Historical Note

The fifty-year period between 1640 and 1690 was a time of religious and political upheaval in Britain. There was conflict between different forms of Protestantism, and between Protestantism and the older Catholic faith still practiced in much of the Highlands, Ireland, and parts of England. An ongoing struggle between parliamentary rule and the divine rights of kings led to civil war and the execution of King Charles I, followed by a commonwealth republic and eventual dictatorship under Cromwell. The monarchy was restored under Charles II, whose hedonistic court rebelled against ten years of Puritan rule. Dissolving Parliament when it attempted to exclude his Catholic brother from the succession, Charles was arguably the last British king to hold absolute power. A bloodless coup d’état against his brother, King James II, the last Catholic monarch, ushered in a constitutional monarchy under William and Mary, that has been uninterrupted since.

During this time, two political parties were born. The Tories (Irish slang for a “popish” outlaw) descended from the Cavaliers and landed aristocracy, and upheld the divine right of kings and the Anglican Church. The Whigs (a term of contempt in Scotland for a fanatic Presbyterian), descended from the Roundheads, represented the commercial classes of the cities and championed Parliament against the king.

James II’s attempts to establish a base in Ireland after his expulsion from England were defeated at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, a year after the events described in this story, and despite the Jacobite victory at the Battle of Killiecrankie (which according to historical accounts really was over within ten minutes), the uprising in the Scottish Highlands was effectively quelled by the loss of Bonnie Dundee and the subsequent Williamite victories at Dunkeld and Cromdale. White-water rafting is popular today at Killiecrankie, and visitors can see the soldier’s leap where Willie MacBean is said to have dropped his gear and made the eighteen-foot leap with claymore swinging Highlanders in hot pursuit. James II died of a brain hemorrhage in 1701 in France, but efforts on behalf of his son James and his grandson, known to history as Bonnie Prince Charlie, fueled Jacobite rebels for years to come, culminating in a Battle at Culloden in 1746.

Highland Rebel is a work of fiction, and of necessity, greatly simplifies these complex times. There were Covenanting Highlanders and Catholic Lowlanders and Protestants who supported the Catholic king. There were also, not surprisingly, men like Jamie, who tried their best to balance competing loyalties, and when faced with shifting circumstances often shifted for their families and themselves. Lady Castlemaine’s erstwhile lover, John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, a prominent example, abandoned his patron and sponsor King James for William and Mary, and later became a Duke. There’s an interesting discussion on the growth of Restoration era apathy and indifference in religious matters, and the loosening of ties to the church after a generation of religious turmoil, in David Cressy’s Birth Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England.

It should be noted that another invitation to William was delivered at the same time as Jamie’s was, by a similar character under similar circumstances, Arthur Herbert, Earl of Torrington.

Women like Catherine were not unheard-of, either. During the civil war, some donned armor and led their people in defense of their homes. There were women who went to war as soldiers, women who inherited, and women who ran businesses or wrote plays and books. Restoration-era ladies were comfortable traveling the city, shopping, and going to the theatre accompanied only by a maid, and in seventeenth-century Holland, England, and Germany, some women chose to dress and live as men. These freedoms gradually disappeared through the Georgian and Regency periods, and to all intents and purposes were gone by Victorian times. Readers who are interested in learning more about the lives of seventeenth-century woman might enjoy Antonia Frazer’s The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in 17th Century England, or The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe by Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. Van De Pol.

Catherine, Jamie, their families and retainers, are fictional characters, as are Jamie’s mistresses. Characters such as the Duke of Buckingham, Lady Castlemaine, and John Churchill, as well as other court personages, are historical figures. I claim some literary license in their interactions with Jamie and Catherine, but the quotes or comments attributed to them or about them are readily available in the historical record. Readers who are interested in reading more might start with Antonia Fraser’s King Charles II; Christopher Sykes’s Black Sheep; Stephen Coote’s Royal Survivor, or Graham Hopkin’s Constant Delights.

There were Earls of Carrick in County Tipperary, but the title became extinct in 1652. Peerages could be bought in seventeenth-century England if one could afford them, and many English soldiers of higher and lower degree were paid for their services with Irish lands and titles, much as Jamie was. The Drummond clan were supporters of the Jacobite cause and fought at Killiecrankie, but for story purposes, I’ve moved my Drummonds farther north, to the lands of Moray. Kinsmen and Clansmen, by R.W. Munroe, gives a history of many of the major Scottish clans, including some who passed lairdship on through the female line.

Several variations of the fortune-telling rhyme, “Tinker Tailor,” were in common usage going back to at least 1695, and it seems safe to assume it was around long before that. A Tom Otter was a term used to describe a henpecked husband, and referred to a character in Ben Johnson’s The Silent Woman, and the first recorded usage of the term tomboy in the sense we know it today was in 1592.

The English coffee houses, called by Charles II seminaries of sedition, played a key role in the dissemination of political, social, and scientific ideas, and were the forerunners of the gentlemen’s clubs of later years. Brooke’s began as a coffee house and White’s as a chocolate house. The interested reader is referred to The Penny Universities: A History of Coffee-Houses by Aytoun Ellis, and London Coffeehouses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries by Bryant Lyllwhite.

Readers who are interested in learning more about day-to-day life in Stuart England from firsthand accounts might enjoy any of the following highly entertaining, readable, and informative firsthand accounts: The Diary of Samuel Pepys tells all, even the naughty bits; Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: Court of Charles II is a highly entertaining, gossipy account of court life by the handsome French courtier and diplomat, le Compte de Gramont; and The Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, esteemed member of the Royal Society, a man of science and philosophy who was familiar with the highest levels of society, covers a span of fifty years.