Will Ye Go to Sheriffmuir?

DESCRIPTION: "Will ye go to Sheriffmuir, Bauld John o' Innisture, There to see the noble Mar, And his Highland laddies." The singer catalogs the contingents of the Highland army and predicts victory
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1819 (Hogg-JacobiteRelicsOfScotlandVol1)
KEYWORDS: battle political Jacobites
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Nov 13, 1715 - Battle of Sheriffmuir
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hogg-JacobiteRelicsOfScotlandVol1 89, "Will Ye Go to Sheriffmuir" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #V44081
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Battle of Sheriffmuir" (subject of Sheriffmuir)
cf. "Up and Waur Them A', Willie (II)" (subject of Sheriffmuir)
NOTES [891 words]: The "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 left Britain with a real problem: Finding a successor to the last of the Stuarts. William III and Mary II left no children (Mary died young, and William seems to have been primarily homosexual). Mary's younger sister Anne was constantly pregnant, but only one child survived infancy, and even he died before reaching adulthood. If a Catholic could be accepted, there was Anne's younger half brother James ("VIII and III") -- but he had been branded illegitimate. And the next Protestant heir was the family of Sophia of Hanover, whose lineage went all the way back to Mary's and Anne's great-grandfather James I, and had two links in female line (Elizabeth "the Winter Queen," daughter of James I, and Sopia herself).
It caused much discontent. But "in England the descendants of the old Cavaliers had become, for the most part, law-abiding and home-staying Tories, who occasionally drank the health of 'the King over the water' with a sigh and a shrug" (Trevelyan, p.42). In other words, they might think about supporting a Stuart, but they would never actually *do* it!
That might have happened in Scotland, too -- except for the 1707 Act of Union which turned the Union of the Crowns into a single nation, with one parliament as well as one monarch. (This came about in part because the Scots were threatening to choose a monarch other than the Hanoverian leader the English Whigs were supporting; Fry/Fry, p. 186)
This, like so much else about English/Scottish relations, had been pursued with a mixture of force and corruption; the Scots were threatened with seizure of land and property in England, and their parliamentary leaders bribed (Fry/Fry, pp. 187-189). The Union passed -- and Scots sang "Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation" to signify their feelings about the matter.
What's more, the Union proved a failure from the Scottish standpoint, in that the economic benefits, highly touted at the time, were nearly non-existent. Scotland remained poor.
So when Anne died, there was a real movement to bring back the Stuarts. One of the (eventual) backers of this movement was the Earl of Mar.
That John Erskine, Earl of Mar (1675-1732) could mess up even something this elementary is easy to imagine for the man who was known as "Bobbing John" because of his inability to stick with one side (Keay/Keay, p. 865). He had signed the Act of Union joining England and Scotland, then tried to have it repealed (Fry/Fry, p. 191). The accession of George I caused him to send what Magnusson, p. 562, calls a "grovelling letter of loyalty," but George snubbed him (Mitchison, p. 322) and Mar decided to rebel and join the Jacobites. He had to leave London in disguise aboard a collier, He raised the Jacobite standard -- but he hadn't told his alleged King James VIII and III! (Magnusson, p. 563). Naturally it took the Old Pretender some time to arrive.
And Mar was "vacillating and incompetent. The rebellion moved slowly, and Perth did not fall to Mar's troops until September 14" (Sinclair-Stevenson, p. 50).
Mar meanwhile managed to raise a mixed force of Highlanders and Lowlanders, against "The government forces, based at Stirling and... commanded by the Duke of Argyll, the chief of the hated Campbells. He was not optimistic. He wrote to Townsend, the Secretary of State for Scotland: 'I must end with insisting on considerable reinforcements, for without it, or a miracle, not only this country will be utterly destroyed byt the rest of his Majesty's dominions put in the extremest danger" (Sinclair-Stevenson, p. 51).
But Argyll stuck to his task. Although most of Scotland fell into Jacobite hands, the government still held the Campbell country, the Sunderland estates in the north, and the region around Glasgow and south of Edinburgh). Mar, despite his growing army, seemed unable to move, even as his men were becoming rebellious for lack of pay (Sinclair-Stevenson, p. 51).
Finally, on a cold day in the fall, Mar put his army into action, but at Sheriffmuir (near Dunblane in Perthshire), on November 13, 1715, he could not beat an army he outnumbered at least two to one (Magnusson, pp. 564-565; Keay/Keay, p. 865, for instance, credit him with 10,000 men to Argyll's 4,000, but others would give Mar 8,000 men to Argyll's 3500 or so). The battle took a form that went back to the days of Alexander the Great: both sides attacked with their right and routed their opponents' left. Despite the fact that neither side was defeated, neither wanted to continue the fight (Keay/Keay, p. 865). Both sides drew back, although Argyll eventually came back to strip the field of battle (Sinclair-Stevenson, p. 53).
Mar could perhaps argue that he had won, or at least not lost, but he could not hold together his army after that (Magnusson, p. 566). The only other significant Jacobite field force had surrendered at Preston at almost the same time (Fry/Fry, p. 192. This was the force led by Lord Derwentwater, hero of the ballad of the same name). Combine the incompetent Mar with the unenthusiastic Old Pretender, who still hadn't arrived in Scotland, and you had a disaster. The Jacobites were not entirely defeated -- but they had lost.
Hogg in his notes admits to having no idea who Bauld John o' Innisture is. I suspect it's just a name made up to fit the need to rhyme with "Sheriffmuir." - RBW
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