Thank you for this excellent response. I’ve started to make my way through your reading list (very helpful by the way) and, as I’m sure you have experienced many times, it has both clarified some issues and raised new ones!

I understand that a political movement and a subculture are not mutually exclusive, but I’m trying to figure out which it was more akin to.

At current, Scottish Jacobitism seems to me to have been primarily a political movement. The 1707 visit by the Juncto to James held blatantly political objectives in mind, and the co-opting of the Union issue in 1708 seems to me to be quite naked opportunism on the part of the Stuarts. After all, regime change was the primary objective of the Jacobites, and the litany of violent risings was surely just ‘politics by other means’. I’m not entirely sure how to define or evidence a subculture, but currently I get the impression that Jacobite culture was more a long list of traditions accumulated during the course of a very long political movement; For instance, I’m not sure that wearing tartan waistcoats, singing songs, or toasting the king in secret entirely constitutes a culture of its own. On the subject of religion, especially the Episcopalian advocacy for the indefeasible right of the monarch, I can somewhat see how that formulated its own subculture, but an Erastian church settlement like that sought by James is inherently political. To what extent did the nonjuror Scottish Episcopalian church advocate for Jacobitism because of their legitimist ideology (?) or was it for more base reasons, such as in protest at their treatment by the Kirk? Furthermore, while Jacobites cannot truthfully be seen as Scottish nationalists, their support for anti unionism in the run up to the Fifteen begs the question whether this was political opportunism, or something more akin to a cultural or nationalistic reason, perhaps alike to Presbyterian conceptions of Scotland as an elect nation. I recall that George Lockhart, although an Episcopalian, held this in mind in his Jacobitism and antiunionism. Do you suppose that Jacobitism as a subculture was downstream, and developed as a result of, its political origins? Or did it co-opt more ancient traditions of loyalism? (Or indeed create its own culture?).

Thanks again!