The real story behind Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites: How Much of Outlander’s Charles Edward Stuart Was Real?

We didn’t study Scottish history at school, and most of my knowledge of Bonnie Prince Charlie came through watching the show Outlander, with Claire and Jamie trying their best to drag a vain young man toward a future he was busy ruining. 

I devoured that show. The kilts, the candlelight, the doomed cause, the slow walk toward Culloden that you knew was coming and still couldn’t look away from. But by the time the credits rolled on that battle, I wanted to know how much of it had actually happened and how much had been created for theatrical appeal.

Who was he, actually? What were the Jacobites really fighting for, and was the prince the disastrous leader history tends to paint him as? 

The Bonnie Prince Charlie Image

We’ve all seen the painting of a man in tartan, sword at his hip, sweeping into a ballroom full of admirers as the candles flicker and the pipes start up. It’s the picture that’s sold a million biscuit tins and probably half the tourist tat in Edinburgh. 

The painting most people are thinking of is by John Pettie, but it was painted roughly 100 years after Charles died. He wasn’t working from a life portrait, his own memory of having attended the event, or any contemporary record of the night in question. He was working from Walter Scott’s novel Waverley, which is to say, a piece of historical fiction.

Charles really did hold court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse for about six weeks in 1745, after the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans. That much is documented. What’s less commonly known is that he expressly told his supporters not to make a party of it. 

According to accounts from people who were actually there, the atmosphere at Holyrood was businesslike, almost grim. Charles and his advisors were head-down over maps, arguing about what to do next. 

So, the ballroom scene we all picture in our heads? Victorian invention, basically. A romantic gloss applied long after everyone involved was dead and unable to object. It’s a useful reminder that a lot of what we ‘know’ about Charles is really what the 19th century wanted to remember about him.

Born in Rome, Buried in Rome, Briefly British in Between

Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria Stuart, and yes, that’s the full name, was born in Rome in 1720. Not Scotland, or France, but Rome. His grandfather, James VII of Scotland and II of England, had been deposed about 32 years earlier for the inconvenient fact of being Catholic in an increasingly Protestant Britain. 

The family had been guests of King Louis XIV in France for a while, then settled in Rome under papal protection after the 1715 rising fell apart and the Treaty of Utrecht made France an awkward host.

Charles spent only 14 months of his life on British soil. Fourteen months, during the 1745 campaign and its aftermath, plus one secret return visit to London in 1750. That’s it. 

The man who is now the face of Scottish romanticism, whose image is plastered on every shortbread tin from Inverness to Edinburgh, was effectively an Italian prince of Polish descent who spoke multiple languages and had been raised from the cradle as a king-in-waiting for a country he’d never seen.

His father, James, still considered himself the rightful king. In 1743, he made Charles his Prince Regent, authorized to act in his father’s name on all matters. Charles was installed with both the Order of the Thistle and the Order of the Garter, the chivalric orders of Scotland and England, which his father bestowed as if he were still on the throne to do the bestowing. 

The whole household operated as a court in exile, with visitors, honors, diplomatic correspondence, the lot. It was an extraordinary way to grow up, and it produced an extraordinary young man with one fixed idea: he was going to take those thrones back.

Was He Actually Bonnie?

Was he as handsome and engaging as the legend says, or was that part of the gloss too? The early portraits show a good-looking young man, dark-eyed, well-dressed, with the kind of bearing you’d expect from someone raised on the idea that he was royalty.

He had the languages, the manners, the presence in a room. The ‘bonnie’ part wasn’t pure invention.

What happened after Culloden is where the picture darkens considerably. Charles lived another 42 years following the battle in 1746, and he never came close to mounting another serious attempt at the throne. 

Money dried up, the support evaporated, and the promised French and Swedish military aid, which had never quite materialized when it mattered most, certainly wasn’t coming back. He drank heavily and fell out with almost everyone who’d ever helped him. 

There’s a sketch of him as a man of about 56, and those features that had been handsome in his 20s had sagged into something heavier and sadder.

His younger brother Henry Benedict joined the Catholic Church and became a cardinal, with their father James’s blessing and active support. For Charles, this was a disaster. He’d been working out how to distance the Stuarts from Catholicism in order to win English Protestant support, even converting to Anglicanism during his secret 1750 visit to London. 

To have his brother go the other way, with their father’s encouragement, felt like a knife in the back. He never spoke to his father again. Not once, for the rest of James’s life.

What Were the Jacobites Actually Fighting For?

Here’s where I think Outlander, for all its strengths, simplifies things. The show frames the cause around Charles himself, his ambitions, his charisma, his blunders. The real story goes back much further, and it’s about a dynasty, not a single man.

The Stuarts had ruled Scotland since 1371. Three and a half centuries on the Scottish throne by the time of the ’45. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the Union of the Crowns, the dynasty expanded into what they considered their three kingdoms: Scotland, England, and Ireland. 

They believed in divine right monarchy, the idea that a king is answerable only to God and not to parliament, the church, or the inconvenient opinions of his subjects. Charles I, James VI’s son, went to the scaffold at the end of the English Civil War still firmly committed to that idea. The Stuart line was eventually restored under Charles II in 1660 and rolled on until his death in 1685.

Then came James VII and II, the brother who succeeded Charles II and who’d secretly converted to Catholicism. In Protestant Britain, that was always going to be a problem. He had a Protestant daughter, Mary, who was expected to inherit, and people made their peace with that. 

But when James fathered a son, raising the prospect of a continuing Catholic line, the political class lost its nerve. Mary’s husband, William of Orange, was invited over from the Netherlands with a Dutch force to put Mary back at the front of the queue. James fled to France, and the whole episode was branded the Glorious Revolution.

Five Risings, Not One, and the Massacre That Haunted It

Something I didn’t know until recently: the 1745 rebellion was the last of five Jacobite challenges, not a one-off. James VII and II didn’t go quietly. In 1689, almost as soon as he’d lost the throne, he tried to take it back, landing in Ireland with mostly Catholic support and getting beaten at the Battle of the Boyne. 

In Scotland that same year, the Jacobites won a victory at Killiecrankie but couldn’t turn it into a decisive result. The Scottish Parliament accepted William as king, and the Highland clan chiefs, whose old oaths had been to the Stuart line, were ordered to swear fealty to the new regime.

All of them complied except McDonald’s, who missed an arbitrary deadline. What followed was the Glencoe Massacre of 1692, when a government force that had been billeted on the MacDonalds in their own homes turned on them and killed dozens. 

It’s one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history, and the outrage was such that King William himself ordered an inquiry. The warrant survives, signed by William III. The commission concluded, as commissions tend to, that nothing in the king’s instructions had authorized the slaughter. Convenient. 

The damage was done, and Jacobite sympathy in the Highlands hardened into something that wouldn’t fully cool for another half-century.

More risings followed in 1708, 1715, and 1719, each one falling short. After 1715, with Louis XIV dead and the Treaty of Utrecht making it diplomatically impossible for France to keep harboring the exiled court, James had to leave for Rome. 

This is how Charles came to be born there in 1720. The ’45 wasn’t a sudden mad dash for the throne by a romantic young prince. It was the latest move in a chess game that had been going on for over half a century, and Charles was the piece his family had been raising for the job since he could walk.

Scotland Versus England? Not Really

We tend to think of the Jacobites as a Scottish movement against an English crown, and Outlander leans into that framing. The name itself comes from the Latin for James, Jacobus, and the cause had supporters scattered across England, Ireland, France, and beyond.

There’s a particular suit on display that the National Museum of Scotland mounted in its huge Jacobite exhibition in 2017, belonging to Sir John Hynde Cotton, a leading Jacobite Tory MP from Cambridgeshire. Cambridgeshire. Not the Highlands. 

He picked it up, or was given it, on a visit to Edinburgh around 1743. There were English Jacobites with money, titles, and political influence. The trouble was that when Charles actually marched south into England in 1745, the English support he’d been promised, both military and political, largely failed to materialize. 

The French and Swedish aid he’d been counting on also evaporated. He was left with a Highland-heavy army deep in hostile territory, having to make the agonizing decision to turn back at Derby.

The army that finally took the field at Culloden in April 1746 wasn’t a purely Scottish force fighting a purely English one either. There were Irish and French troops in the Jacobite ranks, and plenty of Scots, including whole Lowland regiments, fighting on the government side. Calling it Scotland versus England flattens a much more tangled picture into something it never really was.

Was Charles a terrible leader? I think the fairer verdict is that he was a young man raised entirely for one job, who got close enough to taste it, made some bold choices early on, and then watched the whole thing unravel because the support he’d been promised didn’t materialize and the decisions he made under pressure weren’t always the right ones. 

The retreat from Derby haunted him. The 42 years he lived after Culloden haunted him more. He died in the same city he’d been born in, having spent barely over a year of his long life in the kingdoms he’d been raised from infancy to rule.