If we hope to shed light on the relationship between Jacobitism and antiquarianism, we must first situate both within the broader intellectual and moral culture of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland. As David Allan has shown, scholarly enquiry in this period was not understood as a detached or purely technical pursuit, but as a form of civic and moral practice, expected to contribute to the cultivation of virtue and the defence of truth.16 Precisely which virtues and what conception of truth a scholar wrote in defence of, however, was largely a product of their religio-political attachments. Consequently, antiquarian practice must not be understood as a methodology separate from cultural and political entanglements, but as a means of interrogating historical knowledge with deep relevance to questions of religion, authority, and public order.17

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, urgent new questions were raised about accepted narratives of Scottish identity and history. James VII and II had been deposed, and Scots were forced to reconsider the relationship between their national identity and the Stuart dynasty that had ruled them for centuries. This process of reappraisal became more pressing in the wake of the Union of 1707. For many within Scotland’s Presbyterian majority, a combination of classical authorities and trusted Protestant historians, above all Buchanan, remained central to articulating the nation’s constitutional and religious identity. Yet while such sources were reinterpreted within this new political context, the accepted documentary corpus of historical authorities remained largely unchanged, and older narrative frameworks continued to shape understandings of Scotland’s past.

It was antiquaries who began to unsettle this pattern.18 Though their interests varied widely, they were united by the conviction that received historical narratives could be revised or corrected through systematic attention to primary sources.19 While much historical writing in this period continued to use the past didactically as a vehicle for moral instruction or political reflection, antiquaries placed greater emphasis on establishing what could be known of the past through surviving evidence. Their concern was not only with the interpretation of events, but with the evidentiary foundations upon which such interpretations rested.20 In this respect, the rise of antiquarianism marked a shift in emphasis within historical culture, demonstrating that verifiability had become increasingly valued during a moment of political instability.

As Williams has shown, Scotland’s antiquarian culture already existed before the revolution of 1688–90 and was particularly robust within Catholic and Episcopalian intellectual networks in the north-east. The members of this ‘first Enlightenment’ collected manuscripts, performed philological analysis, and an increasingly sophisticated concern with establishing the evidentiary foundations of Scotland’s past.21 Yet, as Hugh Ouston has demonstrated, this interest in historical recovery benefited greatly from a broad initiative on the part of the late-Stuart monarchs to expand learned inquiry more generally. Across the final decade of James VII and II’s reign, Scottish scholars engaged in a wide-ranging programme of intellectual activity that encompassed historical scholarship, antiquarian investigation, and ecclesiastical controversy, all of which were supported by institutions still closely connected to episcopal governance and royal patronage. Consequently, Scotland’s early antiquarian culture developed within a political and ecclesiastical context shaped by Stuart authority and its efforts to use history to legitimize its supposedly ancient dynasty and, during the final years of James’s reign, British Catholicism and Episcopal rule.22

In the decades that followed the revolution settlement, however, this late-Stuart scholarly world was increasingly viewed through the lens of a historical culture which continued to value didactic, moralizing historical scholarship. As antiquarian methods became more visible and more widely practised, they also attracted criticism for their perceived narrowness of focus and excessive attention to detail. Capturing this mentality in 1761, William Warburton, a friend of Alexander Pope, wrote, ‘Antiquarianism is, indeed, to true letters what specious funguses are to the oak; which never shoot out and flourish, till all the vigour and virtue of that monarch of the grove be effete and near exhausted’.23 Nonetheless, antiquarian scholarship played a significant role in reshaping Scottish understandings of the past. Its methods enabled long-standing origins myths to be systematically dismantled, such as the traditional account of a foundational union between an ancient Greek prince and an Egyptian princess, and antiquaries produced a number of historical narratives grounded in documentary verification rather than legendary authority.24

However, this shift toward a more critical conception of national identity should not imply that early eighteenth-century antiquaries wrote history apolitically. Antiquarian enquiry was embedded within pre-existing assumptions about church, monarchy, nation, and the ways in which the past proved them to be legitimate or illegitimate. Antiquaries did not approach their sources without presuppositions, but tended to assume that careful historical investigation would ultimately confirm the legitimacy of their own religious and political outlooks.25 For example, the doctor and antiquary Robert Sibbald (1641–1722), who converted temporarily to Catholicism under James VII and II before returning to the Episcopalian fold, claimed that history had been distorted by ‘Monkish Legends’ in the preface to his survey of the Romans in Scotland, indicating that his book would use evidence to dismiss the apparently corrupting influence of Catholicism on truth.26

Colin Kidd has observed that antiquarian scholarship in early eighteenth-century Scotland was marked by an unusually high degree of ‘cross-fertilisation and cooperation’ across confessional lines.27 Yet this diversity should not obscure the striking frequency with which antiquarian enquiry overlapped with Jacobite sympathies, as we will soon see. Explaining this convergence is complex, and no single cause is sufficient. It is likely that a number of committed Jacobites were drawn to antiquarianism because they viewed its methods as an effective means of legitimizing their cause. Equally likely is that antiquaries inherently tended to be the sorts of scholars whose commitment to the recovery of suppressed or marginalized sources found themselves intellectually and socially aligned with religious and political positions outside of the religio-political mainstream.

Rather than privileging any single explanation, this article argues that Jacobitism and antiquarianism frequently converged because they attracted scholars with overlapping intellectual dispositions, many of whom are discussed in the following section. Both Jacobitism and antiquarianism appealed to those who understood authority as grounded in historical continuity, who treated the past as a repository of legitimating evidence, and who assumed that political and ecclesiastical questions could and should be adjudicated through historical inquiry. Antiquarianism and Jacobitism were therefore not merely parallel interests or overlapping social networks, but closely related intellectual cultures whose shared concern with historical legitimacy made their convergence a recurring feature of eighteenth-century British scholarship.

If Jacobitism and antiquarianism frequently converged in practice as well as in principle, then the network identified by Man deserves closer examination. Though Man exaggerated both its coherence and its intentions, many of the scholars he accused of being ideologically allied with Ruddiman did indeed participate in a remarkably interconnected world of correspondence, patronage, and scholarly exchange. Therefore, while Man’s Censure does not provide a reliable map of a Jacobite conspiracy, it may serve as a valuable guide to the intellectual associations through which antiquarian scholarship and Jacobite politics intersected. Reconstructing these connections reveals not a coordinated project of historical revisionism, but a scholarly community containing a surprising number of Jacobite antiquaries who shared assumptions about history, political and ecclesiastical authority, and state legitimacy.

One of the most revealing figures within this community was the Scottish Catholic priest and antiquary Innes, whom Man described as ‘a great friend and fellow labourer of Ruddiman’s’ and whose own characterisation of Buchanan Man called ‘ridiculous and absurd,’ labelling Innes ‘one of the author’s most malicious adversaries’.28 Few scholars better illustrate the convergence of antiquarian enquiry and Jacobite politics than Innes, whose Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain or Scotland (1729) combined rigorous source criticism with a historical narrative that challenged Buchanan’s account of the Scottish monarchy.29 Rejecting the evidentiary foundations of Buchanan’s account of Scotland’s early history, Innes simultaneously advanced an alternative account of the ancient kingdom that reinforced Stuart legitimacy and denied that the Scottish people had ever possessed a lawful right to depose their sovereign.30

Innes’s significance lay not only in his scholarship but also in his position within the wider intellectual world of British Jacobitism. He corresponded with figures across both the formal political institutions of the exiled Stuart court and the broader republic of letters that linked Jacobite scholars throughout Britain and continental Europe. Innes wrote frequently to James Francis Edward Stuart, while more than one hundred surviving letters record his exchanges with James Edgar, the king’s secretary, who regularly wrote on the king’s behalf.31 He likewise maintained correspondence with the Jacobite secretary of state, John Erskine, 6th earl (and Jacobite 1st duke) of Mar, together with several of the Stuart court’s representatives resident in Rome.32 These letters not only reveal that Innes was an antiquary of considerable scholarly reputation, but that he was an active participant in the political and intellectual life of the Jacobite movement.

These facets of Innes’s thought were deeply entangled, and the same commitment to Stuart legitimacy that animated his correspondence informed his historical scholarship. Although the Critical Essay was presented publicly as an impartial exercise in documentary criticism, Innes described it rather differently in a letter he sent alongside a copy of the book to Stuart in Rome:

Today’s historians benefit greatly from the unusually rich body of surviving correspondence left by Innes. His letters reveal the depth of his personal commitment to the Jacobite cause and make the political and religious worldview underpinning his antiquarian scholarship unusually transparent. Read alongside the Critical Essay, they leave little doubt that his historical investigations and his loyalty to the exiled Stuarts were mutually reinforcing rather than separate aspects of his intellectual life.34 In this respect, Innes provides an exceptionally valuable case study of the close relationship between Jacobite politics and antiquarian scholarship. Such clarity, however, is quite rare. Few Jacobite antiquaries left behind such extensive correspondence or so clearly articulated the political implications of their historical work.

However, by examining published scholarship, scattered letters, and occasional references in the papers of others, connections begin to appear. Innes’s correspondence and citations provide a useful launching off point, revealing not only that he was actively engaged with a number of Stuart-sympathising antiquarian scholars, but that Man’s conspiratorial network contained a germ of truth. In the Critical Essay Innes frequently praised the scholarship of Ruddiman, as well as that of Patrick Abercromby (1656–1716), the antiquary and physician to James VII and II; George Mackenzie (1669–1725), historian and doctor of medicine at Aberdeen; and the historian David Crawford (1665–1726).35 In Man’s Censure, he identified all of these figures as Jacobite conspirators, calling Abercromby ‘a vapouring, swaggering, hectoring blade’ and a ‘friend and fellow labourer’ of Ruddiman’s, and labelling Crawford, whose 1706 Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland portrayed Stuart as the hapless victim of Calvinist intrigue, as one of a company of ‘imputent forgers, of whom even the sober writers among the Roman Catholicks themselves are much ashamed’.36 Although Man misrepresented these scholarly relationships as evidence of a coordinated campaign against Buchanan and the principles he represented, Innes’s surviving correspondence and citations independently reinforce the impression that the network itself was real. They reveal a community of antiquaries who shared sources, exchanged manuscripts, corresponded regularly, and openly admired one another’s scholarship, even if their collaboration fell far short of the organised conspiracy imagined by Man.

Following the trail of citations from Innes leads to a number of Jacobite-leaning scholars whom Man did not implicate in his conspiracy, including Harry Maule, titular earl of Panmure, Roderick O’Flaherty, Jeremy Collier, and Thomas Hearne, all of them antiquaries who either expressed sympathies toward or actively participated in the Jacobite cause.37 In fact, Man portrayed Hearne positively in his Censure, approvingly referencing Hearne’s edition of the Scotichronicon while apparently unaware of Hearne’s Stuart sympathies.38 In reality, Hearne corresponded with Ruddiman extensively before composing his edition of the Scotichronicon, having been so impressed by Ruddiman’s edition of Buchanan.39 In the words of Chalmers, ‘Hearn [sic] spoke of Ruddiman… as his learned friend. They were, indeed, congenial spirits: Congenial in their modesty, and diligence, in the extent of their learning, and in the utility of their labours’.40

The significance of these connections lies not simply in the fact that many antiquaries knew one another, but that antiquarian scholarship repeatedly intersected with Jacobite political sympathies. The figures connected through Innes’s correspondence and citations were linked by the exchange of manuscripts, the circulation of evidence, and a shared admiration for one another’s scholarship, while each also exhibited varying degrees of attachment to the Stuart cause. Man’s conspiracy therefore pointed towards a genuine scholarly milieu in which antiquarian research and Jacobite commitments frequently coincided.

These connections then raise a broader question: why was this the case? Part of the answer lies in the changing place of the medieval past within the learned culture of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. Mainstream historical scholarship continued to privilege classical learning and the history of the Protestant present, while the sources of the medieval period was often neglected as relics of a superstitious and Catholic age. Antiquaries, by contrast, devoted themselves to recovering precisely those neglected texts, chronicles, and manuscripts. Their reasons for doing so varied, but for many Stuart sympathisers the medieval past served not only as an object of scholarly curiosity but a historical inheritance whose political and religious significance had been obscured since the Revolution.41

Hearne provides a particularly clear example of this. As his biographer Harmsden observes, his ‘loyalties lay in the previous century,’ as he was faithful both to the exiled Stuart cause and to preserving a past which he viewed as being both relevant to and misunderstood by his contemporaries.42 Indeed, in the Latin introduction to his edition of the Scotichronicon, Hearne complained that many modern scholars concealed ‘the benefits of some illustrious men before the Reformation, whom they now think ought to be kept secret by right, as if they were not prompted by religion, but by some evil desire, and therefore are not commemorated in vain’.43 For Hearne, the recovery of medieval sources was not simply a scholarly exercise but an implicit challenge to historical narratives that privileged the post-Reformation settlement at the expense of earlier traditions.

Hearne was by no means an isolated case. Antiquarian scholarship did not require its practitioners to share his political commitments, yet many of those who devoted themselves to recovering Britain’s medieval past in the decades after the Revolution also displayed religious or political loyalties that aligned them with the Stuart cause.44 The career of the English non-juring bishop and topographer Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755) illustrates the point. Rawlinson’s interest in antiquarian scholarship first developed in the library of his elder brother, Thomas Rawlinson (1681–1725), a noted book collector, antiquary, Jacobite, and close friend of Hearne.45 At Oxford his enthusiasm was deepened by his encounter with the manuscripts and collections of the antiquary Anthony Wood (1632–95), whose painstaking reconstruction of the University’s medieval foundations, religious houses, and local history provided a model of scholarship rooted in historical continuity rather than confessional rupture. Although Wood belonged to an earlier generation and died before Jacobitism’s birth, his royalist sympathies and profound attachment to the institutions of the pre-Revolution Church ensured that his work appealed strongly to the High Church scholars who came after him. Rawlinson admired Wood sufficiently to publish a biography of him in 1710 and consciously patterned his own topographical research on his example.46

This scholarly inheritance was closely intertwined with Rawlinson’s religious development. As his antiquarian interests matured, so did his commitment to the non-juring tradition, whose refusal to acknowledge the Revolution settlement rested upon an understanding of the Church as a historical institution whose authority and identity had been transmitted across the centuries rather than created anew by political manoeuvring. Medieval charters, cathedral records, episcopal successions, and monastic foundations were therefore more than antiquarian curiosities; they furnished evidence of an historical continuity that non-jurors viewed as fundamental to the constitution of both Church and kingdom. Rawlinson maintained a regular correspondence with Hearne and, in 1716, secretly received ordination as deacon and priest from Collier, another member of this wider scholarly network.47 Rawlinson’s antiquarian and non-juring commitments thus developed together, united by a shared concern with preserving historical continuity against the perceived disruptions of the Revolution.

Rawlinson’s career therefore illustrates more than the coincidence of antiquarianism and Jacobitism; it reveals the intellectual affinities that frequently united them. The recovery of medieval texts, institutions, and landscapes encouraged a conception of history in which the pre-Reformation Church and the Stuart monarchy represented elements of a national inheritance rather than obsolete stages superseded by later political and religious settlements. Such assumptions did not inevitably produce Jacobite commitments, yet for scholars who questioned the legitimacy of the Revolution settlement, such historical enquiry offered a means of recovering evidence for forms of authority, religious practice, and political order that appeared to have been disrupted or neglected. Conversely, Jacobite and non-juring convictions conferred additional urgency to the preservation and publication of sources that seemed capable of restoring forgotten or misunderstood aspects of Britain’s medieval and early modern past.

The overlap between non-juring convictions and antiquarian scholarship was particularly significant in this respect. Non-jurors were disproportionately represented within antiquarian circles, not because all shared the same political commitments, but because their religious position encouraged an intense engagement with historical precedent. Their refusal to accept the ecclesiastical consequences of the Revolution settlement rested upon a belief in continuity: that the authority of the Church was preserved through inherited traditions, apostolic succession, and historical institutions rather than determined by the actions of the contemporary state. The documentary remains of the medieval and early modern past therefore possessed a significance that extended beyond scholarly interest.48 They provided evidence through which non-jurors and sympathetic antiquaries could investigate the origins and continuity of religious and political institutions. Figures such as Rawlinson and Hearne were joined by other non-juring scholars, including George Hickes, Thomas Baker, Henry Dodwell, and Thomas Carte, all of whom devoted significant portions of their careers to antiquarian research.49 Their simultaneous attraction to antiquarian practice and Stuart-aligned intellectual traditions was therefore not simply coincidental, but reflected shared assumptions about the importance of historical continuity and inherited authority.

The relationship between Jacobitism and antiquarianism was particularly evident in Scotland, where questions of national identity, monarchy, and religious tradition remained closely tied to historical enquiry.50 Scottish antiquaries frequently utilized archival investigation to support Stuart sympathies, using historical sources to explore a past that many believed had been misrepresented or neglected. James Gibbs (1682–1752), a Scottish architect and secret Catholic convert, developed a deep appreciation for history through his architectural studies across Europe. During the 1710s he worked covertly for Jacobite and Tory patrons, including Erskine, for whom he designed a lodge at Stirling Castle. Following the failure of the rising of 1715–16, Gibbs’s career was constrained by his associations with prominent Jacobites, yet his scholarly reputation remained sufficient for him to be elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1726.51 Gibbs’s career illustrates how antiquarian interests could survive, and even flourish, among figures whose political associations placed them under suspicion.

Similarly, John Paul Jameson (1659–1700), a Scottish Catholic convert who eventually settled in Rome, combined a commitment to historical scholarship with connections to Jacobite circles. Although Jameson responded to James VII’s request in 1688 that Scottish Catholics return to Scotland to support the Catholic mission there, he spent much of his life in continental libraries and archives. His writings attracted the attention of fellow Jacobite antiquaries, and his scholarly network overlapped with that of Innes and his brother Lewis.52 Bishop William Nicolson (1655–1727), himself an antiquary, suggested in 1702 that Jameson was privately circulating his commentaries on works such as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and John Spottiswoode’s The History of the Church and State of Scotland to ‘a number of his learned countrymen’ in Scotland.53 Jameson’s career, like those of Innes, Ruddiman, and other Scottish antiquaries, demonstrates the extent to which historical scholarship could serve as a vehicle for preserving and debating competing visions of Scotland’s religious and political past.

The influence of Jacobitism on antiquarian scholarship varied considerably. In some cases, it was explicit, as in the writings of the Scottish non-juring Episcopalian bishop John Sage (1652–1711). Banished from Edinburgh in 1692 for his outspoken opposition to William and Mary, Sage employed antiquarian evidence to challenge Presbyterian accounts of the Scottish Church, arguing that they possessed little historical legitimacy.54 More commonly, however, Jacobie political leanings shaped antiquarian scholarship less through overt polemic than through the subjects scholars chose to investigate and preserve. George Martine (1635–1712) exemplifies this quieter relationship between antiquarianism and Jacobitism. His refusal to swear allegiance to William and Mary cost him his clerkship in 1690, and he later expressed his sympathies through the focus of his antiquarian interests. At a time when the Episcopal establishment had been dismantled, Martine endeavoured to recover the institutional memory of Scotland’s premier archbishopric at St Andrews, documenting its privileges, succession, benefices, and jurisdiction. Regardless of the mostly measured tone of his historical narrative, the act of preserving this historical inheritance reflected concerns shared by many Jacobite and non-juring antiquaries. Additionally, the text reveals hints of Martine’s true feelings, as in his description of the destruction of St Andrews Cathedral in 1559, which he describes as having been ‘occasioned by a Sermon of John Knox against idolatry, preached at Crail to a giddy lawless multitude’.55 Though completed in 1683, the work remained unpublished until 1797, leading Robert Wodrow to claim that Presbyterian scholars had suppressed it because of its Episcopalian interpretation of Scotland’s ecclesiastical past.56

A similarly quiet form of non-juring and Jacobite influence can be seen in the career of Robert Mylne (1643–1743), described by one contemporary as ‘a person well known to be indefatigable in the study of Scots antiquities’.57 Mylne collected not only Scottish historical manuscripts but contemporary Jacobite political satires, suggesting that his interest in preserving royal genealogies, heraldic traditions, and sources relating to Scotland’s ancient past formed part of a broader commitment to safeguarding a historical inheritance that he believed was under threat.58 In both the case of Martine and Mylne, Jacobitism influenced antiquarian scholarship not simply through what these men wrote, but through what they considered worth preserving.

Certainly, not all antiquaries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries shared these political commitments. Nevertheless, the prominence of Jacobite, non-juring, and High Tory scholars within antiquarian circles meant that their ideas could not easily be ignored. The early Society of Antiquaries of London illustrates this point. Among its founders and associates were John Bagford, the collector and bookseller who was imprisoned on charges of Jacobitism, the antiquary and secret Catholic John Talman, who sought to preserve Britain’s pre-Reformation artistic heritage, and Hearne.59 One of the organization’s founders, Humfrey Wanley, described the Society as ‘a School wherein the antient Constitution, Laws and Customs of this Kingdom will be best learn’d and usefully declar’d and mentioned in Parliament; whereby ma[n]y innovations and troublesome Debates may be prevented’.60 This vision reflected a broadly Whig understanding of the Society’s purpose, yet antiquarian practice proved far less politically uniform than this ideal implied. Wanley corresponded regularly with the non-juror Robert Nelson, with Samuel Pepys, and with Hearne, while his work at the Cottonian Library required close cooperation with its keeper, Thomas Smith, an avowed Jacobite and non-juror.61 During Innes’s visit to the library, Smith was initially reluctant to assist his research into ancient British customs but, according to Innes, ‘gott… to be very kind the more he knew of [my] sentiments’.62 Even where political loyalties diverged, antiquarian scholarship depended upon shared archives, correspondence, and learned exchange. The antiquarian community therefore remained one in which Jacobite scholars occupied a conspicuous and influential place, ensuring that their historical assumptions continued to shape the wider study of Britain’s past.

The permeability of these scholarly networks is further illustrated by the career of the Scottish Presbyterian Whig James Anderson. An accomplished antiquary whose historical writings defended Scottish independence, Anderson maintained a close friendship with Ruddiman despite their profound disagreements on politics and religion. When Anderson died before completing his most ambitious historical work, it was Ruddiman who undertook to edit and publish it as a tribute to his friend.63 Anderson likewise counted among his associates Innes and the artist John Alexander, painter of several aggrandizing portraits of Stuart and later resident artist to the Jacobite court in exile.64 Such connections further illustrate the extent to which Jacobite scholars and artists were woven into the fabric of Britain’s learned world, demonstrating not that political divisions disappeared within antiquarian culture, but that Jacobitism had become too deeply embedded within that culture to be excluded from it. Even antiquaries who rejected the Stuart cause found themselves dependent upon Jacobite colleagues as editors, correspondents, collectors, and interpreters of the historical record. Antiquarian scholarship was therefore not simply a field in which many Jacobites happened to work; it was one of the principal intellectual environments through which Jacobite ideas, assumptions, and historical priorities were preserved, debated, and transmitted.

The close association between antiquarian scholarship and Jacobitism did not pass unnoticed by contemporaries. Critics frequently attacked Jacobite antiquaries not only for their political sympathies but also for the historical conclusions they drew from their sources. Alexander Pope called Hearne’s work ‘monkish and uninteresting,’ and, responding to Innes’s attempt to challenge the historical foundations of the Scottish people’s right to depose unfit rulers, the Edinburgh clerk Alexander Taitt complained that Scots were being told the lie that they ‘neither are, nor ever were, a free and independent People,’ but were the hereditary property of the exiled Stuarts.65 Such criticisms recognised that antiquarian scholarship could shape contemporary political debate by re-examining the past. Yet it would be mistaken to dismiss the work of Innes, Ruddiman, Hearne, and their associates as little more than Jacobite propaganda. Their editions, histories, and documentary collections were serious contributions to historical scholarship. Their political and religious commitments influenced their choice of subjects, the manuscripts they sought to recover, and the questions they asked of the historical record, but they also reflected a genuine commitment to critical historical enquiry. As Innes himself noted, his Critical Essay was ‘written with as much impartiality as one can write of one’s own country.’66

From this perspective, Man’s Censure appears both mistaken and unexpectedly perceptive. His vision of an organised Jacobite conspiracy directing Britain’s antiquarian scholarship was exaggerated, yet his catalogue of friends and fellow labourers identified a genuine intellectual community. The scholars he assembled did correspond with one another, exchange manuscripts, edit one another’s work, and repeatedly cite the same authorities. They were linked not by a coordinated political programme, but by a common scholarly culture in which Jacobite and non-juring political and religious views frequently coincided with antiquarian methods and interests.

Man never abandoned his belief that this community represented a dangerous conspiracy. Encouraged by fellow Presbyterian ministers, he spent the remainder of his life attempting to produce a ‘true’ history of the Church of Scotland that would expose what he regarded as the distortions of Jacobite scholarship. Though he died in 1762 before completing that project, he did finish an edition of Buchanan’s History of Scotland, published posthumously the following year.67 His Censure, however, survives today largely because Ruddiman chose to answer it. In the introduction to his response, titled Anticrisis (1754), Ruddiman accused Man of ‘rummaging thro’ Authors of all Sorts’ only to ‘draw Poison’ from them, while charging him with repeatedly misrepresenting the works he cited.68 This defence was designed not merely to protect Ruddiman’s own edition of Buchanan, but the works of the wider body of scholars whom Man had implicated and criticised. Ruddiman rejected the suggestion that his antiquarian peers constituted a political cabal, dismissing Man’s accusations as the product of ‘fanatical Rage’.69 Yet in defending not only himself but the broader circle of antiquaries identified in the Censure, he implicitly acknowledged the existence of the learned community that Man had observed. What he denied was not the network itself, but Man’s characterization of it.

Chalmers later predicted that Man would ‘be remembered only as he was an antagonist of Ruddiman’.70 This was not entirely false, yet Chalmers was too quick to dismiss Man’s suspicions as mere paranoia.71 Man mistook an intellectual culture and scholarly network for a political conspiracy, but he did not fabricate the relationships upon which his conspiracy rested. The evidence assembled here suggests that antiquarian scholarship and Jacobitism developed in a mutually reinforcing relationship during the decades following the Revolution. Antiquarian methods furnished Jacobite scholars with the sources, evidence, and historical precedents through which they challenged prevailing accounts of monarchy, church, and nation, while Jacobite commitments encouraged the recovery, preservation, and publication of Britain’s medieval and Stuart past. Man’s conspiracy never existed, but the community of friends and fellow labourers that inspired it most certainly did.

This article has argued that the significant presence of Jacobite sympathisers within late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British antiquarian circles was not merely the result of political coincidence. Though antiquarian scholarship was never exclusively Jacobite, the intellectual priorities of many antiquaries and the historical assumptions of Jacobite culture frequently reinforced one another. Belief in the value of continuity, inheritance, and the recovery of neglected traditions encouraged Stuart sympathisers to pursue the study of lost and rejected sources, while antiquarian methods provided Jacobite scholars with evidence necessary to articulate alternative visions of monarchy, church, and nation. The relationship between Jacobitism and antiquarianism, therefore, was not one of simple political patronage or partisan scholarship, but of mutual influence.

This relationship complicates traditional understandings of Jacobitism as a movement defined primarily by political opposition and dynastic loyalty. Many Jacobite scholars were not merely preserving an imagined past; they were actively engaged in the development of historical practices that emphasised documentary criticism, manuscript preservation, and the reassessment of established narratives. Their work formed part of the broader transformation of historical scholarship in Britain during the eighteenth century, even as their religio-political agenda shaped the questions they asked of the past. Further research will undoubtedly reveal additional connections within this learned network, particularly among Scottish antiquaries, whose work remains understudied. Nonetheless, the evidence presented here suggests that Jacobitism should be understood not only as a political movement but also as an intellectual culture in which antiquarian scholarship served as a crucial means of preserving, interpreting, and contesting historical memory.