History of the Stewarts | Battles and Historic Events
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The rising in 1719, like those attempted in 1689–91, 1715¬–16 and 1745–46, ended in Jacobite failure; defeated militarily on each occasion by the greater armed forces of the British state.
In his histories of Scotland published as Tales of a Grandfather, Sir Walter Scott declared that ´The affair at Glenshiel might be called the last faint sparkle of the Great Rebellion of 1715, which was fortuitously extinguished for want of fuel´ . The great rising that petered out in the western Highlands of Scotland in spring 1716 served to both encourage and dampen Jacobite ambition less than three years later. Although the course of the rising begun in September 1715 shifted (irrevocably, as events turned out) against the Jacobites in November, with strategic defeats against British forces at the battles of Sheriffmuir and Preston the Jacobites had enjoyed a depth of armed support. Perhaps as many as 20,000 Scotsmen had, at one time or another, turned out in arms for the Stuarts. Furthermore, the diaspora of officers from the disbanded Jacobite army which had gone into Continental exile, was a pool of leaders for a fresh attempt. They included George Keith, the Earl Marischal, and William Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, who would be rivals for command of the 1719 rising.
However, these assets of armed Jacobitism were countered by greater disadvantages. Jacobite military failure in 1715–16 can be accounted for under three headings: lack of inspirational leadership, lack of external support, and powerful opposition. In the first count, neither the Earl of Mar, instigator of the rising, and Jacobite army commander, nor James himself, who belatedly landed in Scotland just before Christmas 1715 only to abandon his army and to flee back with Mar to France in early February 1716, had between them the ability to lead the rising in adversity. While in 1745 the charismatic leadership of Prince Charles Edward Stuart - ´Bonnie Prince Charlie´ - sustained the rising undertaken on his behalf, in 1719 the Earl Marischal and Marquess of Tullibardine instead remained at odds with each over strategy. Secondly, Jacobite defeat in 1715–16 had shown the necessity of armed support from an allied power. Even in Scotland, where the Jacobites counted on the manpower of Highland chiefs and north-eastern landed magnates, indigenous Jacobites alone could not, in the long term, defeat Government forces. Anticipated French support - which under Louis XIV had underpinned Jacobite military ambition since 1689 - evaporated as the 1715 rising got underway, upon the death of the old king. His successor, the regent Duke of Orléans intended peaceful relations with Great Britain, and so gave the Jacobites no armed support. The expeditionary force in fact included Spanish troops, but they were too few to counter the third factor disadvantaging Jacobites: the armed forces of the British state. The British Army of the time was small, and in 1719 much less than half of its 29,500 men were in the British mainland. Nonetheless, in 1715, as in 1745, initial setbacks against Jacobite forces were countered by an eventually decisive build-up of British forces, augmented by auxiliaries from allied powers. Indeed, in 1719 British troops in Scotland received Dutch reinforcements. Finally, the British Royal Navy restricted Jacobite strategic options. By far the most powerful fleet of the time, the Royal Navy usually maintained naval supremacy, making landings on the British coast by Jacobites and their allies a hazardous and unpredictable undertaking. In 1719, Royal Navy warships played a decisive role in containing and hampering Jacobite operations.
In the wake of the failures of 1715–16, the Jacobite movement in Continental exile sought a new sponsor. While the Orléanist regime often turned a blind eye to the many Jacobites resident in France, Anglo-French relations had improved to the extent that in January 1717 both powers agreed a defensive military alliance. Denied the mainstay of French support, Jacobite diplomacy instead gained favour in Spain.
During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Spain had suffered defeat against the coalition of Great Britain and her main Dutch and Imperial Austrian allies. Furthermore, by the international peace treaties of 1713–14 Spain had lost territory, in particular, most of its Italian empire to Austria. By 1717, however, Spanish foreign policy was aimed at recovering lost ground in the Mediterranean region. In doing so, King Phillip V of Spain was guided by his formidable first minister, the Italian-born churchman-become-statesman Cardinal Giulio Alberoni.
In 1717 Spanish forces regained Sardinia, and in summer 1718 reoccupied Sicily as a springboard to recover Austrian-held territory on the Italian mainland. At the same time, France, Imperial Austria, Great Britain and the Dutch United Provinces agreed the so-called Quadruple Alliance, intended to secure the status quo in the balance of power in Europe, and especially to discourage revivalist Spanish imperialism. However, only the British Royal Navy was positioned to take immediate action against Spain on behalf of the four powers. The outcome was the battle of Cape Passaro, fought off easterly Sicily on 31 July 1718 , in which Admiral George Byng’s fleet struck a crippling blow against the Spanish navy.
Spain responded by harassing British maritime commerce (and Britain duly declared war in December), but its diminished fleet could not engage in a maritime war against the powerful Royal Navy. Cardinal Alberoni, however, recognised, as had French policy under Louis XIV, the benefits of armed Jacobitism as a fifth-column; it might destabilise the British state, enabling Spain effectively to wage war by other means.
Therefore, by the end of 1718 Spain was in military alliance with the Jacobites. Meeting in Madrid, Alberoni and the Jacobite general the Duke of Ormond (who from 1712 until being sacked by King George I in 1714, had held command of the British Army) planned a Spanish invasion of England with a diversionary landing in Scotland. Ormond leading 5,000 Spanish troops would land in the English West Country (where the Jacobites optimistically always believed they had firm support) intending to encourage a popular uprising against the Georgian regime. Meanwhile, the far smaller expedition to Scotland – with just 320 or so Spanish soldiers, but plentiful supplies of arms and munitions – would trigger a rising of clans in the western Highlands and Islands. Its objective was to pin British troops down in Scotland while inspiring a nation-wide rebellion.
The Spanish main force was delayed in sailing from Cadiz until 23 February 1719. However, on 18-19 March it was struck by an exceptionally fierce Atlantic storm. The transports were scattered and limped back to ports on the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Although no ships were lost, the invasion was postponed and later cancelled. A general without an army, the Duke of Ormond was left stranded at Corunna, to be joined in early April by James III and VIII, who had made the hazardous journey from Rome hoping to achieve his restoration.
Given the loss of the main force, what was remarkable about the 1719 rising in Scotland was not its eventual failure, but the fact that it got underway at all. The Jacobite expeditionary force had two elements. Two frigates of the Spanish Navy, transporting the Spanish troops and military supplies, under the command of the Earl Marischal, appointed by Ormond to lead in Scotland, left San Sebastian on the Biscayan coast on 25 February. The second element sailed from Honfleur in Normandy aboard a hired merchantman on 8 March. This had been organised by James Keith, younger brother of the Earl Marischal. He enterprisingly had brought together as many of the leading Scots Jacobite exiles in France as time and Spanish money allowed. This discordant group included the Marquess of Tullibardine. He carried with him James Francis Edward Stuart’s commission from early 1717 appointing him commander-in-chief of any future military operations in Scotland.
Evading the patrolling Royal Navy warships and avoiding the storms that scattered the Spanish armada, remarkably, the French and Spanish elements of the expeditionary force joined on 30 March in the harbour of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, the pre-arranged rendezvous. A council of war next day, however, exposed factionalism and disagreement over strategy. Having declared his overall command, the Earl Marischal suggested that they should head to the mainland and take Inverness, declare a general uprising. The plan probably had a high chance of success, but the party from France, headed by Tullibardine and the Earl of Seaforth, the most powerful Jacobite magnate in north-west Scotland, opposed it. They argued for waiting on certain news that Ormond had landed in England. The debate continued next day, when Tullibardine revealed his commission as James III & VIII’s general in Scotland; confronted by which Marischal had no option but to relinquish command. But the two leaders already disliked each other and had rival followings, and so the expedition remained disunited.
However, it was agreed to sail to the Scottish mainland. On 13 April, the Jacobite expeditionary force landed in Kintail, on the shore of Loch Alsh near the medieval stronghold of Castle Eilean Donan. They probably numbered few more than 400 men: the Spanish infantry; the leading Jacobites and their servants and followers; and other Jacobite officers and adventurers.
For most of a month the expeditionary force consolidated the beachhead. With local clansmen –mostly the Earl of Seaforth’s MacKenzies – they established outposts further afield, including 13 miles south-east of the landing place, in the pass of Glenshiel, which commanded communications deeper inland. In further councils of war, however, prevarication and procrastination took over;- that the uprising could not become general until the fate of Ormond’s army was known. Taking the right course of action was made no easier by conflicting dubious reports of Ormond’s progress, and worrying news that government forces were gathering at Inverness.
The Jacobite situation took a decisive turn for the worst on the evening of 9 May, when Royal Navy warships anchored in Loch Alsh, a few miles from the beachhead. On 28 April, a squadron of five warships (with a sixth to follow) had been detached from the fleet readied to intercept the Spanish armada in the Western Approaches. The squadron was immediately to sail to the Western Isles and Highlands to oppose the Jacobite landings. Accordingly, on 10 May HMSs Worcester, Enterprise and Flamborough bombarded Castle Eilean Donan and then landing parties seized the Castle, within which the Jacobites had placed their main magazine. The garrison of Spanish infantry was taken prisoner, and what gunpowder the Royal Navy had not seized, enabled the sailors to partly demolish the castle by explosion. During the 10th, HMS Flamborough’s crew also achieved the destruction of a secondary Jacobite arsenal on the shore of nearby Loch Duich.
With their remaining military supplies the Jacobites withdrew inland, but, with the Spanish frigates having left a few days before the British squadron arrived, they were isolated. At the beginning of June, the Jacobites in Kintail received encouraging (although in fact erroneous) news that Ormond had landed in England. On 4 June, Tullibardine finally ordered a general rising of the clans. The next day government forces, about 1230-strong, including British and Dutch regulars and Highlanders loyal to George I, commanded by Major-General Joseph Wightman marched from Inverness.
Glenshiel viewed westward from the River Shiel, at the narrowing in the pass known at the time of the battle as ‘the little glen’. The bluff, left of centre middle distance, rising steeply right (northward), was fortified and occupied as the centre of the Jacobite lines. (Author´s photograph)
The Jacobite army of about 1400 men, mostly Highlanders, gathered to give battle at the narrowest point of the pass of Glenshiel, rightly considered a very defensible position. However, when Wightman’s troops with effective artillery support attacked the Jacobite lines uphill, on the evening of 10 June, most clansmen offered little resistance in a battle without hand to hand fighting. After three hours’ skirmishing most Highlanders had fled the battlefield. The Spanish infantry acting as the Jacobite rear guard withdrew to a high mountain summit above the pass.
The Spanish surrendered to Wightman next day, and the remaining Jacobites, including the leading figures, dispersed. They eventually returned to Continental exile. The short-lived rising was crushed at the battle of Glenshiel, and government forces encountered no further meaningful resistance. A few days after the battle the Marquess of Tullibardine, the erstwhile Jacobite general, reflected bitterly on ‘My Lord Marischal’s ill-conceived expedition’ . Ill-conceived or not, a generation would pass before the Jacobites managed to launch a similar armed rebellion.
Reference: The Battle of Glenshiel, Jonathon Worton
