Since the demise of Communism there is far more awareness of the ills progress is heir to. Few of us now subscribe to inevitability theories. There remains one exception, however: Britons still believe that the Stuart rebellion of 1745, with its backward Catholicism, feudalism, "superstition and wooden shoes," was inevitably—and rightly-doomed.
Does that feeling really represent anything but the ideological success of the House of Hanover? This precarious regime was lucky enough to defeat the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746. It then installed a belief system similar to the one foisted on eastern Europe after 1945: that because victory had been prescribed by the laws of history and economic advance, all opposition must be romantic dream or mere reaction.
In the east it took the dreamers only 40 years to get their own back. Not so here. In the ruins of the 250th anniversary of Protestant consolidation, we continue to congratulate ourselves. Even among Scots there is a sense-though an increasingly sneaky one—of it all having been "for the best."
Really? As we navigate the choppy waters of the end of history, I believe that more ballast will have to go overboard. There is good reason to think a second Stuart restoration might have been for the better. Whatever its vices or absurdities, it would have made the subsequent history of the British state much more European.
The defining problem of current British politics is nationalism. The country is unable to make up its mind on Europe. For a Stuart (even a post-Stuart) Britain, this dilemma would never have existed.
It was Sir Walter Scott who travestied the Stuart attempt to restore absolutism as a "romantic adventure." In fact, its aim was "true" modernisation through what was then the standard European formula: monarchy, aristocracy, bureaucracy and, in Britain's case, religious tolerance. In 1745 it was Prince Charles who represented the forces of progress against a deviant regime using overseas loot to prop up Protestant bigotry and cutthroat commercialism.
Today we have a few advantages over the benighted "Forty-Fivers." We know the absolutist formula was mistaken. We also know that an insular industrial revolution was gestating while they were battling it out at Culloden. But these facts would not have been different if the Highland army had won and Charles had returned south to meet up with a French invasion force.
Scott's basic idea was that the English would not long have tolerated a Stuart monarchy. Tales of a Grandfather concludes: "The defeat of Prince Charles could alone have ended the internal divisions of Great Britain... any victory he obtained would only have added to the protraction of civil strife, and the continuance and increase of national calamity." Scott was almost certainly right. No one can know how long a French-supported imperium might have endured.
But in any case, far from contradicting the essence of retrospective Jacobitism, this speculation confirms it. Immediately, Great Britain might have been "Frenchified."
Any repeat of the 1688 Revolution against restored absolute rule would have been different from the original. It would have been more violent, more socially radical—in a word, more "French. "The missing English republicanism which so disappointed Tom Paine and has gone on puzzling left-wing intellectuals such as the late EP Thompson, would actually have come about.
What about the "internal divisions of Great Britain"? These are, to put it mildly, still with us. If the external dilemma is Europe, the big internal ones remain Scotland and Ireland.
The British state's current problems consist almost entirely of unfinished Jacobite business. It would all be a lot less unfinished if only the "King over the water" had pressed on from Derby to London in December 1745, or emerged victorious at Culloden.
Coming after the onset of the age of nationalism in the late 18th cen-tury, the "protraction of civil strife" over which Scott wept ambivalently would have re-established an independent Scotland. And a separate Ireland with Ulster as part of it.
