George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1681–1731

This comprehensive analysis of the Jacobite mind challenges prevailing stereotypes about Jacobites and provides a detailed history of the Jacobite movement, whose influence on the development of Scotland and the British Isles in the eighteenth century was immense. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of one of the most active Jacobites of the early 18th century: George Lockhart of Carnwath.

Lockhart was almost a stereotypical eighteenth-century Scottish coming man: a Commissioner for Midlothian in the Scottish Parliament; a member of the Commission charged with negotiating the treaty of Union; MP for Midlothian at Westminster; an improving landlord; an accomplished writer and pamphleteer. But most of all, he was a committed, passionate Jacobite and nationalist who rose to become one of the senior leaders of the Jacobite underground in Scotland in the period between the rising of 1715 and the more famous ’45. By bringing out the distinctive features of Lockhart’s perception of the world and his times, Daniel Szechi sheds light on the inner workings of the Jacobite mind and hence the Jacobite underground in Scotland during the traumatic years leading up to and following the Union of 1707.