Most of the songs associated with the '45 were written a hundred years or more afterwards. Not that that means they're bad songs - think of all the great songs about the First World War that got written in the last quarter-century or so. But they aren't contemporary evidence of how it felt at the time, and what motivated people.

So far as I can see, it's a distortion to see it as Scots versus English. It was a civil war in Scotland, which it was anticipated would lead on to a civil war in England. But the English Jacobites, of whom there were a lot, turned out to be armchair warriors.

Hindsight makes it seem as if it hadn't a chance, but hindsight always shows whatever happened had to happen. It's been suggested that if they'd held their nerves and kept on from Derby, German George's nerve would have racked and he'd have bolted home to Hanover, and the whole cardhouse of the Hanoverian regime in England would have collapsed.

There's a book of alternative histories published in the Twenties or Thirties, which I've got somewhere, in which it weorks out like that. It has King Charles going on a trip to the American Colonies a generation later, and winning them over by telling them of all the troubles he's had with the Engish Parliament.

I seem to remember the suggestion is he moves the court over to America, and the Stuarts are still ruling the place in the Twentieth Century. (I think they've been chucked out back in the old country.)