The Road to Culloden Moor Read online

  According to one contemporary, the tactic of the Highlander ‘when descending to battle, was to place his bonnet on his head with an emphatic “scrug”, his second, to cast off or throw back his plaid; his third to incline his body horizontally forward, cover it with his target, rush to within 50 paces of the enemy’s line, discharge and drop his fusee or musket; his fourth to dart within paces, discharge and fling his claw-butted steel locked pistols at the foeman’s head; his fifth to draw claymore and dirk at him!’ Another account described how the Highlanders ‘stooped below the charged bayonets, they tossed them upward by the target, dirking the front-rank man with the left hand, while stabbing or hewing down the rear rank man with the right; thus, as usual in all Highland onsets, the whole body of soldiers was broken, trod underfoot, and dispersed in a moment’.

  Cumberland decided to do something about this. His orderly-book recorded his view that ‘The manner of the Highlander’s way of fighting’ was ‘easy to resist, if officers and men are not prepossessed with the lyes and accounts which are told of them’. He devised and taught his men a new bayonet exercise. Basically this relied on each man lunging at the Highlander to his immediate right rather than his own direct assailant. It was an effective tactic and the troops became so expert ‘that the whole Spell of the Highlander’s irregular way of fighting was broken, as appear’d afterwards in the battle of Culloden’, as one smug account put it.

  None of this boded well for the Jacobites but at least it gave them a breathing space, and while Charles recuperated at Culloden House, the chiefs devised a Highland strategy dear to their hearts. They wanted to keep Cumberland holed up in Aberdeen and retain a grip on the coastal supply line in case aid should arrive from France. They also wanted to reduce the Goverment’s Highland forts, to disperse Lord Loudon’s army, and to repel any Government reinforcements that tried to sneak up through the central Highlands. Lord George cheerfully envisaged a guerrilla campaign lasting several years which would force the English to come to terms. What Charles, lying on his sick-bed, thought of all this is unknown.

  At first the strategy had some success, as Maxwell of Kirkconnell later described: ‘The vulgar may be dazzled with a victory,’ he wrote in lofty tones, ‘but in the eyes of a connoisseur, the Prince will appear greater about this time at Inverness than either at Gladsmuir or at Falkirk.’ Fort Augustus on Loch Ness surrendered on 5 March after a two-day siege when a shell landed in the powder magazine. Its subsequent sacking was a traditional Highland affair with pillaging on a grand scale. However, Fort William, strategically placed at the head of Loch Linnhe as a reminder to the Jacobite clans of Lochaber to toe the line, was not such easy pickings. Neither was the siege so well directed. The director of operations, one Grant, was killed by a stray cannon-ball and the ‘senseless’ Mirabelle was again allowed free rein. He was no match for the fort’s determined and competent commander Caroline Scott, a Lowlander, who was later to achieve an entirely deserved reputation for sadism for the way he hunted down fugitives after Culloden. Not surprisingly the siege declined into stalemate.

  However, the anti-Loudon campaign was effective enough. In his flight from Moy, Loudon had seized as many boats as he could find. These enabled him to flit backwards and forwards across the Dornoch Firth, dodging his Jacobite pursuers. The Duke of Perth decided this must stop. He rounded up a fleet of fishing boats and embarked his men. They sailed across the Firth in a thick fog, surrounded Loudon’s nervous army and scattered it to the winds. Loudon, Forbes and the other leaders were forced to flee to Skye. In the aftermath a number of prisoners were taken and these included Aeneas, husband of ‘Colonel Anne’. On Charles’s orders he was handed over to his wife at Moy where ‘he could not be in better security or more honourably treated’. His wife greeted him with ‘Your servant, Captain’, to which he is said to have replied, ‘Your servant, Colonel.’ Charles was continuing with his policy of treating his prisoners humanely and causing his own men to grumble. One of these, a Mr Peter Smith, ‘who had always very singular ideas’, suggested cutting off the thumbs of their right hands to stop them from holding muskets. But this did not find favour with Charles.

  On 15 March Lord George marched out with his Atholl men. His sights were set on the Government’s thirty military block-houses that dotted the Atholl landscape. Together with Cluny Macpherson’s men he orchestrated a series of early morning raids on 17 March which were so successful that every single blockhouse was taken without the loss of a single Highlander. The victorious raiders returned with three hundred dazed prisoners who had no idea what had hit them. Inspired by this Murray moved on to the siege of Blair Castle, which belonged to his brother, and occupied a strategic position, but this campaign was not a success and, according to an eye-witness account later published in the Scots Magazine, had its farcical side. The castle was being held for the Government by Sir Andrew Agnew, a man of such fearsome reputation that no Highlander would agree to carry the summons from Lord George calling on him to surrender. In the end they decided to send the maid-servant from the inn at Blair who, ‘being rather handsome, and very obliging, conceived herself to be on so good a footing with some of the young officers, that she need not be afraid of being shot, and undertook the mission ….’

  However, her powers of advocacy were not what she had hoped and she was glad to escape from Blair with her life. Agnew promised to shoot the next such messenger through the head but was denied the pleasure when Government reinforcements arrived to help him, including some of the Hessians. Lord George requested twelve hundred extra men to support him, Charles turned him down, and that was that. He said that he did not have that number of men in Inverness. This led Murray to try to treat with the Hessians on his own, knowing that their Prince was still declaring that he had no wish to risk his subjects in a fight between the Stuarts and the House of Hanover. What he hoped to achieve was an end to the rising with a negotiated settlement. However, Charles saw this as nothing less than betrayal and from that day forward had Lord George even more closely watched. All the stories he had been told about Murray’s friendship with Duncan Forbes and former allegiance to the house of Hanover returned to haunt him.

  However, Murray’s soldiers captured a Hessian hussar during the siege. Murray conversed with him in Latin, their only common language, before sending him back with a letter addressed to Prince Frederick asking to know ‘upon what footing Your Highness proposes making war in these Kingdoms’ and whether the Prince would like to have some sort of reciprocal arrangement about the treatment of prisoners. The Hessian Prince’s answer would have been an unequivocal ‘yes’ but he had to consult his portly commander. Cumberland’s response was predictable — and sinister in what it implied. He marvelled at ‘the insolence of these rebels, who dare to propose a cartel, having themselves a rope round their necks’. This was enough for the Hessian who refused to move his men north of Pitlochry, and Cumberland was thus deprived of their support at Culloden.

  Murray’s exploits in Atholl may have lifted Jacobite morale but they had also strengthened Cumberland’s resolve to deal with Charles once and for all. For a while the two rival armies dodged and feinted around each other, but the advantage seemed to be with the Jacobites. They knew the terrain and how to fight in it. They retreated across the Spey believing that a vast force under Cumberland was on the move towards them. Yet as soon as it became clear it was just a reconnaissance, they counter-attacked and won a swift-fought battle against their old enemies the Campbells in the churchyard at Keith. It seemed in those heady weeks that Charles was in the ascendant and that there would be a long campaign with everything to play for. However, as so often in this tale, just when success seemed to be within reach it was snatched away again ….

  Not that the young Prince was really in a fit state to judge his chances of success. He had got over the bout of pneumonia that had struck him down after Moy, thanks to the care of the dowager Lady Mackintosh but he was still weak. On 11 March he set out to tour the Jacobite de
fences on the Inverness side of the Spey but in Elgin he fell dramatically ill with ‘a spotted fever’ which was probably scarlet fever. There was very real concern that he might not recover but in spite of the best efforts of the surgeons who bled him rigorously he survived. It is part of the folklore that on 20 March he insisted on getting up, asserting that if he had to die he would rather do it on horseback fighting Cumberland than lying about in bed sipping gruel, and that people were only ill if they thought themselves so! The sight of their Prince ‘caused a joy in every heart not to be described’ but everything was about to go wrong.

  For one thing Charles was ‘in great distress for want of money’. A consignment of treasure from France aboard Le Prince Charles — formerly the Government sloop of war Hazard — failed to reach him through a series of misadventures. Chased by a British naval squadron, the captain had been forced to beach his ship in the Kyle of Tongue. Knowing how much Charles was depending on the gold, he and his men struggled to carry it along ‘frightful roads’ in hostile territory. They surrendered at last near Ben Loyal having tossed twelve thousand pounds into the heather to keep them out of Government hands. However, this was small comfort to the Jacobites. Maxwell of Kirkconnell described how ‘This last misfortune soon took air … and disheartened the army.’ What it meant was that the Highlanders were reduced to receiving their pay ‘mostly in meal, which they did not like and very often mutiny’d, refused to obey orders, and Sometimes threw down their arms and went home ….’ The London Magazine reported with glee that the enemy camp was beset with ‘Confusion and Mutinies’. Government supporters were delighted. They read in the papers that the most valuable part of the sloop’s cargo had been a cask of consecrated beads to be distributed by the priests, and rejoiced at the thwarting of yet another Popish scheme.

  Another misfortune was that Murray of Broughton had also fallen ill at Elgin at the same time as Charles. He had to be replaced by the manifestly incompetent Hay of Restalrig who was hopeless at organising provisions. Nothing was done to ensure adequate supplies for an army engaged in an arduous campaign in a remote and impoverished part of the country. Without food it was inevitable that men would desert. In addition news began to filter through that ‘the embarkation from Boulogne, which had amused the world so long, and even that from Dunkirk, were entirely laid aside ….’ No military aid was coming from France after all.

  Perhaps it was to forget such bleak thoughts that in those last weeks before Culloden Charles threw himself into a round of feverish gaieties. He went hunting, shooting and fishing. He gave frequent balls for the ladies of Inverness and danced himself which, as Maxwell of Kirkconnell pointed out, ‘he had declined doing at Edinburgh in the midst of his grandeur and prosperity.’ Of course, Inverness was very different from the capital where he had held court. According to one of Cumberland’s men, it was ‘a small, dirty, poor Place’. While it was the capital of the Highlands this was not saying much when the average Highland town was just ‘composed of a few huts’. In the eyes of some the only thing to recommend it was its handsome women. Life was so impoverished there that an onion or carrot was a rarity and when a tailor made a suit of clothes for a gentleman everything, including the thread and buttons, was weighed before him and woe betide if the weight of the finished garments and leftover scraps did not correspond exactly. However, Charles needed to reanimate that sense of romantic destiny that had driven him in the early stages of his campaign.

  The period of dalliance ended with the news that Cumberland was on the move at last. He had left Aberdeen on 8 April, apparently marching on foot with his men as Charles had been so fond of doing. By the time the news reached Charles on 13 April, Cumberland was already over the Spey. It was one of the many mistakes in what was becoming a tragedy of errors that nothing had been done to stop him. The so-called Jacobite ‘Army of the Spey’ which Perth and his brother had boasted would stop Cumberland crossing did nothing to stem the ‘verminous tide of red coats’ as one Highlander described it. The swollen waters had receded and Cumberland’s men forded it in three places without opposition and with the minimal loss of one dragoon and his wife, who fell off their horse ‘lovingly together’, and three women. According to some accounts they were in good spirits. One Government volunteer recorded with gusto how they marched through a village ‘noted for a famous Bawdy-House, kept by an old Woman and her two Daughters’, cheerfully stringing up suspected spies.

  At least the period of waiting was over — the Highland army had been at Inverness for two months suffering all the disadvantages of privation and uncertainty. On 14 April Charles ‘ordered the drums to beat and the pipes to play to arms. The men in the town assembled as fast as they could, the cannon was ordered to march, and the Prince mounted on horseback and went out at their head to Culloden House, the place of rendezvous; and Lord George Murray was left in the town to bring up those that were quartered in the neighbourhood of Inverness ….’ He joined up with Charles later that day. On the following day, Lord John Drummond met up with them as well, and ‘the whole army marched up to the muir, about a mile to the eastward of Culloden House, where they were all drawn up in order of battle to wait the Duke of Cumberland’s coming’.

  This ‘muir’ lay at the north-western edge of a great expanse of upland country known as Drummossie Moor between the Nairn and the Moray Firth. The verdict of many eye-witnesses was that it was a pretty poor place for the Jacobites to do battle. It was probably O’Sullivan’s choice but that was not the only reason Lord George disliked it. He later described his feelings with all the bitterness of hindsight: ‘I did not like the ground, it was certainly not proper for Highlanders. I proposed that Brigadier Stapleton and Colonel Ker should view the ground on the other side of the water of Nairn, which they did. It was found to be hilly and boggy; so that the enemy’s cannon and horse could be of no great use to them there.’ Culloden, on the other hand, was a disastrous choice. ‘Not one single soldier but would have been against such a field had their advice been askt. A plain moor where regular troops had … full use of their Cannon so as to annoy the Highlanders prodigioulsy before they could make an attack.’

  However, this is where the Jacobite army stood to arms on that cold spring day of 15 April, scanning the heather and straining their ears for the first enemy drumbeat. Yet Cumberland did not come. It was his birthday and he was celebrating it snug in his camp at Nairn where his men munched cheese and toasted ‘the youth who draws the sword of liberty and truth’ as one ghastly birthday poem describe him — in half a pint of brandy. Charles’s men shivered on the open moorland, cold and hungry. Their food, the meal which was their payment, had been left at Inverness due to the ineptitude of John Hay. His only response when challenged by a furious Lord George was to bleat ‘Everything will be got! Everything will be got!’ All the men did get on being stood down was a biscuit a piece.

  Lord George was also worried by the fact that the army was anyway below strength. There would be little chance of success in a pitched battle, particularly given the terrain of Culloden Moor. The more he surveyed it the gloomier he became. Nothing was more likely to favour the fighting tactics of regular troops. This persuaded him to agree to lead an attack on the Duke’s camp some twelve miles away at Nairn, provided it was at night and not, as Charles had suggested, at dawn. Cumberland’s men would, he reasoned, be ‘drunk as beggars’. Charles was delighted. For a while he forgot all his grievances against Lord George and embraced him like an old friend. O’Sullivan described how he took him by the hand and placed his other one around his neck, telling him that the glory of the idea was his alone, that by it he would deliver the kingdom from slavery and that he and his father the king would never forget the service he had done. Lord George appears to have been unmoved by all this eloquence. He took off his bonnet, bowed stiffly and said not a word.

  Charles’s euphoria was short-lived. The army set out in two columns — the van led by Lord George with his Athollmen, Lochiel’s Camerons and the Appin S
tewarts. They were guided over the treacherous ground by members of the clan Mackintosh whose territory this was. The second column was led by Lord John Drummond with Charles and the French troops in the rear. The plan was that the first column should make a detour around Nairn and attack Cumberland’s camp from the east and north. The second column was to launch a simultaneous assault from the south and east. However, it was not until eight o’clock in the evening that the army finally set out. By then many men had deserted, desperate for food. ‘When the officers who were sent on horseback to bring them back came up with them, they could by no persuasion be induced to return again, giving for answer they were starving; and said to their officers that they might shoot them if they pleased, but they could not go back till they got meat.’

  It was dark and visibility was made worse by a thick fog. Even more men slipped away across the boggy terrain to search for food, unseen by their commanders. Others flung themselves on the ground, too exhausted to move. Inevitably the first column began to lose touch with the second one which lagged further and further behind, the heavily equipped French troops soon floundering in the ‘trackless paths, marshes, and quagmires’ where ‘men were frequently up to their ankles, and the horses in many cases extricated themselves with difficulty’. The exercise was too much to ask of weary men and it soon became clear that they could not possibly reach Nairn before daylight. There are many accounts of what happened next, as conflicting messages and orders passed up and down the line. According to one eye-witness it was Lochiel who first realised that it was hopeless. He had an urgent conference with Lord George who saw the force of his argument and began the retreat. ‘The day is coming and I have taken my decision,’ he said.