Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness

Sir John Wedderburn
Born Scotland
Died 28 November 1746
Scotland
Nationality Scottish
Occupation landowner
Known for The "Forty Five"

Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness was a Perthshire gentleman who joined the 1745 rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart and, captured at the Battle of Culloden, was afterwards hanged as a traitor.

Early life

Wedderburn's expectations of an inheritance were not fulfilled and he fell on hard times. He raised his nine children in "a small farm with a thatched house and a clay floor, which he occupied with great industry, and thereby made a laborious but starving shift to support nine children who used to run about in the fields barefoot".[1]

The "Forty Five"

Execution of rebels following the Jacobite rebellion in 1745-1746. Published in London in 1746 by M. Cooper.

In 1745 Sir John joined the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart against the Hanoverian crown,[2] serving as a colonel in the Jacobite army before being captured at the Battle of Culloden and hauled off to London to face trial and execution.[2] He was indicted for treason at St Margaret's Hill, Southwark on 4 November 1746, and was found guilty, despite arguing in his defence that he had not personally taken up arms against the Crown, and was executed at Kennington Common on 28 November 1746.[1]

His son, the younger John Wedderburn, made his way to London to plead with such friends as his family still had for his father's rescue and pardon. The boy's mission failed, and he was to witness his father's execution as a traitor by hanging, drawing and quartering, after which he was forced to return to Scotland where he found himself cut off from his inheritance and, without prospects, obliged to take ship to the New World. In Glasgow he found a ship's captain prepared to let him work his passage on a ship bound for the Caribbean.[2]

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