Undoubtedly one of the most successful endeavours in Scottish history since the 1970s has been the study of Jacobitism. No longer portrayed as a sentimentalized cause with little or no hope of success, Jacobitism has been established as a serious political and cultural force not only in Scotland and the rest of the British Isles, but in mainland Europe too.

Rather than a series of disconnected episodes it has been portrayed as a national movement which ‘was far more coherent, united and politically effective than we hitherto realized’. The Jacobites' opponents by contrast have received less systematic study. Therefore ‘anti-jacobitism’- the term applied by scholars of Jacobitism – merits serious study. This actually means an investigation of Revolution Whig ideology, its meaning for its apostles and how they eventually saw off Jacobite attempts to restore the Stuart dynasty. Not only was it anti-Jacobites – or what became the Whig establishment in Scotland – who forced James II and VII to abandon his British and Irish kingdoms, but by the middle of the eighteenth century their protégés as monarchs, the Hanoverians, had become established irrevocably as heads of the united British state. Yet this was the outcome of a titanic and often bloody struggle that had lasted from Covenanting times in the early seventeenth century to Culloden in 1746 and some years beyond. Whig ascendancy was no foregone conclusion.