"The agreeable contrast" : British caricatures of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion

Abstract

“The agreeable contrast” is the telling headline of several eighteenth-century satirical prints published between 1746 and 1749, which raise the subject of good leadership and just government. These prints are generally classified as political caricatures of the failed 1745 Jacobite rebellion led by Charles Edward Stuart in Scotland and encapsulate how contested and many-voiced political and religious identity in mid-eighteenth-century Britain remained. On the one hand, such caricatures uncover the enduring vigor of anti-Catholic sentiment and the incessant reference to English laws and liberty as powerful patterns of argumentation. This suggests that Britain was quickly developing into a modern nation state with distinctly insular traditions in church and state. But on the other hand, such caricatures disclose that the European age of Enlightenment was also shaped by self-confident aristocratic cosmopolitanism and religious irenicism. And the fact that these alternatives of British identity were especially embraced by adherents of the perishing Stuart dynasty does not make them any less valid. Allegations of backwardness and bigotry voiced by the Hanoverian faction must therefore be scrutinized, and the inventive caricatures of the 1745 rebellion testify that the diverse protest movements that made up Jacobitism may have been reformist in their own right.