Thomas Carte, the Druids and British National Identity

Abstract

Was it possible for a convinced Jacobite to imagine an acceptable British national identity? Linda Colley raised this question in her book Britons, where she argued that Jacobitism was antithetical to the concept of a united Great Britain, as well as to the values for which it stood — namely, anti-Catholicism, anti-French sentiment and a global commercial destiny, shared by Scots and English alike.¹ From a different perspective, Daniel Szechi has depicted Scottish Jacobitism as an ideology fundamentally opposed to the Union of 1707, and strongly imbued with an Anglophobic rhetoric.² ‘Britishness’, in other words, was seen by Jacobites as a curse, an identity imposed by Whigs and their tools. Its rejection was part of the appeal of the Stuart cause. This antipathy may also have nourished the cause’s internal weaknesses. Jacobites were seriously divided by national and ethnic allegiances, as contemporary observers often noted. In 1726, the spy John Semple wrote of the exiled Jacobites in Paris that ‘[t]he Irish, Scotch and English of them seem to have quite different views and ways of thinking, and there are two parties of each Nation, so that I may justly say there are six parties.’³ None of them could be called a British party, in any sense of the term.