The Tobacco Lords Trilogy

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  O’Sullivan was galloping this way and that in a confused manner, trying to draw up the army in line of battle. Later Lord George was to remark sarcastically: ‘At Culloden O’Sullivan had forty-eight hours to display his skill, and did it accordingly.’ And many times he insisted, ‘I am certain that neither the Scots officers nor one single man of all the Highlanders would have agreed to it had their advice been asked, for there never could be more improper ground for Highlanders.’

  The Prince rode among his men, doing his best to encourage them, and they, despite their fatigue and low spirits, raised their bonnets and gave him a faint huzza. Then Charles took up his position on the second or rear line beside Fitzjames’ Horse and behind the Irish picquets. There were only enough men to form two sparse lines against the three solid ones behind which Cumberland was positioned.

  On some raised ground at the side of the moor, women and children from Inverness had gathered, some of them with picnic baskets eager not to miss the afternoon’s excitement. Further along Annabella, Nancy, Regina, chiefs’ wives and other women who were travelling with the Highland army also waited and watched.

  Annabella noticed with mounting anxiety that the Highland army was vastly outnumbered. Seeing that there was a much wider distance between the front lines of the opposing armies than there had been at Falkirk, she was quick to realise that this would prove a disadvantage to the Highland method of fighting. She vividly remembered them charging with such speed that their opponents were barely allowed time for one shot before the Highland claymores hacked them down. She also saw that attached to their muskets the English had long bayonets which obviously could pin the Highlanders back out of claymore reach. Not that she was concerned as Nancy was, for the Highlanders as such. The acuteness of her concern was solely directed at the French contingents. She was just about to peer through her telescope in an effort to pick out Lavelle when suddenly the ground shuddered as all the cannon of the royal army exploded in one great roll, obscuring the Highland lines with smoke and fire. As the smoke cleared, she was shocked to see the great holes in the Highland formation. Dead bodies were everywhere. One ball decapitated the Prince’s groom who was only yards away from the Prince. Another injured the Prince’s grey charger and he had to mount a different horse. The messenger that the Prince had sent giving the order for his front line to charge was also decapitated and the Highland line did not move except to close up to fill the gaps as men were blown to pieces. The cannon continued to roar and severed arms and legs scattered into the air, splattering blood over the remaining men. Most of the two thousand men killed at the Battle of Culloden were in fact killed during this time before the order to charge finally reached the survivors. Then they raced through the cannon smoke like devils, shrieking, throwing away their muskets and slashing the air with their swords, only to be mowed down by volley fire and grapeshot.

  The MacDonalds—in response to the Duke of Perth’s cries of ‘Claymore! Claymore!’—had to run for more than half a mile in the face of this unwavering fire. Their opponents, safely out of reach of frantic broadswords, slaughtered them as they came. The Clan Chattans ran into the same choking smoke and devastating fire, some of them holding their plaids before their eyes as they clambered over their dead comrades who were lying three and four deep. The regiments of McLean and MacLachlin had even further to run over boggy ground, but still they went forward, calling out as best they could, ‘Another Hector!’ and ‘Death or Life!’ And it was death for them.

  Highlanders danced and threatened and roared and shrieked and ran and stopped in futile efforts to draw the enemy line, but this time the line refused to be drawn or broken. The Highlanders kept coming and falling in their hundreds, until eventually they began to turn back, first in twos and threes, then in confused and bewildered swarms.

  The Prince’s advisers pleaded with him not to risk his life in the heat of the action, but Charles could not believe that his invincible clans were being routed. Desperately he tried to put new life and confidence into the regiments now streaming from the field and persuade them to return. His bonnet and his wig were blown off in his feverish attempts to stop the torrent of his men’s flight and he only managed to recover the wig as it fell. He kept crying out, pleading on all sides:

  ‘Rally, in the name of God. Pray, gentlemen, return. Pray stand with me, your prince, but a moment—otherwise you ruin me, your country, yourselves. And God forgive you.’

  Most of the men, who only spoke Gaelic, did not understand what he said and anyway the mouths of the cannon spoke louder.

  The Prince became so distraught that Lochiel’s uncle, Major Kennedy, had to grab his horse’s bridle and lead him away.

  A sea of tartan trickled, spurted, rolled, gushed from the field in all directions, with Cumberland’s troops now wildly pursuing them, hacking at them with bayonet, sword and spontoon, or mowing them down with their muskets. Mutilated bodies were piling up not only on the battlefield but all around the countryside. The carnage engulfed the spectators.

  Regina began to moan, then wail, then scream. Nancy called out distractedly: ‘Calum! Calum!’

  Annabella’s horse reared and snorted and stamped and circled in agitation and she saw to her horror a company of dragoons ride straight through the group of Inverness women and children, trampling and slashing them as they passed. She saw a girl’s head being cleft to the teeth, a baby heaved high on the end of a bayonet, a woman’s face cut again and again until it was a crimson poppy stuck to the green stem of her dress. She saw a bayonet being poked in an old woman’s eye.

  Everywhere there was screaming. Annabella shouted:

  ‘Jesus Christ! Where are the French? What am I to do?’

  Just then, Nancy knocked Regina off the back of the horse that they were sharing and galloped into the thick of the battlefield, her long black hair streaming out behind her.

  Regina, tiny among the surging mass of men, looked terror-stricken and her screams staccatoed up in a fit of hysteria. Standing helplessly screeching, she watched an English soldier, sword in hand, approaching her. And still she kept up her staccato screeching after a shot from Annabella’s pistol dropped him in his tracks.

  ‘Up behind me.’ Annabella forced her snorting and squealing horse over bodies and between Highlanders who had no shields to protect them while their opponents slashed at them with maniacal fury. ‘Regina, damn you!’ She shouted again: ‘Mount behind, I said!’

  But eventually she had to reach down and grab the girl’s arm to haul her up. Once on the horse, Regina frantically clutched Annabella around the waist, hid close to her, pressed her face hard into Annabella’s back.

  ‘Oh, mistress, gallop away. Gallop away!’

  Annabella ignored her plea.

  ‘Where are the French? Can you see them?’

  ‘To the devil with the French.’ Regina wept. ‘Let us away to Glasgow where we belong.’

  ‘I belong with my Frenchman. If he goes to the devil, girl, that’s where I go too!’

  She spurred her horse forward. Over towards the river she thought she could see the silver-grey of the French uniform. With the help of her telescope, she discovered it was the Irish picquets who had come down from their post to save the Royal Scots from complete encirclement and whose close and steady fire was also covering the MacDonalds’ retreat. Eventually after losing half their number in the attempt they too retreated, carrying with them their injured commanding officer, Brigadier Stapleton.

  Over at another part the Fitzjames’ Horse commanded by Robert O’Shea, who had come over from France during the winter, was fighting a similar delaying action along with Lord Elcho’s men and allowing the right wing of the Jacobite army to make its escape.

  Then she saw Lavelle’s company, or what was left of it, struggling across the river in the distance. Immediately she kicked her horse’s flanks and shouted it on.

  ‘No, oh, no,’ Regina sobbed when she saw that Annabella’s intention was to cross the river. ‘We�
��ll be drowned. Look at all the others.’

  The river was swollen with the recent heavy rain and from writhing slowly around fields and hills like a silver-backed snake, it had become a rapid, snapping, raging monster. Already it had swallowed Highlanders and the pursuing English.

  ‘No, oh, mistress, for God’s sake, no!’

  Annabella ignored her, and the horse, whinnying with fright, floundered in.

  The noise of the water was deafening. It thundered in their heads, clamped tight over their nostrils, snatched the breath from their mouths. It battered and tugged at their bodies until it tore Regina off the horse. But still she managed to cling fiercely to Annabella, who, with head down and gasping for air, fought to keep a grip of the animal with one hand and blindly clutch at the girl with the other.

  With sheer force of will they held on until the horse stumbled out on the opposite bank.

  Not long afterwards Nancy’s lover, Calum, followed on a black horse, with Nancy close behind on a brown and they too made it safely to the other side. There they stopped for breath and looked back.

  To the sound of a Fraser’s pipes and with flying colours the Jacobite right wing under Lord George Murray was carrying out its retreat ‘with the greatest regularity’. In square formation they faced about several times to keep Hawley’s cavalry in check until the horsemen eventually galloped off in pursuit of the MacDonalds and centre regiments who had taken the road to Inverness.

  The heather-covered battlefield wept blood. Never had a field been so thick with dead. Cumberland’s men, with killing and dabbling their feet in the blood and splashing it about one another, looked like vast hordes of butchers.

  Soon distracted camp-followers and wives were scrambling about searching for their men among the dead and wounded. There were few beggars to pillage the bodies because the beggars too had been cut down by the troopers. Others were burned to death in the Leanach barn along with wounded officers when Cumberland ordered the barn to be locked and set on fire.

  Nancy said: ‘What’s it all been for?’

  Calum sighed.

  ‘No doubt many gentlemen who reluctantly tore themselves from their homes and families and who sacrificed their fortunes will be asking themselves that, Nancy.’

  It was not long before some of the Jacobite officers were angrily asking that very question. According to Michael Sheridan, Sir Thomas’s nephew, he had been ordered to carry back to the Prince all the money that had been recently given to Aeneas MacDonald to distribute among his needy followers. Lord George Murray, whose wig and bonnet had been blown from his head and his sword broken and his whole person splattered with mud, angrily exclaimed:

  ‘It’s a very hard case that the Prince carries away the money while so many gentlemen who have sacrificed their fortunes for him are starving. Damn it! If I had ten guineas in the world I’d with all my heart and soul share it with them.’

  He was also infuriated because although he had pleaded that stores of meal should be sent to Badenoch in case of a reverse, he found nothing with which to feed his men. And he immediately sent a letter of angry recrimination to the Prince.

  This did nothing to alleviate the Prince’s fears that he had been betrayed by the Scottish chiefs and that they and Lord George in particular were treacherous. As far as the Prince was concerned, they had prevented him from reaching London and the crown of England. Now they had lost him the battle against Cumberland.

  After the battle, on a road some miles from the field, the Prince was in a highly distraught and excitable state. He was with Sheridan, O’Shea and his men, and O’Sullivan. As Scots officers began to join him, he became more and more agitated. He ordered them to go to a village a mile’s distance from where he was, then sent one of the Irish officers after them with the order to disperse.

  Lord George Murray received his last brief royal command:

  ‘Let every man seek his own safety the best way he can.’

  No words of gratitude or goodbye; nothing but the cold order. It was not until much later after his life had been saved many times by the ordinary people of the Highlands that the Prince was able to dictate his more generous ‘The Letter to Ye Chiefs in parting from Scotland, 1746’. It said:

  ‘For The Chiefs,

  When I came into this country, it was my only view to do all in my power for your good and safety. This I will always do as long as life is in me. But alas! I see with grief I can at present do little for you on this side of the water, for the only thing that can now be done is to defend yourselves until the French assist you, if not to be able to make better terms. To effectuate this, the only way is to assemble in a body as soon as possible, and then to take measures for the best, which you that know the country are only judges of. This makes me be of little use here; whereas, by my going into France instantly, however dangerous it be, I will certainly engage the French Court either to assist us effectually and powerfully, or at least to procure you such terms as you would not obtain otherways. My presence there, I flatter myself, will have more effect to bring this sooner to a determination than anybody else, for several reasons; viz. it is thought to be a policy, though a false one, of the French Court, not to restore our masters, but to keep a continual civil war in this country, which renders the English Government less powerful, and of consequence themselves more. This is absolutely destroyed by my leaving the country, which nothing else but this will persuade them that this play cannot last, and if not remedied, the Elector will soon be as despotic as the French King, which, I should think, will oblige them to strike the great stroke, which is always in their power, however averse they may have been to it for the time past. Before leaving off, I must recommend to you that all things should be decided by a council of all your chiefs, or in any of your absence, the next commander of your several corps with the assistance of the Duke of Perth and Lord George Murray, who, I am persuaded, will stick by you to the very last. My departure should be kept as long private and concealed as possible on one pretext or another which you will fall upon. May the Almighty bless and direct you.’

  But despite the reference to the Lieutenant-General in this letter, the Prince never was able to rid himself of his fear and distrust of Murray and he later wrote to his father King James saying that if ‘this devil’ came to see him in Rome he ought to immediately imprison him. And even his father could not persuade him to feel otherwise. But before this letter, and the letter to the chiefs and immediately after Culloden, the curt order he sent telling him that every man should seek his own safety was read by Murray to the assembled officers and men. Then they said a last goodbye to each other before separating to seek what refuge they could. No one could tell if they would end on the scaffold or what would happen. The Highlanders gave vent to their grief in wild howlings and lamentations and tears flowed down their cheeks. They realised that their country was now at the mercy of the Duke of Cumberland and on the point of being plundered, and for them and their children there would be no hope.

  Nancy felt harrowed and shocked at the sight of the men in such a distressed state and was glad when Calum wasted no time in galloping away. She was not accustomed to such uninhibited displays of emotion. Lowland men never behaved like this. She wondered what Calum’s reactions were, but he kept ahead of her, silent and stiff in the saddle, and neither spoke nor looked back as they set off on the long journey through hills and glens in their attempts to reach what might be left of his home. She was to see much more tragic and distressing sights on the way.

  Highland regiments of Cumberland’s army—for there had been three Scottish regiments with Cumberland and some companies of Loudon’s regiment and also the Argyll militia—as well as the English were systematically looting, burning, killing, raping, torturing and destroying everything and everyone they could find. Often their victims were not only of their own tongue but of their own name.

  By the time Nancy made up on Annabella and Lavelle who had been wounded in the leg, her face had set in a hard white mas
k against the sickening atrocities she had seen. Annabella had witnessed them too and was so distressed that as soon as she caught sight of Nancy she leapt from her horse and ran to embrace her. Then, immediately recovering, she shouted:

  ‘God damn you! I ought to give you a monstrously severe whipping for galloping off and deserting me. Now you’ll have us all killed by dallying like this.’

  Nancy shrugged. ‘I’m all for getting away from here, mistress, and the quicker the better.’

  Flushed with embarrassment and anger, Annabella remounted. All the time Regina had been sitting like a stone on a horse that had once belonged to a dead cavalry officer. Like the other two women, she was dirty and bedraggled, her hair was flowing free and her clothes like theirs were torn and wet and clinging to her body, showing every outline. They all rode off without saying any more and before night fell they found a house that had been looted and the occupants killed. They were thankful, however, that at least the house had not been burned and could afford them shelter until morning.

  Before settling down to try and get some sleep, Annabella made a determined effort to regain her dignity by combing her hair and tidying her clothes and washing at a draw-well in the yard. She also attended to Lavelle and did what she could to clean and dress his wound. Then afterwards she lay in his arms and tenderly caressed him.

  ‘You are mightily glad now, are you not,’ she whispered close to his ear, ‘that I have come with you?’

  Despite his pain, he managed one of his lop-sided smiles. ‘If I could find a priest I might even make a respectable woman of you.’

  She laughed.

  ‘What do I care about being respectable?’