The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (46 page)

He landed on 23 July 1745 on the west coast of the little island of Eriskay between Barra and South Uist. He could scarcely have been further from London, his goal. He had only a handful of companions. The first historian of the rising, the Chevalier de Johnstone, son of an Edinburgh merchant and subsequently the Prince’s aide-de-camp, described them with some contempt: ‘the Duke of Atholl, attainted and in exile since the year 1715; Macdonal, an Irishman; Kelly, an Irishman, formerly secretary to the [Jacobite] Bishop of Rochester; Sullivan, an Irishman; Sheridan, an Irishman who had been governor to the Prince; Macdonald, a Scotsman, Strickland, an Irishman; and Michel, his valet-de-chambre, an Italian; a most extraordinary band of followers’.
¹⁰
To make matters worse, the second of Walsh’s ships had been disabled by a Royal Navy vessel, and limped back to Brest carrying with it all the guns and military stores Charles had managed to acquire. So, almost without equipment and accompanied by no man of note, for the fifty-six-year-old Atholl had never enjoyed possession of his estates, while the dukedom was held by his younger brother James, the Prince was launched on the maddest of gambles. The previous year in Paris, he had told Murray of Broughton that he would go to Scotland if attended only by a single footman. He had not done much better.

He was met with no enthusiasm. The first loyalist with whom he made contact, MacDonald of Boisdale, a sensible hard-drinking man, told him roundly to go home. Charles replied: ‘I am come home, sir, and I will entertain no notion of returning to the place from whence I came, for I am persuaded that my loyal Highlanders will stand by me.’
¹¹
Boisdale tried to discourage this belief. So did Bishop Hugh MacDonald, the Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic to the Highlands, whose office was proscribed by the law of Scotland. Charles brushed him off too. To prove his commitment he crossed over to the mainland and sent his ship back to France with a letter to his father: ‘the worst that can happen to me, if France does not succour me, is to die at the head of such brave people as I find here’. He dispatched letters to the chiefs of clans believed to have Jacobite sympathies, informing them of his intention to raise the standard at Glenfinnan on Monday, 19 August.

Cameron of Lochiel was another who believed the venture had no chance of success, and set out to try to persuade the Prince to leave Scotland at once. His brother John, a Glasgow merchant, attempted to prevent him from meeting the Prince, saying that if he did so he would yield to persuasion. Lochiel continued his journey, persevering in his original intention, only to succumb as his brother had said he would.

On 19 August, the Prince was in Glenfinnan to find the glen deserted but for a couple of shepherds. Towards noon, a party of a hundred and fifty MacDonalds appeared. It was about four o’clock when Lochiel led some eight hundred Camerons to the muster, soon followed by three hundred more MacDonalds. A little later the royal standard was unfurled by the attainted Duke of Atholl, who then read out the King’s commission appointing the Prince as regent and declaring war on the Elector of Hanover. Few of the Gaelic-speaking clansmen can have understood, but they cheered enthusiastically. The Prince made a short speech, which was also greeted with huzzas.

Among the observers was James More Drummond, a son of the famous Rob Roy. James More, as readers of Stevenson’s
Catriona
will know, was a highly dubious character, a professed Jacobite who doubled as a Hanoverian agent. He sent a report of the proceedings to the Lord Advocate. The Jacobite force, he said, was made up of raw young men and a few veterans of the ’15. It was short of arms, and such guns as it had ‘were in great disorder, some of them with their locks broken and others with broken stocks’. He did not see ‘above twenty saddle horses in the camp, but there were a great number of country horses for carrying baggage’.
¹²

So, without cavalry, with only ‘22 Field pieces about the size of one’s leg’, with a collection of old and broken muskets, and with at most twelve hundred men, the Prince set out to conquer the two kingdoms, united since 1707, and to overthrow the revolution settlement of 1688–9. It was the fourth Jacobite attempt to do so, the least welcome to the adherents of the cause, and the one that, against all odds, came closest to success.

News of the venture brought in more recruits, among them Atholl’s brother, Lord George Murray, who was appointed lieutenant-general of the army. He had come out for the Prince with many misgivings. Pardoned for his involvement in the ’15, he was living quietly on his estates. He had a wife and children, and much to lose. He did not believe there was much chance of success. Indeed it was only his strong sense of honour that led him to set aside his doubts and fears. Charles never fully trusted him, and this was unfortunate, for Murray had real ability as a soldier. But they were ill-yoked, temperamentally apart. Charles read Lord George’s caution as timidity. He questioned his commitment to the cause. Some of the Irishmen around him went so far as to make the unwarrantable suggestion that Murray was a Hanoverian agent and therefore a traitor. Murray of Broughton was another to sow seeds of doubt about Lord George. According to the memoirs of Lord Elcho, he told the Prince that ‘Lord George had taken the oaths to the Government, and that he had been looked on for some time past as no friend to the Cause, and in short, his Opinion was that he had joined only out of an intent to Betray the Affair. What Mr Murray said to the Prince upon this Subject had such weight that he ever afterwards suspected Lord George which did his Affairs great harm.’
¹³

In 1715 Mar had dithered and thrown away the chance of success. This time the Jacobite army moved swiftly. Slipping by the only government troops in the north, they made straight for Edinburgh and occupied the city (though the castle was still held for King George). One hostile observer, who saw the Prince as he entered the city, thought that his

figure and presence were not ill-suited to his lofty pretensions. He was in the prime of youth, tall and handsome, of a fair complexion; he had a light coloured periwig with his own [dark red] hair combed over the front; he wore the Highland dress, that is, a tartan short coat without the plaid, a blue bonnet on his head, and on his breast the star of the order of St Andrew. Charles stood some time in the park to shew himself to the people; and, then, though he was very near the palace, mounted his horse, either to render himself more conspicuous, or because he rode well and looked graceful on horseback.
¹⁴

He dismounted at the gate of the palace and was conducted within by James Hepburn of Keith, who had been out in the ’15 and had ever since ‘kept himself in constant readiness to take arms’. That afternoon – 19 September 1745 – the Prince’s father was proclaimed king and Charles regent, and ‘the pretended Union’ of Scotland and England was declared to be at an end.

Meanwhile the government troops commanded by Sir John Cope had been shipped from Aberdeen to the East Lothian coast, and were camped by the village of Prestonpans. The Jacobite army marched out against them, took Cope by surprise, and scattered his men within an hour of the autumn sunrise. ‘They eskaped like rabets,’ Charles informed his father, but he forbade any public celebration of his victory, saying that he was ‘far from rejoicing at the death of any of my father’s subjects’.

For a few weeks Holyroodhouse became again what it has so seldom been: a royal palace and a brilliant court. The Prince lived there, Elcho wrote,

with Great Splendour and Magnificence, had every morning a numerous court of his Officers. After he had held a Councill, he dinn’d with his principall officers in publick, where there was always a Crowd of all sorts of people to see him dine. After dinner he rode out Attended by his life guards and review’d his Army, where there was always a great number of Spectators in Coaches and on horseback. After the review he came to the Abbey, where he received the ladies of fashion that came to his drawing-room. Then he sup’d in publick, and generally there was musick at Supper and a Ball afterwards.
¹⁵

But Elcho, who came to dislike the Prince, later claimed to remember that in Council, ‘The Prince could not bear to hear any body differ in Sentiment from him, and took a dislike to Every body that did.’ This may well be true. Few of the Stuarts could brook contradiction.

The army grew with the enthusiasm of victory and marched south at the end of October. Some were doubtful, but the Prince assured them that they would receive support in England. He may well have believed this. ‘His reasons for Thinking so,’ Elcho wrote, ‘were that in his Youth his Governors and Flatterers amongst his Father’s Courtiers had always talked of the Hanover Family as Cruel Tyrants hated by everybody.’ He also promised that military help would come from France; and he may have believed this also.

They chose the western route by way of Carlisle because Cumberland and Lancashire had a Jacobite tradition. But the English adherents of the Stuarts were now mostly no more than dinner-table Jacobites, and little support was forthcoming. The choice of the western route was indeed a blunder. The octogenarian Marshal Wade was at Newcastle with some inferior troops. A victory over Wade on English soil might well have encouraged English Jacobites to be bold, and might have intensified the panic already developing in London, where King George was packing his bags ready to slip away to Hanover.

The opportunity was lost. Instead they marched south as far as Derby, disappointed by the lack of support and uncomfortably aware that George’s younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, had brought experienced troops back from the Continent. At Derby, Lord George Murray spoke out in Council. The Scots, he said, had done their bit. They had come into England expecting the promised support, or to join the French if they had landed. But there had been no support and there was no sign of the French. Certainly he had never thought that 4,500 Scots could put the King upon the throne of England by themselves. So in his opinion they should go back and ‘join their friends in Scotland, and live and die with them’. Charles was furious and spoke of betrayal, but the weight of opinion and evidence was against him; and he had to yield. The retreat began.

The decision to turn back at Derby has been the subject of argument ever since. It was the reasonable thing to do. Three Hanoverian armies were converging on them. The Jacobites had, as Lord George argued, found no substantial support in England, and there was no sign of the promised French help. Far more sensible to withdraw to Scotland, regroup, and hope that the campaign might be successfully resumed later. On the other hand, the whole venture had been made in defiance of such common sense. It had been an extraordinary gamble from the start. Why change tune now? Make a dash for London, and who could tell what might be the result?

Common sense prevailed, to the Prince’s angry disappointment. Having lost the argument, he now lost heart. From being an inspiration on the march south, he became a liability. He sulked and refused to give orders, behaving like a spoiled and petulant child. It was thanks to Lord George Murray’s efficiency that the bulk of the army was brought safely back over the border, and indeed won another victory over General Hawley at Falkirk in January 1746. Murray was for retreating into the hills and waging a summer campaign. The Jacobites were by now however short of the money needed to pay and supply their troops. So, on 16 April 1746, battle was in effect forced upon them, though the ground, Culloden Moor, outside Inverness, was ill-chosen. The battle would probably have been lost in any case, wherever fought. For the first time they came up against experienced professional troops and well-drilled artillery, against which the Highland charge could be only quixotic.

There are two versions of how the Prince behaved when the battle was lost. Elcho had him fleeing from the field, and damned him for ‘a cowardly Italian’. ‘He never offered to rally any of the broken Corps’ – though even Elcho admits that any such attempt ‘would have been to no purpose, for none of the Highlanders who escaped ever Stop’t untill they gott home to their own houses’. According to the account of a Presbyterian minister, John Cameron, which was collected by Bishop Robert Forbes in his volume of Jacobite letters and memoirs,
The Lyon in Mourning
,
¹⁶
Charles fought bravely. He had his horse shot under him, and, when the battle was lost, was urged by those around him to retire, which he did ‘with great reluctance and in no hurry’.

After Culloden, the Prince was a hunted man, with a price of £30,000 on his head, and that was a sum such as very few in the Highlands could ever have imagined, let alone have had in their hands. Many knew who he was and where he was to be found during the course of his wanderings, which lasted from the final week of April beyond mid-September, but none was found to betray him. One Ned Burke, from North Uist, whose usual occupation was to carry a sedan chair, was recorded as preferring ‘a good conscience to thirty thousand pounds’; and this was the case with all who were in contact with the Prince during his months of wandering. As for him, he showed himself not only physically tough, but of an almost unfailing good humour. Indeed at times he appears to have regarded his predicament as a matter for comedy. The most famous of his helpers was Flora MacDonald, with whom he travelled ridiculously disguised as her maid. When the pair arrived at the house belonging to MacDonald of Kingsburgh, their host’s daughter told her mother that Flora had with her ‘as very odd, muckle, ill-shaken-up wife as ever I saw’. Then Kingsburgh told his wife that this was the Prince, and her first reaction was: ‘we are a’ ruined and undone for ever’. But, remarking that ‘we will die but ance’, he told her to fetch food for the Prince; and when Charles had eaten heartily, he called for brandy, saying, ‘I have learned in my skulking to take a hearty dram.’ Then he asked for tobacco, saying he had likewise learned to smoke in his wanderings – doubtless first as a deterrent to the Highland midge.