The operation was a brilliant success. Between 2 and 5 a.m. all the blockhouses were taken without the loss of a single Highlander.120 And Lord George himself pulled off another ‘Rout of Moy’. While he was waiting for the commando groups to rendezvous, Murray was alarmed to see that Sir Andrew Agnew, commander of Blair Castle, had sortied in force to see what was the matter with the outer defence ring. At this point Lord George had just twenty-five men with him. Realising that if he retreated, the returning raiding parties would simply be captured one after the other by Agnew, Murray simulated the presence of a brigade by displaying regimental colours and playing the pipes from behind a turf wall near the bridge. This, coupled with the flashing of claymores in the first rays of the morning sun, convinced Agnew that retreat was the wisest course.121
Soon afterwards, Murray’s raiders came in, bringing more than three hundred prisoners, with news of a total success.122 Murray advanced to the siege of Blair Castle. Sir Andrew Agnew, a well-known Hanoverian fire-eater, indignantly rejected the summons to surrender. As he did not possess the big guns necessary to reduce Blair, Lord George tried to starve the garrison out.123
He found the garrison ‘more obstinate’ than he expected. The firing was so heavy that Murray had to send for fresh supplies of ammunition.124 Nevertheless, there were only five days’ provisions in Blair and hunger would soon procure for Lord George what he wanted.
Suddenly reinforcements arrived for Agnew in the form of the earl of Crawford and the Prince of Hesse. Lord George immediately sent to Charles Edward to let him have another 1,200 men, with whom he was confident of routing Crawford’s dragoons and the Hessians. Such a victory would have compelled Cumberland to withdraw from Aberdeen.125 In a controversial decision, the prince claimed not to have that number with him in Inverness.126 Lord George had no choice, then, but to retreat slowly before the relieving Hanoverian force, hoping to draw them into an ambush in the pass of Killiekrankie.
The ruse did not work, mainly because the Prince of Hesse refused to allow his men north of Pitlochry without the properly negotiated prisoner cartel that Cumberland adamantly refused.127 The Hessian prince once again proved his reasonableness by declaring publicly that he was not sufficiently interested in the quarrel between the houses of Stuart and Hanover to risk his subjects in a fight with men who had been driven to despair.128 Yet Hesse’s very reasonableness involved Lord George in a charge of treachery. Because Murray felt he could deal directly with such a man, he put out feelers to see whether a negotiated settlement of the rising was possible.
To Charles Edward this was treason, and not to be condoned.129 He could not afford an open breach with his lieutenant-general, but he set a detail of picked men to watch Murray night and day and to seize him if he showed any signs of betraying the army. Surprisingly (since the Frenchman had so lauded Lord George after Falkirk), Charles Edward was encouraged in this paranoid delusion by the marquis d’Eguilles.130
For all the recriminations it would later engender,131 Murray’s raid into the Atholl country was everywhere recognised as a fine exploit. Jacobite spirits were noticeably lifted.132 Cumberland began to complain about the rebellious spirit even of those areas of Scotland under Hanoverian occupation.133 There was no longer any talk of the rising’s petering out or of sending the Hessians back to Germany.134 The triumphant Jacobites withdrew in good order, Lord George to Inverness, his infantry to Elchies on Speyside.135 Cluny remained to guard the Badenoch passes.
The crucial battlefront remained that around the Spey. Here the duel between Jacobite and Hanoverian developed into probe and counterprobe. There were two routes that Cumberland could take from Aberdeen to Speyside, one via Meldrum and Cullen, the other by Kintore, Inverurie and Strathbogie. To keep his enemy guessing, Cumberland sent out detachments to secure both routes.136 The Jacobite defence then moved up to cover the advance probes. Lord John Drummond, overall commander on the Spey, had his headquarters at Gordon Castle near Fochabers. Strathallan was at Cullen. John Roy Stewart’s Edinburgh regiment and Elcho’s Lifeguards were on station at Strathbogie.137
No serious Hanoverian move was made until 16 March. Then Cumberland suddenly altered the pace and rhythm of his thrusts. General Bland, commanding the forces at Old Meldrum and Inverurie, was ordered to take four regiments and fall on John Roy Stewart’s at Strathbogie.138 Jacobite numbers were known to be no more than five hundred foot and fifty horse. Their cavalry had virtually ceased to exist. Kilmarnock’s and Pitsligo’s were no more; their men had been incorporated into the infantry regiments. Lack of forage and replacement horses had thinned out the once useful riders.139
As fortune would have it, the Jacobites were at that very moment trying to run to earth the Hanoverian chief of irregulars Colonel Grant. In Strathbogie their vigilant outriders spotted the movement of Bland’s approaching vanguard. With supreme aplomb John Roy Stewart ordered an hour’s rest for his weary troops, figuring that it would take the Hanoverian main column that long to come up to Huntley.140 Then the Jacobites retired in good order, their rear holding the bridge until their comrades were safely out of the town.141 They crossed the river Deveron, then formed up again to face the enemy. Bland was not disposed to pursue beyond the river, as the mountainous path on the other side was narrow, rocky and precipitous.142 The Edinburgh regiment then retired in good order to Keith and Fochabers. Their morale was sky-high at the thought that they had made a disciplined withdrawal in the face of a hugely superior enemy without breaking rank or losing a single standard.143
Next day they crossed the Spey, bringing news that Cumberland was on the march. It took time for the Jacobites to discover that the Hanoverian movement was merely a reconnaissance in strength.144 Once they did realise this, Drummond counterattacked. Cavalry patrols were sent across the Spey to reconnoitre. The enemy seemed in complacent mood. Drummond decided to shake them.
Drummond sent Major Glasco on a daring raid. Jacobite infantry made its way silently along the road to Fochabers, while the cavalry arm headed for Keith.145 Glasco’s forces linked up and reached Keith at dead of night without being discovered. It so happened that a large body of Campbell militia was billeted in the church after an attempt to scout Gordon Castle.146 Suddenly, at 1 a.m., they found themselves under fire. A fast and furious fight took place in the churchyard. Bullets whined and pinged around the headstones.147 The sons of Diarmid kept up a brisk fire from the church windows and used up eight rounds before faltering.148 Hearing that quarter would be given, the Campbells surrendered after perhaps half an hour’s defiance. Their casualties were about 80 (including 9 killed) to the Jacobites’ 12.149
After that bruising experience, the Hanoverians did not choose to spend another night in Keith. Bland withdrew to Strathbogie, from where he sent out daily probes. These frequently encountered Drummond’s patrols. Skirmishing and guerrilla warfare became the norm. Glasco set several ambuscades at Keith but the enemy did not come near enough to fall into them.150
March 1746 was a month of uninterrupted triumph for the Jacobites. They had taken hundreds of prisoners.151 Fort Augustus, Dornoch, the Atholl blockhouses, Keith: the string of successes seemed likely to go on and on. But just when Lord George Murray’s forecast of a spring campaign seemed likely to come to pass, the Jacobites were hit by a succession of hammer blows. March 1746 saw the prince’s fortunes at their highest. April was to bring utter disaster.
17
The Night March
(March–April 1746)
THROUGHOUT THE REMARKABLE run of Jacobite success in March, Charles Edward was out of the reckoning. Except for brief intervals, illness kept him confined to his quarters for the first three months of 1746. First there was ’flu at Bannockburn in January; then pneumonia after the ‘Rout of Moy’ in February; finally in March he was stricken by potentially the most serious malady yet.
After a week’s convalescence at the dowager Lady Mackintosh’s house, the prince set out for the north-eastern front (11 March), intending to make a t
our of Jacobite defences on the Inverness side of the Spey. He spent a night in Forres, then pressed on to Elgin.1 But in Elgin he was almost at once struck down by a violent attack of scarlet fever.2 For ten days his aides watched anxiously as he tossed and turned in bed with a dangerously high temperature. As was customary in the eighteenth century, the response to this fever was to let blood. According to his physicians, this timely bleeding prevented a tubercular haemorrhage.3 Whatever the truth of this, it is certain that for two days the prince’s condition gave cause for concern. Finally the crisis passed and Charles made a good recovery.
On 20 March, against medical advice, he insisted on getting up. His physicians, fearing that he might after all have contracted typhoid fever, tried to keep him on light broth, but he quickly progressed to solid food.4 Had the doctors’ fears been justified, and the food taken before the lesions healed, perforation and swift collapse would have followed. But the prince typically declared that if he had to die, he would rather do it on horseback fighting Cumberland than in bed timidly sipping bouillon.5
The irony was that the prince was ill throughout the Jacobites’ run of good fortune6 and recovered only to face catastrophe. His recovery ‘caused a joy in every heart not to be described’.7 His aides rushed him back to Inverness, allowing only a short side-trip to Gordon Castle.8 Once in Inverness, the prince did not stir from his twin bases in the town and Culloden House except for one brief visit to Lady Seaforth at Braan Castle.9
The Jacobites’ joy at the prince’s recovery was short-lived. As April began, a series of disasters rained on the Highlanders. The lifting of the siege of Blair Castle was attributable to superior Hanoverian numbers. But the débâcle at Fort William was the result of simple incompetence in siegecraft. Mirabel this time evinced fresh dimensions to his general uselessness: the disgruntled Highlanders nicknamed him M. Admirable with contemptuous irony.10
Seeing the inept way the siege was being conducted, and sensing the lack of determination among the attackers, the Fort William garrison determined on a sortie in force. On 31 March a clever sally resulted in the destruction of the Jacobite batteries and the capture of some of their guns.11 The loss was irremediable. After a final face-saving bombardment on 3 April, the Jacobites abandoned the siege.12
This was a crushing blow to morale which had already started to ebb as the clansmen’s successes brought them neither victory nor a breathing-space. Charles Edward’s illness at Elgin had to be kept a secret from the rank and file for fear of its impact on their spirits. It was given out that he was staying at Elgin to link up with his brother Henry, daily expected with the long-awaited French army.13
The reasons for low morale in the Jacobite army were by now legion. In the ranks it was the lack of pay that bit most deeply. The prince received no further supply of money after Falkirk, except for £2,500 in Spanish funds landed at Montrose. He was not at first aware how parlous the situation was, for his officers concealed the truth from him during his illness. But on his return from Elgin to Inverness he was dismayed to see his troops being paid in kind and fed on oats.14 Payment in meal might keep the army fed, but it did nothing to stem the desertion rate.15 And even the provision of basic foodstuffs was becoming more and more difficult. The commissary-general fought a losing battle with the farmers of the north-east, trying to get them to pay the public money in meal when they claimed to have paid it time out of mind in barley.16
The clansmen’s patience was at snapping point. Lord George strove valiantly to prevent them going on the rampage, as this would alienate the local population for good.17 But what else could he do? All Charles Edward could contribute was the now tired and formulaic assertion that the French were coming and that Cumberland’s men would not fight against their true king.18 Eventually, morale in Perth’s regiment reached such a low point that in desperation Charles Edward called in the Jacobite engraver Robert Strange and asked him to design and issue the Stuarts’ own bank-notes,19 but not before Sheridan had delivered an unjustified attack on the good faith of Perth’s regiment. Rebutting the duke’s complaints about sinking morale in his ill-paid regiment, Sheridan wrote sneeringly to Perth that it seemed his men never expected to have to fight for their lives but thought the rising was some kind of adventure.20 The injustice of this jibe can perhaps be appreciated when it is remembered that throughout March Perth’s regiment acted as the prince’s bodyguard; in fact with the dispersal of his forces on four separate and simultaneous military operations, they were the only Jacobite troops left in Inverness.21
The crisis over money turned into catastrophe with the enemy capture of the Prince Charles. This was the Hanoverians’ greatest success in the seaborne war to deny French assistance to the Jacobites. Careful preparations had been made in France so that this ship would bring the prince substantial succour.22 Lord Clare had hand-picked the cream of Berwick’s regiment.23 Even more significant than the men was the money the Prince Charles was carrying: £13,600 in English gold and 1,500 guineas laden in five chests.24 There were also 14 chests of pistols and sabres and 13 barrels of powder.25
The Prince Charles reached the coast of northern Scotland without difficulty. But on 25 March she was spotted by four English cruisers in Pentland Firth. After a five-hour chase, the Prince Charles ran aground in shallow water near Tongue while taking evasive action.26 Lord Reay, who was in the vicinity, hurried to the spot, seized the treasure and took nearly two hundred prisoners.27
In desperation the prince sent a force to lay hands on Reay and force him to disgorge the money. The prince’s hopes were slender, since in Sutherland Reay could easily decamp with his loot by sea to Skye.28 Yet even Charles Edward cannot have expected the dismal sequel. Not only did Cromarty (to whom he entrusted the expedition) not regain the treasure, but he also failed in his secondary aim: to raise men and money for the Jacobites in Sutherland and Caithness. Even worse, Cromarty’s battalion commanders were surprised on 15 April by the retainers of Lord Reay and Sutherland and taken prisoner to Dunrobin Castle.29
The loss of the Prince Charles was an extraordinarily grievous blow for the prince. There was now no prospect of paying his men and thus arresting the drooping morale and accelerating desertion rate. Lack of money also prevented him from advancing to Aberdeen to meet Cumberland, as originally intended.30 The prince had no room at all in which to manoeuvre. He had to seek the earliest possible confrontation with Cumberland but could not advance beyond the Spey to encounter him.
At this point yet another dreadful blow hit Charles Edward. As the prince recovered from his illness at Elgin, Murray of Broughton caught the infection and was laid low for the first two weeks of April. After Elgin the prince never saw his secretary again.31 Whatever John Murray’s many faults, he was a good administrator. As the prince’s secretary he had always handled the provisioning of the army efficiently, as even his bitter enemy Lord George Murray conceded.32 His successor, Hay of Restalrig, proved as incompetent in the job as Mirabel had been at siegecraft.33 Conceivably the Jacobites could carry a bumbling director of siege operations. But to have an incompetent commissariat was a first-class disaster. The clansmen in the field starved and were on half-rations even while there were stores in abundance at Inverness.34 By the end of the first week of April, Murray of Broughton’s absence was already being felt and food shortages had become acute.35 To the failure at Fort William, and the loss of the Prince Charles, with the financial disaster this brought, the Jacobites could now add breakdown in commissariat.
The prince’s situation was clearly desperate. Only a French landing or a coup d’état in London could save him now, and both were fantasies. Early in April a courier from Versailles got through to tell him that all plans for a major expedition to Scotland had been laid aside.36
What was Charles Edward’s demeanour in the face of looming disaster? His overt stance was one of cheerful optimism: ‘HRH looks upon what has happened at Fort William as a flea bite and would not have anybody cast down upon it.’37 He rationalise
d the rash dispersal of his army on the grounds that this made it easier for his men to live off the land.38 And to demonstrate his unconcern the prince gave a number of balls at Inverness at which he danced himself, in contrast to his behaviour in Edinburgh in October.39 According to his own account vouchsafed to O’Heguerty in the 1750s, he took this action purely to bolster morale.40 He made a point of appearing in better spirits than ever.
But the difference between his actions in Edinburgh and now in Inverness was an important pointer to his state of mind. Contact with women in Charles Edward’s case always meant touching the chords of failure. The measures he trod with the fine ladies of Inverness were not so much a question of fiddling while Rome burned as an unconscious admission that his cause was now hopeless.
The pattern of self-destructive signs and pointers was not confined to the ballrooms of Inverness. For the first time there is a scintilla of harshness in the prince’s reactions to the sullen recalcitrance of Scottish Whig sympathisers, more of a tendency to condone burnings and draconian treatment through military execution of a foot-dragging population.41
The refusal to reinforce Lord George Murray at Blair is also instructive. If the prince did not agree with the strategy of forcing Cumberland to withdraw from Aberdeen, what exactly did he propose as an alternative? The answer seems to be, nothing.
The prince was unwise in his differential treatment of Scots and Irish officers. The favouritism shown to Irish cronies had long been resented by the Highlanders. There was particular pique about the fact that those chosen to go to Versailles as envoys were always the tame Irishmen (Kelly, Warren) who could be relied on to present the prince’s version of events.42 This was the moment when the prince should have jettisoned his sycophantic henchmen and used all his considerable charm to conciliate the clan officers. So far from doing this, he actually ordered his Irish favourites to shoot Lord George Murray if he showed any signs of defection to the enemy during a battle.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 31
