Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill have reconstructed an important incident in both the history of Jacobitism and the early Hanoverian regime. Timed to take advantage of discontent from the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, the plot was an effort by supporters of James III (the Old Pretender, to Hanoverian adherents) to remove George I in favor of the Catholic Stuart descendant of James II. However, like previous attempts against the new dynasty in 1715 and 1719, the plot failed, triggering moves by Robert Walpole and the government that further marginalized Tories and entrenched the Whig Supremacy (and Walpole's authority).

Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill provide a useful perspective contrary to the traditional Whig view of Jacobitism, as they are definitely of the school of the possibility that, under the right circumstances, a restoration or coup, with historical models in 1660 and 1688, might be possible for the Stuarts. Among Jacobite true believers, there were men who repeatedly staked their lives and fortunes on this being the case, and they encouraged the repeated tries against the Georges. Using the rich sources in the Stuart papers of the Royal Archives at Windsor, many of which are cryptic and encrypted, the authors reconstruct the network of Jacobite activists in Britain and Europe and their complicated machinations to bring off an invasion and revolution.

Some of the most interesting aspects of the book are the details of Jacobite planning—the careful use of visual propaganda with hidden signals and coded references in portraits and medals, and the authorship and deployment of written messages and printed newspapers to support the cause. Mentioning the connections to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels should remind students in eighteenth-century studies of the importance of the political context of classic texts. Additionally, the authors draw attention to the role of financier John Law, usually the focus of economic historians, as a central player in international Jacobitism. This international element, easy to overlook in superficial treatments of Jacobites, shows through here in the intricate connections among France, Spain, Russia, Sweden, and the Italian princes.

The drawback to this book is that in focusing so intensely on the Jacobite sources, the authors overlook the overall context of the events in the reign of George I. A thorough grounding in the 1715 rebellion and its aftermath is necessary for a reader to understand the reactions of the Whig ministry to the new plot, as well as the behavior of key Jacobites in Britain. The ham-handed and tactless arrests of leading figures may have been dictated by previous Jacobite escapes, like that of Lord Nithsdale, which had shown the disadvantage of allowing family visits and niceties. Jacobites, too, were perfectly willing to subvert the justice system, as seen in the overt manipulation of the 1718 Grand Jury indictments in Scotland.

The book is also quick to describe events as melodramatically black or white, rather than the nuanced picture of shifting political allegiance and advantage that was the reality for most men (outside of true believers on each side). The dissatisfaction of the nation at the accession of the new king, painted as deeply and exclusively against George I, is examined in other works as being also against local officials and including personal grudges. It seems a little overheated to describe the trials and aftermath of the Atterbury plot as the “largest witch hunt in British history” (153) or the actions of Jacobites as comparable to the endurance of the Resistance movements of World War II, casting the government of Walpole as Nazi Germany by implication. George I comes off, as the authors introduce him, as having “no knowledge of the English language and little understanding of British institutions or constitutional practice” (25), a historiography more in line with Sir Bart. Henry Machu Imbert-Terry than emergent studies of the first Hanoverian monarch as epitomized by the rewrite of the king's Dictionary of National Biography entry.

But it is in the aftermath of the 1715 rebellion that the view of the forest for the trees is most lacking. The authors dismiss the protracted negotiations for pardons and immunity from forfeiture with “it was usual for friends to try to intercede on behalf of persons whose estates had been forfeited and it was not an attempt to come to terms with the Hanoverian regime” (74)—despite collections of letters in the National Archives of Scotland that spell out explicit terms by which Jacobites were wheeling and dealing their way back into the Hanoverian establishment. These negotiations for lives and fortune had a significant effect on the behavior of men like the earl of Seaforth, a highland chief crucial to the viability of any rising in Scotland.

The most contentious element of the work is the claim that Walpole, in order to manufacture cause to break the conspiracy and maintain himself in power on the wave of paranoia against a plot (although is it paranoia when there is a plot?), had key documents forged that implicated Atterbury and led to his arrest and trial. The discussion is an interesting tour through early eighteenth-century espionage practices, and the power of the ministry to intercept and decrypt letters, as well as Jacobite efforts to avoid detection, but cannot make a definitive case that Walpole went as far as to frame the key conspirators in order to move against them.

This is a work that should interest experts in the early eighteenth century, as it provides a useful “other” to the Whig regime and reference to rarely engaged sources about the South Sea Company and the political atmosphere of George I's reign. Nonspecialists are apt to be confused by the intricate nature of the conspiracy and may wish to read in the expanding field of Jacobite and Hanoverian studies to fully appreciate the plot and the shades of its interpretation.