The Road to Culloden Moor Read online

  THE ROAD TO CULLODEN MOOR

  Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion

  DIANA PRESTON

  © Diana Preston 1995

  Diana Preston has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1995 by Constable and Company Limited.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  To Michael

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have always been fascinated by the legend of Bonnie Prince Charlie, not least because of a family connection with the events of the ’45. Antoine Walsh, the Anglo-French slave trader who supplied the Prince with the vessel that took him to Scotland and sailed with him, is an ancestor of mine. As a child I came across a collection of Walsh’s correspondence with the Prince and with a network of Jacobite agents. The letters defined a strange world of spies and intrigue, ambitious schemes and elaborate plots, but also a world of disillusionment and heartbreak. From those pages I could trace the high hopes of Charles and his supporters in 1744 and 1745 through the bitter aftermath of Culloden to the Prince’s decline and the end of the Jacobite dream. For me the story has an enduring mystique and I hope others find it as compelling.

  It is difficult to know where to begin in thanking all the people who have helped me with this book. However, top of the list must be my husband Michael for his help with the research, his encouragement and for stopping me falling too much a victim to the spell of Bonnie Prince Charlie. I must also thank Vera Faith, Clinton Leeks, Neil Munro, Justina Binks and my agent Michael Thomas for their help and advice at various stages in the project. I would also like to thank the staff of the London Library for their efficiency and resourcefulness in locating the main source material.

  Diana Preston

  NOTE ON DATES:

  Sometime before the ’45, the continent of Europe adopted the ‘new style’ Gregorian calendar, whereas Britain used the ‘old style’ — eleven days behind — until 1752. All the dates in the book are given in the old style except for events on the Continent which, unless indicated otherwise, are new style. A good example is that in Rome Charles’s birthday takes place on New Year’s Eve 1720 (new style), but he celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday on 20 December 1745 (old style) as he retreats across the Esk back into Scotland from England.

  NOTE ON QUOTATIONS:

  On the few occasions where the eighteenth-century spelling and punctuation would, in my view, distract from the meaning or be confusing I have modernised them.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Unless you tear our hearts out and rip our breasts right open, you will

  never remove Charlie from us until we are snuffed out. He is woven into

  our souls …’

  In Rome, in early 1788, an old man lay dying in the arms of his illegitimate daughter. There was nothing heroic about his bloated body and protuberant blood-shot eyes, nothing to suggest that here lay one of the most charismatic and compelling figures in British history — Bonnie Prince Charlie. To himself and to others he was a failure. His great ambition, to reclaim the throne of Britain for the Stuarts, had eluded him and the rest of his life had been an embarrassing descent into wife-beating, paranoia, despair and drunkenness. In those final moments his clouded mind may have recaptured his glory days during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. Perhaps, before his eyes dimmed forever, he saw himself young and handsome again, his body ‘formed for war’, as he marched at the head of his ‘brave Highlanders’. Perhaps he wondered how these events would be remembered, or if they would be remembered at all.

  In fact the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 is one of the most enduring. Two and a half centuries later the handsome young hero still gazes at us from the labels of thousands of liqueur and whisky bottles and tins of shortbread. This book tells that story and in so doing seeks to explain the legend and why it has such a special place in our folklore. How did a half-Polish prince, born in Rome, who spoke English with a foreign accent, and whose great undertaking ended in utter failure, become the celebrated ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ of the poems and songs? Why does the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion still rouse such passionate emotions, particularly north of the border?

  The answer lies partly in the story itself which has all the elements of high adventure. Even at the time people acknowledged that it was extraordinary. One of Charles’s officers described the ’45 as ‘one of the most memorable events that has distinguished the times we live in. Everybody knows that this Prince, with a handful of undisciplined men, made himself master of Scotland; — penetrated into the heart of England; — vanquished armies of regular troops in pitched battles; — and for several months engaged the attention and kept in suspense the fate not of Great Britain only, but of Europe.’

  The story has two phases, each important in the creation of the legend. The first saw a series of dazzling successes, as Charles carried all before him and got within striking distance of London, causing a run on the Bank of England and panic among the capital’s citizens. Yet it culminated in the disaster of Culloden, the last battle on British soil. It was the Prince’s only defeat and his cousin the Duke of Cumberland’s only victory, but its impact was devastating, shattering the Jacobite dream and ending the Highland way of life. Culloden soon came to symbolize an heroic but doomed cause.

  However, it is the second phase of the story which cemented Charles himself so firmly into our collective memory, his escape after Culloden and flight through the Highlands and islands have a powerful romantic appeal. It was full of hairbreadth escapes, drama and self-sacrifice. The stories of the faithful Highlanders —including Flora Macdonald — saving him at great risk to themselves and their families have become part of the folklore.

  So the story of the ’45 is truly the stuff of theatre and legends. It comes complete with heroes and villains. Bonnie Prince Charlie converts into the perfect hero, brave, handsome and chivalrous. ‘Butcher Cumberland’ makes an appropriately villainous foil, corpulent as Charles is slender, harsh as Charles is merciful, a libertine in contrast with Charles’s virginal aloofness. Both transcend the centuries, larger than in life and one-dimensional, like characters from a melodrama. Others share the stage like ‘gentle Lochiel’, the Cameron chieftain, and ‘Hangman Hawley’, the suitably hissable Hanoverian general with a predilection for the gallows. There are spies and secret agents, heroes and heroines — particularly Flora Macdonald and the beautiful and martial Lady Mackintosh to add the necessary romantic dimension. There is buried treasure and brave deeds. The sheer magnetism of the story has been celebrated over the years by a mass of songs and poems and novels. The works of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson all helped to nurture it.

  What initially fed the legend was the use of what we might now recognise as public relations techniques. Both sides — Hanoverian and Jacobite — understood the value of influencing public opinion, and Charles was particularly adept at it. From an early age he showed an ability to create the right image and mould audiences, individuals and groups to his will. When Charles arrived in the Highlands in
1745 he consciously used his good looks and charm to appeal on an emotional level, presenting himself as the saviour who had come to throw off the Hanoverian yoke from the shoulders of his oppressed people. He dressed in Highland clothes to show that he identified with the clansmen. He marched at their head and shared their hardships to show he was as tough as them. His tactics were so successful that he became their ‘Tearlach’ or ‘Charlie’. It was they who gave him the epithet ‘Bonnie’ and called the period of the ’45 ‘Charlie’s Year’.

  Charles also knew that he had to appeal to more than just the Highlanders. By his actions he was careful to emphasize his independence from foreign puppet masters, reminding others that he had come to reclaim his kingdom almost alone, with no foreign army, simply relying on the love and loyalty of his people. He also appealed to their pecuniary interests. He offered officers in the service of the ‘foreign usurper’ an extra year’s pay ‘if they joined their natural sovereign’ and encouraged his followers — many of whom were in severe financial straits — to declare for him by offering to indemnify the income from their lands.

  Charles did not have to begin his appeal to hearts and minds from scratch. Ever since his grandfather, James II, had been forced from the British throne in 1688, a vigorous propaganda machine had been churning out poems, pamphlets, songs and ballads. The very term ‘Jacobite’ derived from that period, based on the Latin for James ‘Jacobus’. Each successive rising gave a fillip to this literary creativity giving Charles a well-established role to step into as the Prince from over the water, he who had been ‘lang o’coming’.

  The increasingly influential press was used as a weapon by both sides. There were some twenty newspapers and magazines in London alone, like the London Magazine, the London Evening Post and Henry Fielding’s True Patriot, as well as several in Edinburgh and the other cities. The Hanoverian reporting of events took full account of the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor. They wanted the English, Welsh and Lowland Scots to question why they should risk their growing prosperity under the unglamorous but constitutionally fettered Protestant Hanoverians for the chimerical emotional pull of a handsome young Stuart who was a Catholic and who believed in the divine right of kings. They gave dire warnings about the Rebellion’s effect on trade. They were not above personal abuse, casting aspersions on everything from Charles’s appearance to his sexuality and his motives, and vilifying the Highlanders. They horrified their readers with lurid tales of the Inquisition and reminded them of the Protestants burned at Smithfield in Mary Tudor’s reign.

  The True Patriot made the good citizens of England quake with descriptions of the Highlanders as ‘savage Inhabitants of Wilds and Mountains …’, adding with relish that ‘Some thousands of them are Outlaws, Robbers, and Cut-Throats, who live in a constant State of War, or rather Robbery, with the civilised Part of Scotland’. It waxed lyrical about the Duke of Cumberland, claiming he was ‘an Englishman in his Nature, as well as his birth’. The Jacobites on the other hand were all that was foreign and frightening, a compound of ‘Highland Rapine, Italian Bigotry, and French Tyranny’. The London Magazine invited its readers to contrast the attributes of the Duke of Cumberland and Charles. ‘In Years, Strength and Activity they were nearly equal; both too possess’d the same Constancy of Spirit, and both courted Renown with the same Ardour, but in different Ways. William, in Acts of Beneficence, had no superior; Charles, in the Practice of Tyranny, had no Equal … William was celebrated for his Bravery; Charles for his Chastity … The ruling Passion of Charles was to gain a Crown, and avoid a Coffin; He vied not in Honour with the Worthy, nor in Courage with the Brave; but was not inferior in Pride to the most Rapacious or in Falsehood to the most Perfidious: He lov’d the Men better than the Women; and yet, which is wonderful, the less he courted the Ladies, the faster they followed him.’

  The Hanoverians did not have it all their own way in the campaign to discredit the Jacobites. Charles did his best to refute the most damaging allegations against him and the Jacobite press reported this. The public could read how he demonstrated religious tolerance by attending Protestant services; how he showed his humanity by his treatment of prisoners of war and care for the wounded; how he promised a free Parliament and emphasized his concern for ordinary people by ensuring that everything his army used was paid for and only imposing the ‘rightful King’s’ taxes. However, as he discovered, in the Lowlands of Scotland and in England such reassuring messages cut little ice in comparison with the fierce diatribes of the Hanoverian papers.

  After Culloden the attacks on Charles became less vitriolic. Charles’s adventures during his five months as a fugitive fascinated readers and there was intense speculation about his whereabouts. The reporting became more sympathetic and human, portraying Charles as ‘the young Adventurer’ rather than a sinister Popish agent. As those who had helped him, including Flora Macdonald, were arrested, the details of his adventures leaked out and found their way into the press. Readers were riveted by the accounts of Charles escaping to Skye disguised as a maid. Trailing its next edition, the London Magazine promised ‘We shall give some Account of his Escape and Adventures after the Battle of Culloden, in our next’. It told its readers what happened when Charles sailed to Stornaway. ‘The Night proving very tempestuous, they all begg’d of him to go back, which he would not do; but to keep up the Spirits of the People, he sang them a Highland Song …’. Here we see the legend already in the making, the demon transforming into the hero of popular imaginings.

  It adds a certain poignancy that Charles was able to read the accounts of his own adventures while he was still on the run in the heather. In particular he was moved by the accounts of the executions of the rebels. The Hanoverian newspapers reported fully on these, painting vivid pictures of the hangings, drawings and quarterings as well as the less barbaric deaths on the gallows and the block. The public were also touched by the courage and devotion to the cause of many who died. Their noble behaviour in their final moments and the fine sentiments of their speeches from the scaffold helped to soften the public’s mood. They created images of steadfastness in the face of death and of men who believed they had a cause worth dying for, contributing to the growing romantic aura of the rebellion.

  Another factor in the story’s enduring fascination is the numerous accounts and memoirs written by participants and observers on both sides. The Rebellion was hardly over before men were putting pen to paper writing in explanation, justification and vindication, and with varying degrees of accuracy and veracity. On the Jacobite side the memoirs were legion. The authors all had their particular motives for writing and left vivid insights into what happened and what ultimately went wrong, written, of course, with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight. Rousing speeches at critical moments and confidential exchanges were recalled with surprising accuracy. Lord George Murray, who was the leading Jacobite general and who wrote extensive memoirs, candidly admitted that ‘it is not an easy task to describe a battle. Springs and motions escape the eye and most of the officers are necessarily taken up with what is immediately near to themselves; so that it is next to impossible for one to observe the whole — add to this the confusion, the noise, the concern that people are in whilst in the heat of action’. Others were not so honest and seem to have been in several places at once and not just during battles. On the Hanoverian side men like Henderson, despised by the Jacobites as an ignorant little schoolmaster, dashed off highly colourful and partisan accounts while promising their readers ‘the utmost Candour, the Strictest Impartiality’. Yet whatever the accuracy of these outpourings, they were gobbled up by an avid public. No previous event can have produced such an emotional outpouring of print, either in the immediate aftermath or in later years, or made such an impact.

  The fact that the ’45 failed and brought such dire repercussions on the Highlands is another key to the legend’s emotional appeal. The savage repression — the ‘long series of massacres committed in cold blood’ and the measures to destro
y the clan system — has never been forgotten. It was meticulously recorded by the Jacobite Bishop Forbes who devoted his life to collecting eye-witness accounts for his great work The Lyon in Mourning. He bound the volumes in black leather and gave each title page a deep black border. He also attached ‘relics’ such as remnants of the garters Charles wore in his disguise as the maid Betty Burke, giving the ‘Lyon’ a holy and mystical quality.

  The failure of the ’45 hastened the diaspora which took the legend overseas. The Jacobite clansmen transported in punishment for their part in the Rebellion took it with them as part of their folklore. So did the Highlanders who emigrated of their own accord to seek a new life in the American colonies. As the events receded in time, so they created for succeeding generations an image of a golden age. The Jacobite legend is as strong today in some parts of Canada and America as anywhere in Britain.

  The suppression of the Highlanders and the rapid fading of the Jacobite threat also meant that, from the late eighteenth century onwards, it became safe for the British establishment to embellish and romanticise Jacobite history. This process showed itself in the absurd outfit worn by George IV, the Duke of Cumberland’s great-nephew, on a visit to Edinburgh in 1822, of a kilt, feathered bonnet and pink woollen tights to keep out the cold. It found its way into the tasteless tartan decor of Balmoral and into Queen Victoria’s assertion that she was a Jacobite. Jacobitism had come to symbolize patriotism, honour, chivalry, romance — not revolution. It no longer caused dynastic jitters. Young ladies could choose from a number of genteel versions of ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ to trill away at in the drawing room. The images that would find their way onto the tins of shortbread and whisky bottles were fast taking shape.