Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (27 page)

The prince spent a pleasant couple of days at Blair Castle. This was a different kind of Scotland, possessing the civilised trappings he recognised, and even some he did not. Two sensations he experienced here were totally new to him. One was the sight of a perfectly manicured bowling green.
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The other was the taste of a pineapple, a fruit apparently unknown in Rome.
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With Tullibardine raising the Athollmen at Blair,
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August ended very favourably for the prince. On 1 September he was joined by Lord Nairne and his brother Mercer of Aldie. With his army increasing daily, the prince moved down to Dunkeld on the 3rd.
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On the evening of the 4th he landed his biggest catch yet. He entered Perth and proclaimed his father King James.
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(September 1745)

MAN FOR MAN
the Highlanders were more than a match for Hanoverian infantry. But hard fighting alone could not solve all the prince’s problems. In the week Charles Edward spent in Perth (4–10 September), he addressed himself to the most serious of these: money, officering, and (crucially) what kind of image the Jacobite army should offer to the world.

Money had always been a headache. Charles Edward landed in Moidart with a war chest of £4,000.
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By the time he got to Perth only one guinea was left.
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At the entrance to the city the prince held the guinea coin ruefully in his hand and said to one of his officers: ‘Behold my war chest!’
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The fallacy in Whig strategy was clear. By penning the tiny Jacobite army behind the Highland line, they could have throttled it. The only consolation for the prince was that the army in being had been paid for for the next fortnight. All future recruits would have to be enrolled on a promise of payment alone.
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Some slight relief was afforded by the collection of the public money (excise duty on malt and the cess) in Perth, and by anonymous donations from sympathisers, but the prince had to accept a loan of 1,500 guineas from Lord Elcho on 16 September just to tide him over immediate problems.
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This injection of funds, however welcome at the time, was later to cause great bitterness, since the prince regarded it as a wager to be paid off at high odds if he regained the throne for the Stuarts; Elcho on the other hand regarded it as a commercial loan pure and simple.

Outriders were sent to Dundee and other towns within Perth’s orbit to collect public monies and seize all available arms, ammunition and stores.
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Yet the lack of pay for the considerable numbers who joined
the
prince at Perth led inevitably to looting and indiscipline. Lochiel had to mount his horse, fire warning shots over his clansmen’s heads, and even wound one of them to drive home the point that casual sheep-stealing was not to be a characteristic of the Jacobite army.
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All the prince’s problems in Perth were interconnected. The new influx of prestigious recruits meant that hard decisions had to be taken about the exact place of individuals in the Jacobite hierarchy. In Perth Lord Ogilvy, Lord Strathallan, the fanatically ideological Oliphant of Gask, and the duke of Perth himself joined the standard.
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The most important recruit of all was Lord George Murray.
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Fifty-one years old, a veteran of the ’15 and the ’19, Murray had been living peacefully on his estates for the past twenty years, a progressive and liberal landowner.
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His joining the prince caused a sensation in Scotland and was a severe blow to Duncan Forbes’s conciliation policy. It alerted many waverers to the real possibility that the Hanoverian position in Scotland might prove untenable.

As the rising was to prove, Murray was a military talent of a very high order. He was an incalculably valuable asset to the Jacobite army. Yet from the very first there was tension between him and the prince. Here was yet another of those unfortunate personality clashes between Charles Edward and a man of his father’s generation. Murray was no courtier: he had no conception of how to charm or flatter to achieve his ends. He was a cold, aloof, blunt-spoken aristocrat, who always told the truth as he saw it, regardless of the unpopularity of his advice.
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Charles Edward was unused to such plain speaking. His only previous experience of it, with Lord Marischal, had left him with a distaste for that person. Marischal and Lord George Murray were, besides (along with his father), the only individuals in that age group who seemed to be impervious to his charm. The prince had charmed Lochiel at Borrodale, and Lochiel had seemed in many ways the ideal father-figure for him. Yet although Lochiel always had a soft spot for the prince, he was genuinely in awe of Lord George and profoundly respected his military judgment. Eventually Lochiel too would lose face in the prince’s eyes for his deference to Lord George Murray.

The unsatisfactory relationship between the prince and the man who was to be his principal general would in other circumstances have possessed a psychological interest alone. In the context of the 1745 Jacobite rising, it was the cardinal weakness in the Highland army. Both men must share the blame for the disastrous lack of rapport that so vitiated the Jacobite effort.

The Seven Men of Moidart quickly spotted that Murray was not
the
sort of man who would allow his great talents to be eclipsed by their spurious authority. Instinctively the prince’s sycophants recognised the enemy. Sir John MacDonald regaled Charles with a medley of insinuations against Lord George: he was a spy, he had joined solely in order to betray the prince, he was Cope’s fifth column, a creature of Duncan Forbes, and so on.
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The ease with which the prince accepted these innuendoes right from the very start of Murray’s service with the Jacobite army would suggest extreme gullibility, were there not a more profound psychological explanation for his ‘will to believe’.

One unfortunate effect of the disharmony between the prince and Lord George was not immediately perceived. This was the gradual split in the Jacobite high command between a ‘prince’s party’ and a ‘general’s party’, uncannily mirroring the division of French Jacobites during 1744–5 into the prince’s party and the king’s party. The prince had relished blunting his father’s influence in this way. It was not such a happy experience when he was on the receiving end. And this split had a further unfortunate consequence in that it tended to follow the lines of an Irish/Scots divide, with the Irish favourites (and later military commanders) taking the prince’s side while the Scots aligned themselves with Lord George. This polarisation was to have disastrous consequences: at Derby, after Falkirk, at Culloden.

However, at Perth it was clear that Charles Edward could snub a man of Lord George’s experience and prestige only at the cost of extreme prejudice to his cause. At first he appointed both Perth and Murray as his two lieutenant-generals, alternating the command between them.
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Strathallan was made brigadier-general.
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O’Sullivan was confirmed as major-general and quartermaster. Sir John MacDonald was given charge of the cavalry.
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Other leading Jacobites, like lords Nairne and Ogilvy, were given regimental commands.

There remained the question of the Jacobite army’s image. The Irish, especially Sheridan and O’Sullivan, advocated a tough policy when dealing with reluctant town councils or recalcitrant farmers. Anyone not co-operating fully with the army should be dealt with severely; only by showing they meant business would the Jacobites command respect. Lord George, who had been startled at the prince’s words at their first meeting – ‘it is the obedience of my subjects I desire, not their advice’ – fully expected Charles Edward to endorse this foolish draconian policy.
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But at Perth Charles sided with Lord George in arguing that the aim must be to win wholehearted Scottish support for the cause. Everything must be paid for, all indiscipline stamped on. The Scottish
gentry
must come to see that their rights were being fully respected, that for them a Stuart restoration would be all gain and no loss. Besides, the prince was not going to throw away the undoubted advantages brought by his own charisma. He had already tasted the delights of popular adulation at Dalnacardoch, when men, women and children came running from their houses for a sight of the Stuart prince.
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Then there was the time at the house of Lude on 2 September (when he was travelling from Blair to Dunkeld). He had held the spectators spellbound by his dancing skills as he performed a strathspey minuet.
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The prince possessed glamour and he knew it. A tough, repressive policy would throw away this precious asset.

By the end of his time in Perth Charles Edward was able to feel a guarded satisfaction about the condition and progress of his army. On 10 September he visited Glenalmond to inspect the newest additions to his army: Perth’s regiment, Robertson of Struan’s two hundred warriors, and assorted MacGregors raised by MacGregor of Glencainaig and Glengyle.
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All eyes were now fixed on the capture of Edinburgh. All other strategies had been rejected.

When the prince heard that Cope had ordered shipping at Aberdeen to take his army by sea to the Firth of Forth, he held a council of war to see whether the Whig general’s movements could be arrested.
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This would mean a long and tiring march north to intercept Cope somewhere between Inverness and Aberdeen. There was a risk that, as on Cope’s march north, he would move too fast for them. There was even an outside chance of ending up between two fires. If Cope stayed on his side of the Spey while the garrison from Stirling issued out to attack the prince in the rear, things might go hard for the Jacobites.
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It was therefore the unanimous opinion of the prince’s council to concentrate on Edinburgh.
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Before leaving for Edinburgh, the prince wrote a letter to his father which contains some important reflections on his dealings with the Highlanders so far.
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Whereas his charm had worked wonders, his sophistication had been too subtle for them. His reaction to the £30,000 put on his head by George II was to reduce the gesture to farce by retaliating with his own offer of £30, demonstrating also that he was not prepared to stoop to the same barbaric level as the ‘Elector of Hanover’. This immediately encountered stiff resistance from the clansmen. They queried why they should risk their own lives for a man who seemed so indifferent to his own. Faced with this outcry, Charles Edward had had no choice but to offer a matching £30,000 for George II.

But if the prince had misjudged the temper of the Highlanders, his
physical
robustness certainly did impress them. The spartan regime Charles had followed in Italy was now paying spectacular dividends. The frustrated man of action had truly come into his own: ‘I keep my health better in the wild mountains here than I used to in the Campagnie Felice [sic] and sleep sounder lying on the ground than I used to in the palace at Rome.’

The sojourn in Perth ended. On 11 September the prince visited Scone, breakfasted at the house of Gask, dined at Lord George Murray’s home at Tullibardine and marched to Dunblane.
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Next day he proceeded to Doune and on the 13th crossed the Forth at the fords of Frew (Boquhan), wading through the water at the head of his detachment.
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That night he encamped at Leckie House near Stirling while the army encamped at Touch.
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The men of Gardiner’s dragoons had boasted over their cups of what they would do if the Highlanders dared show their faces, but on their actual approach the gallant dragoons galloped off to Linlithgow.
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There was no relaxing. The prince sat up late composing a letter to the Provost of Glasgow in which he demanded that city’s arms and a contribution of £15,000.
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On the 14th the army marched past Stirling and was fired on by the castle garrison.
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The clansmen showed their coolness under fire by not breaking step, even when the cannonballs whistled nearby.
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Skirting St Ninians, they halted at Bannockburn, where the prince dined with Hugh Paterson (later to have great significance in Charles’s private life). At night the army bivouacked at Falkirk while the prince spent the evening at Callander House, seat of his latest important recruit, the earl of Kilmarnock.
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That night Lord George Murray took eight hundred Jacobite troops encamped in Callander Park on the first of many raids in the darkness. Accompanied by Lochiel, Keppoch, Glengarry and Ardshiel, Lord George set out for Linlithgow, hoping to fall upon Gardiner’s dragoons in their camp. This time Jacobite luck was out. Gardiner’s men had already withdrawn to the safety of Edinburgh.
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Hard on the heels of the vanguard, the main Highland army came in at 6 a.m. and encamped to the east of Linlithgow. Pursuing his policy of conciliation, Charles Edward kept his men out of the town so as not to disturb the sabbath, and himself spent the day quietly in Linlithgow Palace.
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In the evening the army bivouacked three miles to the east of town on the Edinburgh road; the prince slept at a nearby house. He was the sole exception to the egalitarian practice whereby, on bivouac, all officers from Lord George Murray downwards
slept
beside their men, without any covering but their plaids. The Jacobite aristocrats believed in the power of example.

The Highland army was now closing in on Edinburgh. On the 16th the prince marched through Winchburgh and Kirkliston. After halting a couple of hours at Todshall and sending out a reconnaissance patrol, he advanced to Corstorphine. From there he sent a summons to the magistrates of Edinburgh, calling on them to surrender to avoid bloodshed.
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