Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  Probably already on horseback, the courier will have seen the Atholl Brigade, Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron and the Appin Stewarts tearing across the moor, screaming their war cries and clashing their broadswords into the ranks of redcoat bayonets. Steel rang against steel and Highlanders ran through the gaps in the government lines where the cannon had been emplaced. Gillies MacBean, a captain of Clan Chattan, broke through the front rank, killing several men. John MacGillivray also breached their lines, killing 12 men before breaking through the second rank. He was finally cut down by the men of the reserve battalion in the rear.

  The premature joy of the courier, circling on what was probably a skittish, terrified horse, was understandable. Not only was it difficult to see through the smoke and chaos of a thousand-metre battle front, there was every reason to believe that the Highland army’s ferocious charge would once again prove irresistible. In a matter of only ten minutes, the clansmen had scattered Sir John Cope’s army at Prestonpans in September 1745 and at Falkirk, only a few weeks before Culloden, the redcoats had again turned and run as the claymores had whirled over the heads. Battles can turn on moments and James Wolfe, a young officer who would later find a brief but fatal fame on the Heights of Abraham in Canada, watched Barrell’s Regiment stand their ground:

  They were attacked by the Camerons (the bravest clan among them), and ’twas for some time a dispute between the swords and bayonets; but the latter was found by far the most destructible weapon. The regiment behaved with uncommon resolution, killing, some say, almost their own number, whereas forty of them were only wounded, and those not mortally and not above ten killed. They were, however, surrounded by superiority, and would have been all destroyed had not Col. Martin with his regiment (the left of the second line of foot) moved forward to their assistance, prevented mischief, and by a well-timed fire destroyed a great number of them and obliged them to run off.

  Over on the left of the Jacobite lines the MacDonald regiments failed to engage properly with the government troops, having been driven back by intense musket fire. In the centre, boggy ground had forced the charge of some clans to veer right and they collided with the Atholl Brigade, forcing them against the drystane dykes of an enclosure. Firing by rank, the government troops held firm, stopped the careering momentum of the charge and drove the Highlanders back. They had no other tactic, the charge had failed, the battle was lost and a great slaughter began.

  An accurate version of events far to the north finally reached Edinburgh just after midnight on 19 April. The Caledonian Mercury reported that the celebrations and dances of the disaffected ladies suddenly ceased when ‘their mirth was interrupted about one on the Sunday morning by a round of great guns from the Castle’. Government messengers had finally entered the city and informed the Governor of the Castle that the Duke of Cumberland’s army had routed the rebels. When they heard the salvo, the commanders of Royal Navy warships lying at anchor in Leith Roads answered with one of their own. And, as a further example, the Governor handed down a severe and humiliating punishment to one of his own gunners for drinking the health of Prince Charles. After a frame of halberds had been set up in a triangle, the man was stripped of his shirt and tied to the uprights. The drummers rolled up their sleeves, picked up the cat-o’-nine-tails and lacerated his back with 300 lashes. To silence lingering Jacobite sympathies, the gunner was drummed out of the Castle and made to stagger, bleeding and half-naked, through the streets for all to see.

  Far, far worse had been seen on Culloden field. Prince Charles had been led away by his lifeguards to become a fugitive in the heather and eventually a bitter, resentful exile in Italy. His men were less fortunate. Perhaps as many as 2,000 Highlanders died on that terrible day – many of them slowly and in agony. Cannonballs maimed as often as they killed outright and the same was true of musket balls and wounds from bladed weapons. Often pinned under dead comrades, many bled to death, passing in and out of consciousness, sometimes screaming in terminal agony. Government burial parties reported many wounded Highlanders still alive in the evening of the battle and veterans believed they had never before seen such carnage. It temporarily unhinged some men and an officer reported: ‘The moor was covered with blood and our men, what with killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in the blood, and splashing it about one another, looked like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.’

  In Edinburgh, it was the turn of the Whigs, the supporters of the House of Hanover, to celebrate. As Jacobites closed up their houses and quietly slipped out of the city, the Edinburgh mob assembled. Fuelled by drink as well as hatred, they made effigies of Prince Charles and the Pope and hanged them. Any unfortunate suspected of sympathy for the Stuarts was set upon and worse. And a day was set aside by the bailies for public thanksgiving. The more genteel Whigs held parties and dances.

  Culloden was a catastrophe for the clans and clan society and certainly fatal for the Stuart cause. But, as much as the battle was decisive, it was the appalling aftermath that changed the Highlands utterly and attitudes as well as actions turned history against the clans.

  Amongst the aristocracy and the gentry, there appears to have existed something approaching a genuine political divide, more than a simple loyalty or sense of obligation. It occasionally pulled families apart. When the Jacobite Earl of Kilmarnock found himself surrounded by government cavalry after his regiment had fled Culloden field, he had no option but to surrender. As he passed through the lines of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, tears streamed down the old man’s face and a young officer came forward to hold a hat in front so that others might not see his distress. It was Lord James Boyd, Kilmarnock’s son.

  The fate of other Jacobite aristocrats was less chivalrous but the gulf between them and their Whig counterparts was as nothing compared to what was to happen to ordinary Highlanders and their way of life. For these people, stocksmen, fishermen, and farmers, Culloden was a cultural and economic disaster.

  Once the execution parties led by General Hawley had bayoneted the wounded who lay on the moor, even more destructive work awaited the government army. In order to extinguish the threat of Jacobite rebellion completely and to secure his family’s hold on the throne of Great Britain, the Duke of Cumberland set in train a systematic programme of mass punishment, plunder, rape and killing.

  Flogging the Forces

  To prevent looting after victory at Culloden, at least by the enlisted men, the government army used the medieval threat of the cat-o’-nine-tails. This was a whip of several strands with small slivers of bone or metal attached so that the lashes administered ripped out lumps of flesh from the backs of the guilty. This brutal punishment was part of a long tradition in the British army and navy. If a soldier was caught stealing or committing any other specified offence, he could be sentenced to an extraordinary number of lashes; the maximum could be 2,000 with 200 given each morning for 10 days. The routine was always the same. Soldiers were mustered in a hollow square to see very rough justice done, both as a punishment for the guilty and as a deterrent. Long spears known as halberds were still carried by sergeants in the British army in the 18th century and three or four were tied together to form an elongated cross shape. Offenders had their wrists and ankles secured to the halberds before drummers rolled up their sleeves and began to lash their backs. Buckets of cold water were on hand in case of fainting. As blood spurted and gouts of flesh flew and men screamed in agony, generals maintained that such severity was essential in a modern army. Flogging was only abolished in 1881.

  Having established garrisons at a chain of forts along the length of the Great Glen, reaching from what became Fort George near Inverness down to Fort Augustus, Fort William and beyond to Castle Stalker in Appin, he directed his commanders to send raiding parties into the hinterlands on either side. Encountering little or no resistance, they reived all the livestock they could find, driving vast herds of cattle, sheep, horses and goats back to the forts. One captain counted more than 8,000 head of cattle taken in a singl
e raid. It made little difference whether or not their owners had supported Prince Charles or not. Some had papers of indemnity but they were often ignored. An entire people were made to pay for the treason of a few, guilty or not. Around Fort Augustus, the fields were grazed bare by incoming stolen livestock.

  Reiving turned out to be profitable work for the occupying army. Lowland Scots and northern English cattle dealers quickly came north in search of bargains and paid the quartermasters rock-bottom prices. During the summer of 1746, when enough grass had grown for long-distance droving, immense herds were seen moving south through the mountain passes. Many turned immediate profits at the Falkirk markets and those who stayed on the move, crossing the hill trails over the Cheviots, sometimes made fortunes in the hungry English cities. Cumberland did not care. His overriding purpose was not profit but to drain the lifeblood out of the Highland economy, a way of life that had been based on stock rearing for many centuries.

  The Duke wanted to move more than beasts. In a proposal made to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, he advocated mass deportations, an early example of ethnic cleansing. He explained: ‘I mean the transporting of particular clans, such as the entire Clan of the Camerons and almost all the tribes of the McDonalds (excepting some of those of the Isles) and several other lesser Clans, of which an exact list may easily be made.’

  All that long summer of terror and destruction, Prince Charles remained a fugitive in the Highlands. Many were suspected of harbouring him and the hunt for the leadership of the rebellion, including the likes of Cameron of Lochiel, was used as a pretext for countless acts of savagery. Many murders, rapes and house burnings were reported and doubtless many were not. The hatred of Cumberland and his English officers and men for the Highlanders is perhaps explicable. All they knew of Gaelic-speaking culture was that it came racing across the heather, roaring for blood and death, a swarm of half-naked primitives. It seemed that their war bands could materialise out of the mists, they lived in huts made out of sods and stone and spoke to each other in an alien language. Amongst monoglot English-speakers, this last is still a cause of uneasiness but, in 1746, it was yet another sign of backwardness. It was easy to convert babbling, barbarian, often papist Highlanders into subhumans and treat them as such.

  What is more surprising is a sustained – and comparatively well-recorded – streak of sadism meted out by Lowland Scots who fought in the government army. The excesses of three officers in particular showed how wide the gulf was between the peoples who lived on either side of the Highland Line. Familiarity bred something much more than contempt.

  One Major I. Lockhart of Cholmondley’s Regiment led an expedition out of Fort Augustus into the lands of the Grants of Glenmoriston. They lay to the north-west of the Great Glen. Having first shot three clansmen for no other reason than they had met them on the road, Lockhart’s men began to round up grazing cattle belonging to Grant of Dundreggan. When the old man appeared with a certificate of immunity signed by the Earl of Loudon and clearly attesting that he had had no involvement whatever with the rebellion, Lockhart ignored it. When Grant persisted, he had the laird stripped naked and prepared to have him hanged next to the corpses of the men killed on the road. At that moment, soldiers dragged Mrs Grant, also stripped naked, next to the tree where the bodies had been strung up and tried to cut off her fingers to get her rings.

  It was too much for one young officer in Lockhart’s troop. Also by the name of Grant, he was a Highlander who had marched behind Cumberland’s standards and he threatened to draw his sword to protect the terrified and patently innocent people. Surprisingly, Lockhart accepted the rebuke and signalled for his men to fall in and move further up Glenmoriston. There, women were raped outside their front doors as children scattered and their houses were fired. Isobel MacDonald suffered dreadfully as she was repeatedly raped by five soldiers as her husband watched, hidden in the heather. And all were left with nothing as their cattle, their only source of sustenance, were driven over the passes to the Great Glen, Fort Augustus and the cattle dealers from the south.

  Captain Caroline Scott was an intriguingly named Lowland officer in Guise’s Regiment and he had the distinction of holding Fort William against the rebels. But the charm ended emphatically with his unusual Christian name. After Culloden, he embarked on a series of expeditions of terrible vengeance, hanging, raping and burning houses indiscriminately. However, it was a minor act of random malice that made the attitudes behind the routine savagery even starker. On the road near Fort William, Scott’s soldiers took hold of an old woman and cut off all her hair. They joked it would make a good wig for a gentleman. Pitifully humiliated, the old lady asked for the return of her handkerchief so that she might cover her bleeding and scalped head. Instead the soldiers kicked her, calling her an old bitch.

  An Aberdeen sea captain, John Fergusson, sailed HMS Furnace to the Hebrides where it harried the isles in the summer of 1746. His men raped a blind woman on the island of Rona, off Skye, and killed and burned wherever they disembarked. When Fergusson ordered the vicious flogging of a captured officer (who had been commissioned in the French army and was therefore not a rebel but a prisoner of war), a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers intervened and stopped it. Brave enough, but there is no record of him or any other more principled soldier attempting to mitigate the appalling treatment of ordinary Highland men and women.

  HMS Furnace was also a prison ship and, as it nosed around the islands and sea lochs, arrests of suspected and admitted rebels were made. Conditions in the hold were dreadful and some men were held there for eight months, slowly rotting and starving to death. When food was lowered down, it was often fouled. According to Donald Macleod, a survivor, ‘The victuals were brought to the prisoners in foul nasty buckets, wherein the fellows [the sailors] used to piss for a piece of ill-natured diversion.’

  On 4 June 1746, a strange ceremony took place in Edinburgh, an event emblematic of Lowland attitudes to the Jacobite rebellion and the clansmen who had occupied the city only eight months before. All but two of the standards that flew over the Highland army at Culloden had been captured and brought south to Edinburgh Castle. On the appointed day, the Prince’s personal standard was carried out on to Castlehill by the city hangman, John Dalgleish. In procession behind him down to the Lawnmarket and the Mercat Cross came an extraordinary sight. Carrying the colours of Clan Cameron, the Atholl Brigade and the MacDonald regiments and other clans were the chimney sweeps of Edinburgh. With blackened faces and sooty hands, they cavorted around, dragging the silk standards through the dust and rubbish of the streets. A huge crowd jeered and spat on the emblems of the hated Highlanders, rejoicing in their complete defeat. Captured colours were usually kept and treasured by victorious armies as physical evidence of battle honours, of pride and prestige. But these were the flags, the rags of savages, tribesmen, people scarcely human – they had no value and they deserved no respect.

  At the Mercat Cross, a fire had been lit and the rebel standards were trailed on the ground around it and probably stamped on by the crowds. From the narrow parapet, a herald proclaimed that these symbols of rebellion were to be burned by the public hangman. Then, to thunderous cheering, each was held over the flames and the clan it belonged to was named – and the crowd howled derision.

  The Duke of Cumberland had further ordered that a campaign medal be struck for Culloden, one of the earliest ever made. On one side was the portly duke’s profile and on the other the figure of Apollo pointing at a wounded dragon, an inscription, ‘ACTUM EST ILICET PERIIT’, and the date ‘AP XVI MDCCXLVI’. The Latin inscription translates as ‘The deed is done, it is all over’. And it was. By the end of that summer of terror, thousands of Highlanders had been killed, the economy ruined and its culture fatally wounded.

  Those who visit the country beyond the Highland Line now often sense a great weight of sadness, of emptiness. It is more than that. Beyond the line, beyond the sentinel mountains, lies the landscape of defeat.
<
br />   Two Scotlands collided at Culloden and, in its vicious aftermath, one was determined upon the destruction of the other. Up on Drumossie Moor, on the edges of the Highland Line, there stand cairns and headstones marking the mass graves of the dead, the burial place of a culture. Melancholic and windswept, the battlefield is not the only monument to the passing of the clans.

  Eight miles to the north, at Ardersier, on a spit of low-lying land reaching into the Moray Firth, stands Fort George. It was the most extensive, mightiest and most expensive artillery fortification ever built in Britain and one of the largest in Europe. Completed in 1769, its cost soared over budget and, at more than £200,000, it was greater than the gross domestic product for the whole of Scotland in 1750.

  Built to withstand a heavy artillery assault, the fort is laid out in an extended star shape. The stone-faced walls are many metres thick and their wide and flat tops are grassed over. Bastions project in such a way as to allow defending gunners to rake their fire along the face of the walls and discourage assailants with siege ladders. Under the massive walls are heavily fortified vaults where the garrison could seek shelter from bombardment. The immense defences are concentrated to the southern, landward side of the fort while the sea walls are noticeably less substantial. So that the garrison could withstand a long siege, there is a harbour below the coastal defences to allow supply by sea.

  All of which is puzzling. The Jacobite army so recently routed at Culloden had little effective artillery and even less skill at using it. As an army, they were incapable of laying down the sort of heavy bombardment that would chase Fort George’s defenders into the vaults below the walls. For all of their military success, the clans depended absolutely on the fury and power of the charge and they had neither the knowledge nor the inclination to conduct siege warfare. The design of Fort George seems entirely inappropriate, an enormously expensive deterrent aimed at the wrong enemy. An essentially medieval army that fought with bladed weapons, the clans would never have contemplated attacking it.