Eveline Cruickshanks, Howard Erskine-Hill. The Atterbury Plot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xii + 312 pp. $68.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-333-58668-6.
Evelyn Lord. The Stuarts' Secret Army: English Jacobites, 1689-1752. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004. xxii + 286 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-582-77256-4.
Reviewed by Murray Pittock (School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2005)
These are two very different books on Jacobitism. Both build on the revisionist understanding of the Jacobite period developed over the last thirty-five years, but there the similarities end. Cruickshanks's and Erskine-Hill's book on the Atterbury Plot is a meticulous and detailed study that takes account of the confusing events of 1722-23 from a comprehensive series of perspectives; Lord's exciting title embraces a book which ultimately does not move the discussion on at all from Cruickshanks's Political Untouchables of 1979 and subsequent studies such as Leo Gooch's The Desperate Faction of 1995.
In their study of the Atterbury Plot, Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill provide an encompassing history of the period from 1714. Thorough in conception and well-executed in its own right, this leads on to a discussion of the first phase of the plot, one which clearly bookmarks John Law's Jacobitism as an important part of the process. Indeed, the contiguity of Continental and English (although the book pays appropriate attention to Scottish Jacobite motivations, it does not generally discuss them at length) Jacobite activity and its interchanges are particularly well brought out. The first phase of the Plot in 1721-22 is discussed in as much depth as can be found anywhere, and Christopher Layer's lists and their importance are attended to in detail in chapter 5, while chapter 6 is concerned with the arrests, and the next three chapters with the examinations and trials. Perhaps the book's most striking claim is that Walpole "probably commissioned the forging of the three letters which were to prove fatal to Atterbury" (p. 241). This is a powerful allegation, but Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill show that Walpole had the knowledge of Jacobite code, the opportunity and the incentive to authorize the manufacture of evidence, and that in important respects (notably Atterbury's "absolute refusal to use the ordinary post for confidential or dangerous letters," p. 241), the evidence against the bishop did not fit with his normal modus operandi. The case of course remains not proven, but Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill have prepared a powerful scholarly case which will need careful answering by those opposed to it, and which will no doubt inspire further research.
Evelyn Lord's book promises a great deal: the presence of a "secret army." In fact, it is a history of the Jacobite movement in England between 1688 and 1745 that rarely transcends existing texts, and often displays factual inaccuracies. We learn that "The core of English society--the country squire--was unequivocally Protestant" (p. 9), and this is advanced as a reason why they did not take up arms, despite their pro-Jacobite sympathies. However, even leaving aside whether one can call the Nonjurors "Protestant" in the full sense, the majority of armed Jacobites in Scotland were--as has long been known--Protestants too. But it is clear that Lord does not know much about Scottish Jacobitism. She suggests that the 1708 Rising was intended to foment "a peasants' war" (p. 43); in fact, a brief perusal of the only main discussion of the Rising, John Gibson's Playing the Scottish Card (1988), reveals the aristocratic nature of the machinations in 1706-08, which involved many of the major players in Scottish society. There are likewise signs of limited secondary reading on the 'Fifteen (no mention of the works by Alister and Henrietta Tayler at all, still less their 1936 study). The reviewer is mis-cited on page 158 (wrong book title), as is Paul Monod (wrong date) on the same page, and William Donaldson (wrong date) on page 159: the level of reference on the whole could be better. The details on Derwentwater are good, however, and there is some solid writing on English Jacobitism and the '45. What this is not, however, is a really new study or even a comprehensive synthesis. The Stuarts' Secret Army is simply another book on the Jacobites, good in parts, but not entirely reliable nor innovative.
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Citation:
Murray Pittock. Review of Cruickshanks, Eveline; Erskine-Hill, Howard, The Atterbury Plot and
Lord, Evelyn, The Stuarts' Secret Army: English Jacobites, 1689-1752.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10592
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