In June 1688, seven prominent Englishmen secretly wrote to a foreign prince and asked him to intervene against their own king. Five months later, that prince landed in England with an army.

The king was James II of England and VII of Scotland, an openly Catholic Stuart. The invader was William of Orange, James’s Protestant nephew and son-in-law, stadtholder in the Dutch Republic and one of the foremost enemies of Louis XIV of France. James fled, William and Mary took the Crown and within months England was at war with the French king who had given the exiled Stuart monarch refuge.

That alone is extraordinary. But it was only the beginning.

Over the next generation, the Stuarts established an alternative royal court outside Paris; Jacobite exiles spread across Europe; Parliament tightened its grip over royal finance; the Bank of England was founded to help finance war against France; Catholics were excluded from the succession; England and Scotland were united; and the Crown eventually passed to the Protestant House of Hanover.

These events are usually taught separately. Put them back together, and 1688 begins to look less like a change of monarch and more like the construction of a new British order.

James II became king in 1685. His Catholicism caused anxiety, but it did not by itself bring him down. The crisis deepened through his use of royal dispensing powers, his religious policies, his standing army and his clashes with the established Church.

Then, on 10 June 1688, his Catholic queen, Mary of Modena, gave birth to James Francis Edward Stuart.

Until then, James’s Protestant daughter Mary stood in the succession. A male Catholic heir created the prospect of a continuing Catholic Stuart dynasty. Less than three weeks later, the so-called Immortal Seven – Edward Russell, Henry Sidney, Richard Lumley, Henry Compton, Charles Talbot, William Cavendish and Thomas Osborne – secretly invited William of Orange to intervene.

William landed at Brixham on 5 November 1688 with a substantial military force. James’s support collapsed, and he eventually escaped to France. Parliament later treated his flight as an abdication and offered the English Crown to William and Mary.

The phrase Glorious Revolution can make the episode sound almost administrative. It was not. A foreign prince had entered England with an army after receiving an invitation from leading members of the English elite.

William had his own reasons for coming. Louis XIV’s France was the great strategic enemy of the Dutch Republic, and English ships, money and manpower could transform the balance of power in Europe.

James’s destination made the new alignment unmistakable: Louis XIV received the deposed Stuart king in France, while England under William entered war against Louis in 1689.

The domestic revolution had become a European struggle.

James did not simply retire. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, an alternative Stuart court developed around him: aristocrats, soldiers, clergy, diplomats, servants and political agents. James died there in 1701, while his son continued the claim as the Jacobites’ James III and VIII.

This is why Jacobites appear so often in Continental literature. They were not merely Scottish rebels. They became part of a much wider British and Irish exile world extending through France, Rome, Spain and other European centres. The research places the broader late-seventeenth-century Continental exile population at roughly 30,000–40,000 people.

For a time there were, in effect, two rival political Britains: one centred upon London and the Protestant settlement, the other upon Saint-Germain and the exiled Stuart line.

The names are easily confused.

A Jacobite takes his name from Jacobus, Latin for James, and supported James II and his descendants.

A Jacobin belonged to the revolutionary politics of France nearly a century later.

Jacobitism sought restoration of a hereditary dynasty; Jacobinism became associated with revolutionary republicanism.

Yet the Jacobite exile later became important to Nesta Helen Webster’s interpretation of European secret societies.

Webster argued that Jacobite refugees helped carry a form of Royalist Freemasonry into France. In her reconstruction, some Masonic symbolism was adapted to the Stuart cause, with Britain imagined as a “land of promise” and London as Jerusalem. She did not accuse the original Jacobites of plotting the French Revolution. Her argument was instead that institutions created for one purpose could later be penetrated, redirected or transformed by people pursuing another.

Her wider chain – from Jacobite Masonry through higher degrees, Illuminism and eventually revolutionary politics – is much more speculative. But the historical question remains intriguing: how did a movement devoted to restoring hereditary monarchy become embedded in the Continental world in which later Masonic and revolutionary currents would develop?

While the Stuarts built an exile network, William faced a more immediate problem at home: war was expensive.

After 1688, Parliament became increasingly central to taxation and state borrowing. Lenders had greater confidence that debts backed by parliamentary taxation would be honoured, and Britain began developing what historians call the Financial Revolution.

Then came 1694. William needed money for the war against France. A scheme associated with the Scottish merchant William Paterson, supported by men including Charles Montagu and Michael Godfrey, raised £1.2 million for the government. In return, subscribers received interest and shares in a new private joint-stock corporation: the Bank of England.

It was not yet a modern central bank. But its significance was enormous. Future taxation could now support present borrowing on a far greater scale.

The new machinery looked something like this:

Parliamentary taxation → public credit → private investment → government borrowing → sustained warfare.

Even William and Mary subscribed £10,000 to the new Bank.

This was not a bank imposed upon an unwilling monarchy by hostile financiers. Crown, Parliament and City investors were participating in the same emerging system. William needed money to fight France; investors wanted secure returns; Parliament provided the fiscal guarantees.

The political centre of gravity was shifting.

The constitutional transformation continued alongside the financial one.

The settlement of 1688–89 had already shown that hereditary succession could be overridden. The Act of Settlement of 1701 went further, excluding Catholics and settling the future English Crown upon Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant descendants.

Sophia was not an unrelated German princess chosen at random. She was James I’s granddaughter and therefore carried Stuart blood. But Parliament had changed the decisive criterion: Protestantism now overrode closeness in the hereditary line.

More than fifty Catholic claimants stood ahead of the eventual Hanoverian successor. They were passed over.

Scotland remained a separate constitutional problem, because the English Parliament could not simply determine the Scottish succession. The Union of 1707 resolved much of that danger by creating the Kingdom of Great Britain and embedding the Protestant succession within the new settlement.

When Queen Anne died in 1714, Sophia had already died. Her son became George I.

The Stuart bloodline had not disappeared.

The senior Catholic branch had simply been excluded.

The following year brought the Jacobite rising of 1715, and one unusually bitter insider left a record of its failure.

John, Master of Sinclair, wrote Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715, later printed from his original manuscript with annotations by Sir Walter Scott.

Sinclair was no hostile outsider. He belonged to the Jacobite world, yet his judgement of its leadership was so severe that his family resisted publication. The preface says he was intent upon exposing their “folly, treachery, and incapacity.”

His memoir reads less like romantic Jacobite nostalgia than an internal post-mortem of a failed restoration. Sinclair was writing the autopsy of the cause from inside it.

And restoration is the key word. The rising of 1715 was an attempt to undo the settlement created since 1688.

The chronology is striking when seen whole:

1688 – William lands; James flees.
1689 – England goes to war with France.
1694 – the Bank of England is founded.
1701 – the Protestant succession is fixed in law.
1707 – England and Scotland unite.
1714 – George I of Hanover succeeds Anne.
1715 – Jacobites attempt to restore the Stuarts.

In less than thirty years, Britain had acquired a new dynasty, a new constitutional settlement, a new financial machinery, a new relationship between Crown and Parliament, and an exiled rival monarchy operating across Europe.

These developments were not the product of a single plan, but they reinforced one another with remarkable speed. William’s European war required money; parliamentary taxation supported public credit; public credit financed war; the threat of Stuart restoration sharpened the Protestant succession; and the succession settlement eventually placed a Hanoverian on the throne.

The result proved formidable. The financial system developed after 1688 helped Britain sustain wars on a scale earlier monarchs had struggled to finance. The destruction of one political order helped create the machinery of another.

But the defeated Stuart world did not disappear. It survived at Saint-Germain, in Rome, in Catholic institutions, foreign armies and aristocratic households across Europe. Its members repeatedly sought to return, and their exile brought them into contact with political and fraternal worlds far beyond Britain.

That is what makes the Jacobite story so much larger than Culloden.

The Jacobites were not merely the rebels who lost. They were the exiled political order that Britain had chosen to replace.

By Éire & Albion