" . . . Despite its various armed uprisings, Scotland in the first half of the 18th century has reassuring lessons for those concerned about current trends towards political polarisation. It shows that less obtrusive countervailing forces have the potential to quell the intensity of party rancour. Good neighbourliness and the corporate identity of Scotland’s landed elites – as Daniel Szechi’s work has also demonstrated – helped to soften animosities and patch up partisan divisions. Whig gentlemen lobbied the state to spare the lives and estates of their rebel neighbours. During his stint at the Paris embassy between 1714 and 1720, the Earl of Stair perceived that obtaining pardons for Jacobites in exile might, as MacInnes notes, turn them into ‘passive Jacobites once home’. Scotland’s leading Whig aristocrats, the Duke of Argyll and his brother the Earl of Islay, found posts in government and the military for members of families implicated in Jacobite plotting. As a result, Jacobites came to collaborate with the Hanoverian regime; to find themselves caught in webs of obligation to their Whig neighbours; to become ever more diffident about their Jacobite allegiance. For many formerly active Jacobites, militant commitment dwindled into wishful inertia. . . ."
(SNIP)
" . . .In the UK as a whole, the travails of the House of Windsor have left the monarchy as precarious as at any time since 1688. Should public opinion demand regime change but shrink from the grey prospect of a republic with a superannuated politician at its head, the Bavarian royal family, which inherited the Jacobite claim, might offer an impeccably legitimist alternative. . ."
LRB
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