So the Irish and Scots supported the Jacobite cause in the hopes that the king was going to let them go their own way? Despite the Stuarts being pretty much "my way or the highway"? Was it a hope or did they have some kind of assurances from James? Or was home rule more in line with conventional monarchy but not the parliamentary one?
Look, political ideology isn't always rational and we're talking late 17th/early 18th century political ideology which had barely begun to be worked out, and we're talking about a movement that was generally pretty conservative for its time.
But....the idea was that, because James and his successors were the rightful kings anointed by God, they would not oppress their subjects because A. they had a sense of personal honor, and B. God wouldn't let them. Not joking about that last bit.
Fyre sent me an article that made me Lose My Mind, so instead of sending 800 tweets about it, I decided to just write up my thoughts here
so, in re: ET Fox, 'Jacobitism and the Golden Age of Piracy' --
Fox is definitely exaggerating. His logic jumps from 'ship names and alleged toasts', to 'every pirate was one contact away from a confirmed Jacobite', to "a Jacobite maritime community" (296), with little evidence beyond each previous assumption. He does demonstrate a link with popular Jacobitism, but overstates pirates' political commitment by far.
There's one letter to George Camocke, a Jacobite naval officer, suggesting that the pirate fleet should unite under his command and take Bermuda as a Jacobite base, but the source is shaky, and it went nowhere once Woodes Rogers ousted the pirates. (It's I think from 1718 and unsigned? Possibly from Charles Vane and his crew? Fox only says that, "Through these contacts [unspecified, between Vane and English Jacobites] a letter reached George Camocke" (286), which is suspiciously vague, and I can't access the original to check. Either way, it would still only prove the committed politics of one crew.)
Fox also makes a lot of Archibald Hamilton, governor of Jamaica from 1710-16, who commissioned and profited from the anti-Spanish privateers who turned pirate and made up some of the original Bahamas pirates c. 1715. Since "it has been suggested that [Hamilton] was a Jacobite supporter" (283), Fox claims that these establishing pirates were also committed Jacobites, and therefore the whole pirate community that grew around them must have been. (Which leads to Fox then being baffled when there's no direct evidence of Jacobitism among some of them, such as the crews of Anstis, Fenn, or Rackham.) He relies on these assumptions, and then claims that every connection between pirates proves their mutual Jacobite sympathies.
It's much more likely (and in line with the historians I've read so far) that the Jacobite toasts and ship names speak to a broader anti-authoritarianism among pirates, with no evidence of committed Jacobite actions by them, eg, specifically targeting Hanoverian ships, or materially supporting or trying to support Jacobite rebels beyond that one letter. Indeed, the 1710s/20s pirates are generally agreed to be distinct for not adhering to religious/national loyalties like the C17th pirates usually did. (I'm so sorry, I haven't consolidated my notes yet, but I know Marcus Rediker goes through this, as does Kris E Lane, and I think Tim Travers and David Cordingly.)
Fox does identify a correlation between the rise and fall of Jacobitism and piracy over the mid/late 1710s, but attributes a pretty shaky causation: pirates ceased their Jacobite loyalties due to the suppression of Jacobitism in Britain and Europe. A much more obvious explanation is that both anti-authoritarian movements simultaneously flourished in the post-war, post-succession instability, then were both quashed as the new regime established itself and cracked down on rebels.
So, did many pirates espouse Jacobite sympathies? Yes! They named their ships in favour of Jacobite causes and rulers, and there are plenty of reports of them toasting to King James / the Pretender. (Which it must be said, although the sheer volume lends a ring of truth to the trend, individual claims should be taken with a grain of salt, as Jacobitism was a common accusation against criminals at the time, with or without a basis.)
Does that mean that the 1710s Caribbean pirate community was centred around a heart of politically committed Jacobites, as Fox argues, or largely motivated by Jacobite sentiments? Yeah, probably not.
Anyway, I am SO sorry that this article got me riled up XD the whole point of this is to say, I've never read anywhere that "many pirates were Jacobites driven out of Britain", which I KNOW wasn't even your main point, but I am unfortunately Insane. We can and should talk about expressions of pro-Jacobitism and actual political engagement among 'Golden Age' pirates, but what we know of their actual actions and espoused ideals doesn't speak to a trend of committed Jacobite politics beyond a general loyalty to rebellious causes.
"So what compelled sensible, law-abiding, and enlightened individuals to admire and sometimes even support a conspiracy to overthrow the existing government? In a word, nostalgia. Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society -- except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.
The average Jacobite wanted to return to a community that was stable and harmonious, two qualities that eighteenth-century Britain notoriously seemed to lack. He extolled the virtues of a rural-based society and the authority of a traditional landowning class. He detested the new rising competitive capitalist society, with its getting and spending, its greedy merchants and vulgar upstarts, its contempt for the old rules, its creative destruction [...] he cared deeply about "justice," which in his mind meant inferiors willingly obeying their superiors: tenants obeying their landlords, the middle class obeying the nobility, the people obeying the king and the Church.
In England, and in much of the Scottish Lowlands by 1745, the longing for the security of a stable, hierarchical social order was largely, even self-consciously, a matter of nostalgia. [...] In the Highlands, though, Jacobitism was not nostalgia but reality.
...
In the sharpest sense, the Forty-five was not a war between Scots and Englishmen, but a civil war. The split that divided Scots transcended class or religious divisions, or even the division between Highlander and Lowlander. (According to one recent scholar, Murray Pittock, perhaps as much as 40 percent of Charles' army consisted of Lowlanders.) It was in fact a cultural split, between two competing visions of what Scotland should be and where it could go. Charles' supporters could not afford for Scotland to move forward, and so they were prepared to fight and die to topple the existing Whig regime. Scottish Whigs could not afford to go backward, and so they were willing to do anything and make any sacrifice to keep the Stuarts off the throne.
...
Union had brought them affluence and prosperity. [...] Union, and the Hanovers on the throne, implied a Scotland with expanding horizons and possibilities; growing commerce and trade; the rule of law; the good things in life. Returning the Stuarts meant returning to the old Scotland. In the mind of Scottish Whigs, this was not an option.”
- Arthur Herman, "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" (Random House, 2001)
Why did the Blackfyres keep attacking for decades, despite failure after failure? I guess they're modelled after the Jacobites, so why did the Jacobites keep attacking?
While there are some commonalities between the different Rebellions, I do think that a bunch of them were sui generis and others were strongly influenced by what had happened the previous Rebellion.
So for example, the Second Rebellion was motivated pretty strongly by a sense that Bloodraven and Aerys I had so badly mishandled the royal government that a Blackfyre Rebellion would develop something of a bandwagon effect as disaffected nobles heard that a Blackfyre had landed in Westeros and hatched a dragon egg, and perhaps even something of a populist uprising as people were finally able to vent their frustrations about plagues, droughts, famine, and a royal government that did not care.
The Third Rebellion was motivated by a sense that they would not repeat the mistakes of the Second, that while the Targaryen regime was still a bit shaky, that Bittersteel and the Golden Company would cross the Narrow Sea this time so that the rising could not be easily squashed, and that they would march behind a Blackfyre king who had been given the sword so that no one who had fought for Daemon would forget that here was the rightful king. And I think this one was probably the high-water mark for the Blackfyres.
The Fourth was largely motivated by the conclusion of the Third - namely, the murder of Haegon Blackfyre after he had surrendered honorably. This violation of the laws of chivalry and kinslaying, when combined with Bloodraven's equally treacherous murder of Aenys Blackfyre after he'd been given a promise of safe conduct, created a strong sense of grievance, that House Targaryen in the person of Bloodraven was a house of dishonorable murderers who held power only because they assassinated Daemon's children and them himself at the Weeping Ridge, then murdered Haegon, then murdered Aenys.
Whereas the War of Ninepenny Kings seems to have been entirely opportunistic.
As for the Jacobites, it was really motivated by religion (Jacobites tended to be Catholic or quasi-Catholic High Church Anglicans, while William & Mary, Queen Anne, and the Hanoverians were all Protestant), belief in divinely-sanctioned monarchy instead of the corruption of Parliament, and a nationalist desire among the Irish and Scots to get out from under the thumb of the British Empire especially following the Act of Union in Scotland and the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland.
