Retrieving Captain Le Cocq’s Plunder: Plebeian Scots and the Aftermath of the 1715 Rebellion

Abstract

Rebellions are ipso facto civil wars in the making. However brief and unsuccessful they might be, it is in their very nature to dislocate government and civil society. Hence the condition of Scotland in March 1716. The Jacobite rebellion that had begun in September 1715 was certainly defeated. James Stuart, the Old Pretender, had abandoned his retreating army at Montrose and taken ship for France on 4 February accompanied by the erstwhile leader of the rising, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, and a handful of other senior Jacobite officers.¹ Major-General Thomas Gordon of Auchintoul, left behind with the unhappy task of leading the disintegrating Jacobite army back to the Highlands and negotiating the best terms he could with the pursuing government army and the Whig authorities in London, had disbanded what was left of his demoralised forces at Ruthven in Badenoch on 14 February.²