On the morning of the seventeenth, John Home and the others watched as Charles and his troops paraded in the King’s Park, just below Arthur’s Seat and out of range of the Castle’s guns. Alexander Carlyle remembered them as “short and dirty, and of a contemptible appearance.” John Home had a more appreciative eye. The prince himself “was in the prime of youth, tall and handsome,” while the Highlanders “seemed to be strong, active, and hardy men,” armed with muskets, fowling pieces, swords, and even scythe blades on pitchfork handles. Their “stern countenances, and bushy uncombed hair, gave them a fierce, barbarous, and imposing aspect.” Then he, Carlyle, and William Robertson slipped away to find General Cope.
They found him and his army at Dunbar, some forty miles east of Edinburgh, where he had just arrived by ship from Aberdeen. They managed to give him a detailed description of the Highland army, and Cope ordered them to act as forward scouts as his forces closed on Haddington from the west, while the rebels marched east. The two armies collided at Prestonpans, eight miles east of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, on September 21.
The result must have been secretly gratifying to Home and other ex-Edinburgh volunteers, however disheartening at the moment. At the first charge of the Highlanders, Cope’s dragoons ran away so fast that Charles’s generals thought it must be a feint. The Highlanders then lashed the royal infantry with musket volleys and, grabbing their broadswords and dirks, charged them headlong. The soldiers—professionals this time, not amateur volunteers—broke and ran. Cope and his fellow officers chased after them, calling “For Shame, Gentlemen, behave like Britons,” but to no avail. It was a stunning victory, and at one stroke, to everyone’s amazement, Charles found himself master of Scotland.
In Charles’s mind, still unclouded by any doubts or reflections, his next move had to be southward, into England and on the road to London. Again, there seemed to be little to oppose him. The government was frantically recalling troops from Flanders because there were virtually none in England; Charles had the promise (which ultimately proved empty) of nearly five thousand armed volunteers from the northern counties of England, as well as the hope of French assistance now that the revolt had caught fire. But his generals, who understood the military realities, were less sanguine. Their troops were melting away with constant desertions, as many Highlanders, pleased with their success and their booty, simply packed up and went home. Even with additional volunteers from the Gordons, Mackinnons, and MacPherson of Cluny, Charles had no more than five thousand foot and five hundred horse. Eventually they would have to face a British force of at least six times that number.
Charles’s lieutenants also doubted the likelihood of further French help (here they were mistaken; reinforcements did arrive, but too few to make any difference). In the end, they and Charles worked out a compromise. They agreed to take the army south through Cumberland, where the rough, mountainous terrain would help to disguise their maneuvers from the English. On November 3, in a dense fog, they set out from Dalkeith in two columns, one commanded by James, Duke of Perth, and the other by Charles and Lord George Murray. On the eighth, Charles’s force crossed the River Esk into England. As they crossed, “the Highlanders without any orders given,” according to an eyewitness, “all drew their Swords with one Consent upon entering the River, and every man as he landed on tother side wheeld about to the left and faced Scotland” to raise a salute to his homeland.
Once again the Hanoverian forces, this time commanded by old General Wade, now a field marshal, were outdone by the rebels’ boldness. Charles’s division of forces drew Wade east, while Charles and Perth reunited their forces and closed on Carlisle in the fog and driving rain. The royal garrison withdrew to Carlisle Castle while the city itself surrendered. The Highlanders then marched into what, in less than fifty years, would become the heart of the English industrial landscape. Kendal, Lancaster, Manchester, Macclesfield, Derby—at each town the response to Charles’s coming, while not overtly hostile, was far less warm than he had been led to expect. By December 4, however, they were less than 130 miles from London.
The English natives were as amazed by the appearance of these Scottish invaders as if they had been Eskimos or Watusis. They were certainly just as ignorant of who they were and what to expect. Most could not distinguish between Highland and Lowland Scots. Since many of Charles’s Lowlander volunteers chose to wear kilts and bonnets, English obervers simply described them all as “Highland savages” and let it go at that. Fears ran high that they intended to plunder their way to London, “which according to Ancient Customs will be the murdering of people of all Sexes and Ages, the Burning of Houses, and Cutting of Cattle to pieces, with Swords and dirks. . . .” When Charles and his staff stopped at one house, according to Murray of Broughton, its owner begged the soldiers not to eat her child. But as Murray said of his troops, “There is no instance in the history of any times in whatever Country where the Soldiery either regular or irregular behaved themselves with so much discretion, never any riots in the Streets, nor so much as a Drunk man to be seen.”
In one sense it is idle to speculate what might have happened if Charles and his little army had decided to press on to London, but the temptation is overwhelming. Could Charles really have taken the city, proclaimed his father king at Westminster, and then crafted a political settlement that would have put the Stuarts on the throne again?
It does seem indisputable that if Charles had marched farther south, he never would have made it. Not just one, but three British armies were now converging on him, including the one commanded by King George’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, recently arrived from campaigning in Flanders. Thirty thousand troops were now available for action against the Stuart army of barely five thousand. From a military point of view, those who counseled Charles to abandon his plan to march on London were right. He never had a chance.
But this raises a more interesting point: that the odds against Charles in November of 1745 were more military than political. In other words, if Charles had somehow evaded Cumberland (very unlikely), and if he had made it to London, it is hard to see how anyone could have stopped him from carrying out his plan. Despite the hopes of English Jacobites, the great majority of their countrymen were not going to rise up in support of the Stuarts; but the same majority was not ready to risk life and property to keep the Hanovers. A compromise between Parliament and the Stuarts was not only possible but probable. As early as 1739, when the War of Jenkins’s Ear was starting to heat up, Robert Walpole had sent secret letters to James asking what his intentions were regarding the Church of England and the personal safety of the members of the House of Hanover, if the Stuarts should come back to the throne again.
If they had, the English constitution would never have been the same. The notion, enshrined since 1688, of the sovereignty of Parliament would have died on the spot. But in 1745, not only sentimental Jacobites but most Englishmen would have willingly traded it in to avoid a civil war and have a little peace and quiet.
So who had the most to lose if Charles succeeded? The answer is not the English, but the Scots.
This seems shocking, especially in view of the revolt’s bloody aftermath. Yet it gets to the heart of what really mattered to key political players at the time, and to two very distinct and different groups of Scotsmen.
The first group were Charles’s allies, the Highland chiefs. They had joined their fortunes to his out of a rash sense of honor and pride. To their amazement, they had succeeded. Now, as they assembled at the prince’s headquarters in Derby to discuss what to do next, they realized what success might actually mean. Having a Stuart at Whitehall was not, and would never be, the same thing as having a Stuart at Holyrood. The influence of his Highland allies would inevitably shrink away in the vast labyrinth of competing and conflicting interests of Great Britain. They had every reason to help Charles secure his position in Scotland, but they had no interest in seeing him win his father’s crown in England and Wales. So, military necessity a
part, returning to Scotland served their larger political agenda. No wonder, then, that they stood foursquare together against going any farther.
When Lord George Murray broke the news to Charles that “it was everybody’s opinion that the only party that was to be taken was to retire,” the prince “was astonished at this proposition,” and said, “why the Clans kept me quite another Language and assured me they were all resolved to pierce or to dye.” The debate took place at Exeter House, even as clansmen lined up outside to sharpen their swords in preparation for battle. Although Charles argued and pleaded, the chieftains remained unmoved. Provoked by their intransigence, Bonnie Prince Charlie “fell into a passion and gave most of the Gentlemen that had spoke very Abusive Language,” according to an eyewitness, “and said they had a mind to betray him.” A second meeting that evening produced no change. Finally the prince gave up and ordered the retreat.
The retreat from Derby was a low point for the Jacobites in more ways than one. Charles fell into a pout and a funk, and refused to talk to his subordinates. His troops were equally furious. They quickly lost their earlier discipline and fell to looting the locals, leaving a trail of resentment and rage behind them. Outside Penrith they clashed with some of the Duke of Cumberland’s advance dragoons, who, unlike the raw recruits at Prestonpans, stood to fight rather than run away. Rumors that the Highlanders had cried “No quarter!” and killed some of the British wounded circulated among the duke’s troops, with ugly repercussions later on.
On Christmas Day the army entered Glasgow. As Charles’s chief Irish adviser noted, “the Prince was resolved to punish the Town of Glasgow, who shew’d a little too much Zeal to the Government.” He demanded 5,500 pounds in ransom, as well as supplies and food, including “6,000 pair of shoes, 6,000 bonnetts, and as many tartan hose. ” City merchants paid up with a bad grace, and it was with difficulty that some of the Highlanders were restrained from burning the city down. Nowhere else, Charles said bitterly, had he found so few friends as in Glasgow.
This was his first full encounter with that second group of Scots who had no interest in seeing him succeed: Scotland’s growing middle class of merchants and professional men, as well as improving landowners. Like Robertson, Carlyle, and the other Edinburgh student volunteers, they were Whigs, but less from conviction than out of practical self-interest. Union had brought them affluence and prosperity. Just as its architects had calculated, it secured their loyalty to the new government. Union, and the Hanovers on the throne, implied a Scotland with expanding horizons and possibilities; growing commerce and trade; the rule of law; the good things in life. Returning the Stuarts meant returning to the old Scotland. In the minds of Scottish Whigs, this was not an option.
In the sharpest sense, the Forty-five was not a war between Scots and Englishmen, but a civil war. The split that divided Scots transcended class or religious divisions, or even the division between Highlander and Lowlander. (According to one recent scholar, Murray Pittock, perhaps as much as 40 percent of Charles’s army consisted of Lowlanders.) It was in fact a cultural split, between two competing visions of what Scotland should be and where it could go. Charles’s supporters could not afford for Scotland to move forward, and so they were prepared to fight and die to topple the existing Whig regime. Scottish Whigs could not afford to go backward, and so they were willing to do anything and make any sacrifice to keep the Stuarts off the throne.
Charles’s march south had given them a chance to catch their breath, and as he returned to Scotland to gather reinforcements, they began to mobilize against him. What they may have lacked in martial valor, they made up for in deep pockets and political skill. The city of Glasgow had already raised a regiment of militia which attached itself to the royal forces converging to retake Edinburgh. With them was a diehard company of volunteers commanded by John Home. On January 6, 1746, they retook the capital. Charles’s army, meanwhile, was bogged down in a pointless and ineffectual siege of Stirling Castle, which critically divided his forces and depleted him of resources such as artillery for the rest of the campaign.
More decisive intervention came from two Scottish Whig politicians. One was Archibald Campbell, the former Lord Islay and Francis Hutcheson’s old patron, who was now Duke of Argyll. He brought the powerful Campbell clan firmly on the side of the government, thus securing most of the western Highlands—although, ironically, Argyll’s success in making agriculture more prosperous in the clan area made his followers less than willing to leave their farms to risk their lives on the battlefield.
The other, even more important at the moment, was Duncan Forbes of Culloden. After Prestonpans he found himself, as he remembered later, “almost alone, without troops, without arms,” and “supported by nobody of common sense or courage.” Nonetheless, he knew he had to act to “prevent extreme folly.” Single-handedly he waged a campaign to keep the clan chieftains of the northern Highlands loyal to the house of Hanover. MacLeod, Sutherland, Munro, MacDonald of Sleat—Forbes cajoled, persuaded, and with his own money bribed them into passivity. Other clans he managed to divide, including the Grants, Gordons, Mackenzies, and Frasers. By his efforts Forbes prevented the one thing that might have saved the Stuart cause: a general rising of the clans. If any single individual can be said to have defeated the Forty-five, it is not the Duke of Cumberland but Duncan Forbes.
Of course, Scottish Whigs could use their money and political smarts to prevent Charles from winning, but they still needed a military solution to crush him altogether. Ten days after they retook Edinburgh, royal troops had another disastrous encounter with the Jacobite clans at Falkirk. Once again, British cavalry and infantry flew into a panic as the Highlanders attacked. John Home, stationed with his volunteers on a hill, watched incredulously as the redcoats broke and ran, just as they had at Prestonpans. Yet Samuel Johnson could understand the professionals’ distress. “Men accustomed only to exchange bullets at a distance,” he wrote, “are discouraged and amazed when they find themselves encountered hand to hand, and catch the gleam of steel flashing in their faces.” It was all over in less than twenty minutes. The Jacobites took more than three hundred prisoners, including Home and his volunteers (although he led his men in a daring escape a few nights later and rejoined the royal army). “By my soul, Dick,” one prisoner was heard saying to another, “if Prince Charles goes on in this way, Prince Frederick [the Prince of Wales] will never be King George!”
He was wrong. The end of Charles’s hopes was at hand, in the person of the new British commander in chief, Prince Frederick’s brother William, Duke of Cumberland. Despite Cumberland’s later sobriquet of “Butcher” and his gross rotund appearance, he was a skillful and experienced soldier, and only four years older than Bonnie Prince Charlie. He soon set about restoring the royal army’s morale. He brought them fresh artillery, something sadly lacking at Prestonpans and Falkirk, and a new technique for their new weapon, the bayonet. By training his soldiers to lunge with their bayonets not at the charging Highlander in front of them, but at the one to their right as he raised his arm to strike and thus exposed himself to a lethal thrust, Cumberland now had the tactic that could counteract the violent shock of the clansmen’s charge. His troops sensed for the first time that they could beat the Jacobites in a pitched battle.
They had their chance to prove it on April 16, 1746. Charles’s situation had now deteriorated to the point of collapse. His war chest was empty; his men had no pay; supplies were gone; worst of all, he and his field commander, Lord George Murray, were no longer on speaking terms. He and his troops had been on a long line of retreat for weeks from Cumberland’s much larger army, toward Inverness. Most of his soldiers had not eaten for two days. On the sixteenth, the sorry ragtag force reached Culloden House, overlooking Drummossie Moor—the home of Duncan Forbes, the man who had doomed Charles’s last chance for a Highland uprising. Charles’s officers, “sullen and dejected,” according to one eyewitness, lay down to sleep in the deserted house, “some on beds, oth
ers on tables, Chairs, and on the floors.” The Jacobites had drained Forbes’s private supply of sixty hogsheads of claret on an earlier visit: the prince, weak from a recent bout with pneumonia, had to be content with a dram of whisky and some bread.
With Cumberland close on his heels, Charles decided the only way to reverse his fortune was by offering battle. Murray and the other commanders were appalled by the suicidal plan, and Charles again lost his temper. “God damn it! Are my orders still disobeyed?” he cried. Walter Stapleton, commander of his Irish volunteers, now ventured his opinion: “The Scots are always good soldiers till things come to a crisis,” he said contemptuously. This silenced the other commanders’ objections. Now they had to fight, to prove their manhood. At the end of their enterprise as at its start, honor compelled them to take a position they knew to be a mistake. They and their clansmen were about to pay for that mistake in full measure.
The next day, as the clans and other Jacobite contingents wearily drew up their line of battle, Cumberland’s army marched onto the field, with flags, drums, and the squeal of the Campbell pipes. His army outnumbered Charles’s by two to one. Three of his fifteen regular battalions were Scottish, in addition to Lord Loudun’s regiment of Highland volunteers and Campbell’s clansmen. As rank after rank of redcoats moved slowly but inexorably into position—the two armies were only five hundred yards apart—the hearts of the Jacobite commanders sank. “We are putting an end to a bad affair,” George Murray muttered to Lord Elcho. Even Prince Charlie’s optimism faded, and for the first time he “began to consider his situation desperate.”
How the Scots Invented the Modern World Page 17
