# How Catholics and Jacobites shaped the American Revolution

**By:** Declan J. Ganley  
**Published:** 2026-07-06T20:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/how-catholics-and-jacobites-shaped-the-american-revolution)

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 The official story of the American Revolution centres on taxes, representation and the political philosophy of Locke and the Enlightenment. These were real forces – but they do not tell the whole story. There ran alongside them a deeper current of fidelity: fidelity to legitimate authority, to the ancient constitution and, for many, to the Catholic Faith that had been persecuted under the new regime. That current began with Catholic soldiers in Ireland who would not serve a king installed by foreign invasion. It continued through the Scottish risings. It survived the destruction of the old Highland order. And it reached the American colonies in the memories, the education and the convictions of those who were scattered.
In the autumn of 1691, from their siege-gun batteries on the north side of the Shannon overlooking the walls of Limerick, Williamite gunners looked across at the city they had battered for weeks. They remembered Aughrim, fought on July 12, 1691 (Old Calendar), July 22, 1691 (New Calendar), where their army had broken the forces loyal to King James II in one of the bloodiest days in Irish history. Now the guns were silent. The Treaty of Limerick had been signed on October 3, 1691. The garrison could march out with full military honours, colours flying, drums beating, arms in hand, matches for their matchlocks lit at both ends and a bullet held in their mouths, ready for loading by being quickly spat into the matchlock, in case of betrayal. Of the roughly 13,000 to 14,000 men who left the city, the great majority chose exile in France rather than take service under William of Orange. They would not swear allegiance to the man who sat on the throne by right of a Dutch invasion and the decisions of a Parliament that had set aside the lawful Catholic king. James II was in exile at Saint-Germain, protected by the Catholic King of France.
The cause for which these Irish soldiers had fought was not only political. It was bound to the defence of the Catholic Faith in the three kingdoms. Penal laws already pressed hard upon Catholics in Ireland and England. The men who marched out carried with them not only their muskets but their loyalty to a Catholic dynasty and their refusal to accept a settlement that treated their religion as a disqualification for the Crown. Many would serve in the Irish Brigades of the French army, preserving both their military tradition and their Faith in exile. This was no isolated act of defiance. The same conviction animated resistance in Scotland.
In 1715 the Earl of Mar raised the standard for James’s son. In 1745 Charles Edward Stuart landed in the western Highlands and the clans rallied once more. The rising reached deep into England before ending in defeat at Culloden on April 16, 1746. The repression that followed struck at the social and religious fabric of the Highlands. The Disarming Act and the Dress Act of 1746 were accompanied by measures that further marginalised Catholic practice in those areas where it survived. The old order that had sustained both clan loyalty and, in places, the ancient Faith, was dismantled by statute and by force.
Then came the Highland Clearances. Economic change and landlord policy emptied the glens. Families were driven from their homes. Tens of thousands scattered across the oceans, to Canada, Australia and the American colonies. Among those who crossed the Atlantic were men and women who carried the memory of loyalty to a legitimate Catholic line and resistance to a Protestant settlement imposed by invasion. They brought with them songs, stories and a deep scepticism towards any authority that claimed power without rightful title.
In the American colonies these memories found new ground. Highland Scots settled in significant numbers in the Carolinas, New York and Pennsylvania. Some had direct experience of the risings or their aftermath. Others were descendants who had preserved the old convictions through oral tradition. The tune “The White Cockade”, long associated with the Stuart cause, was known in the colonies as a fife piece. Tradition records that it was played by colonial forces advancing on Concord Bridge in April 1775. Whether the detail is exact in every particular, the presence of the tune itself shows how Jacobite cultural memory had travelled and taken root.
One clear example of this continuity was Hugh Mercer. A Scottish physician who had served with Charles Edward Stuart’s army and was present at Culloden, Mercer reached Pennsylvania in 1747. He later became a brigadier general in the Continental Army and died at Princeton in 1777 while leading his men against British forces. His personal history embodied the refusal to accept Hanoverian legitimacy that had marked the Jacobite cause from the beginning.
Parallel to the Scottish story ran the experience of Irish Catholics. The Carroll family of Maryland descended from Gaelic lords who had lost their lands after the Cromwellian and Williamite conquests. Charles Carroll the Settler arrived in Maryland in 1688, the year James II was driven from his throne. His grandson, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, received his education at the Jesuit college of St Omer in French Flanders. That institution existed precisely because penal laws barred Catholics from the universities of England and Ireland. At St Omer, young Carroll studied the classical curriculum and the natural-law tradition rooted in St Thomas Aquinas and developed by Catholic thinkers such as Francisco Suárez. This formation emphasised that civil authority is limited by higher law and that unjust rule may be resisted.
Carroll returned to Maryland as one of the wealthiest men in the colonies. He became the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. He served on the Continental Congress Board of War, provided substantial financial support to the patriot cause and took part in the 1776 mission to Canada with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase. His cousin John Carroll, also educated in the Jesuit tradition, became the first Catholic bishop in the United States.
For these men, support for American independence was compatible with their Catholic Faith. The British settlement they rejected had continued to treat Catholics as second-class subjects. The natural-law principles they had absorbed at St Omer aligned with arguments for limited government and ordered liberty.
The Catholic dimension mattered in another way. When the Continental Congress sought foreign aid, it turned to Catholic France. The alliance that proved decisive at Yorktown was concluded with a Catholic monarchy. Networks of Catholic exiles and their descendants, formed in the decades after Limerick and Culloden, helped create the conditions in which such an alliance could be contemplated. Shared Faith and shared experience of penal exclusion created lines of trust that purely political calculations could not have supplied.
The Declaration of Independence itself condemned the employment of large armies of foreign mercenaries. For those who remembered the Dutch and German forces that had secured William’s throne in 1688, and the Irish and Scottish soldiers who had refused to serve them, this clause carried a particular resonance. It expressed not only objection to professional soldiers but a deeper rejection of a regime that relied on foreign arms to maintain power it had seized by questionable means.
None of this suggests that the American Revolution was a Catholic enterprise. Catholics were a small minority in the colonies, and many Americans who fought for independence held no special sympathy for the Stuart cause or the Catholic Faith. The primary drivers remained constitutional grievance and Enlightenment ideas. Yet the Catholic and Jacobite inheritance supplied a distinct strand of thought and feeling. It offered a vocabulary of legitimate authority and resistance to usurpation that complemented, rather than contradicted, the more familiar Whig arguments. It helped explain why some Americans felt no profound duty of allegiance to a Hanoverian king many already regarded as foreign in lineage and imposed by force.
The men who left Limerick in 1691 did so as Catholics loyal to their Faith and their king. The Highlanders scattered after Culloden carried with them both the memory of political defeat and, in many cases, the memory of religious persecution. When those convictions reached American soil, they contributed to a broader rejection of illegitimate power. The Revolution that followed was not only a political break. For those shaped by this longer history, it was also an assertion that authority must rest on right, not merely on conquest or parliamentary decree.
The Catholic contribution to the American founding has often been understated in secular accounts that prefer to present the new republic as the pure product of Enlightenment rationalism. The truth is more layered. The natural-law tradition taught in Catholic colleges such as St Omer, the fidelity of families like the Carrolls who preserved their Faith under penal laws and the refusal of Catholic soldiers at Limerick to accept a settlement that marginalised their religion all formed part of the moral and intellectual soil in which American liberty grew. Recognising that Catholic dimension does not diminish the Revolution. It restores a neglected part of its depth and helps us understand why the new republic could accommodate, from its earliest days, citizens who remained faithful to the ancient Faith while embracing the new order of ordered liberty under law.

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