A Call to Arms

Abstract

The bursting of the South Sea Bubble led the Jacobites to prepare for a general rising, while taking measures in Parliament to try and secure a constitutional restoration. Lord Strafford thought the great discontents over the South Sea affair would motivate a popular rising.¹ The Jacobites could not count on the kind of massive foreign invasion which had made the 1688 attempt succeed. They assumed, however, that France and Spain would allow them to use the Irish regiments in their service to land in England and Scotland to make a spearhead to protect them from preventative arrests. The size of the standing army and the availability of Dutch mercenary troops to defend the Hanoverian regime, however unpopular it was, made an unsupported internal rising in England very difficult. In Scotland, the situation was more favourable to the Jacobites because the clans had not been effectively disarmed after the Fifteen and private armies could be trained in the parts of Scotland where heritable jurisdictions remained and the Whig government’s authority did not run. This was the crux of the second phase of the Atterbury Plot.