How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Numbers, discipline, and technology now took over. Cumberland opened the battle with an artillery barrage that pounded the Jacobite line for half an hour, killing, wounding, or scattering nearly a third of Charles’s effectives. Charles himself narrowly escaped death when a solid shot decapitated the groom holding his horse. Meanwhile, a contingent of Campbells had seized the low stone fence that was supposed to secure the Jacobite right, and began to pour a deadly fire into their flank. Charles’s troops still had not fired a shot, and yet the battle had been largely decided.

  However, the clansmen did not realize this. While their commanders had steadily lost their nerve, they were eager for battle. They had scattered their enemies not once but twice, and assumed they could do it again. At last, maddened beyond endurance by the shelling, the Mackintoshes, who held the center of the prince’s line, could no longer be held back and charged. Without waiting for orders, Cameron of Lochiel, sword and pistol in hand, led his “sons of the hound,” as the Camerons called themselves, after them.

  Then the rest of Clan Chattan—Mackintosh, MacGillivray, and MacBean—surged behind them, coming up “very boldly and fast all in a cloud together, sword in hand,” as one English soldier described it; “like wildcats,” said another. Most came on too fast to use the muskets they were carrying; in their bloodlust, they threw their firearms away. The British laid a withering fire into them as they came on, forcing the charging Highlanders to swerve to the right, as if to evade the hailstorm of lead and shot. “Making a dreadful huzza, and even crying ‘Run, ye dogs!’” they broke onto the British line.

  But this time the British did not run. Even the Scots of Munro’s regiment, which had disgraced itself at Falkirk, stood their ground. It was vicious hand-to-hand combat, with the clansmen blindly hacking and thrusting as the choking gunsmoke closed around them. “It was dreadful to see the enemies’ swords circling in the air as they were raised from the strokes,” said one eyewitness, “and no less to see the officers in the army, some cutting with their swords, other pushing with their spontoons, the sergeants running their halberds into the throats of the opponents, the men ramming their fixed bayonets up to the sockets.”

  Meanwhile, the British fire continued undiminished. The smoke became so thick that the Highlanders had to feel rather than see their way to the enemy. Clansmen were shot down in heaps three or four deep as they climbed over the bodies of cousins and brothers and “hacked at the muskets with such a maniacal fury that far down the line men could hear the iron clang of sword on barrel.” Those who were not mowed down by musket fire and grapeshot died on the points of the Britishers’ bayonets. “No one that attacked us, escaped alive,” said one of Munro’s officers afterwards, “for we gave no quarter, nor would accept of any.”

  The last head-on clash between a modern army and a premodern one on European soil ended when the clansmen could no longer stand up to the slaughter. First in ones and twos, then in clumps of ten or a dozen, they broke off and headed to the rear. Some, “in their fury and despair, threw stones for at least a minute or two, before their total rout began.” Now the Campbells rose up, tearing down the stone wall and shouting “Cruachan!” as they fell on their ancient foes. Within minutes the Jacobite center and right turned and ran. The MacDonalds, holding down the left flank, soon followed.

  Some chieftains refused to give up. MacDonnell of Keppoch cried out, “Oh my God, has it come to this, that the children of my tribe have forsaken me!” and charged, sword in hand, toward the enemy. He fell when a ball struck him in the arm, just as his brother Donald was shot down at the head of his company. Keppoch struggled on and took a second wound before dropping to the ground in front of the advancing line of British grenadiers. James MacDonald of Kilchonat tried to help him up, when another bullet hit the chief in the back. Kilchonat left him for dead and fled. But Keppoch was not dead, and when his natural son Angus Ban found him, he was unable to speak but still breathing. Angus and some of his soldiers (he had single-handedly rallied what was left of his father’s regiment and led them off the field) managed to carry Keppoch to a small bothy filled with wounded and dying MacDonnells. There the old chieftain, who had once boasted of having five hundred warriors at his beck and call, expired, surrounded by the clansmen he had led to defeat and death.

  The slaughter among the clan leadership was heavy. Grapeshot had shattered both of Lord Lochiel’s ankles, and he had to be carried off the field. The only regimental commanders to escape unwounded were Lord George Murray, Lord Ardshiel, and Lord Nairne—although Nairne’s brother, Robert Mercer of Aldie, was killed, as was Mercer’s son Thomas. Their bodies were never found. Only three of the Mackintosh officers survived. But if the Jacobite chieftains and their tacksmen paid a heavy price for their misplaced loyalties, it was their followers who suffered most from the retributions of Cumberland and his soldiers.

  We can try to make various excuses for their behavior. We can say war and its aftermath is often very nasty, and that the killing of prisoners and noncombatants is more common than most of us care to admit. There were the rumors that the Highlanders had massacred their prisoners at Penrith, which inflamed many British spirits. There was the desire on many soldiers’ part to settle scores for the humiliations at Prestonpans and Falkirk. Then there was a political culture that treated rebels as traitors and the lowest of the low, undeserving of mercy or pity. And so on. But the bitter truth is that the British at Culloden behaved monstrously, in violation of all the accepted conventions of warfare at the time, and that Cumberland himself set the poorest example.

  When riding across the battlefield, he came upon the twenty-year-old colonel of the Fraser regiment, Charles Fraser of Inverallochy, standing wounded and bloody in front of him. Cumberland asked him to whom he belonged. “To the Prince,” Fraser replied. Furious, Cumberland turned to an officer, Major James Wolfe, and ordered him to shoot the boy on the spot. In less than twelve years, during the French and Indian Wars, Wolfe would be the conqueror of Montreal, and would himself make the commander’s ultimate sacrifice on the battlefield. Now, to his everlasting credit, Wolfe refused to obey the order, and offered to resign his commission. Instead, Cumberland gave a signal to a passing soldier, who raised his musket and shot Fraser through the head.

  Cumberland did show great solicitude for his own troops, giving twelve guineas for every wounded man, and ordered up rum, brandy, biscuit, and cheese for their provision. He praised “my brave Campbells” and the Scots of Munro’s regiment. But there was no mercy for the rebels, either on the battlefield or afterwards. For two days the wounded were left unattended on the field, with sentinels on guard to prevent anyone from helping them. Soldiers went from house to house in the area, rounding up rebel stragglers and executing them by the dozens. The hut in which McDonnell of Keppoch had died was set on fire, consuming his body and those of his followers, those still alive screaming horribly until they were “scorched to death in a most miserable, mangled way.” A nearby hut containing eighteen clansmen was also put to the torch.

  Cumberland’s cavalry pursued the retreating army all along the Inverness road, riding down and killing everyone, rebel or not, whom they met. Afterwards one eyewitness came upon a horrific scene, “a woman stript and laid in a very indecent posture, and some of the other sex with their privites placed in their hands.” At King’s Milns, close to Inverness, he found a twelve-year-old boy, “his head cloven to his teeth.” A Mrs. Robertson, widow of the late laird of Lees at Inshes, came home after the battle to find sixteen dead men in front of her door, all of them murdered by passing dragoons. She summoned her terrified servants and told them to give the clansmen a proper burial.

  The atrocities redoubled when Cumberland’s forces marched across the Great Glen and into the home territories of the rebel clans, in search of the fugitive prince. All summer and autumn the harrying continued, and while hundreds were killed outright, hundreds more died during the severe winter of 1746–47, or died in prison. According to John Prebbl
e, at any given time there were more than 3,400 Jacobite prisoners being held in jails in England and Scotland, or on transports at Inverness and Tilbury. Many had been arrested for being seen “to drink the Pretender’s health” or “known to wish the Rebels well.” What served as a radical-chic gesture at Tory Oxford was now the equivalent of a death sentence in the post-Culloden Highlands.

  Those in the transports suffered worst. A prisoner on the Alexander and James, its hold crammed with prisoners being taken to London for trial and execution, remembered: “They’d take a rope and tye about the poor sicks west, then they would hawll them up by their tackle and plunge them into the sea, as they said to drown the vermine; but they took speciall care to drown both together. Then they’d hawll them up on deck and ty a stone about the leggs and overboard with them.” He added, “I have seen six or seven examples of this in a day.”

  At the same time, the rest of Scotland was returning to normal. When the city of Glasgow learned of the royal victory at Culloden, citizens rang church bells and built bonfires that blazed on through the night. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who had failed to defend the city against the prince’s troops, was arrested and thrown into prison. George Drummond replaced him, and the young volunteers whom people had earlier laughed at and mocked were now the heroes of the hour. Colin Maclaurin, who had supervised reinforcement of the city’s defense so diligently and to so little ultimate purpose, returned from his exile in York. But his health was gone, and before the summer was over he was dead. A popular and respected teacher, Maclaurin’s textbooks on mathematics had made Newton’s calculus standard practice across Britain. Enlightened Edinburgh mourned one of its own.

  The bulk of Cumberland’s army returned to Flanders. His successor, the Earl of Albemarle, divided Scotland into four military districts, and said of the Highland Scots, “Nothing but fire and sword can cure their cursed, vicious ways of thinking.” But except for patrols to look for remaining rebels or the unaccounted-for Prince Charles (who was still in hiding in the Great Glen), his troops spent most of their time completing the military fortifications and roads General Wade had started two decades before, including Fort George at Ardersier Point, near Inverness. A forbidding example of the most advanced eighteenth-century fortificatory technology, it was finally finished in 1769. It has never seen a shot fired in battle.

  At the recommendation of soldiers and bureaucrats, Parliament passed laws banning weapons (again), the tartan, and the kilt. This time the laws had teeth, and the threat of Cumberland’s dragoons, behind them. For a generation Highlanders had to dye their plaid clothing black or brown, and learn to sew their kilts together at the crotch. Warriors hid their swords and targes in the heath, hoping that they or their children would remember where they had buried them. Year by year, the clan battle cries and the tales of ancient cattle raids began to fade from the people’s memory.

  Most of this, like the bloody reprisals in the Great Glen, did not touch the lives of Lowlanders. Scottish Whigs were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, what was happening. An exception was David Hume. He had acquaintances who had turned Jacobite, and he beseeched his cousin, Alexander Home of Eccles, who, as solicitor general, was prosecuting many of these cases: “Seek the Praise, my dear Sandy, of Humanity and Moderation.”

  Another was Duncan Forbes. He had returned to Culloden House to find the windows smashed, the furniture broken or stolen, his wine cellar drunk dry, and his tenants beaten and robbed by both sides. He also learned that twelve wounded Jacobites had sought shelter in the house after the battle, and that British soldiers had turned up and, on the pretext of taking them away to be treated for their wounds, dragged them into the forecourt and shot them. Later, when he met George II, the king asked him if the story was true. “I wish I could say no,” Forbes said.

  As Lord President, he presided over many trials of accused traitors that spring, and tried whenever possible to make sure that justice, rather than revenge, was served. When MacDonald of Kingsburgh was arrested because the fugitive prince had stayed at his house, Forbes offered to put up his bail himself. He warned the Earl of Albemarle, “Unnecessary severity creates pity.” The ban on weapons was something Forbes had been pressing for years, but he thought the ban on the kilt both ridiculous and too severe. He called it “a chip in porridge” and worth “not one half penny.” Instead, he urged the government to put the ban on the rebel clans instead of on everyone, regardless of loyalty. The London government, which was not in the mood to distinguish between good and bad Highlanders, ignored him. Having saved the government from its worst nightmare, a general uprising of the Highlands, Forbes never received any honor or reward, not even a knighthood.

  Forbes did, however, have the satisfaction of seeing through a piece of legislation that he considered key to breaking the power of the chieftains. This abolished the ancient, hereditary jurisdictions of chieftains over their clansmen, including the so-called regalian rights, which made them virtual kings in their territories. At the same date, Lord Kames was writing his Essay Concerning British Antiquities, pointing out that the old Scottish law had been set up to keep tenants under the thumb of their feudal overlords. Now Forbes oversaw the creation of a new legal framework for the Highlands, shattering the age-old dependence of clansman and peasant on the will of his chief. It established a new principle, that the Highlander was a free individual, who could contract to work his own land and keep the proceeds for himself.

  Forbes even introduced a new system of written leases, which freed the tenant from compulsory services in kind to his landlord, including service with the sword. No Highland chieftain could ever again summon up a private army to fight his neighbors—or the British Crown. But the change was also supposed to benefit the tenant as well, by letting him work to pay his laird rather than fight for him. The fact that it did not quite work out that way was not entirely Forbes’s fault; the Highland Clearances were still a long way off, and something no one could have foreseen in 1748.

  Instead, like other Scottish Whigs, Forbes watched with relief the disarming of the Highlands and the disruption of clan life. They had just had a brush with disaster; no one wanted to see it repeated. Looking back, Alexander Carlyle said, “God forbid that Britain should ever again be in danger of being overrun by such a despicable enemy.” According to John Clerk of Penicuik, news of Culloden “gave universal joy” not only to Whigs “but there were even Jacobites who were at least content at what had happened.” Thanks to the rebellion, “all trade and business in this country were quite at a standstill.” Now, Clerk noted with pleasure, “peace and quietness began to break in.”

  Scotland was ready for the next stage of its future.

  III

  There are many aftermaths to Culloden and the Forty-five.

  Prince Charles spent five months hiding from Cumberland’s troops. With a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head, he wandered hungry and sick from one sanctuary to another, endangering everyone who gave him shelter. At one point he traveled disguised as an Irish maidservant with Flora MacDonald, daughter of MacDonald of Milton, to her future father-in-law’s house at Kingsburgh, on the Isle of Skye. Escorted on foot to Elgol, he was able to catch a boat to the mainland, and on September 19, 1746, he made his rendezvous with the French privateer L’Heureux. He returned to France until 1748, when the terms of the peace treaty between France and Britain deported him to Italy. He lived the rest of his life in Rome a corpulent alcoholic, blaming the failure of the revolt on everyone except himself. When his father died in 1766, Charles became the Stuart claimant—but by then it was a meaningless claim. On January 31, 1788, the man who more than any other was responsible for bringing death and destruction to the Highlands expired, still admired by too many of the people whose lives he had ruined.

  The notion that Culloden destroyed the Highland clans is a myth; the traditional ways had been dying for years. Long before, without realizing it, the chieftains and the Crown had conspired to obliterate the old system
of loyalties and mutual dependence in order to consolidate their own power. The battle was the clans’ last stand, just as the myth states. The glory was gone. But the sordid reality of that way of life lingered on for decades: the poverty, the bruising punishment of the weak and helpless, the sullen hopelessness.

  More than a quarter-century after Culloden, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their famous visit to Scotland. From the western Highlands they traveled to the Isle of Skye, and from Skye to Raasay. Raasay, a narrow, barren island fifteen miles long and only three miles wide, was MacLeod land and the scene of some of the ugliest reprisals of the Forty-five (committed, we note in passing, not by the English but by fellow Scots, including MacLeod clansmen from the loyalist side). By 1773, however, the bitterness of those years had faded. The captain of Boswell and Johnson’s boat to Raasay was Malcolm MacLeod, who had escorted the prince to Elgol. Now sixty-two, MacLeod struck Boswell as a perfect “representative of a Highland gentleman”—although he wore breeches and a plaid jacket instead of a kilt. Boswell found him “frank and polite, in the true sense of the word.”

  Boswell and Johnson even stopped in on Flora MacDonald, now a middle-aged married lady, and drank gin with her and her husband. Johnson slept on the same bed Prince Charles had used when he stayed there disguised as Betty Burke. Flora had even saved the sheets the prince had slept in (she would eventually be buried in one of them). Boswell stayed up to visit with his hosts, and was distressed to learn that they were “under a load of debt and intended to go to America.” In 1774 they did as they promised and emigrated to the colonies, just in time to be caught up in another revolt against the British Crown.