by Frank McLynn
Yet if the prince won the argument for an invasion of England, he lost the secondary one concerning the itinerary. Charles’s instinct was to head straight for Newcastle and a decisive trial of strength with Wade. All the Scots leaders, however, who never relished the prospect of penetrating into England, wanted to postpone the final day of reckoning and therefore grasped eagerly at Lord George’s suggestion that the route south should be a western one. If there was latent Jacobite support in England – and Lord George always doubted there really was – it was supposed to be found in Lancashire, Staffordshire and Wales. A march through the north-west, admittedly at first through hostile territory, would soon take them into these promised lands and give the squires of north-west England and Wales the chance to do something more than drink the health of the ‘Pretender’.55 The prince fumed that Lord George’s ideas undermined the logic of his own carefuly reasoned scenario for an invasion of England and was really his lieutenant-general’s way of securing by the back door what he had failed to accomplish at the front. But this time Lord George won a clear majority for his ideas. It was to be invasion, then, but by the north-westerly route, down through Cumbria into Lancashire and on to Staffordshire, a sweep through the alleged Jacobite heartland. Some of the prince’s ideas were still valid, as the prospect of battle with the detested English ended all signs of dropping away in morale among the clansmen, his continued progress south encouraged Versailles, and large amounts of public money were uplifted by an efficient system of tax collection – something that so infuriated the Hanoverian government that they declared all tax collection for the ‘Pretender’ an express act of treason.56 Nevertheless, both Charles Edward’s original scheme and Lord George Murray’s emendation contained some serious flaws. In the first place, the intelligence, communication and espionage system of the Highland army was lamentable. Next, there was no effective communication between the Jacobites and either of their putative allies, the French and the English Jacobites. The prince did not know from day to day what stage French preparations had reached or what their immediate intentions were.57 In the case of the English Jacobites, he sent a few letters south to the pro-Stuart grandees like Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and the 4th Earl of Barrymore, but these were intercepted. Beyond this, Charles seems to have expected that once he crossed the border he would be greeted with rapture and there would be spontaneous armed insurrections on his behalf. He was right that the Whig/Protestant/Hanoverian nexus rested on too narrow a base, but wrong to think that necessarily implied a commitment to Jacobitism.58 The blunt truth was that 90 per cent of the population of Great Britain did not care who won the dynastic struggle, but would join in on the winning side once it was clear which that was.
It was agreed that the Jacobite army, only 5,000 strong – a perilously small number for such an ambitious operation – would march through the Lowlands by two different routes (one easterly, the other westerly) and rendezvous outside Carlisle. Meanwhile the prince laid his plans to ensure that the enemy did not recover Scotland while he was away and thus cut him off from his base. He appointed the Earl of Strathallan to head the second army being recruited in Scotland, with Oliphant of Gask as his deputy, Lord Lewis Gordon to be his strong right arm in the north-east and young Glengarry to raise the hesitant or still recalcitrant clans in the Highlands proper; the Glengarry regiment in England would meanwhile be commanded by his kinsman Donald MacDonald of Lochgarry. The prince set off for the border on 1 November, taking Elcho’s cavalry and the clan regiments with him on an easterly route as if he intended to attack Newcastle, then swung west to rendezvous at Dalkeith with Lord George Murray, the Athollmen, the newly formed Edinburgh regiment and the Lowland contingents, who had marched via Peebles and Moffat with the baggage and artillery.59 The prince spent his first night on English soil on 8 November, then proceeded to a vigorous siege of Carlisle. Marshal Wade, who had marched north with an army in early October, tried to cross the Pennines to relieve Carlisle but was driven back by heavy snowdrifts. In despair at news of the Wade debacle, the citizens of Carlisle surrendered both town and castle on the 18th after perfunctory resistance.60 Murray’s column had disappointed the prince by somehow losing all their tents on the march through the Lowlands, so that henceforth the warriors of the Jacobite army had to be billeted in towns and, because of the pressure on accommodation, the march south through Cumberland and Westmorland was again a two-column affair, with the prince’s contingent always a day behind Lord George’s until they reached Preston.61 The heroism of the clansmen and other Scots in braving snow, rain, freezing temperatures and steep gradients in the fells south of Penrith can never be overemphasised: in such conditions their rate of march was amazing, sometimes up to twenty-seven miles a day. The prince, euphoric and exuberant, marched at the head of his troops, enduring all the hardships of fording rivers and uphill treks, refusing to go on horseback. A few English recruits dribbled in, notably an educated young man named John Daniel, who famously described Charles Edward on the road to Preston:
The first time I saw this loyal army was betwixt Lancaster and Garstang: the brave Prince marching on foot at their head like Cyrus or a Trojan hero, drawing admiration and love from all those who beheld him, raising their long dejected hearts and solacing their minds with the happy prospect of another Golden Age. Struck with this charming sight and seeming invitation leave your nets and follow me, I felt a paternal ardour pervade my veins.62
The two columns reunited at Preston, and another tense council meeting followed, when Lord George suggested that the prince should cut his losses and return to Scotland: they had marched into Lancashire to give the English Jacobites ample time to join them, but there was still no sign of them. On this occasion the prince produced the Marquis d’Eguilles as his trump card, with the French envoy stressing the bad impression that would be created in Versailles. Grudgingly, Lord George agreed to march to Manchester and into Staffordshire, but the atmosphere as the council broke up was ominous, with all present feeling that the real issues had merely been shelved.63 The two-day sojourn in Manchester on 29–30 November seemed to prove the prince right, for the advent of more than 300 volunteers enabled the Jacobites to form a Manchester regiment, and the prince’s party further pointed out that here was a large town of 30,000 people that could conceivably have resisted them but showed no inclination to do so. Nevertheless, there was yet another acrimonious council meeting, this time with Lord Nairne’s vote only just swinging things in the prince’s favour.64 Charles Edward was still euphoric and confident and seemed to take Lord George’s warning that he would march the length of Derbyshire but no further as a mere rhetorical flourish. Murray was at his best as a tactician in the following days, and all of his skill was needed for, having easily outpaced Wade, whose army was following south in a ponderous track on the other side of the Pennines, the Jacobites were now entering the orbit of a second Hanoverian army commanded by the Duke of Cumberland. To make Cumberland think that Wales was still the Jacobites’ destination, Lord George brilliantly decoyed him. Learning that Cumberland was nearby, at Stafford, he feinted towards Congleton as if his target was Wales, then swung back in an arc to Ashbourne, which the prince had already reached.65 With the two columns once more united, the Highland army entered the town of Derby in triumph on the evening of 4 September, just 127 miles from London. Morale among the clansmen was sky-high as they cleaned their guns and honed their claymores. Everyone expected a battle with Cumberland within forty-eight hours and all were confident they would win it. The prince meanwhile had moved from aplomb to complacency and even arrogance. Convinced he was on a winning streak, he made no attempt to lobby or win over the Scots leaders ahead of the council Murray convened for 5 December. He remained convinced that the meeting had been called purely to decide on the itinerary and dispositions as the army approached London.66
To his stupefaction he learned that Murray and the clan leaders had had enough and were determined on retreat. Calmly Murray explained that he had given
the English Jacobites every chance and there was still no sign of them; it was therefore better that the army return to Scotland before it was engulfed by superior numbers. All the signs were that there were three Hanoverian armies in the field: Cumberland close at hand, at Stafford; Wade somewhere in their rear; and a third force barring the way to London at Northampton. Since Jacobite intelligence was so lamentable, neither Murray nor the prince knew what the enemy’s true situation was, but Charles made the mistake of rebutting this tactical appraisal with another general exhortation for ‘just one last push’. The problem was that the council members had heard all this before, at Carlisle, at Preston, in Manchester. Now they demanded to see documentary evidence from the prince of his putative support – letters from the English Jacobites or from Louis XV. To general astonishment the prince was forced to admit he had neither.67 At this even erstwhile supporters like the Duke of Perth became disillusioned and sided with Murray. Sensing the game slipping out of his control, Charles asked for an adjournment until the early evening, hoping to rally support by one-to-one lobbying. He made little progress with this during the afternoon, but by the time of the second council meeting, around 6 p.m., Murray was able to produce his trump card in the form of ‘solid’ physical evidence. He introduced into the council a man named Dudley Bradstreet, a paid agent of the Duke of Cumberland and an operative of high calibre, a master of disinformation. Calmly and lucidly Bradstreet told how he had just come from London and that there was an army of 9,000 men under Generals Hawley and Oglethorpe barring the way to the capital at Northampton. At this the prince became distraught. ‘That fellow will do me more harm than all the Elector’s army!’ he bellowed.68 Bradstreet was then ushered out and a vote taken. Although young Clanranald was the lone voice supporting him, the prince later claimed that ‘he could not prevail upon one single person to support him’. Faced by an almost unanimous vote to return to Scotland, he fumed, raged and blustered: ‘You ruin, abandon and betray me if you do not march on,’ were his reported words.69 Finding even his ‘old faithfuls’ like Tullibardine among the ranks of his opponents, Charles salved his hurt pride with the following outburst: ‘In future I shall summon no more councils, since I am accountable to nobody for my actions but to God and my father, and therefore shall no longer ask or accept advice.’70
The decision at Derby has long been disputed, but in revolutionary terms it is unquestionable that Charles Edward was right and Lord George wrong. The ’45 had been a gamble from day one, and the gamble had paid off spectactularly. All the evidence suggests that Murray and the clan leaders lost their nerve and folded their cards at the crucial moment. From a military point of view, Lord George’s arguments were bogus. Wade was still lumbering in a long way to the north and on the other side of the Pennines, so was out of the picture; Cumberland could at most have got 4,000 weary troops between the Jacobites and London, and who could doubt the outcome of a fight between such men and 5,500 zealous Scots? As for the wholly fictitious third army at Northampton, Bradstreet’s own words are eloquent: ‘Observe that there was not nine men at Northampton to oppose them, much less 9,000.’71 Murray and the Scots leaders were defeatist at the vital moment, with Murray asserting that if the Jacobites advanced, the enemy would grow stronger as they grew weaker; all the evidence is against this, and Murray had only his own gloomy thoughts to buttress the argument: it remained a mere assertion. In fact, the authorities in London were by this stage in a state of panic ‘scarce to be credited’, in Henry Fielding’s words. They knew very well that the proletarians and poor of London had no love for them and would stand idly by until they saw who the winners were. Moreover, even historians who attempt to prove the impossible by claiming that Cumberland still had the military whip hand, concentrate narrowly on the purely military situation and ignore the wider political dimensions of the crisis in December 1745. The index of Bank of England stock fell from 141 in October 1745 to 127 in December, then fell further and did not rise above 125 until mid-January 1746.72 French observers thought an advance from Derby on 6 December would have had one of two consequences. Either there would be a general collapse of business confidence, with panic-stricken investors trying to withdraw funds, or national debt fundholders, seeing their investments in danger of annihilation, would have colluded with London Jacobites and arranged a coup d’état ahead of the arrival of the Jacobite army. As it was, the retreat from Derby let the cat out of the bag in spectacular fashion. It freed the Hanoverians from the abiding nightmare that they might have to fight a war on two fronts; it alerted them that there was no prior collusion between Charles Edward and Versailles, and that the expedition being prepared at Boulogne by Richelieu was an independent venture; and it proved once and for all that the alleged fifth column of English Jacobites was a paper tiger.73
The trek back to Scotland in December was a dismal and dispiriting affair. Once the clansmen realised they were not going on to London but retracing their steps on 6 December, there was an eerie, ululating whoop of despair as they began the march. No longer did the prince march at their head like a hero, but rode in the rear, sullen, depressed and broken. ‘It is all over, we shall never some back again,’ Sheridan remarked.74 The prince never recovered from the psychic shock of Derby. Whereas on the march south he had regularly gone to bed at 11 p.m. and been up again, at 3 a.m., almost panting for the day’s trek, on the retreat he slept late, drank a lot and often delayed the day’s march. Now too the Highland army faced an entirely different situation. They had Cumberland at their heels, Wade ahead of them, and a hostile civilian population to face. The English who had cheered them or at least acquiesced in their presence in the towns, now exhibited a defiant and peevish face. Discipline, so impressive on the way south, also broke down, never entirely, it is true, but still to an alarming extent.75 There were elements of both bluff and reality in the way officers distributed powder and cartridges to the men in expectation of a battle with Wade. Partly it was a morale-building exercise, but partly it was genuine fear. The truly amazing thing about Marshal Wade’s supine performance was that he failed to intercept the Jacobites both on their way south and their way north. If he had been even halfway competent, he should have crossed the Pennines after the Jacobites moved south from Carlisle and cut off their retreat to Scotland.76 As it was, the retreat to Scotland was a sombre affair. The Jacobites had to put up with sniper fire and summary execution of any stragglers. This was the pattern in the towns of Ashbourne, Leek, Macclesfield and Stockport. At Manchester the prince’s patience snapped, and at the first sign of disloyalty, he exacted a hefty fine of £2,500 from the burghers.77 There was further tension between him and Lord George, for Charles resented any semblance of ‘running away’ from the pursuing Cumberland, and was only narrowly talked out of spending a second night in Manchester out of sheer bravado. At Preston, though, he dug in his heels and insisted on a two-day stopover. The consequence was that both Cumberland and Wade’s vanguard came perilously close. Charles Edward still insisted he was returning to ‘prepared positions’ and was itching for a fight with the Hanoverian troops for reasons of credibility. Leaving Lancaster for Kendal on the morning of 15 December, Lord George could not resist a taunt: ‘As Your Royal Highness is always for battles, be the circumstances what they may, I now offer you one in three hours from this with the army of Wade which is only three miles from us.’78
The prince took his revenge by entrusting the artillery and baggage in the rearguard to Lord George, with strict orders that not a cannonball was to be left behind. Not surprisingly, for every day of the march Cumberland closed the gap on the retreating Jacobites. Finally, on the afternoon of the 18th, he caught up with Lord George and the unwieldy baggage wagons as they toiled up the dreadful road to Penrith. All afternoon a running fight raged in and around the approaches to Clifton village. As dusk fell and the Highlanders seemed in danger of being surrounded, Lord George learned that his assailants were not Cumberland’s main force but the 2,000 men of his vanguard. Here was a
great opportunity to commit the entire Jacobite army, wipe out Cumberland’s front-runners and tarnish his image with another Hanoverian defeat.79 Yet the prince refused to heed Lord George’s pleas, pressed on to Carlisle, and sent back only sufficient numbers to prevent Murray and the rearguard from being engulfed. The Scots leaders were infuriated at the lost opportunity. As Lord Elcho remarked tartly: ‘As there was formerly a contradiction to make the army halt when it was necessary to march, so now there was one to march and shun fighting when there would never be a better opportunity for it.’80 Lord George made the best of the reinforcements, fortunately the crack troops under Cluny MacPherson and Stewart of Ardshiel. As dusk fell Cumberland’s men took up defensive positions in the enclosures around Clifton village, but they were soon winkled out by yet another claymore-wielding charge from the intrepid Highlanders. For half an hour there was some nasty fighting, sometimes euphemistically described as a ‘skirmish’. The casualty figures convey the reality. About 100 of Cumberland’s men joined the casualty lists, but only about a dozen were listed as dead; the Jacobites recorded the same number of dead with only one wounded – an indication of the courage displayed in their frontal assault – but they decisively stopped Cumblerland’s pursuit.81 He paused for a day to lick his wounds while both detachments of the Jacobite army pressed on to Carlisle. Here the prince made another bad decision. He elected to leave a garrison behind in the city to defy Cumberland. The 250 members of the Manchester regiment plus about 100 Jacobites in the service of France were left behind in what was to any sober observer a suicide mission. When Cumberland arrived, he used his heavy cannon to blast his way through to the castle and compel an early surrender; the luckless men of the Manchester regiment, unprotected by any cartels of war, were led away to trial and barbarous execution for treason.82
