Hi DH, thanks for this excellent question, which I'll do my best to address for you. First, a gentle qualification to your initial statement; what is often emphasised is usually dependent on the forum and sector to which it is broadcast. Academic scholarship, however, has been pretty consistent with stressing the international breadth of Jacobite sentiment and the multicultural makeup of the Jacobite armies of the eighteenth century. Yet the martial risings themselves started and definitively ended in Scotland, and there is no doubt that the largest segment of Jacobite martial constituency in both of the biggest risings in 1715 and 1745 were drawn from Scotland. In the same breath, it's perfectly accurate to state that Jacobitism and the risings launched by the diverse communities of the disaffected, especially in Britain, cannot be defined simply by faith, region, or 'nationality'. The Jacobite era occasioned a sustained but intermittently effective period of opposition to the Williamite and Hanoverian monarchies by a broad but relatively thin population, mostly in Britain but with international ramifications amidst the backdrop of what I tend to describe as a complex lattice of European power politics. At the same time, it was also a brutal civil war that pitted regions, clans, families, and siblings against one another for a variety of reasons, only some of them focused on restoring the Stuarts to the thrones of the Three Kingdoms or dissolving the Union of 1707.

What all this boils down to is that it would be extremely difficult to identify an 'average soldier' on either side of the Jacobite challenge by the demographic examples you have provided. Picking out Jacobites from a lineup is essentially impossible, especially due to the clandestine nature of its material and ideological transmission, as well as the fact that doing so was patently illegal and potentially punishable by death. Most (of the very few) demographic and prosopographical analyses have instead been undertaken the other way around: by compiling the constituent data based upon archival sources and reporting on the categories and trends that appear in the whole. Fortunately for our particular needs here, the project on which I've been working for many years happens to be focused on teasing out these demographics to discern what kinds of people – both martial and civilian – were involved in later-era Jacobitism and why.

It sounds like you are focused on identifying the types of English citizens who tended to follow and support Jacobite ideologies, and while there have been excellent works done on this in a scholarly context, I can at the very least set you on the right track here with a basic rundown of who they generally were and from where they came. Daniel Szechi uses the term 'courtier-aristocrats' to describe the ideological couriers of English Jacobitism who were boosted by the English Catholic and Anglican communities and other well-to-do eccentrics in keeping Jacobite hopes alive south of the border. The core of Jacobite support in Britain came from the Protestant non-jurors, who were almost always Church of England in the south and Episcopalian in Scotland. The Tory party provided a founded political voice for opposition to Whig progress, though there is plenty of debate at just how deeply the Jacobites had infiltrated it and how 'official' its stance was on advancing blatantly pro-Stuart directives, especially given the fact that Tories were not particularly well-positioned to offer realistic alternatives. High Church values joined with 'Country' ideals to coin the 'typical' English Jacobite, who was likely to be landed elite from a conservative family in the north and north-west of England. We can hone in with finer detail on the plebeians who were captured while in active rebellion during the risings, many of which hailed from Lancashire, Cheshire, and Northumberland, though Paul Monod shows that popular demonstrations with a Jacobite tint occurred widely throughout England. Prisoner lists from Preston in 1715 show a majority of Lancashire men roughly split down the middle between Catholic and Anglican, and we know that by 1745 most of the paltry English martial contribution came from the Manchester environs.

More than this can be surveyed in a host of good work on the subject, which I list below for your reference. I hope this has been of some small help, and please come back to me with any further thoughts or questions you might have.

• Leo Gooch, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-East England 1688-1745 (Hull, 1995)

• Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge, 1989)

• Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688-1788 (2nd ed, Manchester, 2019)

• Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh, 1998)

• Jonathan Oates, The Last Battle on English Soil, Preston 1715 (Farnham, 2015)

• Jonathan Oates, 'The Manchester Regiment of 1745' in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (88: 354, Summer 2010), pp. 129-151.

You also might like to have a look through my PhD thesis, which forms the basis of JDB1745 and offers some more finely detailed demographic analysis, ‘Spines of the Thistle: The Popular Constituency of the Jacobite Rising in 1745-6’ (University of St Andrews, 2016).

Yours,
Dr Darren S. Layne
Creator and Curator, The Jacobite Database of 1745