On the 13th November 1715, two battles took place concurrently on British soil. The first, at Sherrifmuir in Scotland, saw John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, with a Jacobite army of 12,000 men engage with a far smaller government force under the 2nd Duke of Argyll. After a day of heavy fighting, both armies were depleted but Mar chose not to press his advantage and allowed Argyll to withdraw his troops. Sherrifmuir ended in stalemate, but with the Jacobite advance south into England halted and its leaders and men demoralised.
On the same day, at Preston in Lancashire, a second Jacobite army of about 4,000 men under the command of Thomas Forster of Bamburgh in Northumberland, was routed by the government army of General Charles Wills. The Jacobite threat had, for the time being at least, been defused but many historians believe that in the phase attributed much later to the Duke of Wellington it was a “damn close run thing” and that the Jacobites had lost their best chance of victory through Mar’s indecision.
The seeds of the Jacobite uprisings of the eighteenth century had first been sown in 1688 with the deposition of the Roman Catholic King James II in favour of his daughter Mary and her husband William III, Prince of Orange. The Act of Settlement of 1701 confined the succession of the English and Irish thrones to Protestants only, excluding James’ son by his second marriage. When Queen Anne died in 1714, she was succeeded by her distant Protestant cousin George of Hanover. Over the narrow sea in France, however, was James Francis Edward Stuart, James II’s son, who had inherited his claim to the throne upon his father’s death in 1701 and with it a great deal of latent support in both Scotland and England for the restitution of the Stuart monarchy.
From as early as 1691, there had been plots to reinstate James and overturn the Glorious Revolution. In 1696, Sir George Barclay led an unsuccessful attempt to ambush and assassinate King William. Again, in 1708, during the War of Spanish Succession, the French planned to invade Scotland in support of James Francis Edward Stuart. Countless plans and plots were hatched and the spy network established to report on Jacobite sympathisers was extensive.
If the ultimate aim was to restore the Stuarts to the throne, the reasons men had to support this aim were entwined and complicated; religious, political and personal. Many men struggled with the doctrinal difference between a monarch appointed by parliament rather than one chosen by God. When religious doctrine met self-interest, as in the case of some leading ministers and aristocrats who had held office under Queen Anne but were overlooked by the new regime, the circumstances were ripe for revolt.
Whilst the conflict is sometimes portrayed as the Catholic “pretenders” against the Protestant rulers who had supplanted them, this is to over-simplify. Many Jacobite supporters were of the Protestant religion. Similarly, the Jacobite uprisings have often been seen as primarily Scottish in origin whereas in fact there was strong support in England, including in cities such as Oxford and Manchester, and in south western counties such as Cornwall. Northumberland was another county with a strong loyalty to the Stuart succession and from as early as 1690 the Pretender’s court-in-exile had been planning an invasion from the coast followed by the capture of the city of Newcastle. Throughout 1715, riots and protests against the Hanoverians had occurred in many parts of England.
The Jacobites’ hope was for a joint uprising in the south west and simultaneously in the north east of England. However, the government in London had successfully infiltrated the rebels’ ranks in the south with the result that by early October of 1715 they were in a position to arrest all the leading southern Jacobites, seize their arms and subdue the main centres of revolt: Bath, Bristol and Oxford. With the southern element of the rising crushed, the success of the enterprise now depended on the northern rebels.
Thomas Forster, the man chosen to lead the Jacobite troops in northern England, was an English Protestant. The north east was viewed as a “den of popery” by the government and there was certainly sympathy and tolerance for the Catholic faith amongst the Anglican clergy and gentry. Traditionally it was also an area with a strong loyalty to the Stuart monarchy as well, and a powerful dislike of the “interference” of London in local affairs. However, there was a gap between quiet opposition to the new regime and active support for the Pretender. People generally had far more to lose in material terms by supporting the Jacobites.
Forster was ill-equipped for the job of army general. Born in 1683 into the Forster family of Bamburgh and Adderstone in Northumberland, he had been returned to parliament as MP for Northumberland in the House of Commons in 1708. It was the strategic importance of his constituency rather than any personal qualities that pushed him into prominence in the rebellion. The Jacobites’ plan, drawn up by the Earl of Mar and Colonel Henry Oxburgh, envisaged that a French force would land in Northumberland, join up with the Scots as they moved south, and that the English Jacobites would swell the ranks and provide supplies as the combined army marched on London. Newcastle and Tyneside were crucial to the plan since they provided the coal that supplied fuel for London.
As an industrial capitalist in the region, Forster was expected to mobilize his tenants and employees as well as draw support from his connections within the Anglican clergy. However, his tenants and employees did not follow him, his fellow MP Sir William Blackett cried off and his uncle Lord Crewe, Prince Bishop of Durham, although not a Hanoverian, was opposed to rebellion having been tainted by previous suspicions of Jacobite sympathies. From a logistical angle as well, matters did not work out well for the northern Jacobites as the French changed the planned landing place for their troops from Northumberland to the south of England but failed to let the Scots and English rebels know.
It was a therefore relatively small contingent of about 4,000 troops that advanced south and took the town of Preston on Wednesday 9 November. No doubt the leaders of the rebellion had hoped that more men would join them enroute but when it came to an armed uprising, men were reluctant to commit and risk losing their property and their lives. The Jacobite army rested at Preston, feasting and drinking, and at this point anticipating an easy capture of the city of Manchester in due course. However General Wills had already garrisoned Manchester against the Jacobite threat and he was moving up from the south with six regiments of dragoons and horse and one of foot. Meanwhile General Carpenter was closing in from the north with a further three regiments of dragoons. On hearing of Wills’ approach, Thomas Forster made a strategic error and withdrew his troops from a strong defensive position at the Ribble Bridge into the town, where they barricaded the streets.
Wills’ first attack on the Jacobite forces was repulsed with heavy losses but overnight on the 12th November a significant number of Jacobite troops deserted and when Carpenter’s men arrived the following morning, the town was encircled and the Jacobites no longer had any chance of prevailing against superior numbers. Forster’s lack of experience as a general and indeed as an effective leader left them woefully disunited; whilst his allies the Earl of Derwentwater and Brigadier William Mackintosh were planning to break out of the siege, Forster offered an unconditional surrender.
The 1715 Jacobite rising in Northumberland was but one strand of a wider rebellion that affected the whole country. Once the support of the southern English Jacobites had been neutralised and Mar had failed to press his advantage at Sheriffmuir, the cause was lost.
Both the Earl of Mar and Thomas Forster spent the rest of their lives in exile at the court of James Stuart, the Old Pretender. In this they were more fortunate than a number of their co-conspirators, who were executed for treason. The death of the Earl of Derwentwater in particular, was widely lamented, as he was young, handsome, charismatic and the father of a young family. It was perhaps in part Derwentwater’s rhetoric, plus his family connections to the Forsters, that had stirred the rather more stolid Thomas Forster to support the Jacobite cause in the first place, with such disastrous results.
Forster escaped from Newgate prison on 10 April 1716, four days before his trial for treason. Like a number of prisoners before and after, he had mysteriously acquired the keys to his cell. A reward of a £1000 was offered for his re-capture and unlike many other Jacobites, he was not included in the 1717 Act of Grace which offered a general royal pardon. His estates were forfeited and although he eschewed Jacobite politics and always hoped for an eventual pardon and to return to Northumberland, this was not to be until after his death. In November 1738 he was finally interred in the Church of St Cuthbert, Bamburgh.
Unsurprisingly, Jacobite discontent, plots and full-scale rebellion continued to simmer throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. The uprising of 1719 was defeated at the Battle of Glen Shiel in the Scottish Highlands. The most famous Jacobite battle, the ’45, saw the final defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden. In both cases the focus of active discontent had switched back to Scotland. In Northumberland, whilst a great deal of anti-Hanoverian sentiment still simmered, there was never again open support for another rebellion.
Nicola Cornick is a bestselling novelist and the author of .
