Guests at the WS Society Annual Dinner were greeted this year by a small display of historic documents from the 1745 Rebellion which saw Bonnie Prince Charlie lead a Jacobite army from Scotland as far south as Derby before turning back to eventual defeat at Culloden. The WS Society’s mace, carried before the Society’s procession at ceremonial events, is itself a child of the Rebellion and was made for the occasion of the Duke of Cumberland’s victorious return to Edinburgh.

The other items were selected from a unique collection of 1745 material gathered by a contemporary minister, John Jardine of Liberton, whose son Sir Henry Jardine would be one of the most significant Writers to the Signet of the early nineteenth century. They include Jardine’s own certificate of safe passage, signed by the future Keeper of the Signet Lord Milton, an officer’s commission bearing the Chevalier’s signature, and pages from a remarkable – and at times highly personal – list of Edinburgh’s women organised by their personal refinements and their political leanings. This remarkable list has become the subject of two published academic works by Dr. Anita Gillespie.

Also on display was a handwritten, minute-by-minute account of the 1745 in Edinburgh, open to the page reporting the arrival in the city of the Chevalier’s ultimatum, borne by Writer to the Signet Andrew Alves (who was imprisoned for his pains), and a rare map of the Battle of Falkirk, which took place in such bad weather that both sides had considered themselves defeated.