Flight of the Heron read-along: Part V chapters 3-4

[regshoe]

But till my last moments my words are the same: there'll never be peace until Jamie comes hame...

The penultimate week of the read-along, and in these chapters we are still very Jacobite.

Next week we will, sadly, read Part V Chapter 5 and the Epilogue.

Comments

[owl]

There is maybe a hint of criticism when the woman at Achnacarry asks why the Prince ever came to Scotland and Ewen can't answer her - in the midst of the tragedy that that cascading chain of loyalties, from the Prince through the clan chiefs to the clansmen has brought on Lochaber.

Keith provides a POV character for criticism of Jacobitism, but he doesn't seem much troubled by the powerlessness of the rank and file on either the Jacobite or Hanoverian side, although he does object to brutality.

[regshoe]

Yes, that's interesting. I suppose some of the more political criticism of Jacobitism did bring in the lack of freedom for clansmen and their feudal dependence on their chiefs—that was apparently the view of Major-General Humphrey Bland, one of the commanders-in-chief in Scotland after the '45, not that he and his sort acted very progressively in their attempts to 'civilise' the country—but Keith's anti-Jacobitism doesn't seem to be particularly political. Most of what he thinks about them is about how silly and foolish they are trying to rebel when they obviously won't succeed, rather than whether the idea itself is wrong.

[luzula]

Well, but there were both Jacobite and Hanoverian clans, so it's not like the clanship system in itself was a Jacobite thing. But of course the Jacobite clans were a necessary part of the Jacobite military mobilization, so obviously the Whigs wanted to crush the clan system in general to avoid future attempts...

[owl]

I expect the industrial revolution would have ended the clan system a few decades later, if the reprisals for the '45 hadn't.

[luzula]

Yes, that's the impression I get from my reading, as well! And apparently both the Jacobite and Hanoverian clan elites were equally involved in commercial ventures. Jacobitism was not some sort of "return to a feudal past" kind of thing.