Books like The Jacobites and Russia, 1715-1750 — picked by fans

The largest – but also the worst led – Jacobite military challenge to Great Britain happened in 1715, when more than 20 000 men volunteered to fight.

Daniel Szechi tells their story more fully than anyone else, and sees Scottish opposition to the 1707 Union with England as one of the greatest motivators of the Jacobite Rising.

One of the greatest ‘what-ifs?’ of the Jacobite movement centres on the English Jacobites and the fundamental question of why they were so politically important within the movement and yet so useless in terms of achieving a Stuart restoration. 

England was the most powerful of the three kingdoms of the British Isles and a major section of the Tory party, the most popular party in England, episodically developed a yearning for such a restoration. Yet it never took off. Monod’s classic book explores English Jacobitism in admirably fine and lucid detail and provides the best answer we are going to get.

In this book Ó Ciardha deals with the red-haired stepchild of the Jacobite movement. 

Despite the fact that support for the exiled Stuarts was strongest in Ireland and that the tens of thousands of Catholic Irish soldiers in European armies were a major military and diplomatic resource for the Stuart monarchs, Ireland got short shrift in all Jacobite policymaking. 

This is because Protestant religious prejudice meant Catholicism, and Catholic Irish soldiers in particular, were politically toxic in England and Scotland. To control the British Isles the Stuarts needed to control England and Scotland and so the Irish Jacobites were always on the backburner. 

Ó Ciardha unflinchingly presents the whole picture. To understand Jacobitism you have to understand the role of Ireland and this is the book that lays it out best.

This is simply the best biography of Charles Edward Stuart. It is meticulously researched and absolutely gimlet-like in its analysis of the man and his career. 

Yet though McLynn depicts the prince warts and all (and some of the warts, such as his propensity for domestic violence, are pretty disgusting), he retains a fundamental sympathy for the flawed human being.  In the larger sense it is very much an account, too, of the gathering degradation of a man who in other circumstances might have become a radical, reforming monarch.

This was the fifth time I have read this book, and I swear I love it just as much every time I read it.

The book is about a writer who has a story come to her in waking dreams and flashes of vivid insight. The story of the past is one of her ancestors who lived near this place.

As a writer, this idea appeals to me. Some of my favorite ideas have come to me in the space between waking and sleeping. The dual timeline of present and historical mesh seamlessly so that the two pieces complement each other, and I love rediscovering all the ways the pieces connect.

Having met the author and taken a dozen workshops with her, I appreciate the craft that went into the writing. Plus, she’s a fellow Canadian.

This is a collection of essays for a major exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland in 2017. It features essays on aspects of the endurance of the Jacobite cause, and objects associated with Jacobitism (like Bonnie Prince Charlie’s silver picnic set). It also has over 200 pictures. This myth has endured through the writings of Sir Walter Scott through Outlander, and this book presents the much, much larger, and more complex story.

To understand the trauma caused by the Napoleonic Wars, and the craving of people in France, Europe and elsewhere to return to the ‘normal pace of times’ as the Austrian Statesman Clemens von Metternich had it, Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ is the best vehicle to convey ourselves into the mindset of the contemporary Europeans. Europe had to curb the ‘evil passions’ and had to ‘come to its senses’. Just as Waverley’s young hero Edward does by letting go of his romantic love for the rebellious Flora and returning in the arms of his very English, quiet and harmonious fiancée, Rose. Scott’s Waverley came out in 1814, was a bestselling success in Britain and on the European continent. The protagonists of my book, Fighting terror, read it. And it still is a great read for us today, for rainy days.

Fun fact: in college, my specialty was 16th-century Scotland, which meant I spent several months living in Edinburgh doing research for my senior thesis. In this book, Susanna Kearsley brings to life a Scotland we seldom see in novels but which brings back the Edinburgh I lived in and studied more vividly than anything else I’ve encountered.

There are so many books about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but this book tackles the precursor to all that, the tangled politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, from the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution and the exile of James II to the ferment around the 1707 Act of Union in all its glorious complexity, through the life of one woman who finds herself—as one does—a normal person buffeted by larger events. Every time I open this book, I feel like I’m back in Edinburgh again. 

A forgotten gem of a book. Katherine Parker hasn't (yet) enjoyed the same revival of interest as Violet Jacob, but this volume alone should make us reconsider. Sitting somewhere between biography and novel, it teases us and makes us a little uncomfortable as it veers between fragments of dialogue—clearly invented, albeit very much in keeping with period language—and more obviously historical passages, telling the eventful life of Jean Cochrane, Viscountess Dundee (1662-1695) from her birth in the west of Scotland, through her marriage with the famous Jacobite general Viscount Dundee—"Bloody Clavers" or "Bonnie Dundee" depending on your political preferences—to her strange death, killed by a collapsing inn roof in Utrecht, and her stranger exhumation a hundred years later.

A bracing tonic for anyone slogging through the Outlander—or Waverley—version of the Jacobite rebellions, Jacob's 1911 novel is beautiful, painful, and utterly unromantic (even though the deep attraction felt between the two main male characters is the driving force of much of the plot). It throws into sharp relief the ambiguities of civil war and the ways in which personal background, inclination, and affection play more of a role than principle ever could in determining an individual's place in such a conflict. Each year, my students are continually surprised by how much they enjoy it.