The Road Not Taken
Page 32
The prince crossed back into Scotland on his twenty-fifth birthday, having completed one of the great exploits in the history of warfare, albeit unsuccessful. On a 500-mile round trip he had lost just two dozen men and given the slip to two separate armies. He found a mixed picture awaiting him. As soon as he had crossed the border south, the Hanoverians, as Lord George had predicted, reoccupied Edinburgh. Although Cumberland returned to London after Carlisle, a second Hanoverian army had been formed under General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley, a brutal martinet who had been appointed to succeed Wade; that was the elderly marshal’s sole punishment for his lacklustre performance in 1745.83 To balance this, the Jacobites had achieved some signal successes: Lord Lewis Gordon had routed loyalist forces assembled by the turncoat Skye chief Norman Macleod; Lord Lovat had finally brought out his Frasers for the prince; a second Jacobite army had been formed after some barnstorming recruitment drives; and, most gratifying of all, Lord John Drummond had arrived from France with 1,100 men of the Irish Brigade.84 This seemed to indicate that the French were finally coming, but in fact Richelieu and his political masters were already losing their appetite for anything other than ‘pump-priming’ the rebellion in Scotland; the logistical problems of switching an army originally earmarked for an invasion of England to one destined for north of the border were simply too much for them. By the beginning of February 1746 Louis XV had laid aside all thoughts of a major pro-Stuart enterprise.85 Yet, ignorant of these developments, Charles Edward temporarily recovered some of his composure. His army occupied Glasgow, where more money tributes were exacted. After a week in the city, where hostility to the Jacobites was far more evident than in the Scottish capital, the clan chiefs proposed a reoccupation of Edinburgh, to force Hawley to come to them. The prince demurred and opted instead for a siege of Stirling Castle – another attempt at siegecraft doomed to failure; the taking of citadels was simply not the Jacobites’ strong suit.86 Decision-making entered a limbo period when the prince fell ill with influenza and lay on his sick bed from 5 to 16 January 1746. This was the first of three major illnesses that were to prostrate him in the next months: flu in January, pneumonia in February and scarlet fever in March, unquestionably all maladies that were stress related.87 Lord George exhibited his usual blundering lack of empathy by choosing the prince’s invalid period to add another notch to the escalating series of conflicts with him. Since Charles had declared at Derby that he would no longer summon councils, Lord George told him it was now imperative to appoint an inner cabinet of five or six regimental commanders. An invalid still, the prince hit back with one of his most lucid and incisive letters ever, pointing up all Lord George’s faults and containing the typical (and very modern) Charles Edward flourish: ‘When I came into Scotland I knew well enough what I was to expect from my enemies, but I little foresaw what I would meet with from my friends.’88
The siege of Stirling quickly petered out in fiasco, as the French so-called expert in siege warfare who had come over with Drummond proved spectacularly incompetent. Meanwhile Hawley’s advance guard and the Jacobite van had a number of inconclusive skirmishes, clearly the prelude to a major battle. With 8,000 men now under his command, Lord George Murray faced the prospect with confidence. On two successive days he drew up his army near Bannockburn, hoping to tempt Hawley to attack him and thus repeat Robert the Bruce’s glorious victory over the English in 1314. When Hawley refused to take the bait, Murray decided to seize the high ground to the south-west of Falkirk, a mile from Hawley’s camp, effectively forcing him into combat. When Hawley realised around noon on 17 January that the entire Jacobite army (except for some 1,200 still futilely pursuing the siege of Stirling) was moving into position on Falkirk moor, he ordered his own troops to the summit to contest the high ground. The two sides were almost equally matched in numbers and firepower.89 After probing for two hours and failing to winkle the well-disciplined clansmen from their positions, at around 4 p.m. Hawley ordered a frontal attack; Clifton had taught him that the Highlanders were more adapted to night engagements, so he wanted to settle the issue before dark. Yet only a madman would have done as Hawley did, and order 700 dragoons to charge a wall of 4,000 clansmen. The cavalry took a devastating volley at a ten-yard range, and 80 of them fell dead on the spot. Their comrades broke and fled: two of the regiments rode down their own infantry while the third was cut to pieces by Highland berserkers. The blood of the Jacobite warriors was now up, but unfortunately this meant a breakdown of discipline. Two of Murray’s best regiments broke away to pursue the dragoons and the weak Glasgow militia, momentarily exposing the Jacobite flank to Hawley’s infantry, but Lord George’s reserves charged, claymore in hand, and routed four of the six regiments on the Hanoverian left in a matter of minutes.90 Total catastrophe loomed for Hawley but, fortunately for him, his best commander General Huske made an orderly retreat with the three regiments he commanded. In the gathering gloom it soon became impossible for the Jacobites to see what was going on, and they had to infer the course of the battle from noises and sounds. Ultra-caution led the confused Jacobite chain of command to be uncertain of the outcome on the Hanoverian right, Murray did not press his advantage, and so Hawley escaped the annihilation which would surely have been his fate if darkness had not supervened. Although the Jacobites were left in possession of the field, and proceeded to occupy Falkirk that night, their victory was not the total triumph it would have been if battle had been joined a couple of hours earlier. The fighting had been fierce, with some 50 Jacobites killed and 70 wounded, but Hawley sustained much greater losses, with a casualty roster of over 1,000, including more than 400 men and 20 officers killed.91
Seldom has a victory been greeted with less elation. Recriminations flew thick and fast as each of the Jacobite commanders tried to blame the others for the bitter outcome that total victory had slipped from their grasp; Hawley had made good his escape and could be reinforced by sea. With the prince still ill at Bannockburn, where he was being nursed by his mistress Clementina Walkinshaw, the Highland grandees seized the chance to implement the idea they had nurtured ever since Prestonpans: a retreat to the Highlands in an attempt to raise the entire fighting strength of the Jacobite clans. Murray claimed that retreat was essential, since 2,000 disgruntled clansmen had deserted in the bitterly disappointing aftermath of Falkirk. No historian has ever been able adequately to explain how the Jacobite leadership imploded in the ten crucial days of 17–28 January, but Lord George Murray for one seems to have suffered some kind of a breakdown. Whatever the causes, on the evening of 29 January he sent the prince a remonstrance, signed by Lovat, Lochiel, Clanranald, Keppoch, Ardshiel and Lochgarry, demanding an immediate withdrawal to the Highlands. When he read the document, the prince was incandescent with fury. ‘Have I lived to see this?’ he exclaimed.92 In vain he expostulated that history had never before known a case of an army retreating after winning a victory. Lucidly, he rebutted Murray’s specious arguments and demonstrated with faultless logic that the new ‘strategy’ would lead to disaster. But he bowed to the wishes of the majority, albeit with bad grace: ‘After all this I know I have an army that I cannot command any further than the chief officers please, and therefore if you are all resolved upon it I must yield; but I take God to witness that it is with the greatest reluctance, and that I wash my hands of the fatal consequences which I foresee but cannot help.’93 Reluctantly Charles Edward agreed to take the clan regiments into the Highlands, while Murray, the cavalry and the Lowland regiments wound round the east coast via Aberdeen and Montrose to Inverness. The prince was soon deep in his second bout of illness, while his men ploughed through snowdrifts and winter conditions so ferocious that Cumberland, newly arrived in Edinburgh, did not even attempt to follow. Murray’s march round the coast encountered even more terrible conditions, especially on the road out of Aberdeen.94 Three weeks later Cumberland advanced cautiously up to Aberdeen, taking care to build up his commissariat and provision his forces adequately. His long stopover there hand
ed the initiative to the Jacobites. Murray and the clan leaders implanted their Highland strategy, overly confident since at this stage Cumberland made few attempts to impede them. Murray’s strategy was fourfold: somehow to pen the Hanoverians in Aberdeen so that French ships bringing troops and money could continue to land on the east coast; besiege Forts William and Augustus; beat off any enemy reinforcements entering the Highlands; and disperse the hostile forces under Lord Loudoun in the territory to the north of Inverness. March 1746 at first saw the Jacobites everywhere successful, but it was the falsest of false dawns. Fort Augustus fell after two days, but Fort William proved a tougher nut. The Jacobite Earl of Cromarty ended the Hanoverian presence north of Inverness with a forceful campaign. Murray, taking personal command in the central Highlands, scored success after success but was once again defeated by a fortress – this time the Duke of Atholl’s stronghold at Blair Castle which Murray lacked the numbers to reduce.95
As if by a kind of malign pre-established harmony, no sooner was the prince well again after three months as an invalid than Jacobite fortunes dipped alarmingly. Although the failure to take Blair Castle was essentially because of superior Hanoverian numbers, the debacle at Fort William was the result of incompetence pure and simple (and once again the French ‘expert’ in siegecraft was to blame). Seeing the inept way the siege was being conducted, the Fort William garrison made a sudden sortie, destroyed most of the Jacobite heavy artillery and captured the rest.96 Meanwhile failures in administration and commissariat plus shortage of money were leaving Charles Edward’s troops hungry, and so the desertion rate multiplied. The crisis over money became catastrophe with the loss of the Prince Charles. This was a French ship specifically designed for the relief of France’s ally in the Highlands: it was conveying not just Berwick’s regiment of Scots and Irish exiles in the service of France, but 14 chests of pistols and sabres, 13 barrels of gunpowder and, crucially, £13,600 in English gold and 1,500 guineas laden in 5 chests. On 25 March the Prince Charles reached Pentland Firth but was spotted by four Royal Navy cruisers. After a five-hour chase the French treasure ship ran aground; not only were all Berwick’s men taken prisoner but the money was lost.97 This was a disaster of almost inconceivable magnitude. There was now no hope for the Jacobites unless there was a sudden rising in London or a massive French landing, but at this very moment a courier arrived from Versailles to inform the prince that Louis XV had abandoned all thoughts of a major French expedition to Scotland. Instead of a coup d’état in London, Charles Edward now received the coup de grâce from Cumberland. Travelling at unwonted speed, the Hanoverian duke left Aberdeen on 8 April, heading for Inverness and in command of a well-fed and well-equipped army of 9,000 men. He took the Jacobites by surprise, for their regiments were still scattered all over the Highlands in pursuit of Lord George’s heterogeneous strategy.98 In something close to panic the prince ordered them back to Inverness with all speed. Yet the velocity of Cumberland’s advance took him to Nairn, just ten miles from Inverness, on 14 April, at which date the contingents of Cluny MacPherson, Lord Cromarty, Mackinnon, Barisdale and Lord Lovat were still absent, as well as large numbers of Camerons, Clanranald MacDonalds, MacGregors and Mackenzies, leaving the prince about 3,000 short of his nominal muster roll.99 To try to square the circle or at least significantly reduce the odds against him, the prince elected for a night march on Cumberland’s camp at Nairn on the evening of 15–16 April. The idea was for three columns to travel through the heather by separate routes, rendezvous at 1 a.m. outside Nairn and then fall on the Hanoverian encampment at first light, in a rerun of Prestonpans. Yet everything that could go wrong with this stratagem did so. The columns were late in setting out, frequently got lost because the so-called guides provided by the Mackintoshes turned out not to know the terrain in any detail and had grossly underestimated the time it would take to complete a ten-mile march on narrow tracks, and the moor over which they marched was plashy and foggy; fiasco was almost complete when the three columns ended up blundering into each other. At 1 a.m., the time set for rendezvous, the Jacobite vanguard was still four miles from its target, having completed little more than a mile an hour since departure. Amid a welter of recriminations and blame-shifting among the leaders, with Charles Edward once again claiming that he had been betrayed, the decisions was taken to return to base.100 The weary clansmen arrived back at headquarters at Culloden House on Drummossie Moor around 6 a.m. Exhausted and famished Highlanders threw themselves to the ground to grab a few hours’ sleep before the battle which everyone now knew was imminent.
Much has been written about the half-hour battle that commenced shortly after midday, but the essence of it was that the Jacobites were beaten before they began. In one of his self-destructive moments, increasingly frequent after Derby, the prince had already (14 April) rejected Lord George Murray’s advice to fight on a far more advantageous battleground on open ground near Dalcross Castle and had insisted on Drummossie Moor, terrain far less suitable for the Highland army’s main weapon, the frontal charge. His men were tired and starving, and because of the regiments still straggling in or miles away on the road, he had just 5,000 men to pit against Cumberland’s 9,000. O’Sullivan, the prince’s military adviser, had failed to take into account the funnelling effect of the stone walls in Culloden Park, which hemmed the Jacobite front line into a narrow space no more than 300 yards wide. The Jacobites were drawn up in a higgledy-piggledy way, with men joining the left wing at the very last moment and the MacDonald clansmen sullen because they had not been given the ‘place of honour’ on the right wing.101 Instead of giving the order to charge once the enemy were within range, the prince, acting as battle commander for the first and only occasion, wasted time by attempting complex but futile flanking manoeuvres, meanwhile exposing his troops to accurate artillery fire.102 When the order to charge was finally given, the clansmen achieved all that raw courage could achieve but it was not enough. Clan Chattan (the confederacy of minor clans) positioned in the centre hurled themselves on the enemy and nearly succeeded in breaking the front line until being repulsed by sheer weight of numbers. The Athollmen on the right supported them but were badly mauled by close-range fire from Cumberland’s best regiments.103 Many of the other clan regiments did not distinguish themselves. The Camerons behaved badly and fled after taking flanking fire from Cumberland’s Scots allies, the Campbells, not even bothering to attend to their chief, Lochiel, who had been wounded in both legs; fortunately for him, he was helped off the field by a handful of loyal retainers. The MacDonalds on the left never got into the fight. Keppoch was so enraged by their behaviour that he charged back alone towards the enemy to shame them and was at once dropped in his tracks by a Hanoverian marksman, thus becoming the only battlefield death among the Jacobite council members.104 Cumberland’s men next advanced on the Jacobite second line, mainly comprising the Scots and Irish regulars in the service of France. The Irish under Brigadier Walter Stapleton on the Jacobite left gave a good account of themselves, retreating in good order while providing covering fire for the fleeing MacDonalds, while on the right Elcho’s cavalry were the heroes of the hour, halting by staunch courage an encircling movement by Cumberland’s dragoons that would have scooped Charles Edward himself into the net. The defeated Jacobites streamed off the field, but only those mounted or fleet of foot escaped the fury of Cumberland’s pursuers, who butchered without mercy all those they overhauled; even some of the exhausted veterans of the night march who had never woken from their slumbers to take part in the battle were cut down as they slept. About 1,000 Jacobites perished on the field of battle, but another 1,000 or so were slaughtered in the ‘no quarter’ aftermath. Cumberland, who habitually under-reported his losses, posted a casualty list of around 400 omitting any seriously wounded who later died of their injuries. Nevertheless, there could be no disguising the fact that the Jacobites had sustained a major defeat.105
It had been agreed that in the event of a defeat the Jacobites would muster
at Ruthven in Badenoch between 17 and 20 April. About 4,000 Jacobites foregathered there, including the fresh and intact regiments of Lord Ogilvy and Cluny MacPherson. Considering the gravity of the defeat at Culloden they were in remarkably good heart and, if they could only secure reliable food supplies, were willing to carry on fighting or at the worst disperse into the Highlands and fight in guerrilla warfare. Yet all their hopes were dashed by a sauve qui peut message from the prince: ‘Let every man seek his safety in the best way he can.’106 Although Charles assured them he intended to go back to France and return with a powerful army, the impression was left that he was running away. Depressed, dispirited and fuelled by paranoid feelings of betrayal, badly advised by evil counsellors like Sheridan, who exaggerated the disaster at Culloden, the prince had got it into his head that he could trust no one and had to get away to France as fast as possible. His disconsolate army drifted away, now an easy prey to Cumberland’s dubious mercy. The prince to some extent retrieved his reputation by his six-month escapade in the heather, forever one step ahead of the questing redcoats and, in refutation of his paranoia, never betrayed by the Scots even with a bounty of £30,000 (about £2 million in today’s money) on his head.107 He arrived in France in October, was greeted as a hero, but soon fell foul of Louis XV and was expelled from French territory in 1748. After eleven years of ineffectual plotting, he saw Jacobite hopes finally extinguished by Admiral Hawke’s crushing naval victory at Quiberon in 1759. He spent most of the rest of his unhappy life as an alcoholic.108 Cumberland and the government in London exacted a harsh and ferocious reprisal for the rebellion. Around 120 rebels were executed, including most of the high-ranking Jacobite lords who were captured, and 936 men were transported to penal colonies in the Americas. A raft of legislation in 1746–7 banned Highland dress (such as the plaid) and destroyed the clan system. The Abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1747 ended the judicial and military power of clan and feudal leaders in Scotland. The ordinary crofters’ herds of sheep and cattle were systematically pillaged, and the estates of all landowners who had come out for Charles Edward were confiscated.109 Government troops were stationed in the Highlands, and Scotland was for at least a decade an occupied country. The vindictiveness of the authorities evinced the fear they had been living under and their tacit acknowledgement that they had just faced what was to be the greatest revolutionary threat to the State in the eighteenth century. The Stuart prince never deviated from his belief that at Derby he had had a heaven-sent opportunity to topple the Hanoverian government but that the Scottish leaders, with their tunnel-vision state of mind, had prevented this – though, as has been pointed out, in a crisis states of mind are all important and cannot be gainsaid.110 The consensus of historians is that Charles Edward was right. Had he been successful, he would have been regarded as one of the great revolutionaries in history instead of a heroic failure. The most learned commentator on the military aspect of the ’45 concludes thus: ‘Yes, Prince Charles should have advanced from Derby, for that course offered a realistic, if incalculable chance of success, as against the near certainty of the destruction of the armed Jacobite cause.’111