The Road to Culloden Moor Page 5

  Then there were the four Irishmen. Firstly there was poor asthmatic indulgent old Sheridan, devoted to Charles but increasingly frail. George Kelly was a parson but also a born intriguer and bon viveur. He had been out in the ’15, was involved in subsequent plots and spent fourteen years in the Tower for his pains before he escaped. His experiences had given him an eye for the main chance. Sir John Macdonald (or Macdonnell) was another elderly man. Having served in the Spanish cavalry, he was appointed ‘Instructor of Cavalry’ but spent much of his time carousing on a truly eighteenth-century scale. The last of the seven was John William O’Sullivan. Born in County Kerry in 1700 and initially trained for the priesthood in Rome, he was the only one with any claim to active military experience. He also had a preoccupation with drink — and in particular ‘mountain malaga’ — at critical points in the campaign, but he was a brave and devoted if sometimes inept follower.

  In addition to the ‘Seven’ of the folklore there were others including a clerk, Duncan Buchanan, the Abbé Butler, who acted as chaplain to the group, Antoine Walsh, Michele Vezzosi, an Italian follower who had helped the Jacobite Lord Nithsdale escape from the Tower after the ’15, and a former servant of Lochiel’s, Duncan Cameron, who was able to act as a pilot.

  This then was the little group that left Belle-Île on 5 July 1745. There was nearly immediate disaster when, just four days later, the Elizabeth and the Du Teillay had a chance encounter off the Lizard with a British ship, the Lion, en route to join its squadron in the Bay of Biscay. Captain Durbé of the Du Teillay described in his log-book how the Lion and the Elizabeth engaged: ‘… the Englishman had time to pass forward, and contrived so well that he fired all his port volley, which raked the Elizabeth fore and aft, and must have killed many and done her great damage, so that the Englishman got between our two ships, and fired from his starboard guns three shots, which passed between my masts; my sails were riddled with his small shot, so much that we did not fire, being out of range to reach him with our small guns.’

  According to legend, Charles, ‘uneasy as to the result’, wanted to go to the Elizabeth’s help but Walsh refused and even threatened to have him confined to his cabin. The ship’s log tactfully makes no mention of this piece of lèse-majesté. ‘After the battle which lasted for the space of six hours’, the Elizabeth was forced to turn back to Brest with her killed and injured. She had been carrying ‘… 700 men aboard, and also a company of 60 volunteers, all good men’ raised by Walsh. The Lion, similarly mauled and ‘like a tub on the water’, limped back to Plymouth with her captain wounded and her master missing an arm.

  At Charles’s insistence the Du Teillay sailed on with her cargo of ageing musketeers. A fortnight later, as the little frigate approached the shores of Scotland’s Long Island, an eagle swooped overhead. The Duke of Atholl turned to Charles and said: ‘The king of birds is come to welcome your royal highness upon your arrival in Scotland. I hope this is an excellent omen.’

  As far as Charles was concerned he had come home. He had little more idea of what awaited him than Sir Galahad at the start of his quest for the Holy Grail but he saw himself in much the same light. He was setting out with zeal, endurance and chaste devotion to recover the Grail of the British throne.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘A NAKED, NEEDY, DESPERATE CREW’

  Charles had grown up with the romance of the Highlands. The Scottish exiles of the Palazzo Muti had filled his head with tales of the loyalty and devotion of the clans. Yet as the Du Teillay threaded her way through the western isles there was no way he could really understand the society that awaited him. Tribal and feudal, driven by passionate loyalties, it was inexplicable even to the Lowlanders of the time let alone the English, to whom the Highlands might as well have been in Siberia.

  Captain Burt, an officer of engineers travelling in Scotland in the early 1730s, left some revealing letters. He described how ‘the Highlands are but little known even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they have ever dreaded the difficulties and dangers of travelling among the mountains; and when some extraordinary occasion has obliged any one of them to such a progress, he has, generally speaking, made his testament before he set out, as though he were entering upon a long and dangerous sea voyage, wherein it was very doubtful if he should ever return …. But to the people of England, excepting some few, and those chiefly the soldiery, the Highlands are hardly known at all …’

  The perceptions of the Highlands and its people were nearly always negative. The scenery was described with words like ‘dismal’, ‘horrid’ and ‘gloomy’. The people were a ‘naked, needy, desperate crew, malnourished and suffering from the itch and savage in their behaviour’. ‘… Ye clans live in a lawless manner’ was the usual sort of sentiment. Henry Fielding went one further for propaganda purposes. In his magazine the True Patriot, launched to rouse his apathetic countrymen against the Jacobite threat, he called the Highlanders ‘banditti … wildmen and savages’, asserting 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’. As the rebels advanced he wrote increasingly lurid accounts of the Highlanders’ savage and unsavoury habits.

  But the society he afterwards admitted to maligning was a highly complex one with profound ideas about loyalty and chivalry, and the vanishing of its culture has become inextricably bound up with the romance of the ’45.

  So who were the Highlanders and where did they live? The true Highlanders inhabited the mountainous region north-west of the Tay. It was a wild remote world where wolves were hunted as late as the 1730s and a belief in magic still held sway. They spoke the Irish language — the tongue of the ‘Gaels’ or ‘Gaelic’ — and their way of life was rooted in the clan system by which they believed that they were descended from a common ancestor. ‘Clann’ in Gaelic means ‘children’, and they regarded the chief as their father.

  An insult to one was an insult to all, and there were deep bonds. The chiefs protected their people, arbitrated in disputes and helped them in times of hardship. In return the clansmen had a duty to turn out and fight for him. The chief had powers of ‘pit and gallows’ over his people and if he was ‘their idol’ he could be a capricious one. An Englishman complained half in jest to his chieftain host that some of his clansmen had been rude to him. To his horror the chief immediately drew his broadsword and offered to cut off their heads. This was not the behaviour of the drawing rooms of Georgian England. Neither was the instant justice dispensed by a Clanranald chieftain to a woman accused of theft. He had her tied to the rocks by seaweed and left to drown.

  To the eyes of outsiders the chiefs seemed an anachronism, brutish hangovers from the feudal middle-ages. This image was encouraged by the occasional scandal. For example, two powerful chieftains, Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat, the Lord of the Isles, and his brother-in-law Macleod of Dunvegan, tried to deport one hundred of their people to the American plantations for profit.

  The ship was discovered and it was the subject of much shocked talk in the Lowlands. The two lairds had a difficult time weaselling out of it but in the event escaped prosecution, which may have been a factor in their refusal to rise for Charles in the ’45.

  As Burt noted, people would not believe that Highlanders who lived by a different code, spoke a different language and wore different clothes could have any redeeming features. Yet he himself discovered ‘… a very high degree of intellectual refinement, entirely independent of the fashion of their lower garments, from the sight of which, and the sound of a language which they did not understand, their neighbours were fully satisfied of their barbarity, and inquired no further’. In 1746 some of the foreign officers who found themselves in Scotland were able to converse with the Highland gentlemen in Latin. They found that those gentlemen were at least as well if not better educated than themselves. They might have studied at the best universities in Europe — Paris or Rome perhaps — and have made t
he grand tour if they could afford it. They were well-read, good conversationalists, elegant dancers and drank the best, albeit smuggled, claret. Some admittedly, were a curious blend of the civilised and the savage like Coll MacDonell of Barisdale who had lines from Virgil engraved on his broadsword but was also the inventor of a fiendish torture device. It held its victim in a vice and propelled them towards a sharp spike aimed at the throat. Its capture by Government troops was quite a propaganda coup.

  But what of these curious ‘lower garments’ that are referred to in such disapproving tones? The English accounts of the time are full of references to the near-naked state of the Highlanders and the immodest sight that could greet the eye on a windy day. The ordinary clansman wore a long plaid either pleated into a kilt or draped around his shoulders over a shirt. In battle the plaid might be cast off completely and they tied their shirt tails between their legs. The plaid was an all-purpose garment serving ‘the ordinary people for a cloak by day and the bedding at night: by the latter it imbibes so much perspiration, that no one day can free it from the filthy smell’. However, the gentry of the clans were better attired. The chief, who was more likely to ride than march, wore tight-fitting tartan trews, a tartan jacket and waistcoat and a tartan plaid held on his left shoulder by a brooch. Like the tribal chiefs of many countries, the sign of his office was the eagle’s feathers in his bonnet.

  Travellers were struck by the hardiness of the Highlanders, living in such harsh conditions and apparently so ill-equipped by their clothing. However, it was a matter of honour among the clansmen to show contempt for hardship. A story was told that the laird of Keppoch, chieftain of a branch of the Macdonalds, was in a winter campaign against a neighbouring laird. He gave orders for a snowball to be laid under his head to help him sleep at night ‘whereupon his followers murmured, saying, “Now we despair of victory, since our leader is become so effeminate he can’t sleep without a pillow”!’ There are many versions of this in the folklore but all making the same point — the Highlander was tough and bred to endurance.

  This superhuman reputation certainly helped to terrify the English. They listened with alarm to tales of almost supernatural powers, of how the Highlanders coped with sleeping out in the hills in cold, dry, windy weather — ‘they sometimes soak the plaid in some river or bourn; and then holding up a corner of it a little above their heads, they turn themselves round and round, till they are enveloped by the whole mantle. Then they lay themselves down on the heath, upon the leeward side of some hill, where the wet and the warmth of their bodies make a steam like that of a boiling kettle. The wet, they say, keeps them warm by thickening the stuff, and keeping the wind from penetrating.’ When it rained they took to the water ‘like spaniels’, ringing out their bonnet ‘like a dish-clout’.

  Housing was primitive. Some of the chiefs might have very grand houses indeed, but the dwellings of other ‘gentry’ were often no more than simple cottages with earthen floors. Much later in the century Dr Johnson was to describe what it was like getting out of a comfortable and elegant bed in such a house and going straight up to his ankles in the mud of the floor. The ordinary clansmen’s bothies were window-less hovels with a hearth in the centre of the room and the walls blackened by peat smoke. They were thatched, but not very efficiently, with turf, rushes, heather or straw. Sometimes a wattle and daub partition provided a second room which could be used to shelter livestock in bad weather.

  Burt described the clansmen’s life graphically: ‘They have no diversions to amuse them, but sit brooding in the smoke over the fire till their legs and thighs are scorched to an extraordinary degree, and many have sore eyes, and some are quite blind. This long continuance in the smoke makes them almost as black as chimney sweepers … the rain that comes through the roof and mixes with the sootiness of the inside, where all the sticks look like charcoal, falls in drops like ink.’

  It was a precarious as well as a harsh existence and many existed on the brink of starvation. The availability of land was the problem. The chiefs had their own land but what mattered was the land they granted their tenants under leases or ‘tacks’. The tacksmen, like Flora Macdonald’s stepfather, were the gentleman farmers of the clans, next in the hierarchy to the chief. They were also the officers of the clan regiments and it was their job to bring out the clansmen in times of war. They farmed some of their lands themselves and sublet the rest to tenants. But they were essentially soldiers rather than farmers. Their agricultural methods were primitive and the land was hard to cultivate. Furthermore, there was not enough land to go round so that a number of families would try to support themselves on a piece of land sufficient only for one.

  As in many other tribal societies, the women did the hard manual work — and there was much of it. In the islands there are even reports of them wading out with their husbands on their backs to the fishing boats to avoid their husbands getting their feet wet. Certainly, the clansmen could seldom be persuaded by Charles to carry equipment or dig trenches. To the English and the Lowlanders the Highlanders had the reputation of being an ‘indolent, lazy people’ when they were not out raiding cattle. But if they did seem to lack energy, ‘lying about upon the heath, in the day-time, instead of following some lawful employment’ it may have been the result of their diet. Burt described it with massive understatement as ‘neither delicate nor opulent’. In the summer many survived on a diet of just milk and whey without bread, hoarding any butter and cheese they made until the winter. They even ate the ‘braxy’ mutton of sheep found dead on the hillside.

  Coastal dwellers hunted whales for ‘sea-pork’ when they could get it. Come the winter food improved. Many beasts were slaughtered to provide barrels of salt meat which supplemented the butter and cheese, but bread was still scarce.

  The Highland fairs provided a chance to barter but they were poor affairs with ‘two or three hundred half-naked, half-starved creatures of both sexes, without so much as a smile or any cheerfulness among them, stalking about with goods … up to their ankles in dirt’. The goods were not appetising even by the standards of the day: ‘the merchandise … is of a most contemptible value, such as these, viz — two or three cheeses, of about three or four pounds weight a-piece; a kid sold for sixpence or eight-pence at the most; a small quantity of butter in something that looks like a bladder, and is sometimes set down upon the dirt in the street; three or four goat-skins; a piece of wood for an axletree to one of the little carts, etc. With the produce of what each of them sells, they generally buy something, viz — a horn, or wooden spoon or two, a knife, a wooden platter … and carry home with them little or no money.’

  Again, as common in tribal societies, a man’s wealth was measured by the number of his cattle. These were the famous black cattle, small but sprightly and ‘very good meat’. They were literally the life’s blood of the poor clansmen. At the beginning of the winter some of the animals would be slaughtered and the meat salted away in barrels. The cattle that were spared for breeding purposes were bled alive. The fresh blood was mixed with oatmeal to make slabs of sustaining black pudding. This meant that by the time the spring came the cattle were so weak they had to be half carried back to the pasture.

  However, it was not all miserable drudgery. The clansman had the security of belonging to a highly structured society. This was exemplified by the fact that the chief had his special retinue or ‘tail’ consisting of his ‘henchman’, his bard, his piper, his ‘bladder’ and his gillies. The henchman was the son of the wet-nurse chosen to foster the young chief as a baby. Nurtured with the same milk, he grew up side by side with his chief as his bodyguard, utterly loyal to him, sacrificing himself in battle if necessary. The bard was the chief’s praise singer and genealogist. It was an hereditary post and on it depended a chief’s hopes of immortality. However, the standard seems to have been variable. Burt described one who sang ‘his own lyrics as an opiate to the chief when indisposed for sleep’.

  The post of piper was also hereditary. He marc
hed behind his chief into battle playing the wailing notes of the clan rant. He was one of the most important figures in the clan and jealous of his position. Burt describes an argument between a piper and a drummer over precedence, with the piper declaring ‘and shall a little rascal that beats upon a sheep-skin, tak the right haund of me, that am a musician?’ The bladier has been likened to the Mafia’s consigliere, a lawyer chosen for his silver tongue in debating, capable of settling disputes because of his encyclopaedic knowledge of precedents and able to relieve his chief of a thousand onerous tasks. Lastly there were the gillies who carried the chief ‘s weapons and baggage and sometimes the chief himself in wet or difficult terrain.

  So these were the people in whom Charles was placing his trust. Fierce, proud, superstitious, loyal, a society of tribal warriors with long memories. The question was which clans would support him. He was coming with only a tiny retinue — there was none of the hoped-for foreign aid, no soldiers, no money, no weapons, just his emotional appeal as their lawful prince come to claim his own. However, at a conservative estimate there were over thirty thousand potential fighters in the Highlands. Quite enough to topple George from his throne if they were prepared to rise for him. Charles believed that he and his cause would be irresistible to all but the most hardened of his enemies and that those who would not join him would at least not fight against him.

  Charles’s first sight of Scotland came on 23 July as the Du Teillay threaded her way through the Outer Hebrides to anchor in the shelter of the island of Barra. Aeneas Macdonald was sent ashore to seek out his brother-in-law Roderick Macneil. He was rowed across to the castle of Kisimul but returned with grim tidings. The Macneil was away from home but worse than that was the news that the Government had arrested the chief of the Macleans of Mull, a leading Jacobite. It looked as if their scheme had been discovered before it had even begun. Sheridan and the Duke of Atholl earnestly advised Charles to return at once to France, but he refused, backed up by Walsh. While the debate was still going on an immediate danger threatened. Captain Durbé recorded in his journal that ‘as soon as our sails were set, we saw a ship tacking, her topsail close-reefed. The said ship is a big one. We take her to be a man of war.’