Perdition to King George! 2010

Perdition to King George! (PKG) is a study of two hypothetical events in the history of the Jacobite Movement: the plots to overthrow the Georgian regime of Britain by landing Swedish, or alternatively, Spanish troops in Britain.

The famous Swedish monarch, Charles XII, was sympathetic to the Jacobite Cause, and in the years 1717-1719 was not that far away, fighting the Danes in Norway. Rumours have it he was preparing a base of operations for an invasion of England or Scotland with 12,000 men; James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, would be set up as a puppet king. In the event, Charles XII was killed in 1718 and the plots came to nothing, but what if he had not died?

With the death of the Last Viking, the Jacobites were forced to look for another backer, and found it in Spain, where the shifty Cardinal Alberoni was engineering a war against France that would ultimatey drag in the Empire and the English. (It should be noted that the Jacobites' traditional supporter, France, now under an insecure and anglophilic Regent, the Duc d'Orleans, was uninterested in helping them. Indeed, d'Orleans offered a brigade of French troops to help England stave off the threat of a new Spanish Armada!) In the event, the Armada was wrecked, but a small independent party of Jacobites and Spanish soldiers did land on Scotland's rugged west coast, even fighting a battle with loyalist troops before surrendering.

Either invasion could have succeeded. King George I of England took the blame for most of the country's ills following the late War of the Spanish Succession. He relied too much on his Whig friends, which on the one hand gave Parliament more power over royal affairs than ever before, and on the other, encouraged many who would not otherwise have done so to support the Jacobite Cause of restoring the Stuart dynasty. Furthermore, Scotland had suffered a political union with England in 1707, and many in that country were unhappy. The Swedes and or the Spanish would be seen as liberators (the Swedes with the advantage of their Protestant faith, the Spanish with the advantage of closer ties to James Stuart, Scotland's "true" king).