The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  Lord Lovat was impeached by the Commons in March 1747. He had never actually taken up arms for Charles, but his double-dealing had finally caught up with him and he had been arrested while hiding in the trunk of an old tree — quite a feat for a man in his late seventies. His correspondence with the Jacobite leadership was disclosed at his trial by his own secretary and by Murray of Broughton who had turned King’s evidence after his capture. Murray was in such a state that before testifying he drank a whole bottle of wine ‘and would have had brandy if it had been to be come at’. Lord Lovat was found guilty and it did not surprise him. There is a story that as he was being taken back to the Tower one day an old woman leant in through the window of his coach and shouted, ‘You’ll get that nasty head of yours chopped off, you ugly old Scotch dog’; to which Lovat snapped back, ‘I believe I shall, you ugly old English bitch.’ At his execution one of the stands collapsed killing several spectators and it caused him some amusement. ‘The more mischief the better sport,’ he commented wryly before extending his wrinkled old neck to the axeman. His son, the Master of Lovat, whom he had sent to join the Prince, was pardoned and later served in the British army with his regiment of Fraser’s Highlanders, fighting at Quebec under his former opponent General Wolfe and elsewhere in the Americas.

  Murray of Broughton had fallen ill at Elgin shortly before Culloden. While he could have escaped to France he opted to remain in Scotland only to be betrayed by a cowherd. He saved himself by turning King’s evidence but his beautiful wife left him and he was hated and despised by many Jacobites. There is a story that one night he visited Sir Walter Scott’s father on business and drank a cup of tea. After he had left Scott threw the cup out of the window, telling his astonished wife, ‘Neither lip of me or of mine comes after Murray of Broughton’s.’ Paradoxically Charles seems to have forgiven Murray, but his former secretary died in a mad-house in 1777.

  The rebel ladies of the ’45 suffered their own hardships and indignities though none were executed. Lady Mackintosh of Moy was arrested after Culloden and wounded by a soldier’s bayonet as he tried to rob her. She was taken to Inverness along a road strewn with dead and dying Highlanders. Although Hawley had nurtured fantasies of hanging her with silken cords, she was eventually released and in 1748 visited London where she was ‘caressed by Ladys of Quality’. There is a story that she danced with Cumberland at a ball to the tune of ‘Up And Waur Them a’, Wullie!’ but then called for the next dance to be ‘The Auld Stuarts Back Again’. Reunited with her husband she lived until well into her sixties, an enduring symbol of the romance and heroism of the ’45. A number of other ladies were also imprisoned like the famous Jenny Cameron, portrayed in the newspapers as Charles’s mistress. Of the ordinary Highland women, a number fell into Cumberland’s hands and some of these were eventually transported.

  Their fates are largely unknown, but this is not true of Flora Macdonald whose conduct after her arrest won admiration on all sides. Flora had known the risks she was running when she reluctantly agreed to help Charles. She was betrayed under torture by one of the boatmen who had rowed her and the Prince to Skye. The vile Captain Ferguson of HMS Furnace was soon on her trail, questioning the Kingsburghs about what had happened the night Charles had lodged in their house in his maid’s disguise. Had they ‘laid the young Pretender and Miss MacDonald in one bed,’ he asked pruriently. Kingsburgh’s wife replied, ‘Sir, whom you mean by the young Pretender I shall not pretend to guess; but I can assure you, it is not the fashion in the Isle of Skye to lay the mistress and the maid in the same bed together.’ This robust response did not stop Ferguson from arresting Kingsburgh who later admitted Flora’s involvement in Charles’s escape.

  Flora was arrested and imprisoned in the Furnace. Conditions on board for the ordinary prisoners were appalling. The captives were kept below deck, given half rations in ‘foul nasty buckets’ and the smell of ordure was everywhere. Flora was kept apart from the others and was questioned not by Ferguson but by the more humane and gentlemanly General Campbell. She was calm and courageous, answering as truthfully as she could without incriminating others, and he ordered she should be treated with respect. While taking the air on deck she encountered Felix O’Neil, also now a prisoner. She is said to have slapped his face lightly and observed: ‘To that black face do I owe all my misfortune.’

  These misfortunes were not to end for some time. Flora was kept prisoner in various places including aboard the HMS Bridgewater which was moored for a while at Leith. She was not allowed ashore but could receive visitors, and found herself lionised by Leith and Edinburgh society. The ladies were enchanted by the tales of Flora’s days with the Prince. Lady Mary Cochrane even begged the honour of sleeping in Flora’s bed with her. After a while she was sent to London where she was eventually put under a kind of house arrest and allowed considerable freedom. By 1747 the anti-Jacobite mood was easing and she found herself a celebrity. Pamphlets were written about her, dwelling on her physical charms rather than her ‘treasonable practices’. Later that year an amnesty was declared and she was released and able to travel north to Scotland. Her companion on her journey was Malcolm Macleod who had been arrested after helping Charles on Raasay. Many years later he told Boswell and Johnson how surprised he had been — ‘I went to London to be hanged and returned in a post-chaise with Miss Flora Macdonald.’

  Although Flora had her freedom again, her life was always to be coloured by her fame as the heroine who had saved the Bonnie Prince. In 1750 she married Kingsburgh’s tall handsome son and the Scots Magazine reminded its readers that she was ‘the young lady who aided the escape of the young Chevalier!’ Her fame was also to follow her across the Atlantic. Like many others she and her husband began to find life in the Highlands too hard and joined the great wave of emigration to the American colonies. She sailed to Cape Fear, Carolina, to be hailed as the ‘symbol of Highland bravery and independence’. It was a had time to arrive. There was a rising climate of rebellion, but Flora and her family were not revolutionaries. It was ironical that, like many of the other Highland emigrants, they found themselves ranged firmly on the side of Good King George. This made for uncomfortable times. When the fighting broke out Flora’s husband was captured and Flora and her daughters suffered all kinds of harassment.

  This period was a further strange chapter in a life that had already had more than its share of drama. Flora was to face many trials and tribulations before she and her husband were at last reunited again on Skye. Towards the end of her life Flora allowed the story of her life to be set down in writing and in 1790 she died. Her funeral was a fitting one for the Prince’s guardian angel. According to one eye-witness there was a mile-long cortege, and the pipers played ‘the usual melancholy lament for departed greatness’. He also noted that some three hundred gallons of whisky were consumed. She was buried less than two miles from the point where she landed with Charles.

  Flora Macdonald’s journey to Skye is the cornerstone of the legend of Bonnie Prince Charlie. She is without doubt the most famous Highlander associated with the events of the ’45 and she suffered for her role. However, for many hundreds of ordinary people a much worse fate awaited. Their collective woes are what give the story of the ’45 such a powerful emotional appeal, together with the fact that Culloden marked the end of the Highland way of life.

  Cumberland may have disliked Scotland in general, but he left no doubt that he loathed and despised the Highlands and its people in particular. He ordered the extermination of the wounded at Culloden and this was the beginning of a campaign of suppression. Bishop Forbes wrote a moving account from the Jacobite perspective: ‘In several parts of the Highlands the soldiery spared neither man, woman, nor child. The hoary head, the tender mother, and the weeping infant behoved to share in the general wreck, and to fall victims to rage and cruelty by the musket, the bloody bayonet, the devouring flame, a famishing cold and hunger.’

  Cumberland set about his task of subduing the Highlands from his hea
dquarters at Fort Augustus. Martial law was imposed, fugitives were hunted down and indiscriminately hanged and shot. Houses and cottages were razed to the ground and the clansmen’s cattle slaughtered or driven off to be sold to the Lowland and English dealers who flocked to Fort Augustus sensing a bargain. His brutal methods led to protests from even such loyal Government supporters as Duncan Forbes, whom he afterwards referred to contemptuously as ‘that old woman who talked to me about humanity’. What concerned Forbes were the numerous reports of murder, arson, rape, torture and looting in the Highlands and islands. Many of those who suffered had had little or nothing to do with the rising, like a blind girl raped on Rona. It was a particularly favoured practice to rape the women in front of their burning homes, also to strip them and leave them to fend for themselves quite naked and without food like the wife of Cameron of Clunes. The driving off of the cattle deprived many of the clans of their only means of subsistence. Some of them were reduced to begging to be allowed to lick up the blood of their own slaughtered animals.

  Nearly three and a half thousand men, women and children were taken prisoner and their plight was pitiful. Over six hundred died in captivity of starvation, disease and abuse. The conditions aboard the prison ships were particularly dreadful. The stench from these hulks was so great that it deterred all but the most avid sightseers who rowed out to take a look while they were moored at Tilbury. A letter to Bishop Forbes described how the prisoners were ‘lying between decks like fish in a pond and everyone had a twig in his hand, to defend himself from the attacks of his neighbours lice’.

  Some one hundred and twenty were executed, including Captain Francis Townley of the Manchester Regiment and fellow members of that gallant little garrison left to defend Carlisle when Charles retreated north. Some of these suffered the traitor’s death of hang-ing, drawing and quartering. The newspapers gave lurid reports of the executions. For example, the London Magazine described to its readers how when some prisoners had ‘hung ten Minutes, the Executioner cut them down, laid their bodies on a Stage, and stripped them naked’. He then cut out their hearts, ‘throwing them into the Fire with cries of “Gentlemen, behold the Heart of a traitor” ….’ Over nine hundred were transported to the American colonies and a further one hundred and twenty or so banished ‘outside our Dominions’. As one Jacobite lamented, ‘Woe is me for the host of the tartan, scattered and spread everywhere ….’

  However, the real blow to the ‘host of the tartan’ was the policy of de-Gaelicizing the Highlands and destroying the ancient clan system. Everything that had distinguished the old clan ways was swept aside. The chiefs lost their hereditary powers of jurisdiction over their people — the rights of ‘pit and gallows’. Their clansmen were no longer allowed to bear arms on pain of death. Neither were they permitted to wear their traditional clothing. In August 1747 it was decreed that ‘no man or boy within Scotland … shall on any pretence whatsoever, wear or put on the clothes commonly called highland clothes, that is to say, the plaid, philebeg or little kilt, trowse, shoulder-belts, or any part whatsoever of what particularly belongs to the highland garb ….’ The penalty for a repeated transgression was transportation.

  The previous year, fears about celebrations to mark Charles’s birthday had led to the ludicrous situation of Government soldiers being ordered to arrest any woman found wearing a tartan gown, stockings, sash or cape in Leith. All they found was one old woman in her dotage, Mistress Jean Rollo, who happened to be wearing a tartan gown and knew nothing of any ban. However, there was nothing farcical about the legislation which was a very real nail in the coffin of the Highlander’s way of life. By the time tartan was legitimised again in 1782 it was as a romantic and whimsical gesture to a bygone age. Tartans were ‘reinvented’ and attributed to the different clans but had little to do with the old ways. By then many of the young men had anyway left the glens to wear the uniform of the Highland regiments of the British army and fight for the expanding Empire.

  But what of the instigator of all this misery? Despite a letter from a fellow military man written shortly after Culloden saying, ‘Return as soon as you please. No lady that prides to the name of an Englishwoman will refuse you,’ Cumberland stayed at Fort Augustus until July 1746. He spent his time making thorough arrangements for the subduing and government of the Highlands. Only then did he joyfully leave the task of finishing what he had begun to the Earl of Albemarle.

  Cumberland arrived in London to a hero’s reception: mobs ran after his coach; there was a service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s at which he arrived dressed to kill in scarlet, blue and gold; Handel wrote ‘The Conquering Hero’ in his honour, and mock battles were enacted in Hyde Park. A flower was named Sweet William in his honour (though, when news of this reached the Highlands, a particularly noxious weed was christened ‘Stinking Billy’ in retaliation). A new ballet was staged at Sadlers Wells which, unlikely as it may seem, promised its audience ‘an exact view of the battle accompanied by a prodigious cannonade’.

  However, it was not long before the more thinking citizens began to be concerned by the reports of the savage suppression of the Highlands. Letters in the papers described what some of the officers had seen and questions began to be asked about why so few prisoners had been taken at Culloden. Cumberland’s shining image was becoming tarnished and when it was suggested he should be made an honorary member of a city guild one wry suggestion was ‘Let it be of the Butchers’. This was the genesis of the soubriquet ‘Butcher Cumberland’.

  Culloden was Cumberland’s high spot, and as much as his cousin Charles, his later life was disappointment and anti-climax. He returned to the wars in the Low Countries against Marshal Saxe, but Culloden remained his only personal victory. In 1757, defending Hanover with a German army against the French, he was defeated at Hastenbeck and signed the convention of Kloster-Zeven under which he unwisely agreed to disband his army. His actions were condemned by his father and public opinion, the convention was repudiated and he resigned his military appointments. He died unmarried at the age of only forty-four, loved by his soldiers, despite his harshness, but not much mourned elsewhere.

  Cumberland’s accomplice in the suppression of the Highlands, the explosive General ‘Hangman’ Hawley, died in 1759 leaving characteristically blunt instructions that he was to be buried with ‘no more expense or ridiculous show than a poor soldier (who is as good as any man)’.

  The 1745 Rebellion was the turning point of their lives for many who took part, Jacobite or Whig. It also saw the last flowering of the old Highland ways. Yet it is an interesting postscript that at the Normandy landings nearly two hundred years later, Lord Lovat stormed ashore on Sword Beach accompanied by a piper in full rant. He ordered the piper to keep playing as his commando brigade advanced up the beach, which so amazed the German snipers that they held their fire, believing he must be insane. Lovat may not have had henchman and bladier by his side as well, but it was a reminder that some Highland traditions survived that cold April day at Culloden field in what is still called ‘Charlie’s Year’.

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  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS 1745-46

  Caledonian Mercury

  Gentleman’s Magazine

  London Evening Post

  London Magazine

  True Patriot

  PUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCES

  (PUBLISHED IN LONDON EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED)

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  ELCHO, LORD, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in 1744
, 1745 and 1746, ed. E. Charteris (1907)

  FORBES, BISHOP R., The Lyon in Mourning, ed. H. Patton, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1895)

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  MURRAY OF BROUGHTON, J., Memorials, ed. R. F. Bell (Edinburgh, 1898)

  RAY, J. A., Compleat History of the Rebellion (1752)

  DE LA TREMOILLE (ed.), A Royalist Family Irish and French (The Walshes) 1689-1789 and Prince Charles Edward, translated by A. G. Murray MacGregor (Edinburgh, 1904)

  TAYLER, A. and H., 1745 and After (contains O’Sullivan’s account)

  (1938)

  TAYLER, H., The Stuart Papers at Windsor (1939)

  —Jacobite Epilogue (1941)

  —Anonymous History of the Rebellion in the Years 1745 and 1746 (1944)

  —Two Accounts of the Escape of Prince Charles Edward (Oxford, 1951)

  —Jacobite Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1948)

  Woodhouselee MSS (Edinburgh, 1907)

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  BLACK, J., Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud, 1993)

  BLAIKIE, W. B., Itinerary of Prince Charles Stuart from his Landing in Scotland July 1745 to his Departure in September 1746 (Edinburgh, 1897)

  CHARTERIS, E., William Augustus Duke of Cumberland (1917)