Damn’ Rebel Bitches: Research Then and Now

On the 20th anniversary of her first book about the Jacobite Rebellion, Maggie Craig reflects on the research process, then and now.

Twenty years ago this month I published my first book, Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45. It’s never been out of print since and has been described as a modern classic. A non-fiction study of many of the women who supported the Stuart Cause in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, it grew out of research for a novel, powered by a spark of anger.

I’d been finding out from my reading that lots of women played their parts in those interesting times. So in 1995, I wondered why it was that the blizzard of articles marking the 250th anniversary of the ’45 mentioned only one of them: Flora MacDonald, who famously assisted Bonnie Prince Charlie over the sea to Skye while he was disguised as her supposed Irish maidservant, Betty Burke.

Those many other women weren’t hard to find, you just had to be willing to look. The Internet was in its infancy in the mid 1990s, so research had to be done the old-fashioned way. I started with the bibliography of John Prebble’s Culloden, saw which sources he had consulted, and carried on from there. The search took me all over the country, to university and public libraries, reference libraries, archives, record offices and museums in Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle, Penrith, York and London.

I was working then as a Scottish Tourist Guide, escorting mainly German-speaking visitors on coach tours of Scotland. Once I had seen them off on the ferry at Hull, I would tack on a few days’ research in York, Carlisle and elsewhere, as a way of defraying at least some of my travel costs. I became very adept at what I dubbed speed research, references at the ready, so I could hit the ground running.

That was the idea. It didn’t always work. Older books sometimes referenced a cataloguing system that had subsequently been revamped. It took time to get to grips with the new classification and it had to be done when you got there, eating into the time available for actual research. Twenty years ago, comprehensive online catalogues were few and far between. Yet there was pleasure in the anticipation of the unknown. Walking up the often imposing steps of libraries and record offices, I would be excited, wondering what gems I might dig out of the history mines in the day ahead.

I found works by 19th century historians, some which I suspected no one had consulted for decades, the published papers of antiquarian societies, contemporary pamphlets, broadsides and prints, original letters, court transcripts, soldiers’ reports and hastily-sketched maps and eye-witness accounts of events. In the Public Record Office in London, then still in its old home in Chancery Lane, I read a scribbled note, clearly written by a busy man, listing people arrested on Skye in the summer of 1746. They included ‘Mifs Flora McDonald [sic] of Milton made Prisoner for having carried off the Pretender’s Son as her servant in Women’s Apparell.’ There it was in black and white – well, faded but still very readable ink – real documentary evidence of the Betty Burke story.

I also read petitions for clemency from prisoners ‘taken in actual rebellion’. Most were members of the Jacobite garrison at Carlisle, left behind when Charles Edward Stuart and the bulk of his army forded the river Esk back into Scotland after the abortive invasion of England. The garrison fell to the Duke of Cumberland in the dying days of 1745.

One petition was from Elizabeth Grant, a seamstress from Banff. Like many women and even children, she had followed the Prince’s army into England. Elizabeth’s husband seems to have been killed, probably at the skirmish at Clifton, near Penrith, the last military engagement fought on English soil. One of a group of ‘nine Highland women’ consigned to the keeper of Appleby Gaol, she ended up in York Castle. In June 1746 a Catholic priest also imprisoned there presided at Elizabeth’s second marriage. Her new husband was Edmund, (sometimes Edward), Clavering, one of the significant number of Northumbrian and English North Country supporters of the Jacobite cause.

Their gaolers were outraged. The record of the interrogations that followed tells us the priest had officiated at the wedding ‘in order to prevent sin’. Presumably the pair had become lovers well before the marriage ceremony. Four months later, Clavering was tried and hanged at York and Elizabeth was sentenced to be transported to the West Indies as an indentured servant. I can still recall the thrill I felt when I realised I was looking down at the piece of paper on which was written her petition for clemency, lying on the desk in front of me. Her plea was denied, although her story does not end there.

At the end of that particular research day, blinking like a mole who’d just tunnelled up to daylight, I walked the short distance from Chancery Lane to Temple Bar, where The Strand meets Fleet Street. After the failure of the ’45, around 80 Jacobite officers were tried and found guilty of treason. They were hung, drawn and quartered at Carlisle, Brampton, York and London, their severed heads placed on iron spikes as a hideous warning to any other potential rebels. Those put to death in York, like Edmund Clavering, had their heads placed on Lendal Bridge. Some who ‘suffered’ – as the 18th century euphemism had it – on Kennington Common in London had their heads stuck on spikes on top of the old Temple Bar. I stood there and shivered. You don’t get that sort of frisson from Internet research.

There’s something very special about handling original documents, forging that connection with the people who wrote them. You do your best not to handle them, of course, laying them gently on the soft pillows or foam supports provided, keeping the delicate pages flat with strings of small lead weights covered in linen. Back then, most of us didn’t have laptops. We took our notes in pencil, as was mandatory. No ink was allowed near these precious records from the past.

Nowadays you can find so much at the click of a mouse. Some documents are available in their entirety online. Library catalogues often provide summaries of others, helping you choose what you need to look at in this cornucopia of information when you next visit. All credit to the librarians, archivists and volunteers who’ve done the necessary work. We have so much at our fingertips.

I love being able to sit in front of a computer in my corner of rural Scotland and access sources up and down the country and around the world. In the non-fiction books I’ve written in recent years, I’ve found the British Newspaper Archive to be a particularly valuable source. The Deceased Online website has allowed me to discover where some of my research subjects are buried, adding another piece to the jigsaw.

There’s the simplicity too of typing a few selected words into a search engine. When I was researching for a local history project three years ago, an older neighbour told me about a woman who had grown up along the road from my house. She went to China as a Church of Scotland missionary and teacher in an orphanage and died there, just before the Japanese invaded during the Second World War. When I searched for her name with a few more relevant words, I discovered there was a small cache of letters from her in China to a friend in the US, held in the archives of the University of Washington. An email request brought me photocopies and – wonderfully – a photograph of this Scotswoman who had died so far from home. I wouldn’t have found any of that without the Internet.

I knew the heads of Jacobites had been placed on spikes at Temple Bar because I found an old print depicting this while sifting through a lot of similar material at a university library. As an experiment while writing this article, I did an online image search: Temple Bar London Jacobite heads on spikes. Yes, the old print was there. It showed up amid a deluge of images and information on the long history of Temple Bar before and after 1746. It’s all very interesting and I found myself starting to read it … but that way lies madness!

Despite the information overload and the ease of electronic research, there’s still so much that isn’t and never will be available on the Internet. I’m looking forward to many years of walking up the imposing steps of storehouses of knowledge with my laptop in my bag, although I often still prefer my notebook and pencil case.

Maggie Craig writes Scottish historical fiction and non-fiction. On Saturday 30th September 2017, she will be in conversation with award-winning crime writer Lin Anderson at the NTS Visitor Centre at Culloden Moor, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of first publication of Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45.

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