[9] Organised by a small group of Catholic nobility, the October 1641 Irish Rebellion was the cumulative effect of land confiscation, loss of political control, anti-Catholic measures and economic decline.

Although Charles and Parliament both supported raising an army to suppress the Rebellion, neither trusted the other with its control; these tensions ultimately led to the outbreak of the First English Civil War in August 1642.

[11] In 1642, the Catholic Confederacy representing the Irish insurgents proclaimed allegiance to Charles, but the Stuarts were an unreliable ally, since concessions in Ireland cost them Protestant support in all three kingdoms.

For James and his Stuart successors, the main prize was to regain England, while the primary French objective was to tie down British resources, rebellions in Scotland and Ireland being seen as the cheapest option.

[26] The Irish Jacobites and their French allies were finally defeated at the battle of Aughrim in 1691, and the Treaty of Limerick ended the war in Ireland; future risings on behalf of the exiled Stuarts were confined to England and Scotland.

[31] Historian Frank McLynn identifies seven primary drivers in Jacobitism, noting that while the movement contained "sincere men [..] who aimed solely to restore the Stuarts", it "provided a source of legitimacy for political dissent of all kinds".

They claimed the 1688 Revolution had enabled political corruption and allowed selfish opportunists, such as Whigs, religious dissenters, and foreigners, to take control of the government and oppress the common people.

Non-juring Church of Ireland clergyman Charles Leslie was perhaps the most extreme divine right theorist, but even he argued the monarch was bound by "his oath to God, as well as his promise to his people" and "the laws of justice and honour".

[36][42] After the 1701 Act of Settlement, Jacobite propagandists deemphasised the purely legitimist elements in their writing and by 1745, active promotion of hereditary and indefeasible right was restricted largely to a few Scots Episcopalians such as Lords Pitsligo and Balmerino.

[46] The ongoing Stuart focus on England and regaining a united British throne led to tensions with their broader-based supporters in 1745, when the primary goal of most Scots Jacobites was ending the 1707 Union.

[48] Populist songs and tracts presented the Stuarts as capable of correcting a wide range of ills and restoring social harmony, as well as contrasting Dutch and Hanoverian "foreigners" with a man who even in exile continued to consume English beef and beer.

[52] Historian Vincent Morely describes Irish Jacobitism as a distinctive ideology within the broader movement that "emphasised the Milesian ancestry of the Stuarts, their loyalty to Catholicism, and Ireland's status as a kingdom with a Crown of its own.

Tyrconnell's expansion of the army by the creation of Catholic regiments was welcomed by Diarmuid Mac Carthaigh, as enabling the native Irish 'Tadhg' to be armed and to assert his dominance over "John" the English Protestant.

[58] Since regaining England was his primary objective, James viewed Ireland as a strategic dead-end but Louis XIV of France argued it was the best place to launch a regime change war, since the administration was controlled by Tyrconnell and his cause was popular among the majority Catholic population.

[69] However, Gaelic scholar Breandán Ó Buachalla claims his reputation subsequently recovered as "the rightful king...destined to return', while upper-class Irish Jacobites like Charles O'Kelly and Nicholas Plunkett blamed "corrupt English and Scottish advisors" for his apparent desertion.

[70] After 1691, measures passed by the 1689 Parliament were annulled, penal laws criminalized the practice of Catholicism and barred Catholics from public life, while the Act of Attainder was used to justify further land confiscations.

[74] Some historians claim Jacobite rhetoric and symbolism in the many works of Aisling poetry composed in the Irish language and support for rapparees like Éamonn an Chnoic, John Hurley, and Galloping Hogan, is proof of popular backing for a Stuart restoration.

Many of the Highland clansmen who were a feature of Jacobite armies were raised this way: in all three major risings, the bulk of the rank and file were supplied by a small number of north-western clans whose leaders joined the rebellion.

[99] Episcopalianism was popular among social conservatives, as it emphasised indefeasible hereditary right, absolute obedience, and implied deposition of the senior Stuart line was a breach of natural order.

[102] Episcopalian ministers, such as Professor James Garden of Aberdeen, presented the 1707 Union as one in a series of disasters to befall Scotland, provoked by "the sins [...] of rebellion, injustice, oppression, schism and perjury".

[103] Opposition was boosted by measures imposed by the post-1707 Parliament of Great Britain, including the Treason Act 1708, the 1711 ruling that barred Scots peers with English or British peerages from their seats in the House of Lords, and tax increases.

[106] As in England, some objected less to the Union than the Hanoverian connection; Lord George Murray, a senior Jacobite commander in 1745, was a Unionist who repeatedly disagreed with Charles, but opposed "wars [...] on account of the Electors of Hanover".

This has led some historians, notably Bruce Lenman, to characterise the Jacobite risings as French-backed coup attempts by a small network drawn from the elite, though this view is not universally accepted.

Outside elite social circles, the Jacobite community circulated propaganda and symbolic objects through a network of clubs, print-sellers and pedlars, aimed at the provincial gentry and middling sort.

[113] Others included the "Sea Serjeants", largely composed of South Wales gentry or the "Independent Electors of Westminster" led by the Glamorganshire lawyer David Morgan, executed for his role in 1745.

[126] A plot to capture or assassinate George II, headed by Alexander Murray of Elibank, was betrayed to the government by Alastair Ruadh MacDonnell, or "Pickle the Spy", but not before Charles had sent two exiles as agents.

[135] Representing "pre-industrial paternalism" and "mystical loyalism" against forward-thinking individualism, this conception of Jacobitism was reinforced by Macaulay's stereotype of the typical "Tory-Jacobite squire" as a "bigoted, ignorant, drunken philistine".

[135] More recent analyses, such as that of J. C. D. Clark, suggest that Jacobitism can instead be regarded as part of a "deep vein of social and political conservatism running throughout British history", arguing that the Whig settlement was not as stable as has been depicted.

The Aisling poetic genre has also remained a living tradition and has been adapted, by poets such as Máire Bhuidhe Ní Laoghaire, Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún, and Seán Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin to more recent causes and struggles by the Irish people.

By 1933, John Lorne Campbell published the groundbreaking book Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, consisting of 32 Gaelic song-poems, which were analyzed for political content, annotated, and published with facing translations into English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter; the real cultural, political, and religious reasons for the Jacobite rising of 1745 had been obscured by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, who both depicted, "the Highlander as a romantic hero fighting for a lost cause.