings from 1689 to 1745, being powerfully deployed in studies of the last and most famous insurrection. Briefly stated, the Myth of the Jacobite Clans contends that the Jacobite risings (principally the '45) were decidedly peripheral events, based to the north and west of the Highland line, and chiefly supported by a fading civilisation in its Gaelic-speaking and Catholic heartland. Other features of the myth include, on the romantic side, that the '45 was the 'last baffle of the Highlanders and the Strangers',3 that it was a noble, chivalric and doomed attempt by the Children of the Mist who volunteered to restore their Bonnie Prince, and that it was a nationalist rising of Scotland against England. Sceptics, on the other hand, emphasise the marginality of a tribal, Catholic-leaning group unable to come to terms with British society and suggest that the Highlanders were primarily motivated by thieving or had been forced out by self-interested chieftains. It is also said that they did not know what they were fighting for, that more Scots fought against the Jacobites than for them, and that Jacobitism in Scotland was more of a bloody dynastic civil war than a national movement.

      Neither these sentiments nor their context are properly supported by a comprehensive examination of the evidence, but this is not their purpose. Taking sides is at the core of the Jacobite issue, which is why we should always beware of 'neutrality'. The full tale of the Stuart cause remains too often untold, despite a huge number of tellers: it is, as I hope to show, a historical narrative controlled by political need. After the 1994 release of the film Chasing the Deer, Tom Nairn and Peter Clarke clashed over its relevance in the pages of The Scotsman. Each saw in it nothing to challenge their own beliefs, which is a tribute to a film which presents an essentially sceptical reading of Jacobitism while endeavouring not to displease the romantics too greatly: for example, the Prince's conduct at Culloden is given as benevolent a portrayal as humanly possible. 'Do you think I would have wanted it zis way?' he lisps in an appalling French accent made more galling by the Received Pronunciation of a Duke of Cumberland, whose family retained traces of German intonation up till the reign of Edward VII; but, on the other hand, Charles Edward does not lose his temper, accuse Lord George Murray of treachery, blame everyone but himself and prophesy his own defeat. By presenting a largely acceptable romanticised Prince amid a sceptical reading of the '45, Chasing the Deer attempts to balance its audience in an equal but opposite way to that sought by the National Trust for Scotland, which presents a romantic reading of the 1745 Rising (a 'last battle' for Gaelic civilisation) in tandem with a sceptical one of the Prince in its 1984 slideshow at Culloden.4

      As suggested above, it is my contention that sceptical and romantic readings share more than what divides them, in the sense that both are myths. Rather than relying on what has been called the 'logos (demonstrable truth)' of history, they are producers and inheritors of the need for 'mythos (authoritative pronouncement)' concerning it.5 The authoritative pronouncement' which they seek is fundamentally one of interpretation rather than fact, the manifesto of one side of the argument, dependent more on ridicule than demonstration in undermining its opponents. Such history has been seen, like myth itself which rests in a heartland of repeated stories, as 'existence ...valorized by the repetition of archetypal gestures'. As I shall show, the history of Jacobitism is full of the repetition of archetypal gestures' on both sides: gestures which do little more than restate a parti pris. The mythic quality of Jacobitism is demonstrated both in the repetition of romantic gestures and images concerning it, and in the context of attempts at demythologising it, which attempts, through their frequency, bear about them the marks of cultural gesturing. Both are allied in that both draw on a continual fascination with the subject characteristic of myth. One of myth's functions is to provide provisional explanations for an issue where passion, ignorance or simply the human condition prevent the ordering force of a rational settlement from prevailing: and this is the case with Jacobitism. Over the years, the condition of Britain, more particularly of British history, has often had an interest in rendering elusive 'demonstrable truth' as it affects the Jacobite case.

      Whig history is the main vehicle for a primarily sceptical mythologising of Jacobitism. Since Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1931, the end of such history has been prematurely proclaimed. Whig history is essentially a history which conditions its Interpretation of the past by what it has produced in the present: it is thus quintessentially a history written to glorify victors and marginalise losers, in the process writing a narrative whose ultimate end is the explanation and through that the justification of whatever society is its present. In Britain, confronted with a multinational state, it has, in Gilles Deleuze's terms, sought to confirm the genesis of 'a unitary state apparatus'. E. H. Dance's 1967 argument in his report on 'Bias in History Teaching' to the Centre for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe was that 'the universities have already freed themselves' from this tradition, which only remained central in school textbooks. Whether or not this was over-optimistic, the Jacobite movement, one of the central battlegrounds of Whig history, has certainly benefited greatly in the last twenty-five years (and intermittently before this) from the work of many gifted revisionists. What Daniel Szechi defines in his 1994 book The Jacobites as the 'optimist' and 'pessimist' outlook on Jacobitism are alike born from a new understanding of at least its potential importance, whereas the 'rejectionist' school are the inheritors of the traditional historiography which pushed Jacobitism to the margin. Nevertheless, despite such developments in the debate, the traditional accounts of Jacobitism's marginality are deeply grounded in British history, as we shall see. Even at the forefront of scholarship, Whig history remains powerful and prominent today at the highest levels. For example, Linda Colley's Britons (1992) comes to certain conclusions about Protestant solidarity and the marginality of the Stuarts which are more than redolent of the pages of that Whig doyen, Macaulay. In the words of James Young, 'Colley's book reflects the Anglocentric bias of the Oxbridge school of history from above', and one of the achievements of revisionist Jacobite history has been to link its subject to some of the illuminating evidence recovered from a history from below.6

      Romantic readings of Jacobitism, on the other hand, ultimately do nothing to challenge the sceptics, because they accept the marginalisation and detachment of the Jacobite past from the mainstream of historical development. Not only do they present the Stuart cause as high drama of a colourful kind: they also implicitly show it as doomed to fail. It is also almost always detached from its international perspective: far from Jacobitism being a movement with widespread sympathy and support in Europe, it becomes a struggle of loyal Highlanders alone to restore their injured prince. Context-free, romantic Jacobitism idealises a past from which it secretly celebrates its detachment, as Hugh MacDiarmid saw.7

      Although romantic and sceptical explications of the Myth of the Jacobite Clans are found at their most flagrant in popular history, their endurance there is possible because scholarly history itself frequently continues to perpetuate a narrative of inherited orthodoxy, The process whereby the development of scholarship percolates down to popular accounts is largely absent from Jacobitism, because the powerful and habitual misrepresentation of the Stuart cause still has many friends at all levels of historical analysis: Keynes's view that 'common sense' in economics may only be servitude to the obsolescent ideas of some defunct economist is not inapposite.8

      The Myth of the Jacobite Clans remains at the core of both sides of the mythologising process. There are a number of motivations responsible for its continuing centrality. First, and chiefly, it marginalises Jacobitism by uniting its political aims and their expression to a culture characterised as declining and peripheral, if not simply uncivilised and savage. By attaching the Stuart cause so firmly to an extinct mode of social organisation with a failing language, the historian, particularly the Whig historian seeking to provide a teleology for the present which forbids the defeated movements of the past enduring relevance, reinforces a strong picture of a dying and doomed cause. Such a definitive marginality can also be useful to the romantic who wishes to depict much the same material with much the same message in a history which could only ever have had one outcome, but seeks also to celebrate the loyalty, bravery and heroic Celtic fortitude of those who fought and always fell. Both interpretations associated Jacobitism with a strongly demarcated Highland/Lowland divide, a reactionary and often Catholic world-view. headstrong and bloodthirsty magnate chieftains and all the other weeds firmly rooted in the traditional account of an old Scotland full of overmighty subjects who must be subdued before the progressive and beneficial victory of commercial civil society can take place: what Colin Kidd in a recent article calls 'the legend of late medieval Scotland as a benighted magnate anarchy'. Thus the Stuart cause becomes a 'history at the margin'. In so becoming, it enters a state of heritage - defining 'heritage' as historical events which have ceased to have contemporary relevance, and in so doing have transmuted themselves into artefacts to be owned and revisited by a present and future no longer attached to them by the live links of political consequence.9

      The importance of heritage to British identity in the last 200 years, more particularly (as will be discussed in Chapter I) in the last century, is the second central reason for the Myth of the Jacobite Clans. It succeeds in enshrining them as a romantic curio which evokes the loyalty and battleworthiness of the Highlanders while displaying them as part of an extinct society, an extinct society whose motivations and beliefs are detached from ours almost as if it belonged to a different country. Jacobitism, linked to that society, is separated from British politics: which is why a heritage reading of Jacobitism is also motivated towards the primary characterisation of the Stuart cause in Highland terms. Seen as a broad-based phenomenon within the Scottish polity, Jacobitism would be too closely tied to national identity, and with it nationalism. Sometimes the romantic side of the heritage reading accepts Jacobitism as a kind of nationalism, one of the 'clans who fought for Scotland and Prince Charlie', to quote the Culloden monument. But the important point to recall here is that the nationalism of such Jacobitism is that of a nation,'the clans', which is now effectively extinct. Hence the 'Scotland' of Jacobitism is, to paraphrase Marlowe, another country, and besides the cause is dead. In emphasising that the 'It was a peripheral event and that the 'modern' part of Scotland resisted it, a construct is produced which forces Jacobitism to the edge of historical narration, keeping it from troubling us further save as an aide-mémoire to sentiment. For example, the tourist industry which protects both heritage and the sentiment which it recalls to us appears to dictate that on Culloden Moor the Hanoverian line of battle should be described in terms of regiments, the Jacobite one in terms of clans. The emphasis here is threefold: first, it renders the Jacobite army marginal and more akin to a ragbag of militia than a conventional force (the regimental order books show it was the latter); second, that marginality serves to emphasise the doomed yet chivalric role of the whole enterprise; and third, tourist sentiment is stirred by encouraging visitors to 'recognise' their 'families' among the graves and battlefield memorials to the clans. In this way, a domestic, essentially Kailyard veneer is given to an international political movement: families fight regiments. How brave, how foolish, how sad.10

      Marginality and the sentimental romance of heritage both link with primitivism, a third motivation behind the myth. The Highland account of the nature of Jacobitism was, as we shall see, well served by the eighteenth-century development of primitivism and its Romantic connections, which idealised the Highlander in noble savage vein. The affection which heritage conceives for a history that its consumers are relieved to know is remote is echoed in the seductively romantic side of primitivism, with its reportage of tragic finales to an ancient way of life that few of its admirers would care to practise, such as is found in the work of James Macpherson, discussed in Chapter I. The primitivist mode of interpretation, while offering a superficially flattering account of the Highland role in Jacobitism, lends itself readily to marginalisation and distancing.11

      There are two other motivating causes for the Myth which seem more bound up with confusion and inadequate emphasis than with mythologising per se. The first is the inadequate distinction made between the Highlands and the rest of Scotland north of the Forth in some Jacobite history. This confusion, as I attempt to show in Chapter 2, has its roots not only in contemporary accounts of the 1745 Rising, but also in the policy adopted by the Jacobite leadership during that Rising, of using Highland dress as a uniform for the troops in general - a policy which will be seen to offer an interesting commentary on the exact nature of a Jacobite 'Highlander'. The second reason is a simple one of inadequate emphasis: many accounts virtually forget the presence of a second army in Scotland during Charles Edward's march on London, and those that mention it seldom analyse its composition. The 4000 men (6000 by Jacobite estimates, and a possible grand total, though far more than the number of effectives) defending the east-coast Lowlands at the end of 1745 were, with the exception of Lieutenant-General Lord John Drummond's 800-1100 Franco-Scots and Irish troops, heavily Lowland by origin. There may also have been a tendency, discussed further in Chapter 2, for Lowland troops to serve closer to their place of recruitment. Given that the glamour of the campaign rests chiefly on the capture of Edinburgh, the battle of Prestonpans and the march to Derby, it has thus been easy for both romantics and sceptics only to touch on or even to ignore some of the spheres of Lowland recruitment.12

      The above five reasons I believe to be the root motivations for a historical view which is still over-inclined to emphasise the Highland nature of Jacobitism. In doing so, both sentimental and cynical accounts marginalise their subject, while through rote repetition of unexamined shibboleths set within a conventional narrative, they confirm for their stories the status of myth. Before describing how this myth will be tackled in the ensuing chapters, I now turn to examine examples of emphasis in the history which has been here accused.

      Although English supporters of the government in 1745 were quite likely to suspect that all Scots were disloyal, the habitual depiction of Scots as Highlanders in the political cartoon tradition appears to have become blended with comments such as that of a leading Whig decision-maker, who described the forces opposing the state as '5 or 6000 Highlanders' to create an idea reflected in the 1745 set of 'Lillibullero' that 'an army's just coming without any shoes' out of a marginal wilderness to threaten 'Court, country and city'. Distinctions between the Gaeltachd and the rest of Scotland were blurred - a process which often occurs in the characterisation of 'margins' by 'centres'. Prints such as Sawney in the Boghouse, which showed Scots as too stupid to use the lavatory, gave a distinctive eighteenth-century edge to traditional depictions of lice- ridden cannibalism. (Interestingly, the idea of Scots as cannibals, apocryphally realised in the legend of Sawney Bean, was also found in eighteenth-century English chapbook literature about the West country: in such remote margins, what other kind of behaviour could be expected? This smear was of course exported to Africa in the colonial age.) In the 1740s, government and pro-government propaganda presented a peripheral and primitive view of the Jacobites in order to emphasise their barbarism and its irrelevance.13

      This is not remarkable; what is remarkable is the endurance of this depiction, beginning in the distancing of Jacobitism practised by Lowland Scots keen to show their loyalty in the 1750s and 1760s. One of the arguments used for a Scottish militia in the Seven Years' War was that without it, Lowland Scotland had been defenceless against the northern caterans in 1745 (and this was taken up by nineteenth-century historians such as Charles Macfarlane); in Chapter 2 we will see how far this accords with the facts. Later historians continued and amplified the distancing of Jacobitism from the main thoroughfare of historical needs and development. G. M. Trevelyan, for example, describes the Highlanders as 'barbarians' in a Scotland where, indistinguishably, 'the age of barbarism was at last coming to an end' by the close of the seventeenth century (just in time for the benefits of Union). Charles's army in 1745 is described as '5000 Highlanders' engaged in the pursuit of 'a fantasia of misrule ... in defiance of Parliament and the laws ... Parliamentary government ... could scarcely have survived the repeal of fundamental statutes by kilted swordsmen'. Describing the relationship between Edinburgh and the areas of Jacobite support in the aftermath, Trevelyan observes that 'an Afghanistan could no longer be tolerated within fifty miles of the "modern Athens"'. The classic Whig polarity between the 'fundamental statutes' of the constitution and the so-called 'tribal swordsmen' of intrusive barbarity could, one might think, hardly be more pronounced than this. But in fact the 'Afghanistan' analogy is quite moderate. Charles Chevenix Trench, writing in 1973, describes the Jacobites as 'a savage Highland horde, as alien ... as a war party of Iroquois', opposed by 'English and Lowland troops' alike. In this assessment, perhaps Trench was merely following Justin McCarthy, who in his History of the Four Georges sees the 'clansmen, as savage and as desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees' (they also have an impossible language, since Charles attempts 'the desperate task of trying to master the Gaelic speech'). Bruce Lenman, in his Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, notes the irony of Highlanders characterised in such terms (as they effectively had been since the '45) being used to fight the American Indians in the Seven Years' War. However, the Native Americanisation of the Gaeltachd can be traced in at least one Jacobite, Colonel John, Master of Sinclair, who not only grumbles about the fondness for tartan shown by at least one of his Lowland compatriots in 1715, but also asks 'What does an Iroquois, a Negro, a Laplander, a Scots Western Islander, yea, a Highlandman think of? Is it not hunting, fishing, stealeing, plundering and revenging themselves of their enemies!' The Master, who had been expelled from the British Army for killing two men, was evidently of a superior temper. He, however, was far from identifying the Jacobite cause as Highland, marginal and colonial, since he appears to have wished as few Highlanders as possible to be associated with the restoration of the Stuarts, and was more or less the only Jacobite with such views.14

      Even where the analysis is less strident, the effect is similar. Basil Williams in The Whig Supremacy tells us that 'the Highlanders' were defeated at Culloden; J. R. Green in A Short History of the English People says that though the Prince was at the 'head of six thousand men' after Prestonpans, 'all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard', while Cassell's History of the British People, remarks of this 'romantic episode' that 'a dozen clans, a few Lowland gentlemen, a few ruined adventurers and exiles' (note how the Highlanders are counted by 'clan' and any others only as individuals) supported it. Samuel Gardiner, while acknowledging Edinburgh as an exception, suggests that 'in Scotland the traders ... were Hanoverians to a man'. In sceptical mode, Dicey and Rait proclaim that 'the Low landers were mostly Whigs and the clansmen, guided by loyalty to their chiefs, were hardly Jacobites'. A. D. Innes, on the Primitivist. Romantic side, writes of the 'chivalry', 'loyalty' and 'audacity' which 'had actually brought some six thousand clansmen from the wild Highlands of Scotland within measurable distance of winning back the British crown for the House of Stuart'. This is a more positive reading than Sir Winston Churchill's view of the High landers 'Living in their mountain villages like hill tribesmen ... the immemorial zest for plunder ... still unslaked', but the two accounts mainly diverge only in the degree of sentimentality or cynicism they severally bring to bear on what both agree is a remote and antiquated culture. Another Romanticist piece, James Michael Hill's Celtic Warfare, published in 1986, similarly does no favours in describing 'the attack against all reason, against all odds' which was the hallmark of 'primitive peoples' of the Celtic lands, though at least he acknowledges that not all the Jacobite army in 1745 were Highlanders. Robert Rayner in A Concise History of Britain backs up the idea of hopeless odds, when he decrees 'the Highland clans' to have been in pursuit of 'such a forlorn hope' (and its 'forlorn' quality is the reason that the (sensible) English did not join). McCarthy likewise spices up his sceptical reading with a dose of patronising romance: 'the Young Chevalier's troops . . . believed, in the wild Gaelic way, in the sanctity of their cause'. Whereas Keith Feiling approaches a perceived lack of Lowland support in the '45 with caution, Charles Macfarlane in his Comprehensive History of England states that 'the majority... of Edinburgh' were 'wishing every "sharp-edged claymore man" behind Strathbogie' (unsurprisingly,if the Highlanders were motivated by poverty as he suggests). Macfarlane sneers at the appointment of a 'quarter-master- general - an office scarce needed in a Highland army', though he admits that the army contained men from 'that part of Scotland which lies nearest the Highlands' - but then most of it does. In fact, as the surviving regimental order books show, the army was remarkably conventional in its organisation, and was more than a 'Highland' 'raid' in 'a year of romantic vicissitudes', to quote Sir Fitzroy Maclean and Sir George Clark's histories. It also possessed very able military leaders: leaving Lord George Murray aside, at least two of the other senior commanders reached general officer level in continental armies (Lieutenant-Generals Lords Ogilvy and Drummond in France), while the more junior Allan Maclean reached that rank locally in the British Army in Canada, despite leading his regiment into battle wearing white cockades, to the irritation of his superiors. The Master of Lovat, who admittedly took little active part in the 1745 Rising, also became a British general, while William Sharp, great-grandson of the Archbishop of St Andrews murdered on Magus Moor, became a major-general in the Portuguese service.15

      The sentiments quoted above, ranging from standard to school histories, are no longer at the cutting edge of Jacobite scholarship (although some come from books published recently). Yet historical revisionism has made surprisingly little impact on some of the leading accounts published in the last twenty years, for the end of Whig history is more promised than performed. Paul Langford in A Polite and Commercial People (1889) passes on without comment the view that 1745 saw 'the presentation of England against a Highland rabble', while more surprising still is Linda Colley's statement in her acclaimed Britons (1992) that 'only the poorer Highland clans ... rallied to the Young Pretender' in Scotland Colley's view that 'the centrality of trade ... helped to ensure that the rejection of the Jacobite option was decisive' and that this led to 'negligible civilian support' echoes R. H. Campbell's earlier judgement in Scotland Since 1707: how far it is true of Scotland we shall see. Annette Smith, writing in 1988, calls the northern army at Dundee 'the occupying Highland force', though she is discussing Lowland recruitment there (such apparent doublethink is not uncommon, so deep is the notion of a 'Highland Army' ingrained). This extends to separating Jacobite political aims from political behaviour characterised as 'Lowland'. For example, J. G. A. Pocock, apostle of a supposedly fairer 'four nations' British history, appears to see the conquest of the Highlands after 1745 as resulting from the 'lowland kingdom's' having sought 'an incorporating union' which bound it to North British loyalties (support for the Union in fact declined rapidly down the social scale below the peerage in Scotland: it was conservatively acknowledged that three quarters of the population at the time were against it, and there were far higher estimates). Although Daniel Szechi (with Geoffrey Holmes) has provided a more balanced account of Jacobite patriotism in Scotland in the 'four nations' survey The Age of Oligarchy, 'four nations' British history, no matter how fair it claims to be, does not always interrogate the sources which would help it to be so: for example, Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, after 'careful investigation', constructed very full lists of hundreds of Lowland Jacobites from Aberdeen and Banffshire alone more than half a century ago.16

      There are perhaps two wellsprings to be taken account of in our understanding of this selective admissions policy on the part of British history: what E. H. Carr once revealingly described as the 'club' of historical facts. First, until recently,'Britain' as an entity had long been unchallenged - and as Britons, we owe the greatest historical debt to an identity which marginalised Jacobitism in order to remove its dynastic, political and Scottish and Irish nationalist dimensions. On this reading, it is thus no coincidence that strongly revisionist Jacobite scholarship has become widespread at almost exactly the same time as modern political nationalism has made an impression on these islands. Not that it is at all the case that such revisionist scholarship is nationalist: the majority of it is not so, but the point is that its availability has something to do with the way in which we view our own cultural certainties. Attacks on the central myths of Whig historiography are part and parcel of this process, though it is a powerful survivor in our consciousness of the general shape of history.17

      Whereas the cultural causes of historical revisionism may remain somewhat speculative, much clearer evidence is available in confirmation of the second cause of Highlandisation: the confused and blurred boundaries between the Gaeltachd and the rest of Scotland, which date back to pro-government propaganda in the '45, and which were taken advantage of by Sir Walter Scott for romanticising purposes in his rendering Scotland a nation of Highlanders for George IV's 1822 visit, as one of the northern wizard's discommoded countrymen complained. In this context, even distinguished Scottish historians can show signs of a fundamentally romantic confusion between Scotland and the Gaeltachd. Despite going on to say (quite rightly) that the Jacobites 'drew strength from two main areas - the central and western Highlands and the north-east Lowland plain' and (more doubtfully, as I shall show in Chapter 2) that Highland troops volunteered whereas Lowlanders were forced, William Ferguson, in his landmark work Scotland: 1689 to the Present, can nonetheless state that