Oct 28 • History & Law
Erased Before the Battle: Scotland’s Long Fight for Sovereignty and the Right to Self-Determination
Everyone knows the picture history painted for us. Tartan & Flags snapping in the wind, a desperate charge across the moor, and the inevitable defeat that supposedly proved Scotland’s rebellion was doomed from the start. The word Jacobite has been filed away beside words like romantic, futile, misguided. What almost no one asks is what came before Culloden - the slow erasure of a nation’s ability to fight back.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Scotland had already spent two centuries resisting absorption. From the Rough Wooing to the Darien disaster, every generation had faced a choice between submission or punishment. When persuasion failed, policy hardened into removal: leaders executed, sympathisers imprisoned, families cleared from their land or shipped to colonies as indentured labour. Long before the British bayonets lined up at Drummossie Moor, Scotland’s capacity for resistance had been deliberately dismantled.
After the failed Union negotiations of the 1690s, the independent trading venture at Darien was strangled through English interference; its collapse bankrupted much of the country. The debt relief offered in exchange for signing the 1707 Act of Union was not partnership - it was ransom. When riots broke out across Scottish towns, they were written down in London as disturbances rather than acts of national protest. The men who refused the treaty were marked for treason; many would later reappear in the gaols of 1715 and 1745.
Between those years, the British government did what empires do best: it made sure that when the next uprising came, it would already have its outcome decided. Garrisons were built along the Great Glen; weapons were banned; clan leaders watched, exiled, or executed; Gaelic stripped from schools; loyalty purchased with confiscated estates. By 1745, the rising that Charles Edward Stuart led was not the reckless adventure of a few romantic highlanders, it was the final act of a people who had already been hunted, weakened, and silenced.
Culloden wasn’t the end of Scotland’s story. It was proof of how far the Crown was willing to go to make sure Scotland could never again write its own.
The Jacobite Manifesto and the Question of Independence
Critics often insist that the Jacobite risings were purely dynastic quarrels, driven by loyalty to the Stuarts rather than by any desire for Scottish independence. The historical record says otherwise. The very first Jacobite manifesto, issued by John Erskine, Earl of Mar in 1715, makes Scotland’s constitutional position unmistakably clear. It declares:
“Our quarrel turns upon these two points - the restoring our lawful and natural King, and the dissolving the Union. Both which, being of the greatest concern to us and our posterity, ought to be seriously weigh’d by all Scotsmen.”
That sentence, preserved in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, leaves no room for reinterpretation. The Jacobite cause was not merely about replacing one monarch with another; it was about restoring the independence Scotland had lost through an unwanted and coercive union. To claim otherwise is to ignore the plain wording of the movement’s own founding declaration. For the Scots who rose in 1715 and again in 1745, the throne and the nation were inseparable - one could not be restored without the other.
The Long Resistance
1. The Rough Wooing (1540s–1560s)
England’s first serious campaign to absorb Scotland came not through diplomacy but fire. In 1544 Henry VIII ordered Edinburgh, Leith, and the Border towns burned to force a marriage between his son Edward and the infant Mary Queen of Scots. The policy was known - accurately - as the Rough Wooing. Villages were levelled, churches destroyed, thousands killed or driven north. Rather than submission, the attacks deepened Scotland’s alliance with France and the Catholic world. The idea of union with England was born not in negotiation but in smoke.
2. The Covenant and the Civil Wars (1638–1651)
A century later Scotland again asserted its right to self-government through the National Covenant, rejecting English attempts to dictate religion and law. The ensuing civil wars left the country occupied by Cromwell’s army. Ministers, nobles, and soldiers who refused English rule were executed or sent to the colonies. This period forged the conviction that Scotland’s freedom was not a gift from kings but an obligation of conscience, an idea that would live on in the Jacobite creed.
3. The Darien Scheme (1698–1700)
By the end of the seventeenth century Scotland sought independence through commerce. The Company of Scotland raised nearly half the nation’s circulating wealth to establish a trading colony at Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama. England’s government forbade its colonies from supplying the venture and ordered the Royal Navy to deny assistance. Starved of support, the colony failed; more than two thousand Scots died. The financial collapse crippled the country and left it vulnerable to English leverage. Debt relief became the bait for the 1707 Act of Union.
4. The Union of 1707: Consent by Coercion
Protests erupted in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dumfries, and beyond. Petitions poured in, warning that union meant the extinction of Scotland’s sovereignty. London dismissed them as “tumults.” Those who opposed were labelled agitators or Jacobites, whether or not they supported the Stuarts. The treaty passed, not by popular will, but by a handful of paid commissioners. The promise of shared prosperity masked the immediate aim to secure Scotland’s ports, taxes, and army for England’s wars abroad.
5. The First Rising, 1715
When the Earl of Mar raised the standard of James VIII at Braemar, thousands rallied under it. The movement was less about restoring a dynasty than restoring autonomy. The rebellion’s defeat unleashed brutal retribution: executions at Preston and Liverpool, beheadings on Tower Hill, hundreds transported to Virginia and the Caribbean. Estates were seized, clan leaders imprisoned, communities broken apart. By 1716 the message was clear: question the Union, and you would hang for treason.
6. Between Risings: 1716–1745
For three decades the Highlands and Lowlands lived under quiet occupation. Fort George, Fort William, and Fort Augustus anchored a chain of garrisons through the Great Glen. English regiments patrolled the glens, roads were carved for rapid troop movement, and disarming acts stripped civilians of weapons. Gaelic was discouraged in schools and the kirk; loyalty oaths were demanded from every clan chief. Spies and informers filled the inns and taverns. By the 1740s, open rebellion looked impossible, until it happened.
7. The Rising of 1745
When Charles Edward Stuart landed in the Hebrides with barely a handful of men, the government laughed. Within months he held Edinburgh and defeated the British army at Prestonpans. The victories proved what centuries of propaganda denied: that Scotland’s will to govern itself was not extinct. But experience and resources had been destroyed in earlier purges. As the army marched south, hesitation from exiled nobles and foreign allies left it exposed. The retreat from Derby and the slaughter at Culloden were not evidence of naïve rebellion, they were the final punishment for daring to rise at all.
8. Aftermath: Erasure by Law
In the months following Culloden, villages were burned, crofts looted, families starved out. Men were executed or transported; women flogged for sheltering kin. The Dress Act outlawed Highland attire; speaking Gaelic in schools became a disciplinary offence. The clan system - Scotland’s social and cultural spine - was dismantled by statute. What the sword began, legislation finished. The survivors were forced into silence or exile, their land turned over to those loyal to London.
9. The Inversion of Empire
Within a generation, the very people whose culture had been crushed were filling the ranks of the British army and the colonial civil service. Service to empire became the only safe form of ambition left. The same regiments that burned the glens would later occupy India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Scotland’s sons built the empire that had first subdued their own nation - a survival strategy misremembered as partnership.
The Declaration of Arbroath: The Original Statement of Sovereignty
Long before the Jacobite era, Scotland had already defined its principle of self-determination. On 6 April 1320, the nobles of Scotland sent a letter to Pope John XXII — known ever since as the Declaration of Arbroath — asserting that Scotland would never accept English domination. It stated:
“As long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with his life.”
That declaration, recognised by the United Nations as one of the earliest expressions of the modern right to self-determination, established the moral and legal foundation upon which later Scots stood. When the Jacobites fought to dissolve the Union and restore their own king, they were acting within a centuries-old national tradition of defending Scotland’s sovereignty - not inventing a new rebellion, but continuing an old promise.
The Numbers and the Human Cost
History tends to speak of the Jacobite rebellions as skirmishes - brief flashes of drama on a moor. But the real measure of what happened lies in the prison ledgers, the transport lists, and the silent ships that left from English ports. They show the methodical destruction of a nation’s capacity to resist.
After 1715: The Purge Begins
When the Earl of Mar’s rising failed, the British government moved quickly to make examples. Around 1,500 Scots were arrested, their property seized, and their families driven into destitution.
In the months that followed:
• Dozens were executed at Preston, Liverpool, and on Tower Hill.
• Hundreds were transported as forced labour to the colonies.
• More than 2,000 prisoners were held for months in makeshift gaols, many dying of disease before they could be tried.
The survivors were stripped of titles and land. Whole lineages were extinguished, not just through executions but by design: ruin the chiefs and you remove the clan. The government called it justice. Scotland knew it as dismantling.
Between the Risings: The Quiet Years That Weren’t
From 1716 to 1745, the Crown avoided mass trials but maintained mass fear. People were arrested for toasting the wrong king, for singing Jacobite songs, for keeping pistols or broadswords that had hung on family walls for generations. Ordinary Highlanders were marched to Inverness or Fort William on suspicion alone and held without trial. We know this because their names appear in State Paper warrants: tailors, crofters, weavers, shepherds - “suspected of treasonable practices.”
No charges, no sentences, just disappearance into paper and time.
After 1745: The Machinery of Retaliation
Once Culloden ended the fighting, retaliation became industrial. According to The Prisoners of the ’45and the Jacobite Database of 1745, more than 3,470 individuals were officially recorded as prisoners of the rebellion. Most were Scottish. Their fates:
• ≈120 executed, publicly hanged or beheaded for treason.
• ≈900 transported or banished to the Americas and Caribbean.
• ≈500 died in custody, often in the prison hulks moored on the Thames.
• The rest released or pardoned after months or years in captivity.
Among them were not only soldiers but schoolmasters, merchants, farmers, ministers’ wives, and teenage boys who had carried messages. Records show children as young as twelve sent overseas as indentured servants. Even Gaelic poets and pipers were arrested for “inciting disaffection.”
At Carlisle alone, thirty-one Scots were executed in a single month of 1746. The rest were marched to York, Lancaster, or London in chains. Some were displayed as spectacles for English crowds before being shipped to Barbados, Virginia, or Antigua. Others simply vanished from the record after reaching port.
Economic and Cultural Casualties
The destruction wasn’t confined to bodies. Confiscated estates covered millions of acres, redistributed to English landlords and speculators. Gaelic schools lost funding; churches were repurposed or closed. By 1750, entire glens stood empty where once hundreds had lived. The men who survived exile often found themselves pressed into the very army that had burned their homes, used as colonial muscle in India or North America.
This wasn’t accidental. It was policy, the deliberate conversion of a resistant population into a compliant workforce, whether at home or abroad.
A Pattern Recognised Too Late
When you add these numbers together, Scotland’s so-called “rebellions” look less like isolated uprisings and more like a sustained campaign of political cleansing. Between 1715 and 1750, well over five thousand Scots were executed, imprisoned, transported, or exiled for acts linked - or alleged to be linked - to the defence of their own sovereignty. Generations of leadership, wealth, language, and culture were methodically stripped away.
Legacy and the Right to Self-Determination
What followed Culloden wasn’t peace, it was the administrative management of surrender. The Highland Dress Act of 1746 outlawed the very clothes that had marked Scottish identity. Speaking Gaelic in schools became a punishable offence. Possessing a weapon, even a dirk or hunting knife, could mean prison. The Disarming Acts, the Proscription Acts, and the Forfeited Estates Acts worked in concert to break the cultural spine of a people who had refused to bow.
Over the next century the clearances finished what the bayonets began. Tenants who had survived the wars were evicted to make way for sheep and profit. Those who left for the Lowlands or the colonies carried with them what little of their culture could be hidden in memory. By the time the nineteenth century called Scotland a partner in the British Empire, partnership had already been achieved by the simplest means, there was no longer enough resistance left to refuse it.
And yet, the idea of Scotland did not die. It travelled. In the songs of exile, in letters home from Nova Scotia and the Carolinas, in the names of towns built by people who still called themselves Scots. The descendants of the so-called rebels became the engineers, doctors, and teachers who built Britain’s global empire, but beneath the uniforms, they remained the children of a country that had never freely given itself away.
The Legal Lens We Forgot
Two centuries later, in 1960, the United Nations adopted Resolution 1514: The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It states plainly that “all peoples have the right to self-determination” and that subjugation, domination, and exploitation are violations of fundamental human rights.
Read through that lens, Scotland’s eighteenth-century story ceases to be a rebellion and becomes what it truly was: a struggle against annexation. The men and women executed as traitors were, by modern law, prisoners of conscience. The thousands transported or exiled were not criminals, they were deported citizens of a nation whose consent had never been obtained.
Resolution 1514 was written for the world that Britain created, yet its words describe precisely what Britain itself once did to Scotland. That is the uncomfortable symmetry history keeps trying to look away from.
A Story Still Being Written
To tell this story our way is not to rewrite history, but to finish it. The record already holds the names, the numbers, and the orders signed in Westminster ink. What has been missing is the understanding that Scotland’s resistance was never fanaticism or romance, it was governance, democracy, and survival.
Four hundred years of protest, imprisonment, and defiance do not add up to failure. They add up to endurance. And endurance is the foundation of sovereignty.
So when we speak now of self-determination, we are not reaching for something new. We are simply returning to the point where history was interrupted to the unfinished sentence left hanging above the gallows at Carlisle, the plantations of the Caribbean, and the burned glens of the Highlands.
Scotland never stopped saying no.
Sources:
All prisoner figures and Jacobite data drawn primarily from The Prisoners of the ’45 and the Jacobite Database of 1745, cross-referenced with archival material from the National Records of Scotland and the National Archives (UK).
1. The Prisoners of the ’45 by Sir Bruce G. Seton & Jean Gordon Arnot (Scottish History Society, 1928-29) lists of prisoners, fates, transport, etc.
2.Jacobite Database of 1745 (JDB1745) — searchable dataset of names, capture places, fates, along with archival references. 3.Jacobites of Aberdeenshire & Banffshire in the Forty‑Five (Alistair & Henrietta Tayler, 1928) — regional study of rebels from north-east Scotland. 4. The Forfarshire or Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment: Raised on Behalf of the Royal House of Stuart in 1745‑6 (Alexander Mackintosh, 1914) — regimental/muster roll detail. 5. Gordons Under Arms: A Biographical Muster Roll of Officers Named Gordon in the Navies and Armies … and in the Jacobite Risings (Constance Oliver Skelton & John Malcolm Bulloch, 1912) — details on one major clan’s involvement. (Listed in JDB1745 bibliography) 6. Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period 1699‑1750 (Col. James Allardyce, ed., 1895-96) — wide range of archival documents covering arrests, trials and more. https://jdb1745.net/
7. The Rising of 1745: With a Bibliography of Jacobite History (Charles Sanford Terry, ed.) — includes key bibliography of Jacobite-era sources. https://electricscotland.com/history/jacobites/risingof1745wit00terr.pdf
8. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire — academic monograph exploring the broader consequences of the ’45 across empire. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15zc8xh
9. Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 — contemporary narratives of Jacobite participants and prisoners. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20948/20948-h/20948-h.htm
9. A List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion, 1745‑46 (Scottish History Society, 1890) — early primary list of names. 10. Origins of the ’45 (W. B. Blaikie, 1916) — context and origins of the rising, useful for early arrests/surveillance. 11. The History of the Rebellion in Scotland 1745‑46 (John Home) — contemporary account, useful for narrative and firsthand details. https://www.scribd.com/document/235203881/Prisoners-of-the-45-Volume-1
12. Seton, Sir Bruce Gordon, and Jean Gordon Arnot. The Prisoners of the ’45. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1928–1929.
Available at: https://deriv.nls.uk/dcn23/1271/7976/127179767.23.pdf
Jacobite Database of 1745. University of St Andrews. Accessed October 2025.
Terry, Charles Sanford. The Rising of 1745: With a Bibliography of Jacobite History. Cambridge University Press, 1903.
Tayler, Alistair, and Henrietta Tayler. Jacobites of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the Forty-Five.Aberdeen: The University Press, 1928.
Skelton, Constance Oliver, and John Malcolm Bulloch. Gordons Under Arms: A Biographical Muster Roll of Officers Named Gordon in the Navies and Armies of Britain, Europe, America, and in the Jacobite Risings. Aberdeen, 1912.
Mackintosh, Alexander. The Forfarshire or Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment: Raised on Behalf of the Royal House of Stuart in 1745–6. Dundee: Winter, Duncan & Co., 1914.
Allardyce, James, ed. Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period, 1699–1750. 2 vols. Aberdeen: The New Spalding Club, 1895–1896.
Home, John. The History of the Rebellion in Scotland in 1745, 1746. London: T. Cadell, 1802.
Blaikie, Walter Biggar. Origins of the ’45. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1916.
Scottish History Society. A List of Persons Concerned in the Rebellion (1745–46). Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1890.
National Archives (UK). “Prisoners after Culloden” and related educational resources.
National Records of Scotland. “The Declaration of Arbroath (1320).”
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Erased Before the Battle: Scotland’s Long Fight for Sovereignty and the Right to Self-Determination
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