The Last Highlander (37 page)

All day they waited. He did not come. Cumberland’s men were fatigued by their march. He wanted to rest them. This was his twenty-fifth birthday and he ordered them to stay in camp and rest up with a good ration of brandy and rum to celebrate and keep them warm.

As the day ended, the Jacobites stood down. Lord George Murray, in an inspired stroke, proposed a night attack on the enemy camp. They would have the benefit of complete surprise, he argued. Most of Cumberland’s army would be in a semi-drunken doze. The cavalry and infantry, camped separately, would not be able to help each other. Throw the enemy into disarray by the maniacal shock of their charge, thousands of them, out of the night, like devils, he said. Then, scythe them down like corn with their broadswords when they panicked. The scheme had all the elements that had helped them to victory in the south.

Though brilliantly inspired, the manoeuvre was a planning disaster. The Jacobite leaders could not work together. The two columns set off as darkness fell, Highlanders at the front, followed by Irish and French. Sleet came down. The north-east wind blew. Halfway to Nairn, the two columns split and lost each other in the black night. Some men went round the woods of Kilravock Castle in circles. The Irish and French lagged behind and lost sight of the leaders.

One column reached within hearing distance of the Hanoverian camp, and waited for the other column, only to be told they were miles back. At 2 a.m., furious, Lord George Murray led them back, utterly exhausted and demoralised, to Culloden.

The men fell to the ground, some never waking till ‘they found the enemy cutting their throats’. Others, formed up the next morning, were ‘nodding with sleep in their ranks, and at least 1,500 fewer in number than they had been even a few days earlier’. The morning of 16 April, they stood on Drumossie Moor, buffeted by a north-easterly wind and rain, a couple of miles west of Inverness, and waited for the government army to line up opposite them. The walls of Culloden House’s enclosures formed part of the defences.

Fraser of Inverallochy, in charge of the Lovat Frasers, was in the front line, between the men of John Roy Stuart and the Appin Stewarts. The Master was still on his way back from the Aird of Lovat with more men.

Battle joined at about 1 p.m. The Highland charge was delayed. The muddle in timing the order to charge exposed the men to a terrible cannonade for a few minutes. Then they were unleashed, and lacked nothing of their habitual ferocity. Cumberland had been training to meet them.

The Duke had noticed that as the Highlanders raised their right arm to strike, the white skin of their chest on that side lay exposed. At least it did if you were standing opposite but slightly to the side of him. If you were directly in front of the lifted broadsword, the enemy’s spiked targe protected their bodies, and they merely thrust an extra spear-like point at you at waist height, while their swords descended on your head. ‘The instructions given to the soldiers to direct their bayonets, each to his right-hand man of the enemy, will doubtless be entered in the books of discipline as proper against sword and targe. The poor wretches … never thought of the defensive; they never considered, while they lifted up their broadswords with their right arms, how open they laid their sides to receive their death from the bayonets,’ the
Gentleman’s Magazine
noted.

In other words, Cumberland had taught his men
not
to attack the man in front of them. Rather, make a slight turn to the right and attack the man who attacked the man to your right, and stick your bayonet under his armpit. It required great trust. You did not defend yourself, but your neighbour, and you in turn were defended by the soldier to your left. It required, in addition, very good training. The Hanoverians had been practising hard. To stiffen their resolve, the second line of Hanoverian soldiers had their bayonets at the backs of their fellow soldier in the front line, to keep him in place in face of the horror of the unhinged Highlander howling semi-naked straight in your face.

‘The ranks were packed so tightly that even the men whom the Highlanders had cut to pieces did not fall down, and the living, the wounded, and the dead formed such a solid mass that the Highlanders had to give up any hope of breaking through.’ Brutal and obscene, it worked. The artillery and dragoons did the rest.

Lovat’s Inverness businessman, Evan Baillie of Abriachan, with William Duff the merchant, Bailie Steuart and other Invernessians, rode out to watch the battle from a small rise near the Prince’s command position. On the rise, a handful of schoolboys, the sons of chiefs, lay in the heather next to the Inverness lawyers and merchants. Young Archie Fraser, Lovat’s youngest son by Primrose Campbell, was there, aged nine and a half. He searched the sea of men for a sight of his half-brother, Simon, whom he knew should be leading the Frasers below him. The son of Robertson, Laird of Inches, though his big brother was on the government side, stretched out beside Archie. Young Robertson was a cousin of Archie Fraser’s. His mother was Lovat’s sister. They huddled together with a couple of other friends, discussing the fighting. Archie knew Evan Baillie well. He was often at home with his father.

They saw Inverallochy lead the Frasers bravely into the storm of metal. The men fell as if bewitched. They watched Prince Charles’s horse take a musket ball in the shoulder. It bucked and twisted to get its rider off. The Prince’s groom rushed up with a fresh mount. Reseated, Charles turned to thank the man, in time to see him beheaded by a cannon ball. Colonel O’Sullivan told Charles to flee. He refused. In the end a cousin of Lochiel’s seized his horse’s bridle and dragged him from the field of defeat.

The Inverness businessmen ‘remained until dislodged by the cannon balls falling about them’. Jacobite soldiers started to break ranks and run for the shelter of farms, hills, the town. The spectators moved. The men told the boys to run back to school as fast as they could. Baillie and the Inverness men dashed back to lock themselves in their houses in case the Hanoverians gave chase. At the bridge over the Ness, Evan Baillie and William Duff met several hundred Frasers crossing the bridge to their side of the town, led by the Master of Lovat. He and his men had missed the battle, but assumed it was still going on and shouted excitedly about going to join their companions and fight up on the moor.

‘Fighting, by God, Master!’ Evan growled. ‘You were not in the way when fighting might have been of service. You had best say nothing about it now.’ Baillie’s excitement had sickened to fear and anger over the last few hours, watching friends and fellow Highlanders being shot, hacked or blown to death. Duff pulled Baillie away and they went home.

Several chiefs killed, the Prince gone, the Highlanders turned and fled what was coming at them – Hanoverian dragoons, who slashed to left and right and chased them all the way to Inverness. The battle lasted little over an hour. The mopping-up exercise began at once, working their way through the Jacobite wounded lying on the field.

THIRTY-ONE

The beginning of the end, 1746–47

‘There fell the fine Stars’

– JOHN ROY STUART

At first, they knew nothing at Gorthleck House. For days, Lovat watched the women of Stratherrick cook and brew for their victorious Jacobite men. On the day of Culloden, they could not bear to wait at home. White cloths, newly washed, bleached by frost and sun, had been strewn across the hedges for days. The women carried them in, full of the coconut scent of gorse, and laid them on trestles. Salted meat, a little fresh mutton, but not good, it being too early for spring animals to have fattened, lay on trenchers. Plenty of barley bannocks, oatcakes, ale and wine covered the cloths by late morning of 16 April. Beakers and plates and knives, a few glasses for the nobles, all waited. All ready to celebrate the victories from last July to now. Unable to wait, gaggles of chattering people set off up the road to Inverness. It was a horrible, wet day, but in their excitement they did not feel it. Gorthleck House settled into deep silence.

Approaching footsteps broke it. A runner brought a rumour that things were going well for the Jacobites. Others arrived and the news changed. The house began to fill with people anxious to hear about their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers. More people left to go back up the road to Inverness to hear something from those who had been watching the battle. Soon only Lovat sat there, alone, staring into the fire, waiting. A door clicked and he looked round. A small girl stepped out of a cupboard, put there, she said, to stop her getting under everybody’s feet. The quiet frightened her. She thought she had been forgotten, and came out to see. She went over to the window. Below, she began to make out shapes. She caught her breath. ‘The fairies,’ she said to Lovat. The plain below the house was a famous rendezvous for the spirits and sprites. Neither the old man nor the child moved. People believed that the sight of fairies disappeared when you blinked. The old chief shook his head – men. The girl shut her eyes quick and then flicked them open. He was right. Not supernatural beings, just women tearing their head scarves off, and men lying about.

A door crashed and women ran into the house. They grabbed the cloths smoothed with pride on the tables, and ran out with them flapping behind, as if they were being chased by ghosts. They tore them up and bound wounds, invoking God’s peace on the suffering men, questioning. ‘The intended feast was distributed in morsels among the fugitives, who were instantly forced to disperse for safety to the caves and mountains of Stratherrick.’

Back on the battlefield at Culloden, when a kind of peace fell at last, the Redcoats stopped for lunch, sitting down among the dead, wounded and dying. Local people feared to touch the bodies of their dead men till the soldiers had moved to the town.

Cumberland separated the Highland soldiers from the foreign ones. Charles Fraser of Inverallochy, leading the Frasers on the field of battle, had fallen, but with a wound that was not going to be fatal. He hitched himself up on his elbow, looked about and waited to be picked up and given quarter. Someone like him could be ransomed with his kin. He watched General Henry Hawley as he rode through the field with his junior officers. Surrounded by soldiers, Hawley ordered them to pistol or bayonet anyone they thought might still live. The finishing blow delivered to so many wounded revolted Inverallochy. The Jacobites had been careful to be merciful during their whole campaign. These were fellow Scots and Britons. Inverallochy prepared his sword to give up in surrender.

Hawley spotted the young gentleman, a month from his twenty-first birthday, his cocky head propped up, staring at their work. He turned and rode across, halting above him. His horse’s breath was warm and intimate on Fraser of Inverallochy’s face. What party did he belong to, Hawley asked. ‘To the Prince,’ Inverallochy replied.

General Hawley turned to Major Wolfe,
⁶
the officer at his side. ‘Shoot me the Highland scoundrel who thus dares to look on us with such an insolent stare.’ Major Wolfe refused. He would fight as a soldier, not an executioner, he said, and offered Hawley his commission.

The General barked down at a foot soldier to empty the contents of his musket into the dog. Without hesitation, the man approached to point-blank range and fired. The leader of the Frasers fell to the ground to join the corpses of his men. Near him, a Stratherrick man, Alexander Mackintosh, lay with twenty wounds, waiting to be rescued, and taken prisoner. His head ‘which is almost all over in one wound’, swam in a pool of blood. His elbow stuck out at the wrong angle, wounded as it protected his head. His broadsword had snapped in two and he had raised his arm as a sabre came down on him. Redcoats moved through the wounded, killing and stripping them all nearly naked. Mackintosh was ‘reckoned amongst the dead’. He woke ‘out of his swoon’ later to the sound of a party of dragoons with fixed bayonets, looking for wounded and discussing him.

‘Let us try if this dog be quite dead,’ one said. The dragoon bent and thrust his bayonet deep into Mackintosh’s buttock. ‘I happily received [it] without any shrinking or emotion,’ he said afterwards. ‘I had resolved beforehand, under God, upon hearing their language, to endure, if possible, any shock they might put upon me, without showing any signs of life. So they rode off, declaring me dead enough.’ He fainted again, ‘came to himself’ several hours later – and ‘got off the field in dead of night’, dragging himself towards Inverness on his hands and knees. Two sentries stepped into his path. To either side of them bodies waited to be cleared. Mackintosh reached into his sporran and brought out two shillings sterling. He held them up, one for each, in exchange for his life. The soldiers took them and told him to move on. They called after him they could easily have taken the money and his life. He did not risk another encounter, and began the twenty-mile crawl back to Stratherrick.

As the battle ended, the dragoons galloped down the road to the town to hunt fleeing survivors. The road to the town was strewn with bodies. Unlike Bailie Steuart, some who came to watch their men did not leave in time. Women and children heaped up like a pile of laundry, all mixed together, mangled among their dead soldiers. Bailie Steuart and his friends, especially the Jacobites, sat silent in their houses and prayed and prayed for this fury to be taken away from them. The bells of the town began to ring out unsteadily to let Cumberland know they thought this was a victory.

Cumberland ordered the town secured, Redcoat prisoners released and ‘the cavalry to pursue the enemy as fast as they can’, to be sure few escaped. The town braced itself. A servant girl, Margaret Grant, did not get off the street quickly enough. Two unarmed men ran into a cottage as she passed it. A dragoon following them shouted at her to halt. At first, she could not properly understand him. He spoke in English, and in her fright she could not tune her ear to his language. When he merely tossed her the reins of his horse, she almost wept. The town bells grew louder. The cavalryman went in. Miss Grant clung to the horse for dear life, restraining the urge to bolt with it. She knew the moment the dragoon found the hiding men: voices rose as he ‘hash’d them with his broadsword to death’. The cavalryman emerged ‘all blood’, grabbed the reins, mounted and left.

Parallel with the aftermath, some life went on as usual. Robertson of Inches died of natural causes in the week before the battle of Culloden. The family home at Lees lay between the battlefield and the town. Robertson’s relatives listened to his funeral service start up ‘as the cannonading began on Drumossie Moor’. The youngest son was lying next to his cousin, Archie Fraser of Lovat, watching the battle begin from under a plaid. The clergyman had no choice but to press ahead. Mrs Robertson buried her man and two days later the widow went home to a scene of unimaginable horror.

Prince Charles had led his party away from the battlefield and the immediate consequences of defeat. They rode westward, going south around Inverness and entering Strathnairn. The straths and glens lay in rows running east–west. Strathnairn began south of Inverness and at the western end it emerged at a slight angle into Stratherrick, Lovat’s place of safety. They galloped up into Stratherrick, seeking Lord Lovat at Gorthleck House.

Meeting his Stuart Prince at last, the Fraser chief rose and bowed as deep as he could, and repeated his vows to the Scottish royal line. Lovat took Charles’s hand and drank in the features. He knew his father; the colouring was the same, and the height, and certain aspects of his face. The Prince thanked him, and said they must all take to the hills and hide as best they could. Drawing back, Lovat held the young man in his gaze. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘your great ancestor, Robert Bruce, who lost eleven battles and won Scotland by the twelfth.’ This was no time to run. His Highness must think of his cause and of the people committed to death for him, who had nowhere to run, and needed to be led and defended. Charles must calculate and scheme without emotion. They must regroup in the hills, beyond the reach of the Redcoat army. He and Charles dictated a letter to be sent to Cluny MacPherson, telling him to muster at Fort Augustus by Friday at the latest, where the Prince would review his troops and speak of ‘something in view, which will make ample amends for this day’s ruffle’.

The Prince could not imagine guerrilla warfare among the heather and stones. He had come 2,000 miles from Rome, led an army south into battles, and reached within eighty miles of his thrones. Lovat feared for the innocent in their homes around Dounie, waiting for their men to return. If they did nothing to draw off Cumberland, these people were lost. The Duke had been told ‘the Pretender’s son … lay at Lord Lovat’s house at Aird, the night after the action’. Brigadier Mordaunt was marching with 900 volunteers to go into Fraser country, to destroy all the rebels he found there and investigate the rumour that the Old Fox, Lovat, and the Young Pretender were holed up there. Despite the killing on Drumossie Moor, nearly a thousand were keen to volunteer to go and see if they could trap the fox in his lair. Cumberland said he wanted to meet this old Highlander, ‘the Oracle of his country’. His men strained at the leash to hunt him down for the prize.

Up to now, Fraser lands had been protected by Loudon and Duncan Forbes, hoping Lovat might help them now as he had thirty years ago. The impatient Redcoats knew Lovat’s estate was wealthy and offered rich pickings. It was in their interest to gather as much plunder as they could. Cumberland released his troops and they discussed the day ahead. Some wanted to hide little souvenirs; they would be flogged in front of the whole camp if caught. Petty pilfering ruined the esprit de corps and honour of an army. Public flogging reinforced it.

Brigadier Mordaunt’s orders were to burn everything that could not be carried away. What would not burn, must be pulled down and scattered. The glen, from the River Beauly to the hills above, must be laid waste to teach these villains the only lesson that counted – never again. ‘I find them a more stubborn and villainous set of wretches than I imagined would exist,’ Cumberland remarked. He was astonished. His friend, the Duke of Richmond, egged him on. ‘Nothing but force will ever keep that stinking corner of the kingdom quiet … Most joyful it is to think that so many of those villains are destroyed, and indeed the rope must finish those that are escaped with their lives and are fallen.’

The sight of Castle Dounie and its outbuildings provoked whoops of joy from Mordaunt’s soldiers. He smiled indulgently at their boyish high spirits. ‘One thousand bottles of wine, three hundred bolls of oatmeal, with a large quantity of malt, and a library of books to the value of £400, was all brought to Inverness. His [Lovat’s] fine salmon weirs were destroyed.’ The troops waded into the Beauly and hauled apart the cruives. As they did so the river gushed in, nearly knocking them off their feet. ‘Salmon in abundance’ lay in them and they were ‘brought into the camp and divided among the soldiers’. All this destruction, one volunteer said, ‘was very cheerfully undertaken and performed’, as if they were being asked to help a neighbouring squire clear some waste land for cultivation.

The Frasers’ peat stacks smoked, the fuel for heat and cooking for a year gone up in a day. Once emptied, they set fire to Castle Dounie. Over the next few days, it hollowed out into a blackened crown. Any man who had returned from Culloden fled west until Mordaunt was satisfied and gone. Ploughshares, harrows and other farm equipment too big to move went on the bonfires, as did people’s tables and chairs. Their little querns, small millstones for grinding corn to make bread and porridge, were thrown into the river, hammered in half, or rolled down rocky slopes to split them.

Nor did the women and girls escape the soldiers’ attentions. After a couple of days the troops marched back to town tired and happy, followed by horses and wagons laden with Lovat’s possessions and stores. Officers, who lifted a bottle or two from the carts and examined them as they passed, praised the Old Fox’s cellar. When Lovat’s possessions reached the quartermaster, they bought Lovat’s Madeira at two shillings a bottle, and claret for one shilling and eightpence a bottle. Some of it they consumed. Some they sent south, to inspire the anecdotes of this extraordinary time and out-of-the way country, that they could share with friends when the job was done. Good stories attached to Lovat’s things; of this horrendous place and its brutal overlords, and Lord Lovat, tyrant chief and the wickedest of them all.