Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (48 page)

What of the prince all this while? During the cannonade he had been led away from his post by Lord Balmerino and John Daniel.
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When the rout on the right began, Charles vainly tried to rally the regiments on the left. He called out that he would get down off his horse and lead them in a last charge.
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According to one report, his wig blew off while he was imploring the Gaelic-speaking clansmen to return to the fray; they looked at him uncomprehendingly.
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After the valiant rearguard action at Culchunaig, O’Sullivan seized the prince’s bridle and ordered Colonel Robert O’Shea, who had been commanding Fitzjames’s horse there, to accompany him off the field.
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The prince remonstrated. O’Sullivan yelled at him that he was in danger of being surrounded. ‘They won’t take me alive!’ the prince screamed.
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Yet he eventually let himself be persuaded to leave the battleground, guarded by Glenbucket’s and John Roy Stewart’s men.
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Once or twice he turned his head to look back at the rout of the men he had considered invincible. But Sheridan, reading his mind, implored him not to sacrifice himself in vain. Lochiel’s uncle Major Kennedy then seized the bridle and led the prince firmly away from the scenes of carnage.
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As the prince later put it, ‘he was forced off the field by the people about him’.
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Accompanied by Sheridan, Hay of Restalrig and a body of Scots
officers
, shepherded by O’Shea and his men, the prince rode towards the ford of Faillie on the Nairn.
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He did not see the butchery of the Jacobite left as the fleeing MacDonalds, now deprived of Stapleton’s covering fire, were ridden down and sabred on the road to Inverness. Hundreds more sleeping clansmen were slain in the bothies into which they had crept after the exhaustion of the night march, or in the ditches where they had slept through the battle.
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Wounded men were given no quarter; those who took shelter in rude huts had them burned down around their ears. Cumberland’s troopers were seriously out of control. They hacked and bayoneted at anything that looked like a clansman. This kind of blood-lust is not uncommon after a battle. Usually victorious commanders wring their hands in half-regretful impotence. Cumberland was unique in that he encouraged the butchery and threatened with reprisal any officers who would not do his bloody bidding. Fortunately for the prince’s peace of mind, it was not until much later that he learned of these and subsequent massacres – the heinous carnage that was to fix the soubriquet ‘the Butcher’ to Cumberland’s name for all time.

As it was, the prince was ‘in a deplorable state’ mentally.
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Convinced that he had lost the battle through treachery, he seemed uneasy when the Scots were about him, as if they would deliver him up to Cumberland. Eventually he dismissed his Scots attendants, ordering them to meet him at a village a mile away for his further orders.
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Left alone with him, the Irish pressed their advantage. They advised him it would be dangerous to try to rally his army at this juncture. Acquiescing, the prince ordered a general review at Ruthven in Badenoch on the 18th. With his Irish clique, he pushed on towards the Fraser country.
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The small party rode grimly onward, past Tordarroch, Aberarder, Faroline to Gortleg. With the prince were Elcho, Sheridan, O’Sullivan, Alexander Macleod, Allan MacDonald a Catholic chaplain, the servant Edward ‘Ned’ Burke and Captain O’Neill of Lally’s regiment (in the Irish brigade), who had been sent to Scotland with dispatches just before Culloden.
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What general conclusions can we reach about the prince’s behaviour on the fateful day of Culloden? There is first the question of his abilities as captain-general. It is quite clear that the prince was an indifferent field commander. It was true that he was beaten before he started at Culloden, with every conceivable advantage of numbers, gunnery, morale, food, terrain, even weather, on Cumberland’s side. Not even Marshal Saxe could have beaten Cumberland in such circumstances at that time and place. But then it was the prince’s
own
decision to fight on this ill-chosen field, against the advice of all his best officers.

Once battle was inevitable, the prince’s greatest error was to take O’Sullivan’s advice. Neither Charles Edward nor O’Sullivan had anything like Lord George Murray’s eye for ground, yet on crucial issues such as the stone walls of Culloden Park they preferred their own ignorant opinion to his.
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O’Sullivan declared that breaking down the walls would throw the Jacobite battle line out. What destroyed its effectiveness was
not
breaking them down. Again, O’Sullivan claimed that cavalry could not enter Culloden Park by a breach in the east wall and exit in the Jacobite rear. Yet this is precisely what the enemy did. Only Lord George’s quick thinking saved the rear from encirclement.

Drawing up the army between the walls of Culloden enclosures on the left and the walls of Culloden Park on the right was another piece of almost criminal incompetence on O’Sullivan’s part. The prince’s post at Culchunaig was also badly chosen, so that Charles Edward was reduced to directing the battle blind.

The allocation of stations to the various Jacobite regiments was also inept. Even worse was the truly appalling system of communications. Charles Edward later testified that he sent the order to attack eight times to Lord George before his command was acted on.
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The fiasco over the uncoordinated order to charge shows all the negative factors coming together to produce disaster. The centre charged before they had received the order. The left did not charge when they did receive it. No account was taken of the sloping formation, which meant that the MacDonalds on the left would have farther to run before falling on Cumberland’s right.
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A good general would have ordered the MacDonalds forward a minute before the Athollmen to compensate for this. If they had refused to move, the Jacobite right would then have been saved from the certain annihilation involved in a unilateral charge.

The worst single order of the day was the incomprehensible one to Ogilvy’s regiment, previously detailed to prevent flank attack through Culloden Park. Not only were they ordered away from this crucial station, but they were then withdrawn to form a reserve, with idiotic instructions not to fire unless ordered to do so.
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On the other hand, there may be answers to some of the more common military criticisms levelled personally at the prince. One is that he should not have demoralised his men by allowing the reality of Cumberland’s greatly superior numbers to sink in on them while both sides manoeuvred for flanking positions.
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The prince was alive
to
this consideration, which was why he gave Murray the order to charge when he saw Cumberland’s artillery floundering in the mud. He had earlier opposed the retreat across the Nairn for this very reason: that it would give the clansmen the opportunity to ponder pessimistically Cumberland’s larger numbers.
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The second criticism is the most obvious. Why did he allow Cumberland’s artillery to play uninterruptedly on his men for more than twenty minutes, first with cannon, then with case and grapeshot? Surely to stand by doing nothing was unforgivable incompetence? The answer here is that the prince was vainly trying to work out a Culloden Park flanking movement in reverse. He sent John Roy Stewart’s Edinburgh regiment to cross the Nairn and work its way round to the rear of Cumberland’s forces.
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If he could contrive this, the Edinburgh regiment would then mount a diversionary attack in force with the advantage of wind and rain. When Cumberland’s rear wheeled about to face this new threat, the Hanoverian battle line might then become hopelessly confused. But while Stewart and his men were vainly trying to find an unguarded way across the Nairn, terrible punishment was being meted out by Cumberland’s artillery.

Yet the question of Charles Edward’s military competence must ultimately go beyond his contingent actions on Culloden field. What happened there that afternoon between 1 and 2 p.m. was the end point of a long causal chain. Ultimately, the reason for Jacobite failure at Culloden has to be sought in the relations between the prince and his lieutenant-general.

One of the prince’s problems from the outset was that he did not possess among the ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ anyone of real military ability. Charles Edward himself had neither the innate aptitude nor the experience to be his own captain-general. Although history provides many examples of young men achieving military distinction, in most cases they had a single mentor or a core of battle-hardened veterans to lean on. Even Caesar had his Marius and Alexander his Parmenion.

But because of an intrinsic clash of personalities, the prince had to rely on a man he neither liked nor trusted. If there had been anyone comparable in military ability with Lord George, the prince would have discarded Murray. Yet Murray was by common consent far and away the most able Jacobite commander. He stamped his authority on the clan army from the very first. His military dominance was as clear-cut as the prince’s personal one. Murray carried the council with him by reason of his military brilliance alone. Before the ’45 he barely knew the clan leaders he won over to his point of
view
.
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Murray was neither an active Jacobite nor a great territorial magnate.

Yet because the prince felt a visceral dislike for Murray, he followed the advice of the hopelessly incompetent O’Sullivan. This was almost an ‘objective correlative’ of the internal process whereby the prince’s negative feelings triumphed over positive ones. Murray himself eventually came to glimpse the truth of this. During the period of ‘skulking’ after Culloden, he was filled with a morbid conviction that he had failed the prince, that his brusqueness, impatience and lack of deference had played into the hands of Charles Edward’s evil geniuses among the Irish and had encouraged the prince’s worse side to prosper.
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The decision to fight at Culloden
was
a self-destructive act. Even so, the damage could conceivably have been limited if Murray had been given the command.

The experience of Culloden temporarily threatened to unhinge the prince. He was adamant that he had lost only because he had been betrayed.
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Whereas the retreat on the night march was a genuine shock and might well have elicited cries of ‘betrayal’, it is difficult to see how any rational person could have responded in this way to defeat at Culloden. It was evident to everybody that, at the very least, defeat on Drummossie Moor was probable rather than possible. Why, then, the insistence on ‘betrayal’?

The obvious answer is guilt. The prince was guilty because at some level he had willed his own destruction and with it that of hundreds of his followers.

But it is interesting that in propagating the idea that he was betrayed, the prince was unwittingly helping to build up his own legend. Here is a modern estimate of the genesis of such a legend in a very different context:

A hero who has only a small army with him, their enemy racial or national aliens sworn to destroy the hero’s people and culture. As the one-sided battle becomes hopeless, and the hero is worn down by superior numbers, a last stand is called for and the hero is defeated. But it is part of the archetypal appeal that not even the greatest numbers of the enemy, it is felt, could have overcome the hero, unless he had been betrayed.
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The prince’s disturbed state of mind explains the unhappy sequel to Culloden. After leaving the battlefield on the afternoon of the 16th, the prince and his party were guided by Alexander Macleod’s servant Edmond Burke to the Fraser country, using the best roads.
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At the house of Gortlick that evening the prince met the old fox Lord Lovat
for
the first and only time. Over supper they discussed what to do next. Sheridan urged the prince to return to France at once to bring back the long-promised aid. Elcho angrily dismissed this as a chimera: the only choice now was between utter ruin for all time for the Jacobite cause and guerrilla warfare in the mountains.
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Charles Edward was caught between advocates of his positive and negative sides. Like good and bad angels respectively, Elcho and Sheridan argued the case for guerrilla warfare or an immediate return to France. Lord Lovat, doubtless still feeling that he could cover his own treacherous tracks if he could but bundle the troublesome prince off to France, weighed in on Sheridan’s side.
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How, he asked, could a mountain campaign be sustained without money or food? The Jacobite army had been starving when it still possessed the threat of military execution. How could it do better without any enforcing sanctions?

If there had ever been any intention of fighting guerrilla warfare, a supply of provisions should have been laid up in readiness. Lord George Murray had proposed early in March that a food dump be set up in Badenoch to which supplies should be brought from Inverness ready for a campaign in the mountains, if the worst came to the worst.
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Charles Edward had turned this down as timorous defeatism, and now the original self-immolating decision was used to provide the good reasons that answered to the prince’s real desire. Yet at Elcho’s prompting, the issue was left open pending further developments.

It was at this juncture that Lord George Murray’s anger and exasperation led him in turn into a piece of self-defeating indulgence. There was considerable confusion about the arrangements for a rendezvous in case of defeat. Some Jacobite units were under the impression that it was
sauve qui peut
immediately after any reverse. Others understood that Fort Augustus was to be a rallying point.
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Yet Ruthven in Badenoch had often been mentioned as the official mustering place. Accordingly, from 17–20 April units of the shattered Jacobite army began to drift in from Coorybrough, Balnaspiech and Aviemore.
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