Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (53 page)

The prince slept late. Next day Mrs MacDonald requested a lock of his hair as a keepsake. After some demure hesitation, Flora MacDonald sat at Charles’s bedside and snipped the lock.
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The prince assured his hosts this was only the first of many favours they would receive from him once he was restored.

It was late in the day when the prince set out for Portree. He dined, sipped tea, drank wine, and even asked for some snuff which Kingsburgh gave him but told him to keep in his woman’s muff.
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Flora and MacEachain had set out earlier to travel to Portree by road.
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Kingsburgh accompanied the prince part of the way on the cross-country trail. In a wood Charles changed out of the ‘Betty Burke’ outfit into Highland dress.
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The gown and petticoats were burned by the Kingsburghs to remove incriminating evidence. For the rest of the route to Portree the prince had a lad called MacQueen along with him as guide.
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They traipsed along the byways in pouring rain. At the inn in Portree he met up with Flora and MacEachain and Donald Roy MacDonald, the third conspirator in the garden.

Final plans were hatched for a pre-arranged crossing to Raasay Island.
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The prince changed his shirt in the inn and sat down with his comrades to a meal of roasted fish, cheese, bread and butter.
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After two hours in the inn, with the rain still flooding down, the prince was inclined to spend the night in Portree. His companions said this was too dangerous and argued him out of it.
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There was one last-minute hitch. The prince bought a roll of tobacco from the landlord for fourpence ha’penny. He paid with a sixpence and seemed disinclined to wait for his change. Donald Roy warned him that such aristocratic hauteur amid the poverty of Skye would attract immediate suspicion. The prince took up his three ha’pence change.
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Charles Edward was now leaving the sheltering custody of the MacDonalds for the uncertain care of the Macleods. There was both genuine emotion and some anxiety in his leave-taking. Not surprisingly, he, MacEachain and Donald Roy polished off a bottle
of
whisky before leaving the inn.
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Then he bade a courtly farewell to his saviour Flora. ‘For all that has happened, I hope, Madam, we shall meet in St James’s yet.’
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But they were not destined to meet again, in London or any other place.

At dawn on the first of July the prince left the shores of Skye for Raasay Island, accompanied by the leading Raasay Macleods, Murdoch, Malcolm and John. On Raasay the effects of Cumberland’s devastation of the Highlands were only too plain to see. There had been three hundred cottages on the island. Not one was left standing. Cumberland’s licentious soldiery had pillaged, raped and murdered their way from one end of the island to the other. When told of Cumberland’s atrocities, the prince found them hard to believe: such actions were against all known laws of civilised behaviour.
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On arrival in Raasay, the prince slept for two hours in a small hut. Again it was of the variety where one had to stoop to enter.
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Then he dined avidly on a meal of roast kid, butter and cream.
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He was in euphoric mood, seemingly much taken with the idea of redemption through suffering: ‘Sure. Providence does not design this for nothing.’
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But it was too early for self-congratulation. News of his presence on Skye was abroad almost as soon as he had cleared the island. The flight to Raasay already seemed like a false move. It was too easy to be trapped on this barren island. Next day the prince decided to take his chances back on Skye. While he was arranging this with his comrades, a lookout gave notice of the approach of a local pedlar, strongly suspected of being a Hanoverian spy. The Macleods at once decided to kill him. Immediately the prince’s merciful and compassionate side was triggered. ‘God forbid that we should take any man’s life while we can save our own,’ he expostulated.
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Fortunately, the pedlar settled the argument by passing by at a safe distance.

At 9 o’clock on the evening of 2 July they put to sea again. It was a stormy night, the wind increased to gale force, and even on the short stretch between Raasay and Skye the waves threatened to overwhelm the boat.
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They made landfall at Nicholson’s Rock near Scorobreck, on the north side of Portree harbour.
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After spending the night and the following day in a cow-byre, the prince set out on the evening of the 3rd for the Mackinnon country. Dismissing the boatmen Charles Edward took Malcolm Macleod alone with him and headed towards Strath. This time he took the alias of Lewie Caw, allegedly Captain Macleod’s servant.
¹⁰²

To avoid Sligachan, then occupied by the enemy, they skirted the top of Loch Sligachan and made for Elgol by the circuitous route
via
Strath Mor. It was a hard night’s marching, with difficult and treacherous conditions underfoot.
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At one point the prince sank into a bog right up to his thighs. Macleod had to pull him out.
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After more than twelve hours’ dour marching, they reached Elgol in the early morning. It was as well that the prince, at Macleod’s urging, had perfected his disguise, for outside the village they were stopped and questioned by three militiamen. Macleod and the prince had already decided to make a fight of it if the militiamen became suspicious.
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Their first port of call in Elgol was the house of Captain John Mackinnon, Malcolm Macleod’s brother-in-law. Here they were fed and their clothes changed. With difficulty Macleod persuaded a servant girl to wash the feet of his ‘servant’.
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While the Mackinnons arranged for his onward journey, the prince dandled a young Mackinnon child on his knee and carried him on his back. ‘I hope this child may be a captain in my service yet,’ he remarked.
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John Mackinnon’s reply was to weep silently.
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Word of the prince’s presence was brought to the old Mackinnon chief. Malcolm Macleod at once resigned the management of the prince’s affairs to the Mackinnons and prepared to depart.
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At about 9 p.m. Old Mackinnon, Captain John and four boatmen embarked with the prince for the mainland. Some enemy sails were seen on the horizon but Charles refused to delay his departure.
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As if to confirm his trust in Providence, the wind veered and the ships stood away. They made the short crossing to Mallaig without incident.

The prince’s devious circling path through the islands was over. From now on his flight would be through the burns and glens of the mainland.

(July–September 1746)

BY NOW THE
authorities in London and their bloodthirsty acolytes were lashing themselves into frenzies of indignation and frustration at their inability to track down ‘the Young Pretender’. Nearly three months had passed since Culloden. Ancram, Lockhart, Scott and Fergusson had spread fire and sword across the Highlands, yet still the major prize eluded them.
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Cumberland himself stayed in Scotland until mid-July, vainly hoping to crown his triumph in battle with the capture of the ‘Pretender’s son’.
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But although the Whigs were often hot on the prince’s trail, they were always just short of catching him.
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Sometimes the Hanoverians rationalised their failure to capture their prey by alleging that Charles had already left Scotland. To the obvious objection that in that case he would have been seen in Paris, they replied that he must have escaped via Norway.
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More often, they simply threw greater and greater resources into the chase.
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If anything, after Cumberland’s departure, his successor Lord Albemarle intensified the hunt, avid for the prestige of succeeding where his royal master had failed. On the mainland, in addition to the Campbell militia and Loudoun’s regulars who made criss-crossing patrols, Albemarle placed a chain of sentries between Inverness and Inverary at the important passes, so that the chances of Charles’s slipping through their fingers were considered remote.
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Whig money was firmly placed on the islands as Charles Edward’s most likely hiding place. Almost Cumberland’s last act before leaving Scotland was to order Albemarle to bottle up Skye, where the prince was now definitely placed (in fact he was already on the mainland).
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Albermarle followed this up by sending search parties to every single Hebridean island.
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He vowed he would not leave Fort Augustus until all hope of catching the Young Pretender was gone.
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Bit by bit Albemarle narrowed the gap between pursuers and pursued. Almost without exception, those who helped Charles Edward on his way were taken prisoner and questioned closely: Donald Macleod, O’Neill, Flora MacDonald, Kingsburgh, Malcolm Macleod, Old Mackinnon.
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To a man (or woman) they testified that their motivation was common humanity and that they scorned the £30,000 reward on the prince’s head. Flora MacDonald testified eloquently that she would have helped anyone so deeply in distress, not just the Stuart prince.
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Kingsburgh spoke movingly of a fugitive without meat and sleep for two days and nights, whom he had come upon sitting dejectedly on a rock, beaten upon by the rain and, when that ceased, eaten up by flies. The fugitive was ‘meagre, ill-coloured and overrun with the scab’.
¹²

No threats of imprisonment (or worse) could shake the Highlanders’ stories or drag from them a scintilla of useful information about the secret network of sympathisers that took the prince ever onwards out of the hands of his pursuers. As for the £30,000, that was looked on by the overwhelming majority with unconcealed contempt. Eighteenth-century Europe was much struck with this aspect of the prince’s successful flight in the heather. Diderot, arguing for man’s natural goodness, later cited the refusal of the Highlanders to give up the prince for £30,000 (a million-pound reward in our terms and the wealth of Croesus by any standards) as his most telling instance.
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The failure of the Whigs to locate and capture the prince during his five-month escapade has sometimes been set down to the London government’s reluctance to apprehend him; a decision as to his fate would be fraught and embarrassing, the argument goes. Such a view cannot be sustained from the evidence.
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It is true that the prince himself thought that if captured he would be in more danger of assassination by poison or ‘accidental’ death than public execution.
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But in this he underrated the threat to his person. The London government had shown by its virtual suspension of due legal process in Scotland, and by the unleashing of Cumberland’s military rabble, that it was determined to exterminate once and for all the hydra of Jacobitism. And what better way to do this than by burying the hydra’s ‘immortal head’? The execution of Charles Edward would produce a trauma from which the Jacobite movement could never recover. And precisely this consummation was both urged and expected by leading Whig luminaries. Horace Mann was asked by the Prince de Craon what would happen to Charles Edward if he was taken. ‘He would be beheaded,’ said Mann. ‘Fie, fie, a king’s
grandson
!’ Craon remonstrated. ‘Well, Prince,’ Mann replied, ‘it is just that fact that would cause his destruction.’
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The first days on the mainland might have been a time for sombre reflection by the prince on his possible fate, since for three days and nights he and his party lay in the open air.
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They could get no help or shelter because the presence of a militia encampment at Eansaig on the south of Loch Nevis intimidated their potential supporters. By the fourth day Old Mackinnon had had enough. He set off in search of a better refuge.

Chafing at the inactivity, the prince, John Mackinnon and the three boatmen launched the boat for an ill-advised reconnaissance of Loch Nevis. They were spotted by five militiamen on the shore and ordered to put in to land for identification.
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The prince was all for making a fight of it, as they were roughly equal in numbers.
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But John Mackinnon took command and ordered his men to pull away. He told them to have their muskets primed but not to fire unless he gave the word. If firing commenced, they could not leave a single militiaman alive.
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It did not come to that. They quickly outdistanced their pursuers and put in to a wooded shore. From a hill the prince watched the militiamen give up the chase and return to their station. Then he lay down on the hillside and slept for three hours.
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They re-embarked and rowed across to a small island on the north shore, a mile away from the house of Scotus, one of the luminaries of clan Donald.
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John Mackinnon went ahead to sound Old Clanranald, who was known to be living there. The Clanranald chief was appalled to find the prince once again in his domains. ‘What muckle devil has brought him into this country again?’ he cried, and went on to refuse all help.
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The best he could suggest was refuge on Rona – an even more desolate island than Raasay. Both he and Mackinnon understood that this was code for an undeviating refusal to become involved. Rona was a green island with no cover; not a single sheep or goat could escape detection there, let alone a man.

Disappointed, the prince returned to Mallaig. With Captain John and Old Mackinnon, Charles walked by night to Morar Cross, a mile south of the bridge over the Morar river.
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Here they found MacDonald of Morar, who was now living in a bothy, since his house had been burned down. The prince was fed on cold salmon and taken to a nearby cave to sleep.
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