Jacobites

In 1714, George I, a German protestant was crowned king of England and this aroused objections from Scottish 'Jacobite' rebels who supported James Stuart, the 'Old Pretender', a descendant of the Stuart line of English and Scottish kings. The Scottish Jacobites had a great deal of support in Northumberland and in fact their leading rebel, Tom Forster was from Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast.

Forster, a member of an influential Northumbrian family, assembled an army of Scottish Jacobites and Northumbrian supporters and intended to march deep into England as a demonstration of their Stuart support, taking military action if it was needed. Their eventual hope was to restore the Stuarts to the throne in London.

Forster marched across Northumberland to rally support and every town in the county of Northumberland supported him except for the biggest town of all Newcastle upon Tyne. Newcastle declared its support for King George and the town shut its gates to the rebels. The Jacobites would have been disappointed by their lack of support in Newcastle, but continued their march into England proceeding along the western side of the Pennines where they were eventually defeated by the English forces at Preston.

One interesting sideline to this story is that in those days people called George including King George himself were known as Geordie by people in Scotland and North East England. It is said that Newcastle’s support for King George earned the townsfolk the nickname Geordies, as opposed to the rest of Northumberland who were Jacobites in favour of King George. Unfortunately there is no definite evidence to support this theory. The preferred view is that Geordies took their name from George Stephenson’s safety lamp used by the miners of the North East region who were certainly known as Geordies throughout the nineteenth century.

A further Jacobite rebellion occurred thirty years later in 1745 in which rebels this time mostly Highlanders from northern Scotland supported Bonnie Prince Charlie, against King George II. This Prince, the son of James Stuart the Old Pretender, was known as the Young Pretender. The supporters of George I and George II called them pretenders because Stuart claims to the throne were now refuted because of their Catholicism.

Unfortunately for the Jacobites of 1745 there seems to have been little support for this new rebellion in North East England. Military forces supporting King George were established at Framwelgate Moor and outside Newcastle to meet the expected invasion. In the event the Jacobites headed south down the western side of the country via Cumbria and Carlisle in the hope that they would eventually reach London and restore the Stuarts to the throne.

They proceeded further than their predecessors of 1715 and seized the town of Manchester before continuing their journey as far south as Derby. Here they had hoped to hear of the arrival of French support in the south of England but this did not materialise and the invaders eventually lost their nerve and returned to northern Scotland. The English were determined to defeat these invaders once and for all and amassed a skilled army that eventually defeated the Highland Jacobites in a bloody and highly decisive battle at Culloden near Inverness.

The threat of Scottish raids had seemingly ended once and for all and in the centuries to come the North East began to settle into a role as peaceful region. It was the first time it could do so in at least sixteen centuries. Life was in any case changing for most North Easterners throughout the 1700s and as the century passed the region became increasingly dominated by coal mining and industry that would reach the height of development during the Victorian era.

Though people with old border names like Robson and Charlton were now working in huge numbers often alongside people with Scottish names in the industrial towns and mining villages of the region, the days of border raiding and Scottish invasions were now largely forgotten. Only the legacy of countless castles, towers and other fortifications scattered across the North East serve to remind us of the region’s often bloody past.