Lot 244
JACOBITE RISING OF 1745
PROCLAMATION OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART, 10 OCTOBER 1745
Scottish Works of Art & Whisky
Auction: Lots 1 - 412 | 20 August 2024 at 10am
Description
contemporary secretarial manuscript copy, begins ‘As soon as we conducted by Providence of God arrived in Scotland …’, ends And this my Declaration will indicate to all posterity, the nobleness of my undertaking and generosity of intention, is given at our palace of Holy Rood House, C. P. R., By order of his Highness, Jo. Murray’, ink on laid paper with fleur-de-lys watermark, written on 3 sides of a single bifolium (39 x 25.5cm), partial separation along folds, nicks to extremities
Footnote
Prince Charles Edward Stuart's declaration of 10 October 1745, issued a month after the Jacobite capture of Edinburgh and less than three weeks after the Jacobite victory at the Battle of Prestonpans, was a major statement of his intended restoration of the Stuart dynasty and provides an insight into the kind of kingdom which might have come into being had he succeeded. In it the prince promises to respect freedom of religion and to consult parliament on the national debt and the nature of a refashioned union of England and Scotland, and refutes accusations of a Jacobite alliance with France and Spain, to which end he describes his arrival in Scotland, ‘attended by seven persons’ only, which he contrasts with the motley international backing of ‘Dutch, Danes, Hessians, and Swiss’ enjoyed by the Hanoverians. He asks whether his would-be subjects can say that have ‘been more happy and flourishing’ during 50 years of Hanoverian rule, and in an ingenious turn he presents a Stuart restoration as the true path to independence and domestic stability, asking: ‘Who has the better chance to be independent of foreign power? He who with the aid of his own subjects can wrest the government out of the hands of an intruder? Or he who cannot without assistance from abroad support his government … against the undisciplined part of those he has ruled over for so many years?'.