In the spring of 1708, a small squadron of French vessels attempted to land a force with the Stuart Pretender, James III and VIII, on the Fife coast, but in spite of a less than sterling performance by the British Royal Navy, Admiral George Byng forced them to abort what might have become a (if not the) major Jacobite rising. The British ruling elite—and perhaps half of Scotland and nearly all of England and Wales—could breathe again. Yet, as Daniel Szechi contends, it was a close-run thing. In the immediate aftermath of the union of the two kingdoms circumstances were fairly propitious for launching an invasion of Scotland and raising Jacobite forces north of the border.

Szechi's stimulating Britain's Lost Revolution? is, in essence, an explanation of how various factors present in the winter of 1707–1708 made a descent on Scotland with the aim of launching a major rebellion viable and likely to cause significant disruption to the British state, if not worse. He goes beyond this, however, by exploring the relationship between internal Scottish politics and international Jacobite conspiracy, in an attempt to suggest what sort of post-restoration settlement might have emerged in Scotland. Szechi's purpose in doing so is to demonstrate that Scottish Jacobitism was not just an Episcopalian reaction to the Revolutionary settlement: its appeal could transcend narrow religious and dynastic allegiances. Certainly at least a sizable portion of the Scots Jacobite leadership had embraced a radically “commonwealth” outlook on the Revolutionary settlement and were determined to force the exiled Stuarts into accepting a string of measures that (in this reviewer's view) would have reduced James's power to something like that of a stadtholder in the Dutch Republic. Szechi's treatment—bringing together his own research with that of Scottish historians—is illuminating and makes abundantly clear that Jacobitism was not inherently backward looking.

It was also not inherently boneheaded, like James II had been. Queen Mary Beatrice, James III's mother, showed real political skill in bringing Louis XIV's council to the point where it was willing to back an invasion with money, men, and matériel. But, as ever, the Jacobite government in exile was a supplicant at Versailles, which, by 1707, was seeing its war machine starting to seize up to an extent that the Jacobites simply do not seem to have appreciated. By contrast, Szechi makes a very serious effort to appreciate the changing geopolitical and geostrategic circumstances of the War of the Spanish Succession, over which the Jacobites had little control. It would, of course, be foolish to write off the chances of a successful landing that could have brought civil war back to at least part of the three kingdoms (and Szechi could, I think, have made more of the chances of a rising getting off the ground in 1707). A landing would have set back the cause of the Grand Alliance and destabilized England for a while. But it would have been wise of Szechi to halt speculation at this point, or at least to give more space to various alternative scenarios. Szechi's work—like so many studies of Jacobitism—is suffused with a sense of what might have been, and it makes an implicit suggestion that a Scotland under James would have given the northern kingdom a body politic morally superior to that of its larger southern neighbor. This mild version of virtual history might be of some small comfort to a certain sort of politically committed reader, but it might also rest upon a questionable reading of how things would have turned out had the “entreprise d'Ecosse” achieved a landing and Scottish mobilization.

What Szechi does not seriously consider is that the Stuart court in exile at Saint-Germain might have been deeply insincere in its swallowing of the radical “country” program its supporters demanded it accept: had it been restored in Scotland and then broken faith, what alternative would James's supporters have had but to accept the situation or reopen civil war and probable English invasion? And even if James and Mary did accept prerogative restrictions, we need to consider the practicality of a weak monarchical commonwealth facing a hostile and very powerful southern neighbor. In the event that the rebellion had indeed succeeded in establishing a separate Scottish state under James III, allied with France, relations with England would have been fraught even in times of peace. It is highly likely that considerations of raison d’état would have fairly soon produced a more dynamic and assertive monarchy in Edinburgh simply to protect and hold together a realm that was riven with political and religious tensions.

Yet, as Szechi acknowledges, it is open to serious question whether a rising would have succeeded even in its limited aim of restoring the Jacobites in Scotland. His case seems to hinge on the likelihood of a supported landing pushing the British state into a period of profound crisis, if not financial meltdown, and forcing it to pull back from its continental commitment to deal with a major rising. There was indeed quite a wobble in London in 1708. But it is more likely that Sidney Godolphin's skill at managing the money markets would have settled things enough to keep the Grand Alliance together while the Duke of Marlborough dealt with the rebellion, not least as the economic and financial situation was much more robust than in the Nine Years’ War. At the same time, this reviewer can testify that the records of the French finances and army demonstrate pretty clearly that France—which could provide springboard assistance to the Jacobites—would almost certainly have been unable to follow through with logistical support after an initial couple of months. The Jacobites would have been on their own, and the rebellion would have probably gone the way of the 1745 in 1746. It was their tragedy that, at a time when Scotland was probably riper for rebellion than at any other moment after 1689, they could persuade the French to support a rising only when Louis XIV was desperate and too weak to follow up any initial investment. It might have been a blessing to all concerned that the landing did not succeed.