How the Scots Invented the Modern World (23 page)

This seems shocking, especially in view of the revolt’s bloody aftermath. Yet it gets to the heart of what really mattered to key political players at the time, and to two very distinct and different groups of Scotsmen.

The first group were Charles’s allies, the Highland chiefs. They had joined their fortunes to his out of a rash sense of honor and pride. To their amazement, they had succeeded. Now, as they assembled at the prince’s headquarters in Derby to discuss what to do next, they realized what success might actually mean. Having a Stuart at Whitehall was not, and would never be, the same thing as having a Stuart at Holyrood. The influence of his Highland allies would inevitably shrink away in the vast labyrinth of competing and conflicting interests of Great Britain. They had every reason to help Charles secure his position in Scotland, but they had no interest in seeing him win his father’s crown in England and Wales. So, military necessity apart, returning to Scotland served their larger political agenda. No wonder, then, that they stood foursquare together against going any farther.

When Lord George Murray broke the news to Charles that “it was everybody’s opinion that the only party that was to be taken was to retire,” the prince “was astonished at this proposition,” and said, “why the Clans kept me quite another Language and assured me they were all resolved to pierce or to dye.” The debate took place at Exeter House, even as clansmen lined up outside to sharpen their swords in preparation for battle. Although Charles argued and pleaded, the chieftains remained unmoved. Provoked by their intransigence, Bonnie Prince Charlie “fell into a passion and gave most of the Gentlemen that had spoke very Abusive Language,” according to an eyewitness, “and said they had a mind to betray him.” A second meeting that evening produced no change. Finally the prince gave up and ordered the retreat.

The retreat from Derby was a low point for the Jacobites in more ways than one. Charles fell into a pout and a funk, and refused to talk to his subordinates. His troops were equally furious. They quickly lost their earlier discipline and fell to looting the locals, leaving a trail of resentment and rage behind them. Outside Penrith they clashed with some of the Duke of Cumberland’s advance dragoons, who, unlike the raw recruits at Prestonpans, stood to fight rather than run away. Rumors that the Highlanders had cried “No quarter!” and killed some of the British wounded circulated among the duke’s troops, with ugly repercussions later on.

On Christmas Day the army entered Glasgow. As Charles’s chief Irish adviser noted, “the Prince was resolved to punish the Town of Glasgow, who shew’d a little too much Zeal to the Government.” He demanded 5,500 pounds in ransom, as well as supplies and food, including “6,000 pair of shoes, 6,000 bonnetts, and as many tartan hose. ” City merchants paid up with a bad grace, and it was with difficulty that some of the Highlanders were restrained from burning the city down. Nowhere else, Charles said bitterly, had he found so few friends as in Glasgow.

This was his first full encounter with that second group of Scots who had no interest in seeing him succeed: Scotland’s growing middle class of merchants and professional men, as well as improving landowners. Like Robertson, Carlyle, and the other Edinburgh student volunteers, they were Whigs, but less from conviction than out of practical self-interest. Union had brought them affluence and prosperity. Just as its architects had calculated, it secured their loyalty to the new government. Union, and the Hanovers on the throne, implied a Scotland with expanding horizons and possibilities; growing commerce and trade; the rule of law; the good things in life. Returning the Stuarts meant returning to the old Scotland. In the minds of Scottish Whigs, this was not an option.

In the sharpest sense, the Forty-five was not a war between Scots and Englishmen, but a civil war. The split that divided Scots transcended class or religious divisions, or even the division between Highlander and Lowlander. (According to one recent scholar, Murray Pittock, perhaps as much as 40 percent of Charles’s army consisted of Lowlanders.) It was in fact a cultural split, between two competing visions of what Scotland should be and where it could go. Charles’s supporters could not afford for Scotland to move forward, and so they were prepared to fight and die to topple the existing Whig regime. Scottish Whigs could not afford to go backward, and so they were willing to do anything and make any sacrifice to keep the Stuarts off the throne.

Charles’s march south had given them a chance to catch their breath, and as he returned to Scotland to gather reinforcements, they began to mobilize against him. What they may have lacked in martial valor, they made up for in deep pockets and political skill. The city of Glasgow had already raised a regiment of militia which attached itself to the royal forces converging to retake Edinburgh. With them was a diehard company of volunteers commanded by John Home. On January 6, 1746, they retook the capital. Charles’s army, meanwhile, was bogged down in a pointless and ineffectual siege of Stirling Castle, which critically divided his forces and depleted him of resources such as artillery for the rest of the campaign.

More decisive intervention came from two Scottish Whig politicians. One was Archibald Campbell, the former Lord Islay and Francis Hutcheson’s old patron, who was now Duke of Argyll. He brought the powerful Campbell clan firmly on the side of the government, thus securing most of the western Highlands—although, ironically, Argyll’s success in making agriculture more prosperous in the clan area made his followers less than willing to leave their farms to risk their lives on the battlefield.

The other, even more important at the moment, was Duncan Forbes of Culloden. After Prestonpans he found himself, as he remembered later, “almost alone, without troops, without arms,” and “supported by nobody of common sense or courage.” Nonetheless, he knew he had to act to “prevent extreme folly.” Single-handedly he waged a campaign to keep the clan chieftains of the northern Highlands loyal to the house of Hanover. MacLeod, Sutherland, Munro, MacDonald of Sleat—Forbes cajoled, persuaded, and with his own money bribed them into passivity. Other clans he managed to divide, including the Grants, Gordons, Mackenzies, and Frasers. By his efforts Forbes prevented the one thing that might have saved the Stuart cause: a general rising of the clans. If any single individual can be said to have defeated the Forty-five, it is not the Duke of Cumberland but Duncan Forbes.

Of course, Scottish Whigs could use their money and political smarts to prevent Charles from winning, but they still needed a military solution to crush him altogether. Ten days after they retook Edinburgh, royal troops had another disastrous encounter with the Jacobite clans at Falkirk. Once again, British cavalry and infantry flew into a panic as the Highlanders attacked. John Home, stationed with his volunteers on a hill, watched incredulously as the redcoats broke and ran, just as they had at Prestonpans. Yet Samuel Johnson could understand the professionals’ distress. “Men accustomed only to exchange bullets at a distance,” he wrote, “are discouraged and amazed when they find themselves encountered hand to hand, and catch the gleam of steel flashing in their faces.” It was all over in less than twenty minutes. The Jacobites took more than three hundred prisoners, including Home and his volunteers (although he led his men in a daring escape a few nights later and rejoined the royal army). “By my soul, Dick,” one prisoner was heard saying to another, “if Prince Charles goes on in this way, Prince Frederick [the Prince of Wales] will never be King George!”

He was wrong. The end of Charles’s hopes was at hand, in the person of the new British commander in chief, Prince Frederick’s brother William, Duke of Cumberland. Despite Cumberland’s later sobriquet of “Butcher” and his gross rotund appearance, he was a skillful and experienced soldier, and only four years older than Bonnie Prince Charlie. He soon set about restoring the royal army’s morale. He brought them fresh artillery, something sadly lacking at Prestonpans and Falkirk, and a new technique for their new weapon, the bayonet. By training his soldiers to lunge with their bayonets not at the charging Highlander in front of them, but at the one to their right as he raised his arm to strike and thus exposed himself to a lethal thrust, Cumberland now had the tactic that could counteract the violent shock of the clansmen’s charge. His troops sensed for the first time that they could beat the Jacobites in a pitched battle.

They had their chance to prove it on April 16, 1746. Charles’s situation had now deteriorated to the point of collapse. His war chest was empty; his men had no pay; supplies were gone; worst of all, he and his field commander, Lord George Murray, were no longer on speaking terms. He and his troops had been on a long line of retreat for weeks from Cumberland’s much larger army, toward Inverness. Most of his soldiers had not eaten for two days. On the sixteenth, the sorry ragtag force reached Culloden House, overlooking Drummossie Moor—the home of Duncan Forbes, the man who had doomed Charles’s last chance for a Highland uprising. Charles’s officers, “sullen and dejected,” according to one eyewitness, lay down to sleep in the deserted house, “some on beds, others on tables, Chairs, and on the floors.” The Jacobites had drained Forbes’s private supply of sixty hogsheads of claret on an earlier visit: the prince, weak from a recent bout with pneumonia, had to be content with a dram of whisky and some bread.

With Cumberland close on his heels, Charles decided the only way to reverse his fortune was by offering battle. Murray and the other commanders were appalled by the suicidal plan, and Charles again lost his temper. “God damn it! Are my orders still disobeyed?” he cried. Walter Stapleton, commander of his Irish volunteers, now ventured his opinion: “The Scots are always good soldiers till things come to a crisis,” he said contemptuously. This silenced the other commanders’ objections. Now they had to fight, to prove their manhood. At the end of their enterprise as at its start, honor compelled them to take a position they knew to be a mistake. They and their clansmen were about to pay for that mistake in full measure.

The next day, as the clans and other Jacobite contingents wearily drew up their line of battle, Cumberland’s army marched onto the field, with flags, drums, and the squeal of the Campbell pipes. His army outnumbered Charles’s by two to one. Three of his fifteen regular battalions were Scottish, in addition to Lord Loudun’s regiment of Highland volunteers and Campbell’s clansmen. As rank after rank of redcoats moved slowly but inexorably into position—the two armies were only five hundred yards apart—the hearts of the Jacobite commanders sank. “We are putting an end to a bad affair,” George Murray muttered to Lord Elcho. Even Prince Charlie’s optimism faded, and for the first time he “began to consider his situation desperate.”

Numbers, discipline, and technology now took over. Cumberland opened the battle with an artillery barrage that pounded the Jacobite line for half an hour, killing, wounding, or scattering nearly a third of Charles’s effectives. Charles himself narrowly escaped death when a solid shot decapitated the groom holding his horse. Meanwhile, a contingent of Campbells had seized the low stone fence that was supposed to secure the Jacobite right, and began to pour a deadly fire into their flank. Charles’s troops still had not fired a shot, and yet the battle had been largely decided.

However, the clansmen did not realize this. While their commanders had steadily lost their nerve, they were eager for battle. They had scattered their enemies not once but twice, and assumed they could do it again. At last, maddened beyond endurance by the shelling, the Mackintoshes, who held the center of the prince’s line, could no longer be held back and charged. Without waiting for orders, Cameron of Lochiel, sword and pistol in hand, led his “sons of the hound,” as the Camerons called themselves, after them.

Then the rest of Clan Chattan—Mackintosh, MacGillivray, and MacBean—surged behind them, coming up “very boldly and fast all in a cloud together, sword in hand,” as one English soldier described it; “like wildcats,” said another. Most came on too fast to use the muskets they were carrying; in their bloodlust, they threw their firearms away. The British laid a withering fire into them as they came on, forcing the charging Highlanders to swerve to the right, as if to evade the hailstorm of lead and shot. “Making a dreadful huzza, and even crying ‘Run, ye dogs!’” they broke onto the British line.

But this time the British did not run. Even the Scots of Munro’s regiment, which had disgraced itself at Falkirk, stood their ground. It was vicious hand-to-hand combat, with the clansmen blindly hacking and thrusting as the choking gunsmoke closed around them. “It was dreadful to see the enemies’ swords circling in the air as they were raised from the strokes,” said one eyewitness, “and no less to see the officers in the army, some cutting with their swords, other pushing with their spontoons, the sergeants running their halberds into the throats of the opponents, the men ramming their fixed bayonets up to the sockets.”

Meanwhile, the British fire continued undiminished. The smoke became so thick that the Highlanders had to feel rather than see their way to the enemy. Clansmen were shot down in heaps three or four deep as they climbed over the bodies of cousins and brothers and “hacked at the muskets with such a maniacal fury that far down the line men could hear the iron clang of sword on barrel.” Those who were not mowed down by musket fire and grapeshot died on the points of the Britishers’ bayonets. “No one that attacked us, escaped alive,” said one of Munro’s officers afterwards, “for we gave no quarter, nor would accept of any.”

The last head-on clash between a modern army and a premodern one on European soil ended when the clansmen could no longer stand up to the slaughter. First in ones and twos, then in clumps of ten or a dozen, they broke off and headed to the rear. Some, “in their fury and despair, threw stones for at least a minute or two, before their total rout began.” Now the Campbells rose up, tearing down the stone wall and shouting
“Cruachan!”
as they fell on their ancient foes. Within minutes the Jacobite center and right turned and ran. The MacDonalds, holding down the left flank, soon followed.