Balanced on the brink: Scottish Jacobite histories of Stuart absolutism

The emergence of a Jacobite concept of monarchy in the wake of the Glorious Revolution has been a subject of confusion and neglect. It is a commonplace that the Revolution of 1688 was due in part to James II and VI’s failure to respect civil liberties, his persecution of critics and his extension of Crown prerogative beyond limits that were acceptable to newly wealthy classes. Historians have tended to maintain that Jacobites sustained principles similar to those which led to James’s demise. But this essay demonstrates how, on the contrary, a range of Jacobite conceptions of monarchy emerged from a frustration with the Stuarts’ flawed use of the powers of the Crown. While Irish Jacobites did indeed tend to sustain absolutist principles, Archbishop Fénelon, watching the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution, encouraged Jacobite exiles in France to moderate their absolutist tendencies, and advised James Francis Stuart, the Old Pretender, that the Crown’s prerogative should be kept for promoting the common good. Andrew Michael Ramsay, Fénelon’s student and one-time tutor to Charles Edward Stuart, took this patriotic doctrine to the Jacobite court in Rome. Meanwhile, the Jacobite strategist and historian Sir James Steuart, exiled in Germany, wrote in his notes on the history of England that the Stuarts’ consistent failure to develop their idea of royal prerogative led the dynasty to the brink of a precipice, from which it toppled in the Civil War, then limped on until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Whereas early modern historians have tended to assume continuity between Stuart absolutism and Jacobite ideas of royal prerogative, this essay reassesses the Jacobites’ historical understanding of the demise of the James II and VI and the decline of monarchic power.