How the Scots Invented the Modern World (22 page)

When news reached Edinburgh that the Highland army was on the march, the inhabitants, in David Hume’s words, were seized with a “universal Panic,” and, he added, “that not groundless.” The military situation could not have been worse. The government had stripped available troops down to fewer than three thousand, most of whom were inexperienced or “invalid” garrisons stationed in towns such as Edinburgh and Stirling, or Highland regiments such as the Black Watch, whose loyalty was suddenly very much in question. The English commander was General Jonathan Cope, who, despite warnings from Duncan Forbes in early July that something was up, had done nothing until it was virtually too late. By the time Cope decided to move his troops to block Charles’s line of march, the prince had already joined up with Stewart of Appin, MacDonald of Glencoe, and Grant of Grandiston, crossed Corriearrack Pass by Wade’s military road, and taken Perth. Edinburgh, the capital, was clearly next.

Cope decided his only option was to avoid Charles’s army—which he believed to be twice the size it actually was—and withdraw to Inverness. This, he believed, would give clans loyal to the government a chance to rally and allow him to send reinforcements by sea to Edinburgh. There was only one problem: the Disarming Act of 1725, which had outlawed weapons and firearms in the Highlands after the last Jacobite rising, was widely ignored by disloyal clans such as the MacDonalds, but obeyed by the loyal. It in effect disarmed precisely the Highlanders Cope now needed to have armed.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh would have to fend for itself. Its reputation as a bastion of Whig and pro-Hanover sentiment began to wilt as the Lord Provost and the town council met. They showed no interest in opposing the advancing Highland army, and temporized about taking any emergency measures. Instead, organizing the defense of the city fell to two private citizens, a merchant and former provost named George Drummond and a professor of mathematics at the university, Colin Maclaurin. They immediately called for volunteers to help the undermanned royal garrison in Edinburgh Castle. Their summons brought forward a host of young volunteers, many of them students. One was William Robertson, future author of
The History of Scotland,
who was serving as pastor at Gladsmuir. Behind him came William Wilkie and John Home, both probationers awaiting their first assignments as ministers. Theology student Alexander Carlyle signed up, as did William Cleghorn, who would later beat out David Hume for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh. Clerics and intellectuals, they were the future stars of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, who now put their lives on the line for the House of Hanover and the Union.

They drilled twice a day. Cannon of various sizes and from various eras were assembled on the city walls. Professor Maclaurin drew up designs to modernize Edinburgh’s defenses, and vigorously supervised the building and repair work. One of his assistants was the seventeen-year-old Robert Adam. In the meantime, citizens anxiously watched the weather vanes, hoping for a change in the wind and news that Cope’s army would be under sail to rescue them. On September 15 they learned instead that the Jacobite army was only eight miles from the city and closing fast.

It was the moment of truth for Edinburgh’s bands of volunteers. The result was one of those episodes that epitomizes the contrast between a culture that is prepared for war, whether it wants it or not, and one that, however willing, is not. Drummond hastily drew up his four hundred volunteers at the Lawnmarket for the march down the Bow, a long, winding street through the heart of what is now the Old Town, to the West Port. Students and other citizens set off in serried ranks through the crowds, drums beating and flags flying, to meet the invaders.

To their dismay, however, the crowd sent them off not with cheers but jeers and insults, while the rest of Edinburgh quickly shut up its houses and barred its windows. The volunteers, with Drummond at their head, marched on. When they got farther down the Bow, Alexander Carlyle remembered later, “the scene was different, for all the spectators were in tears, and uttering loud lamentations.”

Still they marched on. Finally, as the volunteers neared the West Port, Drummond turned around to review his troops. To his shock, they had almost all disappeared. One by one, his brave young volunteers had reconsidered their position and, with the help of neighbors, quietly melted away up a convenient wynd or into a nearby tavern. Only Carlyle, Robertson, Home, and a few others still stood sheepishly with him, muskets in hand.

Their humiliation, and Drummond’s, was not yet complete. Bearing down on them was the Principal of the University, William Wishart, and a gathering of local clergy appealing to Drummond not to expose “the flower of the youth of Edinburgh” to certain death at the hands of the fearsome Highlanders. Turn back and send them home, Wishart begged him. The crowd added their entreaties, cheering and applauding. Drummond was furious, but with no troops left, his options were limited. He finally gave the order to withdraw, and the West Port gates were closed. The volunteers were to see no action that day.

Carlyle, Robertson, Home, Cleghorn, and another student volunteer, Hugh Bannatine, retired to Turnbull’s Tavern to restore their pride and spirits. A couple of glasses of claret put them in a better mood, and together they swore an oath to carry on the struggle for “the security of our country’s laws and liberties,” as Carlyle put it, even if Edinburgh surrendered, as now seemed very likely.

In fact, the end came even more swiftly than they had imagined. The next day Prince Charles camped at Gray’s Mill, two miles from Edinburgh, and sent a note asking the city to surrender. Deputies from the town council met him to discuss terms, but the two sides could not reach any conclusion. As the deputies returned to the Bow Port and ordered the gates opened, however, a detachment of Camerons that had set out earlier to reconnoiter the city walls dashed as quick as lightning through the opening and seized the guard. With a triumphant shout, the Highlanders pelted up the street to the city guardhouse, taking possession of it and then the other gates to the city. Edinburgh Castle, with its garrison of six hundred men, remained secure. But the city had fallen before most people knew it was under attack. The next morning a citizen out for a walk noticed the strange-looking soldiers standing guard on the walls. He asked a Highlander who was leaning on a cannon and smoking a pipe, surely these were not the same soldiers as yesterday? “Och, no,” the man answered, “she pe relieved.”

On the morning of the seventeenth, John Home and the others watched as Charles and his troops paraded in the King’s Park, just below Arthur’s Seat and out of range of the Castle’s guns. Alexander Carlyle remembered them as “short and dirty, and of a contemptible appearance.” John Home had a more appreciative eye. The prince himself “was in the prime of youth, tall and handsome,” while the Highlanders “seemed to be strong, active, and hardy men,” armed with muskets, fowling pieces, swords, and even scythe blades on pitchfork handles. Their “stern countenances, and bushy uncombed hair, gave them a fierce, barbarous, and imposing aspect.” Then he, Carlyle, and William Robertson slipped away to find General Cope.

They found him and his army at Dunbar, some forty miles east of Edinburgh, where he had just arrived by ship from Aberdeen. They managed to give him a detailed description of the Highland army, and Cope ordered them to act as forward scouts as his forces closed on Haddington from the west, while the rebels marched east. The two armies collided at Prestonpans, eight miles east of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, on September 21.

The result must have been secretly gratifying to Home and other ex-Edinburgh volunteers, however disheartening at the moment. At the first charge of the Highlanders, Cope’s dragoons ran away so fast that Charles’s generals thought it must be a feint. The Highlanders then lashed the royal infantry with musket volleys and, grabbing their broadswords and dirks, charged them headlong. The soldiers—professionals this time, not amateur volunteers—broke and ran. Cope and his fellow officers chased after them, calling “For Shame, Gentlemen, behave like Britons,” but to no avail. It was a stunning victory, and at one stroke, to everyone’s amazement, Charles found himself master of Scotland.

In Charles’s mind, still unclouded by any doubts or reflections, his next move had to be southward, into England and on the road to London. Again, there seemed to be little to oppose him. The government was frantically recalling troops from Flanders because there were virtually none in England; Charles had the promise (which ultimately proved empty) of nearly five thousand armed volunteers from the northern counties of England, as well as the hope of French assistance now that the revolt had caught fire. But his generals, who understood the military realities, were less sanguine. Their troops were melting away with constant desertions, as many Highlanders, pleased with their success and their booty, simply packed up and went home. Even with additional volunteers from the Gordons, Mackinnons, and MacPherson of Cluny, Charles had no more than five thousand foot and five hundred horse. Eventually they would have to face a British force of at least six times that number.

Charles’s lieutenants also doubted the likelihood of further French help (here they were mistaken; reinforcements did arrive, but too few to make any difference). In the end, they and Charles worked out a compromise. They agreed to take the army south through Cumberland, where the rough, mountainous terrain would help to disguise their maneuvers from the English. On November 3, in a dense fog, they set out from Dalkeith in two columns, one commanded by James, Duke of Perth, and the other by Charles and Lord George Murray. On the eighth, Charles’s force crossed the River Esk into England. As they crossed, “the Highlanders without any orders given,” according to an eyewitness, “all drew their Swords with one Consent upon entering the River, and every man as he landed on tother side wheeld about to the left and faced Scotland” to raise a salute to his homeland.

Once again the Hanoverian forces, this time commanded by old General Wade, now a field marshal, were outdone by the rebels’ boldness. Charles’s division of forces drew Wade east, while Charles and Perth reunited their forces and closed on Carlisle in the fog and driving rain. The royal garrison withdrew to Carlisle Castle while the city itself surrendered. The Highlanders then marched into what, in less than fifty years, would become the heart of the English industrial landscape. Kendal, Lancaster, Manchester, Macclesfield, Derby—at each town the response to Charles’s coming, while not overtly hostile, was far less warm than he had been led to expect. By December 4, however, they were less than 130 miles from London.

The English natives were as amazed by the appearance of these Scottish invaders as if they had been Eskimos or Watusis. They were certainly just as ignorant of who they were and what to expect. Most could not distinguish between Highland and Lowland Scots. Since many of Charles’s Lowlander volunteers chose to wear kilts and bonnets, English obervers simply described them all as “Highland savages” and let it go at that. Fears ran high that they intended to plunder their way to London, “which according to Ancient Customs will be the murdering of people of all Sexes and Ages, the Burning of Houses, and Cutting of Cattle to pieces, with Swords and dirks. . . .” When Charles and his staff stopped at one house, according to Murray of Broughton, its owner begged the soldiers not to eat her child. But as Murray said of his troops, “There is no instance in the history of any times in whatever Country where the Soldiery either regular or irregular behaved themselves with so much discretion, never any riots in the Streets, nor so much as a Drunk man to be seen.”

In one sense it is idle to speculate what might have happened if Charles and his little army had decided to press on to London, but the temptation is overwhelming. Could Charles really have taken the city, proclaimed his father king at Westminster, and then crafted a political settlement that would have put the Stuarts on the throne again?

It does seem indisputable that if Charles had marched farther south, he never would have made it. Not just one, but three British armies were now converging on him, including the one commanded by King George’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, recently arrived from campaigning in Flanders. Thirty thousand troops were now available for action against the Stuart army of barely five thousand. From a military point of view, those who counseled Charles to abandon his plan to march on London were right. He never had a chance.

But this raises a more interesting point: that the odds against Charles in November of 1745 were more military than political. In other words,
if
Charles had somehow evaded Cumberland (very unlikely), and
if
he had made it to London, it is hard to see how anyone could have stopped him from carrying out his plan. Despite the hopes of English Jacobites, the great majority of their countrymen were not going to rise up in support of the Stuarts; but the same majority was not ready to risk life and property to keep the Hanovers. A compromise between Parliament and the Stuarts was not only possible but probable. As early as 1739, when the War of Jenkins’s Ear was starting to heat up, Robert Walpole had sent secret letters to James asking what his intentions were regarding the Church of England and the personal safety of the members of the House of Hanover,
if
the Stuarts should come back to the throne again.

If they had, the English constitution would never have been the same. The notion, enshrined since 1688, of the sovereignty of Parliament would have died on the spot. But in 1745, not only sentimental Jacobites but most Englishmen would have willingly traded it in to avoid a civil war and have a little peace and quiet.

So who had the most to lose if Charles succeeded? The answer is not the English, but the Scots.