CONSTRUCTING A JACOBITE: THE SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF GEORGE LOCKHART OF CARNWATH

Abstract

George Lockhart of Carnwath is best known for his bitter denunciation of the Anglo-Scottish Union in his Memoirs, concerning the affairs of Scotland, first published in 1714. There Lockhart appears as a wholly Jacobite narrator and moralist, passionately inveighing against the iniquity of his peers. Yet we know that his background was not cut from the same cloth as that of his more stereotypical Jacobite contemporaries. Not for him the brooding presence of a Cavalier ancestor ‘martyred’ while fighting alongside Montrose or ancient traditions of loyalty to the Stuarts. Rather, like many Scotsmen after him, he was converted to Jacobitism in the course of the political crisis gripping early eighteenth-century Scotland. From the point of view of the historian studying the dynamics of political commitment the fact that Lockhart falls into this category is a godsend. Uniquely among his Jacobite peers, in the Memoirs and in his many surviving letters, as well as the correspondence and accounts of affairs penned by contemporaries, Lockhart has left the historian a substantial amount of evidence to work on. This article will explore the social and intellectual background to George Lockhart's adherence to the Stuart cause, focusing in particular on the interplay of social forces that shaped his childhood and teenage years, before going on to trace the key features of his understanding of politics and society. Lockhart was not a natural convert to Jacobitism, and the fact that he and many like him moved in that direction merits close analysis. By better understanding why a man like Lockhart embraced the exiled Stuarts we can gain a more general insight into the revival of the Jacobite cause in Scotland in the early eighteenth century.