The Road to Culloden Moor Read online

  The Camerons and the Stewarts ran too. Lochiel had been wounded in both ankles by grapeshot and was helpless. His men hastily scooped him up and carried their chief with them as they ran, but as the Highlanders fled past the park wall they were fired on by the Campbells who had been lying in wait and now took a bitter toll of their enemies. They drew their swords with cries of ‘Cruachan!’ and, jeering at their foe, advanced onto the moor, hewing and hacking at the stragglers. The Campbells later claimed the distinction of having been ‘the only foot who pursued, and that the regular foot did not advance a step after the action’.

  The Jacobite left, on the other hand, never really attacked. The commanders of the left pleaded with the Macdonalds to charge but they were still some twenty or so paces from the Government lines as the right began to fall back. Keppoch was so ashamed of the behaviour of his men that he charged alone in one of the last great heroic acts of the campaign. He is said to have cried out, ‘O my God, has it come to this, that the children of my tribe have forsaken me!’ and was shot down almost at once, his red and black tartan crimsoning with his own blood. He was later carried from the field by his son and grieving clansmen but died soon after. Clanranald was badly wounded in the head just as he seemed to have won his clansmen round to the charge. Stung to action, the Macdonalds advanced ‘firing their pistols and brandishing their swords’ and daring the enemy to come out and fight.

  Chevalier Johnstone was with them and saw the disastrous consequences. The Hanoverian troops simply picked them off as they stood there yelling their defiance. ‘As far as I could distinguish, at the distance of twenty paces, the English appeared to be drawn up in six ranks [actually three]; the three first being on their knees. They kept up a terrible running fire on us.’ His friend Scotus of Glengarry was cut down at his side. Although the Macdonalds showed the ‘greatest resolution’ they could not stand up to this for long and began to fall back without ever having reached the enemy line. ‘What a spectacle of horror!’ Johnstone wrote. ‘The same Highlanders who had advanced to the charge like lions, with bold and determined countenance, were in an instant seen flying like trembling cowards in the greatest disorder.’ For a while they were given cover by Stapleton’s Franco-Irish force who took up positions behind the walls of the Culloden enclosure and kept up a barrage of flanking fire. Stapleton was to die a few days later of wounds he received in this gallant holding action which cost half his men their lives.

  Meanwhile, Cumberland had seen his chance. He sent his cavalry down on the centre of the Jacobite second line and nearly managed to encircle the Royal Scots. On the right he came close to out-flanking the retreating Jacobites. The jubilant Campbells had breached the west wall of Culloden Park, leaving a space wide enough for the cavalry to pass through three abreast. They were nearly up with the Jacobite rear when Lord George Murray realised the danger. In the nick of time he ordered Elcho’s Lifeguards and FitzJames’s Horse to face the pursuing dragoons. It was not an equal contest. One hundred weary and bedraggled Jacobites on famished horses faced five hundred well armed sturdily-mounted dragoons. Even so, it was more than ten minutes before the dragoons found the courage to attack. Although Elcho and his dogged little band could not hold out for long, they enabled the remnants of the right wing of the Jacobite army to escape in reasonable order.

  It was plain that the game was up. ‘The men in general were taking themselves precipitately to flight; nor was there any possibility of their being rallied,’ wrote one survivor. O’Sullivan came galloping up with a cry of ‘You see, all is going to pot’ and urging that Charles be forced off the field. There are many accounts of those last frantic moments. According to some, Charles was contemplating one last mad act of bravado. He shouted over the roar of the battle that he’d never be taken alive and seemed about to spur his horse forward. Seeing this, Lochiel’s uncle, Major Kennedy, lost no time in grabbing the Prince’s horse by the bridle and taking Charles away. Charles later claimed that he was ‘forced off the field by the people about him’. Whatever the case it was a dreadful moment for him. He had pinned his faith on two things — the invincibility of his Highlanders and his conviction that Cumberland’s men would never fight against their lawful Prince. He had been proved wrong on both counts.

  His Italian valet Michele Vezzosi described his sheer disbelief, how he saw ‘with astonishment these troops which he had looked upon as invincible, flying before the enemy in the utmost disorder and confusion. In vain did he strive to reanimate and persuade them to return to the charge; the mouths of murdering cannon spoke a louder and more persuasive language than all his promises and entreaties could do, though uttered in the most moving terms, such as these: ‘“Rally, in the name of God. Pray, gentlemen, return. Pray stand with me, your Prince, but a moment — otherwise you ruin me, your country and yourselves; and God forgive you.”’ Stirring words, but for once his persuasive powers failed utterly. One of the problems may have been that the Gaelic-speaking clansmen could not understand a word he was saying.

  There was farce in the midst of the disaster: ‘While he was in this confusion and endeavouring to stop the torrent of his men’s flight, his wig and bonnet blew off; the last it’s said was taken up by one of his friends and presented to a gentlewoman of the Roman Catholick religion, who kept it as a sacred relic … His wig he recovered as it was falling from the pommel of the saddle.’

  Charles was in a state of shock. With a small escort that included the faithful Sheridan he galloped towards the ford of Faillies over the Nairn. Halting under a tree he could hear Cumberland’s men cheering. Elcho and O’Sullivan joined him at the ford. Elcho claimed Charles was ‘in a deplorable state’ and completely paranoid about the Scots, convinced they meant to betray him. As more and more Scots arrived, Charles ‘ordered them to go away to a village a mile’s distance from where he was, and he would send his orders thither’. Elcho also accused Charles of only worrying about the fate of his Irish companions and being quite callous about the fate of the Highlanders. In his eyes Charles had fallen from grace and this bitterness characterised Elcho’s feelings about Charles for the rest of their lives. According to one account, he had actually shouted at Charles as he left the field, ‘There you go for a damned cowardly Italian.’

  Charles set off towards Fraser territory, hoping for assistance from Lord Lovat, and ordered the officers to proceed to Ruthven and await further instructions. Meanwhile, Lord George Murray was conducting the retreat of the Jacobite right ‘with the greatest regularity’, pipes playing. Cumberland’s cavalry treated them with considerable circumspection. During their retreat they encountered a party of dragoons who ‘appeared as much embarrassed as the Highlanders; but the English commander very wisely opened a way for them in the centre, and allowed them to pass at the distance of a pistol shot without attempting to molest them or to take prisoners.’ According to Chevalier Johnstone, one officer thought otherwise and decided to take a Highland prisoner. He selected his man and advanced a few paces, only to be cut down by the contemptuous Scot who ‘stopt long enough to take possession of his watch, and then decamped with the booty’.

  Such coolness apparently won him the admiration of the English commander who ‘could not help smiling and secretly wishing the Highlander might escape on account of his boldness, without appearing to lament the fate of the officer, who had disobeyed his orders’. A bit of wishful thinking on the Chevalier’s part perhaps, but it shows the healthy respect of seasoned soldiers for those Jacobite units that were still intact. Cumberland’s men preferred to devote their energies to ‘sabering such unfortunate people as fell in their way single and unarmed’. When he reached Faillies, Lord George took the road for Ruthven and wondered what to do next.

  The retreat of the left had been rather different. According to one Government soldier: ‘A few royals [mortars] sent them a few bombs and cannon balls to their farewell, and immediately our horse that was on the right and left wings pursued them with sword and pistol and cut a great many
of them down so that I never saw a small field so thick with dead.’ The cavalry were relentless, riding down and sabering the exhausted Macdonalds on the Inverness road. There was no mercy and the killing went on to within a mile of the town. Weary clansmen who had sought a few hours’ sleep after the night march were murdered in the bothies and ditches where they lay. Fugitives from the battle were burned alive in the huts where they had taken shelter. Non-combatants were also slain, such as two poor old weavers and a man and his young son murdered by troopers in a ploughed field. ‘The Troops were enraged at their Hardships and Fatigues during a Winter campaign; the habit of the enemy was strange, their Language was still stranger, and their mode of Fighting unusual; the Fields of Preston and Falkirk were still fresh in their Memories.’

  The actual clash of arms had only lasted half an hour, but Culloden was the beginning of a new and greater nightmare. Cumberland’s men were already showing that they were more than victors on the field — they were a merciless army of occupation. Some poignant scenes were acted out. Maclean of Drimnin tried to return to the field — by now a grisly blood-soaked, limb-strewn piece of ground — to search for his two sons. Two troopers tried to stop him. In his rage and desperation he shot one and wounded the other, only to be hacked to pieces by their comrades. Schoolboys like little Archie Fraser, younger brother of the Master of Lovat, had played truant from school to watch from the heather as their fathers and brothers marched out to face Cumberland and had carried the news of the defeat to their homes. Women came to search anxiously among the slain, risking their own lives to find loved ones or help the suffering. Whisky and oatcakes were administered as the last sacraments to dying men. Mrs Stoner, Mrs Leith and the latter’s maid Eppy set out from Inverness on the day of the battle to tend the wounded, left to lie among the corpses in retribution for Charles’s supposed treatment of Cope’s men after Preston Pans. Some wounded Highlanders had managed to crawl from the field only to be found and bayoneted. Others took extreme measures to treat themselves and keep on the move. Mrs Macdonald of Culwhiniac was startled in her kitchen by a Highlander who ran in and thrust the bleeding stump of his severed arm onto the red-hot griddle on which she was baking bread to cauterize the wound. One local witness trapped in the rout saw to his horror ‘a woman stript in a very indecent posture and some of the other sex with their privities placed in their mouth’. He also saw a twelve-year-old boy dead with ‘his head cloven to his teeth’.

  There were many such stories, like the tale of the dragoon who grabbed a new born child from its fleeing mother, Elspeth McPhail, and twirled it round by its thigh before releasing it.

  Cumberland was delighted with his men. ‘You have done the business!’ he congratulated them and if that business included murder he was not concerned. The rebels deserved it and it had his personal seal of approval. Riding across the blood-sodden moor he noticed a wounded Highlander, the twenty-year-old Fraser of Inverallochy. He asked Fraser what was his allegiance. When he answered ‘To the Prince’, Cumberland ordered Brevet Major Wolfe to shoot him. To his credit Wolfe refused but the order was carried out by someone less squeamish. One of the great lies perpetrated in the war of words was that Charles had ordered no quarter to be given to Government troops. Cumberland even produced a forged document. It gave a cloak of respectability to a slaughter which would have happened anyway, ‘since the time was now come to pay off the score, our people were all glad to clear the reckoning and heartily determined to give them receipt in full’.

  Lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock were taken on the field and were lucky not to have been shot out of hand. As a rule of thumb only those whose uniforms showed them to belong to the French army were spared as prisoners of war. Old Lord Balmerino had preferred surrender to flight, but poor Kilmarnock was taken prisoner when he mistook the Government horsemen for his own. He found himself face to face with his own son James, Lord Boyd, who was fighting for King George and who held a hat in front of his father’s face to hide his tears.

  The business done, Cumberland’s infantry lunched on biscuits and cheese on the battlefield and then marched to Inverness, many wearing the hats and coats and bonnets of their slain enemies as trophies. Some were still covered in blood. A Hanoverian officer admitted, ‘The moor was covered with blood and our men, what with killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in the blood, and splashing it about one another, looked like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.’ They created such a spectacle that the inhabitants of the town thought that every chief and man of rank in Charles’s army must have fallen, and quaked with fear. The volunteer James Ray described their consternation with pleasure: ‘The Rebels had order’d the Inhabitants of Inverness to provide all the Oatmeal they could spare, and with it bake Bannocks for their Suppers, against their Return from the Victory; but their Disappointment was very pleasing to us, who came to eat it in their Stead.’ Ray had worked up a fine appetite by cutting the throats of a couple of clansmen he had discovered hiding in the town. It was not long before the execution squads were being sent out from Inverness to kill any survivors they could find, shouting ‘Billy’ as they marched.

  There was pandemonium as the jails of Inverness were thrown open and Government soldiers were released. Their place was taken by new Jacobite prisoners, including the Royal Scots and some of the Irish picquets. More were brought in every hour and the church and other buildings were turned into temporary jails. Cumberland, arriving at Inverness at four o’clock, made himself comfortable in old Lady Mackintosh’s sandstone house in Church Street. He seemed to enjoy sleeping in the same quarters as his cousin. His elderly and acerbic hostess was less than pleased, particularly as he had her locked up and put on a diet of meal and water. This unchivalrous usage caused her to remark that she had had ‘two king’s bairns living under my roof in my time and to tell you the truth, I wish I may never have another’. She had her wish but for now her immediate fears were for her beautiful daughter-in-law who was soon to be a prisoner in Government hands. She was arrested and brought to Inverness where her youth and loveliness captivated many of Cumberland’s officers, though not, of course, Hawley. ‘Damn the woman,’ he is said to have roared over the dinner table, ‘I’ll honour her with a mahogany gallows and a silken cord!’

  Meanwhile, the Stuart ‘bairn’ had made for Gorthlick some twenty miles from the battlefield where he sought the dubious hospitality of Lord Lovat. The old man was in a lather of anxiety and could hardly get rid of Charles quickly enough. ‘Chop off my Head, Chop off my Head, the old Lord cryed out to the unhappy Fugitive: My own Family, with all the great Clans are undone … All the comfort he gave him was two or three glasses of wine, and tradition has it that Charles’s tears mingled with the vintage. Still hedging his bets, Lovat reminded him of Robert the Bruce who lost eleven battles but won Scotland by the twelfth, and offered more help from the Frasers. However, he was plainly anxious for Charles to be off, giving him some cold chicken to put in his pocket. He was later to say that none but a madman would have fought that day.

  The Prince was in despair, convinced that the best thing he could do was to flee to France. He received a message from Lord George to the effect that his Highlanders were full of animation and ardour, and eager to be led against the enemy again, but Charles did not respond with similar passion. Instead, he sent a message that everyone should ‘look out for the means of saving himself as best he could’. This struck a chill into the hearts of the Highlanders. They had never imagined their Prince would abandon them, neither could they understand the justification for it. Surely they were strong enough to fight another day?

  Instead, here was an end of an enterprise that had begun so curiously but had struck so much fear into the hearts of the Scottish Lowlanders and the English. Greater decisiveness, less bickering and clearer objectives might have won Charles the prize without which his life would become meaningless — the paradox was that it was the only battle Charles ever lost and the only battle Cumberland ever won. Charles had
not given up completely. He believed that if he could get back to France he could rally more support for another attempt. However, he did not appreciate that he was leaving his Highlanders to a similar fate to the one which overtook the gallant little garrison at Carlisle. Even if he did return he would not be in time.

  Lord George realised something of this. He sat down and wrote a famous letter to Charles burning with reproach and criticising him for ever having raised the standard without proper assurances from the French. He thundered against the ‘gross incompetence’ of O’Sullivan and the stupidity of Hay in failing to get adequate food for the army on the eve of Culloden. The letter ended with his resignation, but it changed nothing. Charles did not respond directly but wrote a general letter to his chiefs justifying his actions. He said he had only ever desired their good and their safety, and he saw ‘with grief I can at present do little for you on this side the water’. There is no record that they ever received the letter, but they already knew that the end had come.

  Chevalier Johnstone described the last poignant moments of the Jacobite army. Charles’s message had been a ‘sad and heart-breaking answer for the brave men who had sacrificed themselves for him’. It was ‘a most touching and affecting scene’ as they said their ‘eternal adieus’. The Highlanders knew the fate that would soon be upon them — they would be ravaged ‘and themselves and their families reduced to bondage, and plunged in misery without remedy’.

  South of the border the mood was different. ‘Fame, like an Eagle, carried the News of the Defeat upon her Wings.’ News of the Government victory reached London before the arrival of Lord Bury who had been despatched with the glad tidings, but he was able to restore King George’s peace of mind about Cumberland. ‘“What’s become of my son?” George is said to have cried. “He is very well”, answered Bury. “Then all is well to me” replied the King, and unable to speak for Joy, he withdrew for a little, and ordered Bury 1,000 Guineas.’ As the news spread through the city there was open rejoicing. ‘The Joy upon publishing the News was as universal as the Illuminations (the most splendid ever seen) were general and delightful, forming but one continued Blaze.’