Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (17 page)

Not only did the "well affected" Highlanders prove to be disaffected, they added injury to insult by raiding Cope's provisions and ambushing his troops. And what was worse, the Highlanders in his regiments began to desert, leaving him with fewer men than ever to face Charles and his growing army.

To these difficulties were added others. Rumors reached Cope that French troops had landed to support the rebels, and these rumors accelerated the desertions in his ranks. Then the deserters went over to the Jacobites, and told them everything they knew. The scouts and guides he had hoped would be forthcoming from Highlanders loyal to the government were not forthcoming. Rain spoiled food supplies, pack animals were stolen. The thousand unused stands of arms were a burden to already overburdened soldiers.

Then Cope learned that Charles, with three thousand men (in actuality he may have had as many as fifteen hundred, but no more) was waiting to confront him at the Pass of Corrieyairack. The boulder-strewn, nearly perpendicular mountain pass was approached, from the south, by a dangerously steep ascent with seventeen traverses—making it arduous enough in itself, but suicidal with an enemy waiting at the top. Cope changed his plans and decided, despite orders from Edinburgh to the contrary, to march his men to Fort George, at Inverness, instead of to Fort Augustus. Had he attempted Corrieyairack, he would have found the Stuart forces entrenched there, having placed their guns in position so as to enfilade the treacherous traverses and then waiting at both the top and bottom of the pass to capture the survivors.

Cope's decision left the Lowlands virtually unprotected. After chasing the Hanoverians for a day or two, with many of Charles's Highlanders furious at not being able to engage him, the Stuart forces marched southward, through Atholl country. Here where Cope had not been able to find a single fighting man to join him, Charles found hundreds of people running out of their houses to greet Tullibardine, whom they considered to be their rightful chief. The Hanoverian Duke of Atholl fled, and Tullibardine installed himself at Blair Castle.

Charles was elated. More and more men were turning out to follow him, some of them men who had supported his father thirty years earlier, bringing their sons and their tenants. People cheered him as he rode by, and cheered for King James, and wished the army well. Cope had been afraid to face him, and that was surely an encouraging sign. Even the weather, which had been lowering and stormy, had improved, and the sun shone on their southward progress.

On September 4, toward evening, Charles entered Perth. He rode into the ancient capital in triumph, dressed as a Highland prince in a suit of tartan cloth with gold lace trim, the Star and Garter on his chest, the Stuart white cockade in his bonnet. Cheers went up all around him as he made his way to the home of Viscount Stormont, where he was to stay for a week while his growing body of men drilled and trained and his officers made their plans.

Three decades earlier, James had ridden into Perth. Pale, austere, and defeated-looking, he had presided over the disintegration of his army and the dissolution of his hopes. In deep snow and bitter cold, his underfed men had marched with rusty guns until, overwhelmed by chaos and by their lack of faith in James, they had left him and gone back to their homes.

Now his son, handsome, sanguine and energetic, had arrived to redeem that sad defeat. Charles's men were well fed and reasonably well equipped, and what they lacked in organization they more than made up for in enthusiasm and battle-eagerness. Their numbers were growing: Charles Stewart of Ardshiel brought two hundred and fifty Stewarts of Appin, there were four hundred Glengarry Macdonalds, and the twenty-year-old Lord Ogilvy, whom Charles had known in France, arrived to pledge an entire regiment of six hundred men as soon as they could be brought from Angus.

Most important of all, the men were intensely committed to Charles. The chiefs had drawn up an association pledging themselves never to abandon him while he remained in Scotland, and never to surrender unless he ordered them to. The soldiers, Murray of Broughton recalled later, were so utterly devoted to him that "there was scarce a man among them that would not have readily run on certain death if by it his cause might have received any advantage."6 They shouted their support "by huzzas and acclamations that even rent the sky whenever they saw him," and wrote songs to him, which they sang loudly and lustily in his presence. The wintry melancholy that had hung over James's cause for thirty years had been dispelled forever; the Stuart sun had come out at last.

Chapter 10

The English, in the middle of the eighteenth century, thought of Scotland as an impossibly remote, sparsely populated region with a boreal climate and a bleak, treeless landscape. Its mountains were ''black and frightful," one traveler wrote, its hills bore "a most hideous aspect." "The huge naked rocks, being just above the heath," another visitor commented, "produce the disagreeable appearance of a scabbed head."
¹

"The face of the country is wild, rugged and desolate," wrote John Home in his contemporary history of the 1745 rising, "as is well expressed by the epithets given to the mountains, which are called the gray, the red, the black, and the yellow mountains, from the color of the stones of which in some places they seem to be wholly composed, or from the color of the moss, which, in other places, covers them like a mantle." (Another writer suggested a slightly different palette, describing Highland scenery as "of a dismal brown drawing upon a dirty purple, and most of all disagreeable when the heath is in bloom.")

To venture forth into this blighted wilderness was an act of reckless courage, for there were no roads in the usual sense, only narrow dirt tracks and the paths beaten out by cattle being driven to market. These deeply rutted, boulder-strewn pathways turned to swamps in wet weather, and in the long frigid winters the swamps froze over and were buried under deep snowdrifts. Horses could barely stumble their way along; for carriages the going was nearly impossible.

Before starting out, the intrepid travelers had to assure themselves that their carriage was in good repair, and some even took the precaution of carrying a wheelwright along with them so that when the axletree broke—as it almost invariably did—the driver did not have to leave them stranded while he searched the deserted countryside for a blacksmith. Often a footman rode ahead, armed with pistols and broadsword, to warn of obstructions in the path or to fend off highwaymen, while two more footmen rode alongside the carriage carrying long poles with which to extricate it from the mud. Delays for repairs normally added several days to the journey. While they were being made, the travelers took refuge in the nearest tumbledown inn while the wind howled and rain cascaded down the mountainsides in torrents. Or, where there was no inn, they simply waited in the open air, at the mercy of the elements, while repairs were made on the road. The horses were unhitched, and villagers were recruited to bring carts and lumber and heavy tools out to the site of the accident. Many hours later, the journey was resumed.

Conditions in the Lowlands were bad enough, but travel in the Highlands, to the west of a line stretching from Dumbarton in the southwest to the Moray Firth in the northeast, was nearly impossible. No carriage could climb the mountains; indeed the going was too rough even for horses, and most travel was on foot. Beyond the inconvenience and sheer arduousness of going even short distances, visitors were put off by the nature of Highland life itself. There were no cities or towns, no commerce, virtually no agriculture. The itinerant Highlanders devoted themselves entirely, it seemed to outsiders, to following herds of emaciated black cattle through the mountains, nearly starving in winter and reviving briefly in the chill far northern summer.

The hardihood of the Highlanders was inexhaustible. The clan chiefs and their principal retainers recreated themselves by taking to the high hills in winter, oblivious of the snow, to hunt for game. For days at a time they scorned shelter, sleeping on the frozen ground wrapped in their plaids, eating the game they killed and drinking the few bottles of whiskey they brought along with them. The common folk spent the winters in mean sod or turf cottages, sleeping on bare boards with heath or straw beneath them. In the summer they left the "winter towns" for the hill pastures, and lived there in temporary huts, moving on when the grazing gave out. They managed to subsist on fish and game, and on what the cattle provided—not only milk and butter and cheese but the thick pudding made from the blood of the cows, boiled and solidified.

Hardy as they were, people and cattle alike became enfeebled during the snowy winters and many did not survive to face another dark spring. In years of abnormally cold weather, famine and disease forced people down out of the Highlands into Lowland towns or across the water to Ireland. These "'hungry years" decimated the countryside; in some parishes fully a third of the population died, and the abandoned pastures and winter towns did not come to life again for decades.

Such desperate hardship was almost beyond the comprehension of the few English who found their way north of the Highland Line. A scant, starveling—if ferociously combative—people clinging to their bleak hillsides and wedded to their backward customs: such v/as the impression the visitors received. Efforts by well-meaning outsiders to improve the lot of the Highlanders met with truculent rejection. When ryegrass and clover were introduced for use as hay for winter feed, the Scots rejected them as "English weeds" and refused absolutely to change their traditional habits. And when for military use roadways were built connecting the principal forts, the Highlanders complained that the gravel was hard on the hooves of their unshod horses, which traveled far more comfortably on heather.

Mutual incomprehension between the Highlanders and most outsiders—including Lowland Scots, who contemptuously referred to the Highlanders as "Irish"—was perhaps inevitable, for the Highlands were as remote culturally as they were geographically. The prevailing customs, particularly those of the islands off the west coast, mingled Christian and pre-Christian observances and were exotic indeed by English standards.

In his Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, Martin Martin, himself a Highlander, recorded his observations made on a tour of the islands in 1703.
²

Martin found the Western Isles to be a charmed world where, as on the island of Rona, the people repeated the Lord's Prayer and Apostles' Creed in their chapel on Sunday mornings and went home to propitiate spirits with gifts of milk and oatcakes. Whenever Martin put to sea in the course of his journey the steersman and crew of the boat recited a liturgy of blessing. "Let us bless our ship," the steersman called out, and the crew answered, "God the Father bless her." "Let us bless our ship," the steersman called again, and this time the answer came, "Jesus Christ bless her." A third repetition invoked the blessing of the Holy Ghost, after which came more questions and answers, ending with the resounding cry, "We do not fear anything!"

All this was orthodox enough, but Martin noted that the sailors hung a goat from the boat's mast to ensure a favorable wind, and consulted oracles before starting out on their journey. He also recorded that they were careful, when turning around, always to turn "sun-ways"—that is, from east to west, in the direction of the sun—lest they bring bad luck on themselves or their ventures.

A great deal of the islanders' attention and energy went into preventing misfortune. They were afraid of being carried off by ghosts, and of the fairies who came in the night to steal newborn babies. When there was a birth, friends came to stand in a circle around the cradle and guard the baby, keeping vigil all night and holding the Bible aloft to ward off danger. Another peril to be averted was that which arose from praising any animal without adding "Luck fare the beast," or admiring a child without saying "God bless the bairn" immediately afterward. Unless these propitiatory phrases were added, the cow might die or the child might grow up a cripple.

All the islanders used incantations and charms to protect themselves from scaith, or evil. They carried fire in a circle around their beasts to keep them safe from injury. They made pilgrimages to holy wells, where spirits lived, to seek healing or advice. They repeated magic words to make their cows give more milk and hung branches of mountain ash in their stalls to keep them healthy. On the first of May they built Beltane fires and danced around them, throwing pieces of oatcake over their shoulders and chanting, "This to thee, protect my cattle," "This to thee, O fox, spare my sheep," and "This to thee, O hooded crow, save my lambs."

Children in the Western Isles wore amulets made of beans to warn them of danger from the evil eye. The beans turned black if anyone with the "uncanny eye" came near—a likely occurrence, the Highlanders believed, because so many people possessed it.

Martin preserved vivid images of life on the more remote islands, images of young men riding at breakneck speed along the frigid beaches, whipping their horses forward with a long piece of seaweed; of stalwart fisherwomen who waded out through the freezing water to their boats, carrying their husbands on their backs in order to keep the men's feet dry; of drinking rituals lasting for several days, in which people drank whiskey distilled from oatmeal and so strong that to drink more than a spoonful of two "would presently stop a man's breath and endanger his life."
³

Here as elsewhere in the Highlands it was difficult to grow any sort of crop. The islanders laboriously broke the salty, stony ground with small wooden-toothed harrows, which they drew themselves, sparing the horses. Then, using spades, they turned the soil over, covering it with seaweed to fertilize it. Beyond what little they grew, their diet was augmented by milk and cheese, fish, and "sea-pork"—the flesh of whales, hunted in the shallow island bays and driven in shoreward to beach themselves. When famine came the islanders were reduced to living on boiled goat's milk—and survived so well on it that the hardiest among them lived to a very advanced old age. Martin was introduced to one ancient islander who claimed to be a hundred and thirty years old, and who still had vigor enough to labor with his hands.