Jacobites

This article is about the movement to restore the House of Stuart. You may be looking for the political club in Revolutionary France.

Jacobites (Scottish Gaelic: Na Seumasaich) were members of a political faction advocating the restoration of the Catholic House of Stuart to the British throne after the Glorious Revolution.^[1]

When England's pro-Catholic king James II chose exile after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, British Parliament ruled that he had "abandoned" the English throne, which was given to his Protestant daughter Mary II and her husband William III.^[2] The exiled king's followers were known as Jacobites, a term derived from the name "James" being rendered in Latin as Jacobus.^[1]

After the War of Spanish Succession and the House of Hanover's accession of the throne in 1714, the Jacobites began to revolt in Great Britain.^[3] Around the same time period, a newspaper article agitated about the increasing number of pirates in Nassau that voiced their support for the exiled James Stuart, publishing rumors that the Republic of Pirates had established bonds with the Jacobites in England in order to secure privateer contracts once King George I was overthrown.^[4] The pirate Abel Bramah captained a brig named the Jacobite.^[5]

The Bahamian Governor Woodes Rogers was suspected to have ties with the Jacobites while in fact he was a member of the Templars' Caribbean Rite.^[6] His Grand Master Laureano de Torres y Ayala tasked him to use Isu blood vials and collect samples of every member and minister in Parliament under the pretext that it was a pledge of fealty to the king against the Jacobites.^[3]