Jacobites

Whilst being a tremendously well-researched work on Scottish heraldic heritage, this is not simply an account of Scottish history. The fact is that this book contains the stories of men and women who genuinely believed in their inheritance, their diversity and their ability to regain for Scotland and England a truly great kingdom; they are the Jacobites. 

From the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and James II’s fleeing the country, the Jacobite cause has existed. A strong belief that they should serve the proper and rightful King was their strength and ambition, and this feeling of existing for, and belonging to, the Jacobite movement is something which has been passed down in many families throughout Scotland across the intervening centuries. 

The original mantle was passed from James II to James III and VIII de jure, and then on to Charles Edward Stuart, the man known to all as Bonnie Prince Charlie who fought at Culloden. Whilst this latter figure has been romanticised over the years, with his flight from the battlefield aided by Flora MacDonald, this book tells the story of all those others involved in the great Jacobite cause before that fateful day. It includes the stories of many other truly heroic women such as Clementina Sobieska, James III’s wife and mother to Charles Edward, who travelled across the Alps incognito to marry the man she loved although she had never yet seen him in person.

These individual stories of men and women bound by a single cause make an interesting and compelling read, if sometimes tragic, and not all have previously been published except as parts of family genealogies. So this is probably the first comprehensive chronicle of those following that proud Jacobite cause.