The Road to Culloden Moor Read online

  Four hundred volunteers were left behind. These included the Manchester Regiment under Francis Townley together with a few men from the regiments of Gordon of Glenbucket, Lord Ogilvy, the Duke of Perth and Colonel Roy Stewart. There were also some hundred or so Jacobites in the service of the French but they knew that, if captured, they would be treated as prisoners of war not traitors. It was the Manchester men and the Scots who were to suffer the full weight of Cumberland’s malice when he captured the town a few days later. The Duke wrote to the Duke of Newcastle with the grim comment that ‘I wish I could have blooded the soldiers with these villains, but it would have cost us many a brave fellow, and it comes to the same end, as they have no sort of claim to the King’s mercy and I sincerely hope will meet with none.’ He had his wish.

  Half of the officers including Townley were to be hanged, drawn and quartered and those other officers and men who survived the terrible conditions in the prisons and the hulks were transported to the colonies. But they did not realise the terrible fate that was so soon to overtake them as Charles thanked them for all they had done and suffered in his cause. He promised a speedy return with increased forces before the enemy could retake the town. Neither did Charles guess that in a matter of days his corpulent cousin would make a point of lodging in the same house and in the same bed that Charles had occupied. It was around this time too that Francis Strickland, one of the original seven men of Moidart, died of dropsy at Carlisle.

  The army left Carlisle on Charles’s birthday — 20 December (old-style) — and made for the border ten miles away. When they reached the river Esk at Longtown they found that the heavy rain had turned it into a flood. Government spies believed it to be impassable but they had reckoned without the courage and determination of the Highlanders. To the astonishment of the French envoy d’Eguilles, they formed a human barrier against the torrent: ‘We were a hundred men abreast, and it was a very fine shew: the water was big, and took most of the men breast high. When I was near cross the river, I believe there were two thousand men in the water at once.’ Charles played his part in this, relishing the opportunity for heroics and apparently saving one lad from drowning by grabbing him by the hair. The faithful O’Sullivan said, ‘The men seeing the horses go over tho’ with a great deal of difficulty, cried out that they wou’d pass it, as they did, which was one of the most extraordinary passages of a river that cou’d be seen. The Prince stopped them, & went in himself with all the horse we had, to break the stream, that it shou’d not be so rapid for the foot; this of his own motion. The foot marched in, six in a breast, in as good order, as if they were marching in a field, holding one another by the collars …’ According to him, the only losses were a couple of poor women ‘that belonged only to the public’ and who were swept away. Like others he thought it was significant that Charles should be in both England and Scotland on his birthday.

  Extraordinary scenes took place on the Scottish banks of the Esk. Bonfires were lit, the pipes began to play and they danced Highland reels to get themselves dry. According to Lord George this did not take long, ‘for they held the tails of their short coats in their hands in passing the river, so when their thighs were dry, all was right’. Lord George had dressed for the occasion as well. ‘I was this day in my Phillibeg, that is to say without Breeches … and nothing encourag’d the men more than seeing their Officers dress’d like themselves and ready to share their fate.’ In spite of all the hardships there was a sense of wild euphoria. ‘They had carried the standard of Glenfinnan a hundred and fifty miles into a country full of foes; and now they brought it back unscathed, through the accumulated dangers of storm and war.’

  Charles’s enemies also understood what an extraordinary feat it had been, though they were more inclined to blame English lassitude than Highland daring. The True Patriot, while exulting in the retreat, asked ‘… can History produce an Instance parallel to this, of six or seven Men landing in a great and powerful Nation, in opposition to the inclination of the People, in defiance of a vast and mighty Army …. If we consider, I say, that this Handful of Men landing in the most desolate Corner, among a Set of poor, naked, hungry, disarm’d Slaves, abiding there with Impunity, till they had, as it were, in the Face of a large Body of his Majesty’s Troops, collected a kind of Army, or rather Rabble, together …’

  It was the beginning of the legend and Fielding stated angrily that it was England’s fault as a ‘sinful nation’. He even went so far as to call it ‘our Sodom’.

  There was great relief in England that the rebel army had crossed back into Scotland ‘which to the generality here is the same as Norway’. As Horace Walpole wittily observed, ‘No one is afraid of a rebellion that runs away.’ The citizens who had been packing up their belongings and biting their nails vented their relief in some vicious pursuits. An apothecary surgeon in Macclesfield bought the body of a Highlander who had been overtaken and hanged at Cheadle. He paid 4s. 6d. ‘to have had leather of the skin (worth his money) which he accordingly gave to a tanner to dress’. For whatever reason the tanning did not work, causing Jacobites to claim that the skin had mystical properties whereupon its ghoulish owner buried it. Another individual ‘had a highlander flayed to make himself a pair of breech of the skin and sent it to three tanners to have it dressed’. Perhaps he had more success.

  Words were as savage as deeds. Stories abounded of the repulsive habits of the Highlanders. ‘Wherever they rested they had let fall their ordure all over the towns, and at people’s doors, so caused the towns to stink intolerably; many of them also fouled their beds …’ An epigram on their disgusting behaviour ‘during their flight’ appeared in the Newcastle Gazette: ‘Such filthy farting, pissing, shiting. (From Nature be’t or Fear of fighting). Gives a shrewd proof, to make an end on’t. Charles is a warming pan descendant. When thus he leads, from kindred clans. An Army of Scotch warming pans.’

  But this warming pan army was not yet a spent force as events would show.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘GOOD GOD! HAVE I LIVED TO SEE THIS?’

  The question was the familiar one — what next? It had been a spectacular achievement to bring the Highland army safely home, but without clear objectives the clansmen would simply melt away. Lord George was suffering from ‘a most violent cold and cough’ contracted a few days earlier and which had not been helped by floundering about in the freezing Esk. The whole army was exceedingly weary as it trudged on into Scotland. A contemporary verse sneered at the raggle-taggle force:

  And with joy they ran home,

  To the place whence they come,

  To Beggary, Oatmeal, and Itch.

  The True Patriot also took the trouble to try to debunk the idea of Charles’s personal charm. It carried a supposed letter from one young lady in the country to another in Edinburgh. It was not true, she declared, that Charles was a ‘charming Man’ with ‘courtly, easy, winning, killing Behaviour’, doing everything with ‘an Air of Majesty and Charms’. She knew better, ‘For I am informed by one who has seen him, that this Charmer is a black lanthorn-jawed Italian, and not to be compared with either of the Princes of the True Royal Blood, in Comeliness of Person.’

  Meanwhile, on 21 December the ‘Charmer’ had reached Dumfries — ‘a considerable town, full of fanatical Calvinists’. He lodged somewhat unromantically in what is now the Commercial Hotel. Remembering the citizens’ previous lack of co-operation, he levied the excise and demanded two thousand pounds and two thousand shoes from the indignant citizens. The Highlanders meanwhile helped themselves to nine casks of gun powder, any arms they could lay their hands on and every house ‘that could be found in town or country’. The True Patriot wailed about their wicked behaviour among these good loyal Lowland citizens: ‘The Nastiness of these Savages is scarce credible. They may indeed be compared to Hogs, the same Stye in which they eat and sleep, serving them for every other Occasion of Life. These Wretches being now returned to Scotland, persist still in their Plunder.’

 
From Dumfries he marched to Drumlanrig where the Highlanders occupied the castle, seat of the Duke of Queensberry. His Grace received an agonised account of how the men laid straw in all his fine rooms to sleep on and defaced a portrait of William of Orange with their claymores. Even worse: ‘They killed about 40 sheep, part of your Grace’s, and part of mine, most of them in the vestibule next the low dining-room and the foot of the principal stair, which they left in a sad pickle, as they did indeed the whole house.’ They drank all the Duke’s spirits and most of his wine and were cheerfully making off with his bed linen until intercepted by the Duke of Perth who made them give it back. He was not the man to think lightly of the pillaging of a ducal home.

  On Christmas Eve Charles arrived at Hamilton and lodged in its beautiful Palace. It must have been a strange Christmas. Only two years ago he had still been in Italy, eagerly awaiting his summons from Louis. That French help had not materialised, but he had not given up hope. In Dumfries he had assured his army that troops were on their way. He spent his first and last Christmas day in Scotland in one of his favourite boyhood pursuits — hunting — and rounded it off with a fine dinner of a turkey costing three shillings.

  On Boxing Day afternoon the Prince entered Glasgow — one of Scotland’s ‘prettiest (but most whiggish)’ towns — to the chagrin of its citizens. No one cheered, ‘nor did the meanest inhabitants so much as take off their hats’. They knew that Charles meant to punish them for their former behaviour. Not only had they refused to help him but had raised a battalion against him. False reports that the Duke of Cumberland had defeated the Jacobites near Lancaster had brought them cheering onto the streets just a few days previously. So now they got their desserts as far as Charles was concerned. He forced them to cough up ten thousand pounds’ worth of shirts, stockings, bonnets, waistcoats and shoes to clothe his ragged Highlanders.

  However, the Prince still could not believe that these dour townspeople could really remain impervious to his charm. The reports describe how he sallied forth in his French garb, ‘more elegantly, when in Glasgow, than he did in any other place whatsomever’. He held a ball but the Glaswegian ladies refused to attend and delivered the coup de grâce by declaring that he was ‘not handsome’. Nevertheless, he had his devoted circle of Jacobite ladies which for a while is supposed to have included young Clementina Walkinshaw. She was from a fervently pro-Stuart family and her father had been a Jacobite agent. She had been named after Charles’s mother who was one of her godmothers. She met Charles again a few days later at Bannockburn House where, according to some accounts, she first became his mistress. Whatever the case, she was later to be his mistress in exile.

  At this stage Charles’s mind was probably not on love. The situation in Scotland was quite different from the one he had left behind. Government troops now controlled Edinburgh, Lord Loudon held Inverness, and the Royal Navy was setting up a blockade on such a scale that it would be well nigh impossible for any French ships to slip through. In addition, Charles had now heard the dismal news of the fall of Carlisle. In the circumstances the best bet seemed to be to march north to rendezvous with his supporters at Perth and to besiege Stirling Castle. On 3 January the Highland army moved out of the Whig city ‘in a handsome manner’, to the beating of the drums, colours flying and pipes piping, and to the great relief of the townsfolk. At Stirling they met up with Lord John Drummond and his troops from France and with Lord Lewis Gordon. Lord Lewis was brother to the Duke of Gordon who, while sympathetic to the Prince, had prudently decided to keep out of things. Nevertheless, he had done nothing to stop his brother conducting a recruiting campaign in Gordon country. Lord Lewis had had mixed success and wrote a letter to the Duke of Perth which complained that both the gentry and the common people were ‘more Remiss than I expected, and I am credibly informed … that their slowness is chiefly owing to Vile Presbyterian Ministers who abuse the Prince’s goodness towards them by inculcating a Parcel of infamous Lies into the people’s heads.’

  However, Lord Lewis made some headway, mostly by threats, and raised a couple of well-equipped battalions. Other welcome reinforcements had arrived with Lord Strathallan bringing Frasers and Farquarsons. Lord Cromarty and Lord Macleod had raised the Mackenzies. Lord Cromarty was the target of one Whig account of the rebellion which claimed to be ‘A Genuine Narrative of all that Befell that Unfortunate Adventurer [Charles] in the most Candid Manner and every fictitious Embellishment avoided’. The author went into gleeful and irrelevant detail about the unsavoury habits of the Earl as a young man. During one debauch he and some others apparently seized a man who was ‘fix’d in a Posture proper for their purpose. They took a burning Candle, and applying it to the Orifice of the Anus, put the Man to the most horrid Pain. How they treated the fair Sex,’ the writer primly observed, ‘I do not chuse to mention; Tho’ I have heard many Particulars on that Subject both in Ross and elsewhere.’

  There were also the four hundred Mackintoshes rallied by Lady Mackintosh. Dressed in a tartan habit trimmed with lace, with a blue bonnet on her head and a pair of pistols at her saddle-bow, ‘Colonel Anne’ rode through her husband’s country and succeeded in raising enough clansmen to form a battalion. This was the biggest Jacobite force yet assembled, despite the inevitable desertions which had plagued them since crossing back from England. Chevalier Johnstone recorded how the army found itself all of a sudden ‘the double of what it was when we were in England’.

  The town of Stirling fell to the Jacobites on 8 January due to the ‘Pusillanimity, Disaffection and Cowardice of a few of the Inhabitants’, or so the London Magazine announced disapprovingly. But the defenders of the castle were made of sterner stuff and defied the rebels. The protracted siege of the fortress was to prove a dangerous distraction from more fruitful activities. One factor in this was the arrival from France, in company with some cumbersome artillery, of a French engineer Mirabelle de Gordon — a man of awesome incompetence. Johnstone described the confidence placed in Mirabelle on the grounds that ‘a French engineer, of a certain age, and decorated with an order, must necessarily be a person of experience, talents, and capacity; but it was unfortunately discovered, when too late, that his knowledge as an engineer was extremely limited, and that he was totally destitute of judgment, discernment and common sense. His figure being as whimsical as his mind, the Highlanders, instead of M. Mirabelle, called him always Mr Admirable.’ Neither he nor the artillery from France were to have any effect on Stirling Castle which remained untaken.

  Meanwhile Charles had caught a fever and was being nursed back to health at Bannockburn by Clementina, using the fashionable cinnamon treatment. Perhaps it was soothing to be able to talk to her about Rome where she too had spent part of her childhood. Whatever the case it seems that a bond was formed between them. However, the period of calm did not last long. On his second day at Bannockburn Charles received one of those visits from Lord George Murray that he had learned to dread. Lord George brought a petition from the chiefs asking him to convene a council of war and containing an irritating list of all the things which they believed would not have gone wrong had Charles been prepared to call one earlier. In his fragile state this caught him on the raw. So did the grumble that his men were volunteers not mercenaries and that he ought to be more considerate towards them.

  Charles responded with his famous riposte that since this was an army of gentlemen of rank and fortune he might have expected more zeal, more resolution and more sheer good manners. He concluded that his authority might be taken from him by violence but that he would ‘never resign it like an idiot’. The love affair with his chiefs was clearly at an end. However, before the crisis could develop the situation changed. News of an imminent French landing sent Cumberland dashing back to London. Yet another verse had been added to the national anthem to celebrate the House of Hanover:

  George is magnanimous,

  Subjects unanimous;

  Peace to us bring:

  His name is glorious,

 
Reign meritorious,

  God save the King!

  Cumberland himself was celebrated in a special prologue added to performances of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’. The words combined loyalty with sugary sentiment:

  O! Thou who dost o’er human

  Acts preside, If Britain is thy care be William’s guide;

  The noble Youth, whom ev’ry Eye Approves,

  Each Tongue applauds and ev’ry Soldier loves;

  Another change was that Wade had been replaced by the infamous Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley. This charming character, ‘with no small bias to the brutal’, had been amusing himself while he waited for reinforcements at Edinburgh by building gibbets on which to hang any prisoners. He also took the precaution of making sure that hangmen accompanied his army. He was hated by his men for his macabre cruelty. In Flanders he had hanged a deserter in front of his windows. He so enjoyed the spectacle that he was reluctant to sell the body to the surgeons for dissection. His solution was to ask for the skeleton back to hang up in the guard-room! His brigade-major, James Wolfe, the later victor over the French at Quebec, did not mince his words. He wrote that his men dreaded his severity and despised his military knowledge. Hawley, on the other hand, was immensely conceited. In the ’15 he had fought at the Battle of Sheriffmuir on the victorious right wing and did not believe that ‘these Rascalls’ of Highlanders were anything to worry about.