At the council two things had to be decided: future strategy and a choice of military leader. The loss of heavy ordnance when the Elisabeth turned back meant the previous idea of first besieging Scotland’s forts and castles would have to be abandoned; indeed, they would have to give Fort William a wide berth to avoid its cannon.81 That being the case, the prince advocated a swift advance on Cope’s forces as soon as the clan army was properly equipped and victualled. He was aware that Cope had no more men than he did, as a result of heavy troop withdrawals to Flanders, both before and after Fontenoy.82 Lochiel and the other clan leaders also favoured another approach to the Skye chiefs, this time in their own names without mentioning the prince.83
Then they turned to the issue of the command. Lochiel spoke with due modesty, saying he knew nothing of formal military matters but would take advice from those who did. Sir John MacDonald then proposed O’Sullivan as major-general.84 Strangely enough, considering his partiality at this time for the forty-five-year-old Irishman, the prince deferred a decision. Perhaps at some level he knew O’Sullivan was a military dud. Only constant nagging by Sir John MacDonald over the next few days secured the appointment.
The prince passed that night in a little barn at the head of the loch. Next day he departed to spend some days with Lochiel at his estate at Achnacarry, between Loch Lochy and Loch Arkaig.85 Then the small army began its march. They pressed on through mountain trails to the Glengarry country. From Kinlocheil, where Charles Edward jokingly offered £30 for George II’s capture in response to the price on his own head,86 he forged ahead to Moy, staying one night at Fassifern’s house.87 On the 24th the army made a detour to avoid being seen by a warship lying off Fort William in Loch Linnhe.88 Not far from Fort Augustus the prince was met by five hundred Glengarry men and about three hundred Stewarts of Appin under Charles Stewart of Ardshiel.89 Already the prince’s mania for physical fitness was paying off. The clansmen actually complained that he set too fast a pace!90
Monday 26 August was a critical day for the prince. He was now aware that Cope was marching by Dalwhinny towards Fort Augustus. He therefore sent part of his army by forced march to seize the head of Corriearrack pass before Cope could reach it.91 Only one week after Glenfinnan the prince faced the prospect of a battle. He did not shirk it, even though sufficient excuse presented itself, in the surprising form of a communication from Lord Lovat.
On reaching Inverary Castle after a hard day’s march by way of Letterfinlay, the prince was met by Fraser of Gortleg with a verbal message (naturally!) from Lovat.92 Assuring him of his loyal services, Lovat asked the prince to direct his steps towards Fraser country. If he passed through Stratherrick to Inverness, clan Fraser would rise to a man; almost certainly such a march would also draw in the Grants, Mackenzies, Mackintoshes and Macleans, all of whom were Jacobite clans with unpopular Hanoverian or absentee leaders. In that case Macleod and Sir Alexander MacDonald would be cut off from their protectors; they would no longer be able to maintain their pro-Whig stance against the hostility of their own tacksmen.
This was a very tempting strategy. Even while Charles Edward pondered it, Tullibardine suggested another. This was to push south with all speed through Atholl country and swoop on Edinburgh. But not, the prince insisted, before he had dealt with Cope. Here, as usual, the prince’s intuition was sound. His instinct was always for an early battle, and it was a good one in the early stages of the rising, when the best hope was a series of knock-out blows. Evasion of a battle in 1745 (as opposed to 1746) always brought misfortune to the Jacobites. The prince’s conclusion was that he would take Tullibardine’s advice once he had vanquished Cope.
On Tuesday the Jacobite army pressed on to Aberchalder, where the MacDonalds of Glencoe joined them, plus some of the Grants of Glenmoriston.93 Ominously, though, there came the first signs of a problem that was to dog the prince throughout the campaign: desertion. This time it was a group of Keppoch’s MacDonalds that absconded.94 Yet, all in all, the prince felt his army to be in good shape for the coming clash with Cope.
The battle of the Corriearrack pass was, like the battle of Stone on 1 December, a case of a battle that never was which yet had momentous consequences. To understand the situation we must return to follow Cope’s movements. The obvious government strategy was to keep the Jacobites penned behind the Highland line, waiting for lack of money and resources to dissolve the tiny rebel army. Cope decided otherwise. He quit Edinburgh on the day of Glenfinnan and was in Stirling on 20 August. His orders were to seek out and destroy the enemy before they could leave the Highlands – a rerun in effect of the strategy so successfully pursued by General Wightman in 1719. But it was a risky strategy, given the paucity of government troops in Scotland, for if it misfired the Jacobites could descend into the Lowlands and seize the great cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. For success, Cope needed enemy leadership to be as supine as it had been in 1715 and 1719. Instead, this time he faced the driving, dynamic energy of Charles Edward Stuart.
Cope laid his plans carefully. Before leaving Edinburgh he strengthened the garrison there (and at Glasgow and Stirling) and left Colonel Gardiner’s dragoons to defend the Forth at Stirling. Another company of dragoons was detailed to defend Edinburgh.95 So far everything had been done professionally. But things began to go wrong for Cope when he was just one day out from his base at Stirling. At Crieff he found not a single pro-Hanoverian clan waiting to join him. His inclination was to proceed no further. But he had his orders.96
Advancing, he reached Dalnacardoch on 25 August, where he learned of the speed of the Highlanders’ progress. The prospect of a battle in the Corriearrack loomed. Cope took his army to the closest possible base, at Dalwhinny.97
What he saw there did not reassure him. Corriearrack was an obvious spot for an ambush. A high pass through the mountains, separating Loch Laggan and the Spey valley from the Great Glen, Corriearrack was in those days traversed by one of Wade’s roads. A spectacular engineering feat, the road zigzagged up from the south side to a height of 2,500 feet. Then it descended more steadily to Fort Augustus on the northern side, passing through several glens and valleys with ample cover provided by dense heather.98
The negotiation of this pass would have been difficult enough for redcoats in full pack even with no enemy present. Convinced from his intelligence (though wrongly) that the Highlanders already controlled the north side of Corriearrack and had laid an elaborate ambuscade, Cope decided that any further advance would carry him into a death-trap. Cope concluded that the odds were against him. He ordered his men to make for Inverness by forced marches.99
The Jacobite army began its ascent of the pass before daybreak on 27 August, expecting, when they reached the summit, to see Cope’s men strung out snake-like on the southern approaches.100 The Highlanders gained the summit. There was not a single redcoat to be seen. On 28 August the prince advanced cautiously to Garvemore, in battle order, suspecting a ruse by Cope. From dispirited camp-followers of Cope’s army they soon learned the truth. In jubilation they marched down the zigzags to Garvemore.101 Here for the first time since Glenfinnan the army tasted bread, having eaten only roast meat on the road – a curious reversal of dietary fortune for most clansmen.
When the full army assembled. in high morale at the thought that Cope had fled rather then risk a battle with them, the prince called a hastily improvised council to consider pursuing the Commander in Chief, Scotland. A forced march through Strathclear might enable them to intercept him at Slochd Mor between Carrbridge and Tomatin. But it was decided that Cope had too long a start on them, and that the Highlanders were too fatigued to make success certain.102
The prince now wished to press south through the unoccupied pass of Killiekrankie to the Atholl country. Against his wishes, he was drawn into a diversionary raid. Hearing that Cope had fled pell-mell through Ruthven, doubtless demoralising the troops there, O’Sullivan saw a chance to set the seal on his oral appointment as major-general. The barracks at Ruthven lo
oked an easy target. The prince, however, argued that with no cannon or scaling ladders, taking the barracks would not be worth the loss of life involved. Once again he was right.103 Eventually O’Sullivan and Archie Cameron wore him down and persuaded him to let them have a small party of raiders for the attempt. O’Sullivan quickly revealed his military ineptitude. So far from being demoralised, the defenders at Ruthven beat off the Highlanders with losses.104
More successful was the side trip to seize Cluny MacPherson at his house. Murray of Broughton had summoned the nominally Jacobite Cluny to the colours a second time on 26 August but there had been no reply.105 The ambivalent chief was carried prisoner to the prince next day.106 After Charles Edward gave him the same terms as Lochiel, i.e. security for his estate, he agreed to come out and raise his clan.107 Disguising the hard-headed bargain he had struck, Cluny pretended it was loyalty to the Stuarts that had brought him out: ‘an angel could not resist the soothing, close application of the rebels.’108
On 29 August the prince pressed on to Dalwhinny and on the 30th to Dalnacardoch. Here he had word from Robertson of Struan that the Robertson clan would be joining the army at Blair.109 On the 31st the army proceeded to Blair Castle in Atholl. Here they received another important recruit in the form of John Roy Stewart.110 The army was short of experienced officers, and John Roy had held a commission in the Scots Greys. The prince gave Stewart a commission to raise a new regiment in the north and if possible to bring in the Grants.111 At about this time, too, good news was received from the MacGregors, who had surprised and captured eighty-nine soldiers at the barracks of Inversnaid.112
The prince spent a pleasant couple of days at Blair Castle. This was a different kind of Scotland, possessing the civilised trappings he recognised, and even some he did not. Two sensations he experienced here were totally new to him. One was the sight of a perfectly manicured bowling green.113 The other was the taste of a pineapple, a fruit apparently unknown in Rome.114
With Tullibardine raising the Athollmen at Blair,115 August ended very favourably for the prince. On 1 September he was joined by Lord Nairne and his brother Mercer of Aldie. With his army increasing daily, the prince moved down to Dunkeld on the 3rd.116 On the evening of the 4th he landed his biggest catch yet. He entered Perth and proclaimed his father King James.117
11
‘That sweet aspect of Princes’
(September 1745)
MAN FOR MAN the Highlanders were more than a match for Hanoverian infantry. But hard fighting alone could not solve all the prince’s problems. In the week Charles Edward spent in Perth (4–10 September), he addressed himself to the most serious of these: money, officering, and (crucially) what kind of image the Jacobite army should offer to the world.
Money had always been a headache. Charles Edward landed in Moidart with a war chest of £4,000.1 By the time he got to Perth only one guinea was left.2 At the entrance to the city the prince held the guinea coin ruefully in his hand and said to one of his officers: ‘Behold my war chest!’3
The fallacy in Whig strategy was clear. By penning the tiny Jacobite army behind the Highland line, they could have throttled it. The only consolation for the prince was that the army in being had been paid for for the next fortnight. All future recruits would have to be enrolled on a promise of payment alone.4
Some slight relief was afforded by the collection of the public money (excise duty on malt and the cess) in Perth, and by anonymous donations from sympathisers, but the prince had to accept a loan of 1,500 guineas from Lord Elcho on 16 September just to tide him over immediate problems.5 This injection of funds, however welcome at the time, was later to cause great bitterness, since the prince regarded it as a wager to be paid off at high odds if he regained the throne for the Stuarts; Elcho on the other hand regarded it as a commercial loan pure and simple.
Outriders were sent to Dundee and other towns within Perth’s orbit to collect public monies and seize all available arms, ammunition and stores.6 Yet the lack of pay for the considerable numbers who joined the prince at Perth led inevitably to looting and indiscipline. Lochiel had to mount his horse, fire warning shots over his clansmen’s heads, and even wound one of them to drive home the point that casual sheep-stealing was not to be a characteristic of the Jacobite army.7
All the prince’s problems in Perth were interconnected. The new influx of prestigious recruits meant that hard decisions had to be taken about the exact place of individuals in the Jacobite hierarchy. In Perth Lord Ogilvy, Lord Strathallan, the fanatically ideological Oliphant of Gask, and the duke of Perth himself joined the standard.8 The most important recruit of all was Lord George Murray.9 Fifty-one years old, a veteran of the ’15 and the ’19, Murray had been living peacefully on his estates for the past twenty years, a progressive and liberal landowner.10 His joining the prince caused a sensation in Scotland and was a severe blow to Duncan Forbes’s conciliation policy. It alerted many waverers to the real possibility that the Hanoverian position in Scotland might prove untenable.
As the rising was to prove, Murray was a military talent of a very high order. He was an incalculably valuable asset to the Jacobite army. Yet from the very first there was tension between him and the prince. Here was yet another of those unfortunate personality clashes between Charles Edward and a man of his father’s generation. Murray was no courtier: he had no conception of how to charm or flatter to achieve his ends. He was a cold, aloof, blunt-spoken aristocrat, who always told the truth as he saw it, regardless of the unpopularity of his advice.11 Charles Edward was unused to such plain speaking. His only previous experience of it, with Lord Marischal, had left him with a distaste for that person. Marischal and Lord George Murray were, besides (along with his father), the only individuals in that age group who seemed to be impervious to his charm. The prince had charmed Lochiel at Borrodale, and Lochiel had seemed in many ways the ideal father-figure for him. Yet although Lochiel always had a soft spot for the prince, he was genuinely in awe of Lord George and profoundly respected his military judgment. Eventually Lochiel too would lose face in the prince’s eyes for his deference to Lord George Murray.
The unsatisfactory relationship between the prince and the man who was to be his principal general would in other circumstances have possessed a psychological interest alone. In the context of the 1745 Jacobite rising, it was the cardinal weakness in the Highland army. Both men must share the blame for the disastrous lack of rapport that so vitiated the Jacobite effort.
The Seven Men of Moidart quickly spotted that Murray was not the sort of man who would allow his great talents to be eclipsed by their spurious authority. Instinctively the prince’s sycophants recognised the enemy. Sir John MacDonald regaled Charles with a medley of insinuations against Lord George: he was a spy, he had joined solely in order to betray the prince, he was Cope’s fifth column, a creature of Duncan Forbes, and so on.12 The ease with which the prince accepted these innuendoes right from the very start of Murray’s service with the Jacobite army would suggest extreme gullibility, were there not a more profound psychological explanation for his ‘will to believe’.
One unfortunate effect of the disharmony between the prince and Lord George was not immediately perceived. This was the gradual split in the Jacobite high command between a ‘prince’s party’ and a ‘general’s party’, uncannily mirroring the division of French Jacobites during 1744–5 into the prince’s party and the king’s party. The prince had relished blunting his father’s influence in this way. It was not such a happy experience when he was on the receiving end. And this split had a further unfortunate consequence in that it tended to follow the lines of an Irish/Scots divide, with the Irish favourites (and later military commanders) taking the prince’s side while the Scots aligned themselves with Lord George. This polarisation was to have disastrous consequences: at Derby, after Falkirk, at Culloden.
However, at Perth it was clear that Charles Edward could snub a man of Lord George’s experience and prestige only at the cost
of extreme prejudice to his cause. At first he appointed both Perth and Murray as his two lieutenant-generals, alternating the command between them.13 Strathallan was made brigadier-general.14 O’Sullivan was confirmed as major-general and quartermaster. Sir John MacDonald was given charge of the cavalry.15 Other leading Jacobites, like lords Nairne and Ogilvy, were given regimental commands.
There remained the question of the Jacobite army’s image. The Irish, especially Sheridan and O’Sullivan, advocated a tough policy when dealing with reluctant town councils or recalcitrant farmers. Anyone not co-operating fully with the army should be dealt with severely; only by showing they meant business would the Jacobites command respect. Lord George, who had been startled at the prince’s words at their first meeting – ‘it is the obedience of my subjects I desire, not their advice’ – fully expected Charles Edward to endorse this foolish draconian policy.16
But at Perth Charles sided with Lord George in arguing that the aim must be to win wholehearted Scottish support for the cause. Everything must be paid for, all indiscipline stamped on. The Scottish gentry must come to see that their rights were being fully respected, that for them a Stuart restoration would be all gain and no loss. Besides, the prince was not going to throw away the undoubted advantages brought by his own charisma. He had already tasted the delights of popular adulation at Dalnacardoch, when men, women and children came running from their houses for a sight of the Stuart prince.17 Then there was the time at the house of Lude on 2 September (when he was travelling from Blair to Dunkeld). He had held the spectators spellbound by his dancing skills as he performed a strathspey minuet.18 The prince possessed glamour and he knew it. A tough, repressive policy would throw away this precious asset.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 19
