Listen to the voices of some of the key people to get a glimpse of what they might have thought and said.
Some fought for personal gain in the hope that they would benefit by a change of monarch, some for political reasons such as the dissolution of the union of Scotland and England. However, many Jacobites believed that a king received his authority from God and fought to remove the usurpers of the Stuarts as a matter of faith.
Laws were passed to keep the Stuarts from the throne and settle the succession on the House of Hanover. The succession of George I brought Tory and Whig rivalries to breaking point and caused leading Tory politicians to ally with James VIII. In Scotland, the additional religious tension between Presbyterians and Episcopalians combined with rejection of the Act of Union of 1707 made a Jacobite rising almost inevitable.