The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  The True Patriot was quick to trumpet about the superior bravery of the English troops. ‘His Royal Highness has subdued the Highlanders,’ it wrote joyously, ‘and the Highlanders themselves will soon be civilised.’ It also accused Charles of cowardice, asserting he ‘stood an idle Spectator of the Battle, at a safe Distance, and took the first Occasion to preserve by Flight, a Life perhaps more worthless and miserable than that of the meanest of those Wretches who had been the Followers of his Fortune, and were now, at a great Distance, the Followers of his Flight.’ The London Evening Post made similar jibes, while the London Magazine compared the two Princes and made some insinuating remarks about Charles: ‘He lov’d the Men better than the Women; and yet, which is wonderful, the less he courted the Ladies, the faster they followed him.’

  Culloden was hailed as the extinction of the rebellion. It was also the excuse for an orgy of humble addresses, loyal reflections, admiring odes to the ‘much accomplish’d Youth! Britannia’s pride!’, and earnest proposals for the erection of statues to the stout young victor. The panic of late 1745 was forgotten. The Highlanders resumed their place in the popular imagination as benighted savages rather than the formidable warriors who had been within an ace of marching on London. And their Prince, instead of being a sinister pawn of Rome and Spain, was simply a fugitive on the run.

  During the next five months Charles was to read about his supposed exploits in the Whig Press. Perhaps it brought home to him that to most of the English, and many of the Lowland Scots, he had seemed more adventurer than saviour. It was to the Highlanders that he must look for salvation, trusting to their fidelity and forgetting his suspicions. John Roy’s lament — written from his hiding place in Strathspey — expressed the curious place that Charles held in their hearts in spite of the debacle: ‘All pleasure has departed me, my cheek is frosted with sorrow, since at present I hear no glad tidings about my beloved Prince Charles, rightful heir to the crown, who knows not which way to turn.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘O MISS, WHAT A HAPPY CREATURE ARE YOU …’

  This was the beginning of Charles’s life as a fugitive. It was also the beginning of those wild and romantic adventures which, far more than Culloden, were to fix him in the popular imagination and inspire a whole folk tradition. What could be more appealing than a young prince fleeing for his life and saved by his faithful Highlanders without a thought for their own safety or, indeed, the thirty thousand pounds on his head? What could be more glamorous than a brave young girl — Flora Macdonald — sailing with her prince over the sea to Skye? As the weeks passed, an increasingly sympathetic press carried detailed accounts of ‘the unhappy Fugitive’ and his adventures, whetting their readers’ appetites with promises of further instalments, so that by the time Flora Macdonald was brought to London as a prisoner she found she was almost a national heroine. Yet what really happened during those five months after Culloden? There was heroism and romance, certainly, but there was also squalor and hardship and, for many, a bitter legacy.

  Charles was a wanted man from the moment he left the battlefield. After quitting Lord Lovat he made for Fort Augustus in the hope of news, but the clansmen had melted away and there was not ‘any mortel that cou’d give him any accounts’. The atmosphere was menacing and fearing capture at any moment, he and his small band hurried on to Invergarry Castle where their reception was a cheerless one — there was no welcoming laird to order a feast to be spread and fires to be lit. The castle was silent, empty and ‘without meat, drink, fire or candle’. It could provide no entertainment for a wandering prince or even any food until the resourceful Highlander Ned Burke, an ex-Edinburgh sedan chair carrier who was acting as Charles’s guide, went fishing and caught two salmon ‘which furnished an ample repast’. The fugitives washed it down with some wine and discussed what they should do.

  Nervously they decided that the best course was for the group which included Sheridan, Alexander Macleod, O’Sullivan, Felix O’Neil, Allan Macdonald, a priest, and John Hay of Restalrig to split up. It was not safe for the Prince to travel with so many men. There would be eyes everywhere and he must be as inconspicuous as possible. O’Sullivan, Macdonald and Burke would be his only companions and he took the precaution in case of capture of changing his tartan doublet for Burke’s worn old coat. They set out on foot for the west coast in the hope of finding a French ship. The country was rugged and the weather bitter as the men trudged along.

  On 17 April they reached the house of Donald Cameron of Glenpean on Loch Arkaig and Charles was able to sleep properly for the first time since before Culloden. But the next day they were off again, through Glen Pean to Loch Morar by ‘the cruelest road that cou’d be seen’. Here they waited for a boat but as night drew on and nothing appeared they were forced to seek shelter in ‘a small sheaf house near a wood’ where their Macdonald host fed them butter, milk and curds. On 20 April Charles moved on to claim shelter in the house of Alexander Macdonald of Borrodale. He recouped his strength on meals of meal, lamb and butter and slept on a bed of straw.

  However, there was no sign of any French ships off Borrodale. As it seemed dangerous to linger on the mainland Charles decided on his flight to the isles. He still believed that those wily grandees of Skye, Sir Alexander Macdonald and Macleod of Macleod, would help him and he summoned the elderly Donald Macleod — who had been chosen to pilot him to Uist — in the hope that he would take them a message. Their conversation has become part of the folklore: ‘The Prince, making towards Donald, asked, “Are you Donald Macleod of Guatergill in Sky ?” “Yes,” said Donald, “I am the same man, may it please your Majesty, at your service. What is your pleasure wi’ me?” “Then,” said the Prince, “You see, Donald, I am in distress. I therefore throw myself into your bosom, and let you do with me what you like. I hear you are an honest man, and fit to be trusted.”’

  When Macleod later recounted this tale to Bishop Forbes the tears ran down his aged face. At the time he was touched and flattered by Charles’s appeal but refused to take messages from the fugitive Prince to known Government supporters who ‘were then, with forces along with them, in search of him not above the distance of ten or twelve miles by sea from him ….’ However, he agreed to help Charles escape and went to look for a suitable boat. By the time he had found a stout one, together with enough competent and willing boatmen, four pecks of oatmeal and a cooking pot, a storm was brewing. He advised Charles to wait but the Prince was ‘anxious to be out of the continent where the parties were then dispersed in search of him’. News had come that a detachment of Cumberland’s men was closing in. As the skies blackened he and his small band, which included O’Neil again, climbed into the boat ‘in the twilight of the evening’ and trusted to fate. It must have crossed Charles’s mind that this was the very spot where he had landed so full of hope only a few months ago.

  It was not long before he realised that the old pilot had been right to advise him to wait. Their little craft rolled and bucked in the swell. Shouting above the thunder and the driving rain, Charles asked Donald to return to shore — he would rather ‘face cannon and muskets than be drowned in such a storm as this’ — but it was too late. If they tried to turn back they risked being dashed against the rocks and their only hope was to ride out the storm. O’Sullivan described the furious waves that broke over the boat throwing the Prince from side to side and Charles crying out, ‘There is no hurt, there is no hurt.’ It was a long and terrifying night. ‘But as God would have it, by peep of day we discovered ourselves to be on the coast of the Long Isle,’ as Donald later recounted.

  A miserable, cold, sodden group of men found themselves in the dawn light off Benbecula, the middle island of the Long Island of the Outer Hebrides which belonged to Clanranald. They landed at Rossinish in a wind so strong they could scarcely stand up and ‘all wet from head to foot & black wth cold’. Charles took stock of this new world. It was a place of barren desolation and they were lucky to find a hut where they could shelter
from the rain. They lit a heather fire to dry their clothes and Charles managed to sleep for a while on an old sail spread out on the ground. Food was a problem but ‘there were Cows about the house’, and they shot and cooked ‘one of the fattest’ which, in keeping with the rules of Highland hospitality, Charles paid for. After a couple of days the weather eased and they decided to sail on to Stornaway. Charles hoped to find a ship there to take him to Orkney and then to Norway and eventually France. They set out on 29 April but again a storm blew up pushing them off course to Scalpa. This bleak rock of an island looked unpromising, but the weary little party found a kind host in Donald Campbell, a friend of Donald Macleod. He was let into the secret of Charles’s identity and took pity on the bedraggled group which ‘cou’d really pass for peoples that were Shipracked for we were in very bad equipage, all the Princes clothes were a Vest, Coat & breeches, that he got made before he parted from the main land, of an old Riding Coat he had … & every stitch they had as stiff as buckrum from the salt water.’

  Despite his name, Campbell was loyal to the Prince and soon proved his devotion to the tradition of Highland hospitality. A boat bristling with armed men and led by the Rev. Aulay Macaulay — grandfather of Lord Macaulay the historian — landed on Scalpa ‘with a determined resolution to seize the Chevalier and secure the bribe offered by the Government’. However, Campbell ‘scorned the bribe’ and told the reverend gentleman to be off since ‘he himself would fall in his cause, rather than give up the man that intrusted him with his life, or entail shame on his posterity’. Charles and his companions had been ready to give MacAulay ‘a hot reception’ but he slunk away with his cronies, ‘ashamed and disappointed at the loss of the money, which they already had devoured in their thoughts, and divided to every man in his due proportion’.

  Donald Macleod went on alone to Stornaway in Campbell’s boat — ‘a fine, light, swift sailing thing’ — to try and hire a vessel to take Charles to the Orkneys. A few days later, Charles set out to join him, at first by boat but then overland through ‘the wildest country in the universe, nothing but moors & lochs, not a house in sight, nor the least marque of a road and path, walking all night with a continual heavy rain’. He and his companions got lost and arrived cold, wet and exhausted. The first thing Charles did was to send for a bottle of brandy. According to O’Sullivan he ‘was in a terrible condition’ with his shoes disintegrating and tied to his feet with cords and his toes ‘quite stript’. The news which greeted him did not improve his temper. The men of Stornaway had guessed who the boat was for and, fearful of ‘losing both their cattle and their lives’, were refusing to let him have it. As far as they were concerned, Charles was as welcome as the plague and should leave at once for the continent ‘or anywhere else he should think convenient’.

  Crestfallen and anxious, Charles and his little party made their way back to Scalpa, only to discover that their host of a few days ago was now away skulking. There was barely time to digest this before they were sighted by a man-of-war, forcing them to put out to sea and make for Benbecula again. All they had to eat on their perilous journey was meal and salt water — a new experience for Charles. He ‘ask’d them whether it tasted better than it look’d, they answered if he would only try it, he would be as well pleased with it as what they were, whereupon calling for a little of it, he eat it as contentedly as the most delicate dish that ever was served upon his table, saying at the same time that it tasted pretty well, considering the ugly appearance it made’. Again they were sighted by a man-of-war and the Prince rallied his crew with the words, ‘If we Escape this Danger my Lads, you Shall have a handsome reward; if not, I’ll be Sunk rather than taken.’ Luckily for them the larger vessel was becalmed and could not follow their ‘nimble little boat’. As soon as they landed on Benbecula, Charles sent for Clanranald who arrived with wine, beer, biscuits and trout. As O’Sullivan cheerfully remarked, ‘Never a man was welcomer to be sure.’ Clanranald also sent Charles some shirts, together with some shoes and stockings which must have gone some way to alleviate the problems of those ‘stript toes’.

  The result of this fruitless and dangerous junketing around the Hebrides meant that Charles had missed a very real chance of rescue. The instincts that had driven him to the west coast had been sound — Antoine Walsh had been making plans, even before the news of Culloden had reached the ears of the French court. As early as March he had been writing to Maurepas that ‘the Prince’s fortunes could so decline that he would have no alternative to seeking refuge in the hills, and this could make him think of returning to France.’ He had accordingly arranged that two privateers should make sail for the west coast of Scotland. On 30 April the Mars and the Bellona were in Loch nan Uamh where their crews learned of Culloden and congratulated themselves on their timely arrival. In the event, though, it was not Charles they rescued. Other Jacobite fugitives came flocking on board — the Duke of Perth, now very ill, Lord John Drummond, the despondent and bitter Lord Elcho, fond old Sheridan, feverish with anxiety about the Prince, Hay of Restalrig and many others, but not Charles.

  There were rumours that the Prince was in the Hebrides and it was agreed that a message should be sent, summoning him back to the mainland. However, before this could he done, the Royal Navy’s twenty-four gun Greyhound and the sloop Baltimore alighted on the Mars and almost crippled her and her sister vessel. They were forced to limp back to France, leaving the most wanted Jacobite of all behind to the mercy of an increasingly efficient military search operation. The other disaster from Charles’s point of view was that the French ships had brought some 35,000 louis d’or packed in six cases. Coll MacDonell of Barrisdale — a great fair-haired goliath of a man, later accused by Charles of betraying him — had the welcome task of unloading it, but when the royal navy ships appeared much of it had to be buried at Loch Arkaig for safekeeping. Its subsequent fate was the subject of much debate and ill-feeling, but whatever the case it could be of no immediate use to the Prince.

  As yet, though, Charles knew nothing of these missed opportunities. Neither did he know that the first rumours of the defeat at Culloden had reached France on 13 May to be confirmed a few days later. This had convinced Walsh that whatever the fate of the Mars and the Bellona yet more ships must be sent. As June broke other French vessels slipped past the Royal Navy and began to comb Lochs Broom, Ewe and nan Uamh for the royal fugitive.

  Sadly, Charles was still in the islands and his patience was wearing thin. There had been an abortive attempt to find him a hiding place in a grasskeeper’s hovel on Benbecula about three miles from Rossinish but he had drawn the line at this ‘little hut of a house … the entry of which was so very narrow that he was forced to fall upon his knees, and creep in upon his belly, as often as he entered. This habitation not pleasing him, he begged of Clanranald to send him into some Christian place wherein he could have more … freedom and ease, for in that monstrous hole he could never have satisfaction, which he said the devil had left because he had not room enough in it.’

  A more ‘Christian place’ was found by the long-suffering Clanranald — this was the delightful Coradale, ‘a little pleasant glen’ on South Uist in the shadows of the mountains of Hekla and Benmore. It was a good hiding place. Having sent Donald to the mainland with letters to Lochiel and Murray of Broughton and instructions to bring back information, money — and that increasingly necessary commodity brandy — Charles settled down to life in a house ‘which he swore look’d like a palace in comparison of the abominable hole they had lately left’. The weather had turned fine and he spent an agreeable few days fishing and shooting. His spirits, which had been ‘very low’ according to the sympathetic O’Sullivan, began to revive and he was delighted with a new companion sent to him by Clanranald. This was Neil Maceachain, a young schoolmaster about the same age as Charles who was struck by the Prince’s cheerfulness. He ‘was so hearty and merry, that he danced for a whole hour together, having no musick but some highland reel which he whistled away as he
tripped along’.

  There was serious carousing when local Jacobites came to call. Boisdale arrived too late for one party. He was ‘received by the Prince with open arms, and found some of the gentlemen of the country who came to see him the day before … lying in their bed, very much disordered by the foregoing night’s carouse, while his royal highness was the only one who was able to take care of the rest, in heaping them with plaids, and at the same time merrily sung the De Profundis for the rest of their souls’. Charles plainly had the constitution of an ox and Neil wrote approvingly of how he ‘took care to warm his stomach every morning with a hearty bumper of brandy, of which he always drank a vast deal; for he was seen to drink a whole bottle of a day without being in the least concerned.’

  Clanranald visited him again and this time brought Charles a complete suit of Highland clothes. O’Sullivan left a lively description of Charles’s pleasure. When he put them on he became ‘quite another man. “Now,” says he leaping, “I only want the Itch to be a compleat highlander”.’ Charles would shortly have his wish but does not seem to have been much disturbed by matters of fastidiousness. According to O’Sullivan the only thing that ‘repugned him’ was having to drink out of a common vessel ‘for he is not delicate in any thing else’. Clanranald offered him sheets to sleep in but he said he was perfectly content to roll in his plaid like a Highlander. Bishop Forbes recorded in The Lyon in Mourning how Charles was also quite happy to clean himself up by rubbing his legs and belly with his plaid, though he wondered if it was quite proper to describe such an unroyal approach to cleanliness.