The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  He followed this up with a further proclamation which was a personal appeal to his subjects, laying bare his intentions and his aspirations. He promised freedom of religion and that Parliament would review what could be done about the heavy burden of the National Debt. He warned them against the lies in the weekly papers, ringing with ‘the dreadful threats of popery, slavery, tyranny and arbitrary powers’. He also gave them a sense of the sacred quest he was pursuing. ‘I, with my own money, hire a small vessel, ill provided with money, arms or friends; I arrived in Scotland, attended by seven persons; I publish the King my father’s Declarations, and proclaim his title, with pardon in one hand, and in the other liberty of conscience, and the most solemn promises to grant whatever a free parliament shall propose for the happiness of the people. I have, I confess, the greatest reason to adore the goodness of Almighty God, who has in so remarkable a manner protected me and my small army through the many dangers to which we were at first exposed, and who has led me in the way to victory, and to the capital of this ancient kingdom, amidst the acclamations of the King my father’s subjects. Why then is so much pains taken to spirit up the minds of the people against this my undertaking?’

  While the rhetoric flew the Government in London counted their blessings that Charles had not invaded at once after Preston Pans. Charles had actually gathered his commanders around him on the battlefield that very day and proposed they march immediately to Berwick, where Cope had fled, as a prelude to an invasion of England. However, he was dissuaded on the grounds that they did not yet have enough men and it would be better to wait in Edinburgh while they built up the army. One of the problems was that many clansmen were already melting away to their homes with their booty. A fine example of this was the elderly Robertson of Struan who left for home immediately after the battle riding in Cope’s own personal carriage and magnificent in Cope’s chain and fur-lined nightgown. Chocolate found in Cope’s carriage was soon on sale as ‘Cope’s salve’. Within a few days of the battle Charles’s army was down to only about fourteen hundred which meant that at least one thousand had disappeared. It might, indeed, have seemed a ‘Don Quixote expedition’ as his enemies were fond of calling his army, if he had headed straight for England. On the other hand, Charles knew that delay would only make his enemy stronger. As one Hanoverian volunteer, James Ray, was to write, ‘happy it was for us that they stay’d so long with their Friends at Edinburgh; for had the Rebels, flush’d with Victory follow’d their Blow, whilst the Hearts of his Majesty’s Subjects were dismay’d by General Cope’s Defeat, and very few disciplin’d Troops in England, it is hard to say what would have been the consequence.’

  The question of whether to go south came up again at the first meeting of Charles’s newly-constituted Council. This now consisted of the grandees — the Duke of Perth, Lord George Murray, Lord Elcho, Lord Ogilvy, Lord Pitsligo, Lord Nairne, Lord Lewis Gordon; the chiefs — Lochiel, Keppoch, Clanranald, Glencoe, Lochgarry, Ardshiel; and Charles’s inner circle of Sheridan, O’Sullivan and Murray of Broughton with the devoted, elderly Glenbucket. This unwieldy group met every day in Charles’s drawing-room at Holyrood to deal with everything from major strategy to points of detail about how to govern Edinburgh.

  The unfortunate dynamics within the Council were soon obvious, particularly the distrust between the Scots and the Irish. The Scots disliked the Irish contingent whom they viewed as adventurers along for the ride and, unlike the ‘people of fashion’, with nothing much to lose and able to cheat the gallows by claiming French citizenship. They also saw them as a bunch of ‘yes men’. Elcho later recalled how ‘there was one-third of the Council whose principles were that Kings and Princes can never either act or think wrong, so, in consequence, they always confirmed whatever the Prince said.’ An even more serious problem was Charles’s growing dislike of Lord George Murray who was probably his most competent adviser and who was certainly not a believer in the infallibility of princes. The flames of this dislike were assiduously fanned by Secretary Murray, who saw Lord George as a threat and a rival.

  It was to this diverse group riven by ‘dissension and animosity’ that Charles explained his passionate conviction that they must move quickly. His strong instinct was to attack General Wade at Newcastle where he was waiting to block off a Jacobite invasion. A second victory against Government forces would do immense harm to the Hanoverian’s credibility and encourage Jacobite supporters to come out openly in support. However, the majority of the Council were against such a scheme and Charles yielded. He was subsequently criticised for this in the light of hindsight, but as the shrewd James Maxwell of Kirkconnell, who joined him in Edinburgh, observed, ‘what would have been said of such an attempt had it miscarried?’

  Charles settled into a routine during those weeks of waiting. He divided his time between Edinburgh and Duddingston where the bulk of the army was camped. Holyrood House saw a brief reflowering of its once dazzling court. ‘There were every day, from morning till night, a vast affluence of well-dressed people. Besides the gentlemen that had joined or come upon business, or to pay their court, there were a great number of ladies and gentlemen that came either out of affection or curiosity, besides the desire of seeing the Prince. There had not been a Court in Scotland for a long time, and people came from all quarters to see so many novelties. One would have thought the King was already restored, and in peaceable possession of all the dominions of his ancestors, and that the Prince had only made a trip to Scotland to show himself to the people and receive their homage.’

  Government spies were as active here as they’d been in Rome. One of these painted an interesting picture of Charles to his masters describing how he was ‘always in a highland habit, as are all about him. When I saw him, he had a short Highland plaid waistcoat; breeches of the same; a blue garter on, and a St Andrew’s cross, hanging by a green ribbon, at his button-hole, but no star. He had his boots on, as he always has.’ The same spy noted that Charles practised ‘all the arts of condescension and popularity’, talking familiarly to the meanest Highlanders and making them ‘very fair promises’.

  It was not actually true that Charles always wore the Highland dress. Sometimes he took care to appear in ‘a habit of fine silk tartan, (with crimson velvet breeches), and at other times in an English court dress, with the blue ribbon, star, and other ensigns of the Order of the Garter’. It was all carefully calculated to make the right impact. A later commentator wrote that as Charles moved to the sound of Scottish airs through the halls of his forefathers, ‘an hundred of whom looked down upon him from the walls, that effect must have been something altogether bewilderingly delightful and ecstatic’.

  Amidst all the splendour and magnificence Charles had a relentless round of engagements. Every morning there was the Council meeting. After this Charles dined with his principal officers in public ‘where there was always a Crowd of all sorts of people to See him dine’. After dinner he rode out attended by his life guards and reviewed his army. Again ‘there was always a great number of Spectators in Coaches and on horseback’. After the review he returned to the Holyrood where he received the ladies of fashion in his drawing-room. Later, he supped in public and ‘Generally there was music at Supper and a ball afterwards.’

  However, Charles remained reflective in the middle of these gaieties. He knew the value of wooing the public but he was preoccupied with the task ahead. He managed to marry the two by making noble and lofty-sounding statements. When asked why he did not dance he made the grand reply, ‘I like dancing, and am very glad to see the Ladies and you divert yourselves, but I have now another Air to dance and until that be finished I’ll dance no other.’ These words made a great impression and were repeated with admiration. Those closer to him were also impressed with his single-mindedness. O’Sullivan remarked that it was strange that a Prince of that age who had a passion for dancing and fowling never thought of any pleasures and was as retired as a man of sixty! Charles still showed no interest in women. When it w
as pointed out that the ladies of Edinburgh were at his feet he replied that frankly he would rather be with his brave Highlanders! ‘These are my beauties,’ he is supposed to have exclaimed pointing to a bearded Highland sentry.

  He was probably more comfortable during the times he spent at the camp. Here there was a sense of martial purpose. Lord Elcho observed rather snootily that Charles often slept in the camp and ‘never Strip’d’. However, even here he was not immune from the onlookers. Admirers and critics went to observe him. Mrs Hepburn, a Whig, wrote an enthusiastic account to a Miss Pringle about her visit to Duddingston. She described how Charles was sitting in his tent when she first arrived. The ladies made a circle around it and ‘after we had Gaz’d our fill at him he came out of the Tent with a Grace and majesty that is unexpressible. He saluted all the Circle with an air of Grandeur and affability capable of charming the most obstinate Whig, and mounting his horse which was in the middle of the circle he rode off to view the men.’

  He was the epitome of grace and nobility, dressed to kill in ‘a blue Grogram coat trimm’d with Gold Lace and a lac’d Red Waistcoat and Breeches: on his left Shoulder and Side were the Star and Garter and over his Right Shoulder a very rich Broadsword Belt, his sword had the finest wrought Basket hilt ever I beheld all silver: His Hat had a white feather in’t and a White Cockade and was trim’d with open gold Lace: his Horse furniture was green velvet and gold, the horse was black and finely Bred’, and the lady noted that it had been ‘poor Gardner’s’.

  She saw all the danger of such a young and charismatic figure, conceding that Charles ‘in all his appearance … seems to be cut out for enchanting his beholders and carrying People to consent to their own slavery in spite of themselves. I don’t believe Caesar was more engagingly form’d nor more dangerous to the Liberties of his Country than this Chap may be if he sets about it.’ Mrs Hepburn also observed shrewdly that ‘he will make a great noise and be much spoke of whether he win or lose …. Poor Man! I wish he may escape with his life. I’ve no notion he’ll succeed.’ So here was the fairytale in the making, the handsome young Prince born to charm but destined to waste himself in a doomed cause.

  Charles added to his mystic appeal by apparently reviving the custom of ‘touching for the King’s evil’, whereby the King’s touch was supposed to cure this skin disease otherwise known as scrofula. Queen Anne had been the last monarch to carry out the ceremony and the Jacobites claimed that the usurping Hanoverians dare not ‘lest they should betray their want of the real Royal character’. Charles now conducted the ceremony in the Picture Gallery at Holyrood. A little girl was brought to him and he ‘approached the kneeling girl, and, with great apparent solemnity, touched the sores occasioned by the disease, pronouncing, at every different application, the words, “I touch, but God heal!”’. According to the tales precisely twenty-one days later the child was cured and she became an object of veneration to the Jacobites who no more doubted the efficacy of Charles’s touch than his right to the throne.

  Yet the pageant of life at Holyrood was just a passing phase to Charles. What mattered was attracting sufficient support to enable him to push on into England. Five days after Preston Pans he had despatched George Kelly to Versailles to tell Louis of the victory and to ask again for help. In fact help was already on its way before Kelly reached the French court. As a result of Antoine Walsh’s lobbying, four small ships had sailed for Scotland at the end of September bringing volunteers and arms. The very day before the news of Preston Pans reached Louis he had ordered Lord John Drummond, the Duke of Perth’s brother, to Scotland, with his Royal Scots Regiment amounting to one thousand men ‘full of zeal and desire of shedding the last drop of their blood’ and certainly well-armed and drilled.

  Charles still hoped for a large-scale invasion. He had not forgotten the heady excitement and subsequent despair of those weeks at Gravelines. His spirits were lifted by the arrival in mid-October of an ambassador from Louis in the form of Monsieur du Boyer, Marquis d’Eguilles, aboard one of those four small ships. He interpreted this as a sure sign of Louis’s good faith and exploited it to convince sceptics like Lord George Murray that the French would stand by him. D’Eguilles was ‘vastly well received by the Prince and treated by every body with a Great deal of respect’ as the ‘French ambassador to his court’. The letters he brought from Louis were never shown to the Council but it was given out that Charles’s brother was at Paris and was shortly to embark with a large French invasion force. These claims were to be the source of bitterness and accusations when the help failed to materialise but for the moment they buoyed up the Jacobites’ spirits ‘as they expected to hear of a French Landing daily’.

  Charles had also been trying to rally support in Scotland. Macleod and Sir Alexander Macdonald received dulcet despatches assuring them that he perfectly understood their earlier unwillingness to commit themselves but suggesting that now he had beaten Cope they might like to join him. They did not. He also wrote to other powerful leaders like the Earls of Sutherland and Cromarty, Lords Reay and Fortrose and the chief of the Grants.

  While he waited on these grandees his success elsewhere was mixed. In October Arthur Elphinstone, shortly to become Lord Balmerino, joined together with Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Nithsdale. So did Viscount Kenmure — briefly. Charles received Kenmure very graciously and dined with him, but the next morning he was gone. Murray of Broughton received a ‘triffling letter’ from his wife excusing Kenmure from joining Charles on the grounds that he was the only son left and if anything were to befall him asking what would happen to her and her child — his father had been executed at the end of the ’15. Murray was exasperated at this sign of ‘instability and weakness’.

  Such nervousness was contagious. Lord Nithsdale, who had also dined with Charles that night, ‘after he retired home from the palace was Struck with such panick and Sincere repentance of his rashness that he was confined to bed for some days … where nothing but the most dreadful scene of Axes, Gibbets and halters presented themselves to his waking thoughts’. His father had been sentenced to death in 1715 but had escaped from the Tower, assisted by his mother who employed the standard device of dressing him in women’s clothing. He too decided on a path of discretion rather than valour but not, as in Kenmure’s case, with the agreement of his wife! Lady Nithsdale was ‘so much ashamed of the pusilanimity of her husband that she Scorned to accompany him, but Stay’d in town, quite ashamed of his Cowardice ….’

  Lord Kilmarnock remained loyal — the result of crippling debts and a fervently pro-Stuart wife as much as anything else. He was one of the few Lowland noblemen to join and soon received a rude reminder of how things had changed in the Lowlands since his father had rallied his people in the 1715 rebellion. His father had not had ‘the slightest difficulty in raising a large regiment among his tenants and dependents, all of whom were at once willing to attend their baronial master’. By 1745, however, they were ‘making fortunes by the manufacture of nightcaps, and had got different lights regarding feudal servitude’. All Kilmarnock apparently got out of them were some rusty old weapons.

  Luckily there was some more solid support for Charles. Lord Elcho described how after Preston Pans ‘a great many people of fashion joined the army’. For example, Lord Ogilvy now brought in some three hundred men. Old Glenbucket managed to rally a further three hundred clansmen from the north-east. Mackinnon of Mackinnon brought one hundred and twenty from Skye. True to his word the previously reluctant Macpherson of Cluny who was ‘greatly beloved by his Clan’ was able to raise three hundred fighters, while Lord Lewis Gordon, younger brother of the Duke of Gordon and reputedly ‘more than a little mad’, had gone north to raise the followers of his family. There were also encouraging accounts that the Frasers and Mackintoshes were in arms and ready to join the Prince; the former had been reluctantly raised by Lord Lovat’s eldest son on his father’s Machiavellian orders, and the latter by the twenty-two-year-old Lady Mackintosh, whose husband, chief of that n
ame, was actually in the service of the Government.

  Lady Mackintosh — or la belle rebelle or ‘Colonel Anne’ as she was variously known — was a remarkable young woman. An admirer wrote that ‘it was through the influence of this heroine, endowed with [the] spirit and vigour of our sex, and all the charms and graces of her own, that the Mackintoshes took arms, not only without the countenance of their chief, a thing very rare among the Highlanders, but what is perhaps without example, against him.’

  But it was a slow and frustrating process during those weeks in Edinburgh. So many had deserted and showed no sign of wishing to return. The Jacobite Duke of Atholl, William, was trying without success to rally his men. Lord George Murray urged him to take desperate measures. ‘For God’s sake cause some effectual method to be taken about the deserters; I would have their houses and crop destroyed for an example to others, and themselves punished in the most rigorous manner.’ Burning out was quite a common technique and even the ‘gentle’ Lochiel had threatened his Camerons with it. However, a Government official, Commissary Bissatt, snug in Stirling Castle, was able to report to the rival Duke James that ‘The men are turn’d intirely obstreperous and … very Few will rise for him.’

  However, the cavalry was taking shape under five leaders. Sixty-seven-year-old Lord Pitsligo arrived in Edinburgh with a contingent of horse and foot from Aberdeen and Banffshire. He was a ‘little thin fair man’ of a scholarly frame of mind but ‘a worthy virtuous gent’ known both for his courage and his humanity. Nobody doubted his sincerity when, setting out with his cavalry, he said simply ‘O Lord thou knowest our cause is just. March gentlemen.’ The much handsomer Lord Kilmarnock commanded the horse grenadiers. Murray of Broughton had his ‘hussars’ smart in plaid waistcoats and fur caps, while Lord Elcho was allowed to raise a very handsome company of Lifeguards composed of ‘gentlemen of family and fortune’. As to be expected of this fashionable young man they made quite a splash in their uniforms of red and blue and were ‘all extremely well mounted’. He would have been much affronted at a Whig allegation that they were just a rabble of men ‘such as had no character to lose’. The fifth cavalry leader, Balmerino, was given the troop originally destined for the craven — or perhaps prudent — Kenmure.