Perhaps this is fitting for Halloween... but I just had to mention my new obsession...witches.

Strangely enough when you study Early Modern England and you have a knack of finding stuff about Puritans and fanatical religious groups... witches appear and I love reading about them, studying the process of finding them and how they prosecuted them.


I have effectively gone down the rabbit hole at this point and found a new obsession.

Suffolk, England apparently, in the 1500s was a hotbed for witches and so I am currently reading all I can about this.

Happy Halloween! 

Violence

You know, there are moments when I read something and I feel the immediate need to share. This just occurred as I read some of Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen. 

 

Take note of the dates associated with the text as I explain this awesome story. So, apparently French villages liked other French villages about as much as hipster coffee dude likes Starbucks ( I like both btw). To often settle inter-village conflict by actually going into physical battle... Described as a struggle with massive injury using staves, stones, cudgels, gouging, and biting. Yep, if Jean in one village thought Louis in another gave him the stink eye... Each village would basically assault each other until they got worn out. This was the 19th century btw, not the Middle Ages lol. Gotta love history.

Research

The persistent bother with having some sort of ongoing blog and having a very busy life...resides in the fact that there are huge swaths of time where I completely forget that I had a blog in the first place. It is not personal or intentional, I just have so much going on that I forget.

I have now survived my first full month of a PhD program without falling completely apart and dying on the inside. I am enjoying my European and Pedagogy courses and I feel like I am on the right path.

On the educational/research side... I have read some pretty cool things.



There was a village in  what is now Germany that is fantastic because they secretly (I say secretly because most of them tried to deny it at first) ritually buried a live bull at a crossroad to stop an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease in the village...yea you heard me right.

Check the book out here:

Can you imagine this conversation in the beginning... 
Hey guys we have to stop this disease, it could kill all our cows.

Oh man yea, but what are we going to do?

Well I heard that in a few villages over they had a pig that was sick and they did this and well, it worked I think.

What did they do

Well... You see... they took a male pig to the crossroads at twilight and buried him alive.

Uhhh...that sounds crazy and kind of pagan.

Yea, but it worked.

LETS DO IT!

Sad Cow does not like this idea.

Darwin and the Complexity of History

History is always pretty complicated.
The word complex is probably scribed into every history book known to man because no history is ever easy.
Many major figures in history are usually a mix of good and bad... often contradictory. 

I did not know anything really about Charles Darwin prior to this semester, one of the reasons I found an entire class based upon his work and its relation to the Victorian Era so interesting....

Now that I know him...he is pretty complex lol.

Darwin was a huge humanitarian, he loathed slavery and it pained him to see people abused, animals abused for that matter.

His whole family, a mix of the Wedgwoods (yea the tea pot and dinner china people) and Darwins were HUGE abolitionists and very anti-cruelty to a high degree...


When Darwin was a child and he would fish at his Wedgwood relations home, they taught him to soak worms in brine prior to hooking them so they would not feel the metal hook going into them.  Let us think about this for a second... he did not want the worm to feel pain.

This did not stop Darwin from being a HUGE hunter, he was a hunting enthusiast and also... when he was on his trip to the Galapagos... he captured, killed, and preserved hundreds of specimens, shooting tons of game to eat.  I am sure he tried to do it in the most humane way as possible, but still... does not want to make that worm suffer.

One of the books I am reading attributes Darwin's entire exploration into the origin of species and man to his hatred of slavery and in defiance of the normal excuse that somehow those enslaved by other men were lesser...not in the same species. As disgusting and horrible as it sounds, that horrible excuse was pretty prominent and others all the way through until the Civil Rights movement used those kind of disgusting and dim witted excuses to deny people the vote, rights, or even human dignity. 

Darwin witnessed the harsh treatment of slaves on some of his trips and it devastated him... and so he wanted to prove that regardless of skin, people came from the same stock.

I already liked Darwin, I just like him a lot more now. 

GREEN BEER!!!!!???!! WOOOOO... no.

We all fall for it.. even I do as I sit here after having shamrock shaped pancakes for breakfast and green rice krispy treats all day while drinking Irish Breakfast Tea.
(ok well the ones of us who are obsessive about things Irish)... we get all caught up in the fervor of St. Patrick's Day and yes, I will have a guinness tonight as well, as I should.

But... what is it all about?

The very modernized and proper depiction of St. Patrick

No... he did not run all the snakes out of Ireland, though the comics with him driving the car with them in it is pretty hilarious and fantastic.

He was not even from Ireland.

But...that is OK, we are an adaptive society of people, we go with it. 

He was probably born somewhere in Scotland in the late 3oos, so you know...records are not the best. It is not like his mum had the opportunity to facebook every moment of his life... look Patrick's first bowl of gruel, look Patrick playing with his stick doll... nope... 

Patrick did not have the best adolescence... I mean if you are a young teen and you are kidnapped, made a slave, and then forced to tend sheep in Ireland, it is not exactly what you planned on doing (and if you did...well, special... just special)

Eventually he escaped and began working to Christianize the pagan Irish, which turned out to be pretty successful since when I visited Ireland I found more Churches in Dublin than I did in Middle Georgia and well, wow...that is a difficult thing to do.

He lived like many of us think the mendicant orders lived during the middle ages...vow of poverty, chaste, scant living...and he continued to work to turn people to God, inspiring others in Ireland to follow in his footsteps, so pretty cool guy, I can see why he has a holiday.

So...the Shamrock?  Simple, he used it to explain the holy trinity..worked out pretty well. 

Do not even ask me to explain how it turned into green beer and drunken lunacy.  I went to the Savannah celebration once, I am good.  

That being said... I am currently wearing a green tshirt with a giant cat leprechaun on it.  

Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

The Past is Not Ideal

This is going to be quick because I am currently studying for my graduate comprehensive exams, but something occurred to me this morning as I read...something that I encounter a lot and something that really aggravates me about people who look to the past as "better times".

First... many people have this idealistic view of the past so let me just shatter that for a moment and say that just because I love studying the past in no way means I want to revisit it.

We are a progressive society (for the most part) and we move forward in the hopes to make life better for all people...at least some of us do.

So... first...
Those nuts who think that we should go back to the days of the founders when FREEDOM was real!!!!  This is the worst representation of 'Mercuh that I can think of and it is an example of the growing dangers of civil religion and nationalism that I have seen in a while.
The 1700s were not ideal for anyone...well unless you were a wealthy, white, and land owning male. Women had no rights, no property and were at the will of their fathers or husbands... there was slavery... and a lot of the population could not vote... how is that ideal?
By the way... during our Second president's tenure...we had some of the strongest censorship laws in our history with the alien and sedition acts.... just saying.

Second...
the 1950s
Um Red Scare people and Jim Crow
I am not even going past that...that is enough. 

Thanks 

Grit and Darwin

I am in full paper mode right now so I do not have much time to talk...but after reading most of Desmond and Moore's biography of Darwin, I have such a different perception of him.
I always pictured him as this high society naturalist with an edge, but... during his time on the Beagle , Charles Darwin was anything but dainty. He spent most of his time rouging it on the plains of South America with native guides and riding with gauchos, eating armadillo and puma and liking it. He had to bargain with warlords and tread over hundreds of miles of rough territory just to look at new flora and species. 
I just did not know... it is a pretty interesting thing. 

Beetle Mania

A good bit of my blogs come from content that I am currently studying because well...when you read three books at once you really do not have a lot of spare time to look into other things, sadly.
Today I found something amazing when reading Desmond and Moore's biography of Charles Darwin (and I do recommend it if you have time to read it, it is amazing)

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
By the way, I had the opportunity to correspond with one of the authors of this book, James Moore...because I had some questions about his studies when I researched him as a Darwin historian, he is a very friendly and helpful scholar who gave a random student a bit of his day and made some awesome suggestions, which is why I am promoting this book even more... it is very rare someone is so nice. 

Anyway, when Darwin was attending college at Cambridge to become a member of the Anglican clergy...yep Charles Darwin...he took up the hobby of collecting and categorizing beetles. During one of his years at Cambridge, Darwin and his cousin obsessively collected beetles and this was a popular thing to do. People would buy books and basically compete to see who could amass the most extensive collection of beetles. Darwin freaked out one time because he got ahold of this German species of beetle with red antenna. Now, I do understand the efforts to reconnect to nature by pursuing such a hobby and naturalism was popular during the industrialization filled 19th century in England, but I just cannot get out of my head this intense group of college students at Cambridge...walking around in their gowns and caps...feverishly looking for the perfect beetle specimen. 
Hilarious...

You KNOW you want to spend your time looking for this guy and his friends 

Puritans and Witches

Anyone who knows me can back up that I have a slight obsession with the Puritans. Honestly I love those crazy Predestination, hard life, devotees to one of the most strict interpretations of Christianity I have ever seen. Why? Beyond the obvious insane things I read when studying their court records? I think it is because they are the perfect representation of how a society can break down when you put too many restrictions on the natural behaviors of human beings to long to be happy and free thinking.
We just do not appreciate some daunting figure telling us if we love our children (you were supposed to have this distant separation), like to dance, read, sing...etc... maybe work in the garden on a Sunday afternoon...we are going to suffer in the depths of hell for an eternity. Especially when you have no idea if you were one of the select who only knew they were one of God's chosen few to go to Heaven by WANTING to adhere to such tight restrictions. 

Oh man...and did it have a bad effect on their daily lives.

We love starving and walking through the snow NOT to dance or sing

One negative effect of such a restrictive lifestyle manifested itself a few times in the new world with Puritan and puritan-like peoples in Massachusetts AND Connecticut. I know most people are aware of the witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, but it was not a singular event. 

From the late 1640s until the end of the century, people in Connecticut also faced the charge of witch and just like in Salem...turned to hysteria and murder (I am sorry, hanging and executing people for witchcraft is murder so I am just going to be honest here and call a spade a spade).

Let me preface... I do not care if a 100% lunatic in an official manner (COTTON MATHER I AM TALKING TO YOU SIR) writes memoirs of his escapades as a crusader against the Devil's war against American colonialism and describes bad Exorcist style scenes to legitimize his fantasies and delusions of grandeur, these people were charged, jailed, and often executed because they were poor, disliked, or proved to be an obstacle for someone else's success in a town and Mather with his various cronies contributed to straight up murder in my eyes... no sympathy for the real wicked here. 

" One while their Tongues would be drawn down their Throats; another-while they would be pull'd out upon their Chins, to a prodigious length. They would have their Mouths opened unto such a Wideness, that their Jaws went out of joint; and anon they would clap together again with a Force like that of a strong Spring-Lock. The same would happen to their Shoulder-Blades, and their Elbows, and Hand-wrists, and several of their joints. They would at times ly in a benummed condition and be drawn together as those that are ty'd Neck and Heels;' and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn Backwards, to such a degree that it was fear'd the very skin of their Bellies would have crack'd. They would make most pitteous out-cries, that they were cut with Knives, and struck with Blows that they could not bear. Their Necks would be broken, so that their Neck-bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it; and yet on the sudden, it would become, again so stiff that there was no stirring of their Heads; yea, their Heads would be twisted almost round; and if main Force at any time obstructed a dangerous motion which they seem'd to be upon, they would roar exceedingly. "

-Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689)

You can Marvel at the Entire Thing HERE

By the way, this complete horrible excuse for a human being, riled up Salem so bad that after he appeared to help more people were arrested and executed.  Good going Cotton, good going!

Oh look what the moron just so happened to Publish and make money off of....

Back to Connecticut...
So of course, the practice of anything even akin to witchcraft during the 17th century was a capital crime in the colonies and please let me be clear... if you walked into a friend's house in 1650 in Connecticut and accidentally said something to the effect of "Hey I was walking outside and it was so glorious that I wanted to marvel at the magic of nature." There might be a chance that a day later your best friend who you shared bread recipes with and sat by in church might be pointing their finger at you in a frenzy because moments after you left (you heathen nature worshipping demon) she came down with a sharp pain in her head...placed there by you of course and the DEVIL (also know as a headache). 

Oh and that is all it took by the way.... you caused a headache, froze the cow's milk (does not matter if it was 19 degrees outside in February in Connecticut), or looked at someone funny.  All it took was one annoyed person and the utterance of witchcraft and your butt was toast. 

Like Salem, dozens of people were accused and executed for witchcraft in the late 17th century... Puritans man...Puritans. This happened decades before the tragedy at Salem and proceeded throughout the rest of the century, until the late 1690s when new laws were implemented in colonies to restrict the prosecution of witches (probably because of Salem)...but still, these people Mary Sanford, Lydia Gilbert, and John Carsington were killed in part because of the restrictive nature of an overbearing theocratic rule that deprived early colonists of any sort of free thinking or will.... the Enlightenment could not come soon enough for these people. 

Massachusetts witch execution 

My New Venture into Latin America and the World of Darwin

My final semester of graduate school does not look like it will disappoint.... already filled with weird and interesting little tidbits of history.


From a book I am reading this week in Latin America
Peru in the 16th century, a Spanish priest is sent to a small outpost that will be his parish.  He enters the city pretty much acting like a lunatic...he throws things at people, hits them with random objects, calls them bitches and curses them.... constantly acting like a crazy man.

Why?  Was he TOO moved by the spirit?
No.... he had lived for many years in a mining town where they mined silver by using mercury and he was just poisoned so much that it had addled his brain.

Now I just picture this guy throwing his food, money bag, beads, and whatever else he had at people as they looked on him in complete fear.

After a few weeks of the guy being in town...no one would go to mass, no one would go around him and eventually he was replaced but just picture a mercury addled insane priest coming in your town out of the blue and him having authority over your spiritual well being.

Priests in the new world had a rough time... one...who wanted to do something about the labor system in place in one town...was poisoned for getting in the way... after drinking his hot chocolate he fell dead....

Yep... 

And whoever says history is boring, is insane. 

Lord Nelson...and that time he lost his marbles

So for anyone who knows anything about British naval history....
they know who Horatio Nelson is.
He is an icon, a masterful leader and he won one of the most amazing battles in naval history, Trafalgar (well he died a few hours in, but it is what he is famous for).

Well...
After the Nile and before Copenhagen... Nelson had this, well.. let us just be honest... midlife crisis (really end of life crisis since he was going to get destroyed a few years later).

He abandoned his really sweet seeming wife Fanny and had a very open and very scandalous affair with this woman named Emma Hamilton who had an oblivious or just not caring older husband.
By the end of this...she had Nelson's kid... Horatia (I cannot make this up)

scannnndallllll

Some of the crazier things...

He left his wife and tried to cut her out of his will

An openly pregnant Hamilton would rhomp about drinking champagne and singing while not hiding the fact that she was having Nelson's love baby

He wrote letters to her about how she was his real wife and they would be together forever

and he got caught up in this really complicated political intrigue with Naples and the Queen (Marie Antionette's sister by the way)...and at one point got a letter from a commanding officer that kindly reminded him what country he worked for.

He did not start acting semi-alright until he got back on a ship and went to fight again.

Here is my issue.... he got a pretty nasty gash in the head from shrapnel during the Nile Battle....is that why he went nuts or was he just a crazy man.  He had an affair before with a woman, but it was never this over the top and this guy lived on boats most of his life so I can see him not having the understanding how to behave...if he was not known for his ability to get men to follow him due in part to his social skills with his fleet.

Something to think about...did the injury in the battle of the Nile really knock Nelson stupid for a while? 

That Napoleon...

Read this in N.A.M. Roger's Command of the Ocean and was like... wow Napoleon.... 

So he thought that Europe was too small for his awesome and decided to go try to take Egypt and to make a long story short, that did not work out or end up the way he wanted so he decided to leave and head back to France (where he took over the country)....

But... before leaving Egypt he massacred all of the prisoners he had amassed over the campaign oh...and he poisoned his own ill and wounded troops...leaving many of them stranded in Egypt to rot.

Nice dude....

Oh yea...looks all majestic here... the meanie 

A little extra for the day...

You know when I read something crazy I have to share...

I know we all have this perception of what it was like for sailors on ships in the 18th century, and a great deal of influence does come from movies like Pirates of the Caribbean that romanticize the lifestyle. Honestly, the drinking was pretty on par, it was not like one could safely drink water from casks on a ship...that just screamed disease and you do not want to do anything that might start an epidemic in a tight space.

In reality, it took a lot of food to keep the sailors fit enough to run a ship and so despite the ideas of hard tact and salt beef with weevils throughout being our idea of sea fare, they worked pretty hard to keep fresh ingredients on the ship...including livestock... ALIVE livestock.
When ships set out they would sometimes have dozens of cows on board.  Can you imagine?  
So you have hundreds of men, supplies, cargo, everything one would need to travel and maintain a ship on a journey... and some cows.
I just thought that was funny. 

Women did not just become activists recently....

Women have a long history of being politically active...not just your outliers like Mary Queen of Scots or Elizabeth I....Isabella... these were monarchs with a great deal of power, but women also have worked pretty diligently go get their points across to the wider public.

Women in America worked pretty hard to fight for suffrage beginning in the 19th century.
Additionally, you would be surprised at how many "founders" consulted their wives before making decisions...Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison could be pretty forceful and sharp tongued when you crossed them.
In France, the women could be effective and deadly, just ask Marat.

But.... this month many many years ago, women in Paris finally lost their tempers and marched on Versailles because they were pretty tired of high and unaffordable grain prices and a lack of food can make a woman pretty hangry.
In truth, starvation was a real thing in absolutist France, the economy was atrocious and a bad year for agriculture meant starvation across the countryside with a monarchy and government so detached from reality that they simply did not realize the state of affairs with their people...

Btw...that let them eat cake was taken wayyyyy out of context...but anyway.

In October 1789, the women got so angry and out of sorts that they mobbed the armory in Paris, marched to Versailles (I think about 16 miles away) and began demanding change in a we have weapons sort of way. 
They actually forced the King to return to Paris to get some work done and this was all temporary to some extent because we all know what happened to Louis.

Anyway... this whole anti-feminism tilt lately where women should be in the home...make babies...not vote stupidity.... maybe these guys should read about what happens when you make a collective group of women angry enough. 

These ladies were not kidding

How the Navy Even Sailed....

I will say this about any navy that accomplished even setting sail in the eighteenth century...miracle.

I am not even being coy really, the fact that these ships made it to sea proves pretty miraculous, especially when they are able to sail and defeat another force.

Was the British navy pretty hardcore in the 1700s...yes, but they also almost always operated with too little men, with huge numbers of sick and inexperienced sailors, and the weather... the weather out there!

I came across one instance when the British were preparing to sail and one ship doctor found fifty FIFTY sailors on ONE SHIP with venereal disease and that does not account for problems with typhus and scurvy...

Ships were in disrepair, the officers were all eligible for the senior citizen discount at Ye Olde Golden Coralle, everyone was sick and you probably were short at least a few dozen men.

Now to be fair... in France it was ten times worse and the Revolution and Terror pretty much slapped the French Navy in the face and kicked it in the mud.

But still... The fact that they were able to sail at all sometimes seems like a miracle.

This just seems more likely than the amazingly triumphant landscapes I usually see...

Now just imagine all the guys on shore had venereal disease...

When Revolutions Go Wrong

After a fun little talk about the French Revolution on my facebook page... there are a few things I noticed about the French one...
People say you have to break a few eggs.... or tens of thousands of eggs in a horrifically tyrannical and violent fashion.
wow...
The French.  

How did this...

Become this....

By the time the Committee for Public Safety was in control of France, the Revolution had jumped the shark and any idea of liberty was out of fashion.

I read in a book tonight (The Glorious First of June) that when one man attempted to use the Rights of Man in his defense (which he was lucky because they thought trails for criminals and dissenters were a waste of time).... the Judge basically said that saying such was proof of sedition. 

This was like President John Adams levels of paranoia....granted he didn't execute thousands of people, he just thought anyone who dared criticize him was the "debil" lol.

The CPS sent troops throughout France to squash "Counter Revolutionary ideas" or what we would call...logical people having a problem with bloodthirsty loons running the country.

They massacred thousands of people and threw them in mass graves.

Oh man... good times right?  Thankfully that period did not last long, but still...the damage done in the short time it did. 

Alternate Histories

Truth:
Historians (at least those I have encountered) have major annoyance issues with people who write those awfully flawed and illogical alternate history novels... you know when technology is mixed and soldiers in the 19th century have 21st century weapons and such...
We do not like it....
It is not that we do not have any creativity.
It is not that we do not enjoy a good historical novel...some of us really do...
Here are some of the ones I like...
Wolf Hall
A Triple Knot
Cold Mountain
All Quiet on the Western Front
Memoirs of A Geisha
Pillars of the Earth

Annoyance over.

Thanks!

Side Notes from Reading...

I am currently reading Bergen's Manhunt which follows the ten year attempt to take down Osama Bin Laden.  I own the documentary based off of the book and I will fully admit that I have watched it at least a dozen times, I am fascinated by the analysts that worked for the CIA in Alec Station and so I finally got the book.  I did not get far in last night before falling asleep...to be fair, I spent most of the day and evening reading about the French Navy and chasing around a hyper toddler so I was a bit tired.

My early observation that really does not have much to do with the story as a whole is this...

If you are an architect in Abottabad, Pakistan (oh btw... Abottabad was actually named after a British dude named Abbot...crazy!) and you get a call to build a very expensive and specific compound...would you not get suspicious about who on earth you were building for???  Maybe the guy knew and was just like...I wont ask questions and I will take the money, but despite its very sparse appearance...that place was expensive to build and had pretty specific designs. I am sure the guy knew there was something clandestine going on, but I did find it odd.

To Pouf or not to Pouf

Would you believe me if I said one of the early conflicts in France during the time or Revolution involved arguments over fashion?
No... I have not had any Guinness today.

So this is a French Revolutionary dude...

(thanks wikipedia)

dapper fellow

See that thing on his hat, its called a cockade...and the red white and blue ones were a fashionable way to say...hey I support the revolution.  There were also poufs that members of the National Guard (revolutionary dudes too) wore to show their enlistment in local militias... kind of like an "in your face" gesture towards men enlisted in the French Military who took their orders from the King. Well, I am reading a book titled... Revolution & Political Conflict in the French Navy by Cormack and he discusses this crisis in the Naval base town of Toulon where the Commandant of the Navy would not allow the base dockworkers to wear the poufs of the National Guard...for obvious reasons... and he even let them wear the cockades if they wanted, but wearing a pouf of a pretty much offensive armed force might have caused some instability in an already tense situation.

This caused a hailstorm of bad... and contributed to Revolutionary tensions....

Never think accessories are not dangerous!

Scottish and Freedom?

I think everyone I know the past few weeks has asked about my opinion in regards to the Scottish independence movement and if I thought if they should be independent. It is safe to say that I've seen a few people look pretty shocked when I say... no, I think Scotland is good where it is, but I'm not subjugating a people or forgetting their struggles with their once occupying neighbor to the South... it is more of a current economic climate and logic decision and I honestly think that the few economic boosts Scotland has going for it would not be sufficient to support the country's population economically and thus Scotland would decline and its people would suffer... and let us be fair, Scotland being a part of the UK has nothing in common now as it did when it struggled for independence a few times in the past... NOTHING in common... I do not even think Scotland has anything in common with Northern Ireland...who I think SHOULD be a part of Ireland and not the UK by the way...

Did you like my intro into discussing Scottish history today?

So I will admit, I watch Outlander the Starz television show based on the quasi-romance novel of the same name by Diana Gabaldon. I actually caught up on the show today...and what an episode it was...whew!

Anyway...
The show and the novel has caused me to look back at the Battle of Culloden...

It is so hard to root against the Redcoats sometimes... look how cool they look....

The Battle of Culloden took place on 16 April 1746. The eighteenth century was a rough period for the British in a way... the seventeenth was a time of chaos, war, and blood... and the English...after this period, often had a grudge against the Stuart family. Sure, James I was tolerable, but a hard sale after Elizabeth I's age, even if her administrative methods left the country a bit cash poor. James Stuart was also James VI, King of Scotland, the son of a beheaded Mary Queen of Scots (who he sold out by the way and totally promised his cousin Elizabeth that he would not retaliate for his mother's beheading as long as he was the heir... nice kid right!). He had this odd reign where he and parliament argued over legislative power and control...and that continued when Charles I took the throne in 1625 and he also fought bitterly with parliament over control...and because I am not discussing that at the moment...let us just jump to the whole beheading, crazy violent time in England...Charles II... more problems...William of Orange...more problems...Anne...Hanovers take over and lots of Georges follow...Scotland does not like the King, Scotland wants rights and FREEDOM! (I cannot help it)

Back to Culloden...

By the way, while I am in no way a France hater...at all, I like France... the 18th century was totally not a time to try to work with the French to perhaps get someone on the English throne.  The British and the French were basically at war with each other every other day...and France's administrative and economic methods were what I am going to simply call...questionable. 

Scotland went to France because it would make sense that they did so, Jacobite rebellions were fostered by the French, especially when the British had such a problem with Catholics and the British were the annoyed rivals of the French. Just think about the crazy Alabama fan who poisoned the Auburn trees...it is that kind of hate. 

Tensions, tensions...violence...unrest... leads eventually to rebellion in a swords/guns/fighting sort of way, not some glorious revolution where people hug it out and say Let us change our government (it really did not happen that way then either, but yea...another story). 

The Duke of Cumberland, the guy who was at the head of the English forces...was decent militarily and it helped that he had quite a few men behind him, more men than the Scots who oppose them and unlike many movies and fictional portrayals of outnumbered forces...they usually lose, no matter how much heart they have.

Duke William was a Prince, highly educated, and honestly...just had more men and better equipment to handle an already disorganized and not wonderfully led group of Scots. I do not place the blame on Lord John Murray, he did what he could at the location chosen for him... but, these guys had swords and the British had guns and cannons... we all know what will happen when you get on a boggy field with some swords and shields against more modern weaponry...you get owned in the face...and the Scottish did. 

Around four thousand people died overall in the battle... and I will say the Scots took out quite a few dudes.

Interesting tidbits, the sides were not as stark as some of your romantic tales may portray them... scots fought for the British as well in that battle, not everyone was enamoured with Bonnie Prince Charlie (I would not be...he was kind of a loser).