Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (24 page)

The siege of Carlisle was no sooner over than Lord George resigned as Lieutenant-General. He was piqued at not being involved in negotiating the surrender of the town and castle (even though he had remarked when the town was first invested that he knew nothing about siege warfare), and resented Charles's permitting the Catholic Duke of Perth to represent him in the negotiations, even though under English law Catholics were forbidden to hold either civil or military offices. In truth, Murray had been resentful for weeks; the events at Carlisle had merely been the last straw. He was committed to the Stuart cause, but less than approving of Charles personally. Murray was, according to the Duke of Perth's aide-decamp, ""fierce, haughty, blunt and proud," and inclined to think himself superior to everyone else—which he was in military experience and competence. Charles, on the other hand, was blithe, carefree, and congenial, the opposite of the intense, hot-tempered Murray.

Charles felt Murray's disapproval, and resisted it. Lord Elcho wrote that Charles "loved to contradict" Murray, provoking him to irritation and making his anger flare. They were ill suited to one another, the twenty-four-year-old adventurer and his middle-aged general, and to make matters worse, several of Charles's closest advisers distrusted Murray and disparaged his Ioyalty.
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Matters reached a head at Carlisle, and Lord George wrote Charles a letter of resignation in which he complained that his advice carried too little weight. In short, he felt slighted. Charles, characteristically, accepted the letter and, without weighing the military consequences—or perhaps weighing them, and discounting Murray's value—determined to go on without the benefit of Murray's generalship.

His reply was blunt. "I think your advice ever since you joined me at Perth has had another guess [
sic
] weight with me than what any General Officer could claim as such," he wrote. "I am therefore extremely surprised you should throw up your commission for a reason which I believe was never heard of before." He assured Murray that he appreciated the latter's sincere desire to see his father's rights upheld, but added that he was certain James would "never take anything as proof of it but your deference to me. I accept of your demission as Lieutenant General," he concluded, "and your future service as a volunteer."

As might have been expected, the chief officers were aghast, and urged Charles to secure Murray's services again at all costs. Murray's co-commander, Perth, also resigned, to remove any lingering occasion for bad feeling and as a gesture of conciliation. Eventually a compromise was engineered: Lord George agreed to resume his command on condition that Perth and his men take over the inglorious assignment of guarding the baggage train and Murray of Broughton (whom Lord George particularly hated) remove himself from Charles's war council.

The crisis over Murray's command was but one of many. Individuals quarreled with one another, Highlanders clashed with Lowlanders, Protestants with Catholics, Scots with Irish. Each day brought new occasions for disputes. One of Lord George Murray's grievances was that, when Carlisle fell, his Atholl men were assigned miserable quarters in the vaults of the castle and in a ruined house that barely provided shelter. They were without food, and had neither candles to light their gloomy surroundings nor coal to warm them. Rightly or wrongly, Murray blamed O'Sullivan, and attributed the miserable situation of the men of Atholl to his malice. Earlier, when the town was first invested and deep trenches had to be dug in the frozen earth, the Highlanders had simply refused to do their share. They would fight wherever and whenever their leader commanded them to fight, but manual labor was beneath them. Even sentry duty made them grumble. So, no doubt occasioning a good deal of resentment, the self-sacrificing Perth ordered his men to dig the trenches, pitching in, despite his poor health, to help them with his own hands.

So it went, this group against that, officers competing against one another for prestige, slandering each other and, when they found their assignments intolerable, threatening to resign. Young Lord Ogilvy, who had brought his beautiful wife with him on the march, announced that rather than undertake the "dirty work" his regiment was given he would demote himself to being a simple volunteer in the ranks. His ego was soothed, and the assignment changed.

The bickering Stuart army moved south from Carlisle on November 21, divided into four groups: an advance guard of cavalry, the vanguard, the main body of the army led by Charles himself, and lastly the baggage and artillery. The various units traveled at different speeds and often by different roads; at most they were separated by the distance of a day's march. The road south from Carlisle led through exceedingly rough, hilly country, the hills at this season covered with snow. After a halt at Penrith, the men marched on, over more wild and barren country, reaching Kendal on the twenty-third. Charles, walking as always ahead of his troops, wearing his Highland costume and thick brogues, became badly fatigued. He trudged on, but so wearily that he appeared to be sleepwalking, and just as he reached the town he almost fainted. The people of Kendal were greatly impressed with his hardihood and lack of aristocratic pretensions—though not impressed enough to join his army—and he rested among them for a day before going on.

Meanwhile part of the army was already en route to Lancaster, taking a road that wound through hills "high as the clouds," offering a view down steep cliffs to the sea. Another easy day's march along a rare stretch of good road brought them to Preston, reputedly a stronghold of Catholicism and Jacobitism, where in fact a few dozen recruits were obtained. The townspeople cheered the army as it marched in, and there was talk in the taverns of considerable numbers of men on their way from North Wales to join Charles.
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The mood of the soldiers was optimistic, partly because, after weeks of miserably cold weather, the temperature rose and there was a brief, almost spring-like thaw.

Charles met with his officers to talk over their situation and to determine strategy. His own spirits were, as usual, high, and the men, who after their victory at Carlisle had opposed risking the dangers of a further move to the south, now favored going on to London. The ordinary soldiers too were sanguine. In a letter written on November 27, one of them said that "the army is in as great spirits as possible for troops to be in, and I have no doubt of a victory on our side against an army twice our number.”
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The boast was plausible enough, for there was no enemy army anywhere near Preston, and the likelihood of a battle any time soon was small. But if morale was not a problem, numbers were. The Stuart army had perhaps four thousand men, desertions having reduced it by about a thousand. More were expected to join as the invaders pressed deeper into England, and as their string of victories became more convincing. But Lancashire, a prime recruiting ground, had been disappointing so far. The Jacobite Clubs in the towns had not formed themselves into auxiliary fighting units. The villagers of Cumberland, huddled against the cold in their mud-walled huts, had shown themselves more fearful than welcoming, and had not turned out to lend their support. Some of the townspeople were hostile, or at least treacherous. At Garstang, a treasure box was stolen from one of the wagons as the baggage train passed through. The town was threatened with retribution; finally the box was unearthed from where it had been hidden—in a field behind the town hall.
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It was true that few men had as yet come forward to fight under the Stuart banner—but this might change. It would not take much to tip the balance, a few enthusiastic recruits might bring others, tens might grow into hundreds, and before long into thousands. The fever of rebellion could easily spread, especially among the poor, the Catholics, the tradesmen who disliked the government and its taxes, the restless and discontented, the impressionable who were sure to be swept away by the sight of the fair, athletic young man who strode the muddy roads with such authority. So volatile were the passions and loyalties of the people that anything—a rumor that the French had landed, or that King George had fled to Hanover, or that the government troops had been soundly beaten once again as at Prestonpans—could sway them. It was too soon to say that the moment would not come when they would be decisively swayed.

Charles was willing to wait for that moment, but his quarrelsome officers were beginning to wonder whether the English would ever rise in rebellion. It was not enough for the French envoy, d'Eguilles, who marched with the army, to insist that King Louis's troops were about to land somewhere on the English coast, and that their landing would precipitate an uprising in the south. They sought reinforcements closer at hand.

Charles claimed to have received letters from English Jacobites promising help soon, but this may have been an invention on his part.
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In particular, he claimed to have written assurances from Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, M.P. for Denbighshire and an affluent Welsh landholder, that a regiment of three hundred mounted men had been raised by Wynn and his Jacobite friends. This cavalry unit, plus Wynn's own numerous tenants, armed as footsoldiers, would represent a sizable addition to the army, and would join it at some point on the road between Macclesfield and Derby. Another stalwart, Charles said, the Duke of Beaufort, was in the process of raising men in South Wales and would lead them to capture Bristol. Murray of Broughton added his hopeful message. He was in communication with a colonel in the Hanoverian army, he said, whose regiment was in Kent. The man had assured him as solemnly as possible that when the time came, his entire regiment would declare for the Jacobites.

Certainly the countryside was astir, if not as yet fully awakened. A traveling metalworker, who was constantly on the road through Lancashire, Stafford, Shropshire and Chester, kept an ear open for Jacobite talk. Everywhere he went he heard people raising their tankards in the taverns ''to our friends that are on the other side of the water," "to our friends abroad," and "right to them that suffer wrong." Having drunk the treasonable healths, the drinkers passed along rumors of "a rising in favor of the Pretender," and of an imminent French landing. People even went about dressed in plaids to signal their sympathies.
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The country folk were well aware, in the fall of 1745, that they were witnessing something rare and strange: an army that was not an army, but an untidy agglomeration of people, including a great many young boys, old men, women and children, making their way along the roads and fanning outward in an arc miles wide when the terrain permitted. With them were large herds of black cattle, such horses as they were able to requisition from the towns and villages they passed through, and wagonloads of artillery and arms.
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Dozens of pipers walked in the midst of the throng, which was flanked by mounted men, some of them incongruous in their smart, if somewhat bedraggled, cavalry uniforms.

In the early morning they marched by torchlight, in the early evening, as they sought out what quarters were available to them, the torches were lit yet again. They were notably stoical, putting up with the bare, cold rooms that were offered them, sometimes a hundred of them crowded into a single house. At the end of a long and footsore day, they were grateful for any shelter at all, since they had no tents—their tents having been carried off by the inhabitants of Dumfries early in the campaign—and dreaded having to spend the night in the open.
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They were a miscellany of types and occupations—fillibeg-wearing clansmen, farm laborers, plowmen, farmers, weavers, shoemakers and barbers. Merchants mingled with servants, lairds and landowners with shepherds and shopboys. There were a great many women among them, soldier's wives, camp followers, mistresses acquired along the route of march. Officers had orders to permit only wives to follow the army, but "regimental women" abounded, tolerated so long as they made themselves useful and did not take up room in the wagons. A number of these women were left behind when they became pregnant and could no longer keep up.
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There is a poignant reference in one contemporary narrative of the Stuart army to crossing a swollen river, "without any loss but two women, that belonged only to the public, that were drowned."
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Observers were struck by the large numbers of very young boys in the Jacobite army. A man who saw the throng enter Manchester swore that it contained as many as three thousand "boys of ten, twelve or fourteen years old," all carrying heavy muskets, swords and shields, and with braces of pistols strapped to their thin waists. Some of these may have been servants, carrying their masters' arms, but many of them were soldiers themselves. By the age of fourteen they were expected to fight as men, however undersize or immature they might be. Some had been forced by their clan chiefs or older relatives to come along, others had come not only voluntarily but eagerly, glad to leave behind stern parents or, in the case of apprentices, harsh masters.
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Seen as a moving swarm blackening the landscape, the Jacobites were intimidating. Taken as individuals, however, they seemed less so. "The common soldiers are a most despicable crew," wrote one who saw them entering a town, "being in general less in stature, and of a wan and meagre countenance, stepping along under their arms with difficulty, and what they are about seems more of force than inclination." Still, they knew what they were about, and left no one in their vicinity in doubt as to their purpose. "They intend to push on to London," the same writer added, "but do not know the route. Wherever they go they magnify their numbers, and tell the most confounded lies about themselves. In their letters to their friends in Scotland, they say that their army now consists of twenty-four thousand, and that neither ditch, dyke nor devil can turn them.
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Those forced to play host to the Jacobites winced at their uncouth-ness and marveled at the size of their appetites. A man who gave quarters to six officers and forty privates was put off by their foreign speech, which seemed to him like that of "a herd of Hottentots, wild monkies in a desert, or vagrant gipsies." Most of them, he commented, "looked like so many fiends turned out of hell, and under their plaids nothing but various sorts of butchering weapons were to be seen." They were content to sleep on straw in the hall and the laundry, although the straw soon began to reek, and the host had to replace it with fresh. At first he fed them bread and cheese, and gave them ale to drink, but by the second day of their stay they were demanding better fare, and before they left they had eaten a side of beef, eight joints of mutton, quantities of chickens and ducks, along with more cheese and bread, and had drunk enormous quantities of ale and beer.
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