The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  Charles was never consulted. The first he knew of it was when he came across some of the Duke of Perth’s men heading back towards Culloden. ‘“Where the devil are the men a-going?”’, he demanded and then, ‘Some positively say that he cry’d out, “I am betrayed. What need I give orders when my orders are disobey’d?” …’ He was very keen for sending orders to Lord George to return; but being told that Lord George was already so far on his way back that it would be impossible to bring up the army with time enough to execute the intended plan, he said with an audible voice ‘“Tis no matter then. We shall meet them and behave like brave fellows”.’ One suspects he may have said a great deal more than that. But the net effect was the same — he knew the plan had failed.

  It was an exhausted and hungry army that limped back towards Culloden in the dawning light. It was also a disgruntled one: ‘The fatigue of this night’s march, join’d to the want of sleep for several nights before and the want of food, occasion’d a prodigious murmuring among the private men, many of them exclaiming bitterly ev’n in the Prince’s hearing, which affected him very much. Many of them fell asleep in the parks of Culloden and other places near the road, and never waken’d till they found the enemy cutting their throats.’ They had walked some twenty miles and some of them had had nothing to eat for two days but a biscuit and some water. It was not surprising that morale was low but there was little that could be done to remedy the desperate situation. After the return from Nairn Charles had tried to get a meal for his men but time was simply running out. Moreover, ‘everybody seemed to think of nothing but sleep.’ Exhausted clansmen lay everywhere, in the fields and the ditches, dead to the world and the pangs of hunger. Charles returned to Culloden House and fell asleep — as Cumberland had done that night — in his boots.

  Oblivion was short-lived. The news came that nemesis — in the form of Cumberland’s army — was marching towards them. He was only four miles from Culloden and advancing quickly. There was panic as the drums began to beat. The pipers struck up with the clan rants and men tried to force themselves awake some ‘quite exhausted and not able to crawl’. Charles ordered cannon to be fired to assemble the clansmen. Riders dashed to Inverness to sound the alarm. Those that could made their way to the site chosen by O’Sullivan and formed up as they had the previous day, swaying with weariness and straining to catch their first glimpse of Cumberland’s men. Charles rode to the moor on a grey gelding at the head of the Camerons, an excited but determined figure in tartan jacket, buff waistcoat and a cockade in his bonnet. He tried to rally their spirits, talking of the glories of Preston Pans and Falkirk. ‘“Go on my lads” he said “the day will be ours and we’ll want for nothing after”. He took a sword from one of the clans-men and tested its edge saying “I’ll answer this will cut off some heads and arms today!”’ All that was needed to see off a dispirited enemy was ‘a brisk attack’. O’Sullivan thought him truly princely at that moment.

  This view was not shared by all. Some — like the French envoy d’Eguilles — had tried to reason with him that it was madness to confront Cumberland in this weakened state and that they should withdraw. Charles was deaf to such arguments, still convinced of his destiny and tired of hesitations and delays and sideshows. ‘He could not bring himself to decline battle even for a single day,’ wrote the exasperated Frenchman who hurried off to Inverness to burn his papers and to think about how to save any French troops fortunate enough to survive the coming catastrophe. Others had taken over where d’Eguilles had failed, urging Charles to shun a battle or seek a more favourable site. Lord George Murray and Lochiel had pleaded for a withdrawal across the water of Nairn, but he was not to be moved, listening only to his ‘favourites’ — the Irish — who encouraged his optimism and flattered his ego as Lord Elcho believed. A servant heard him exclaim, ‘God damn it, are my orders still disobeyed?’ Brigadier Stapleton, Commander of the Franco-Irish Picquets, threw his pennorth in by remarking, ‘The Scots are always good troops till things come to a crisis.’ This was a like a red rag to a bull to the touchy Highland chiefs. According to Lochiel, ‘I do not believe that there was a Highlander in the army who would not have run up to the mouth of a cannon in order to refute the odious and undeserved aspersion.’

  This was the mood of bitterness and uncertainty on that chilly April morning. What they were all about to witness was not only the last battle on British soil, but the last time the attacking cry of ‘Claymore’ would be heard against a Government army and the destruction of the Jacobite dream.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘NONE BUT A MAD FOOL WOULD HAVE FOUGHT THAT DAY’

  Wednesday 16 April 1746 was a cold and misty day. Sleet and a bitter wind scoured the faces of the Prince’s exhausted men. By eleven o’clock in the morning the two armies were face to face and just two and a half miles apart. Cumberland marched another half mile forward then drew up his men in battle order. His own Highlanders, mainly Campbells, were on the flanks — men so nimble that:

  With Kingston’s Horse as spies and van,

  From hill to hill they skipt and ran

  To Cumberland’s pleasure his men manoeuvred ‘without the least confusion.’ He was firmly convinced that they would ‘fight better on empty bellies’. Besides, eating first would be tempting fate —he remembered ‘what a dessert they got to their dinner at Falkirk’. Perhaps he reminded Hawley, now commanding his militia and cavalry, of this. He rode amongst his men, a portly but imposing figure urging them to rely on their bayonets. ‘Let them mingle with you,’ he exhorted them, ‘let them know the men they have to deal with.’ Neither could he resist a grand speech. His redcoats were fighting for King and country, religion, liberty and property. Any man that wanted to retire could do so with a free pardon because he would rather lead one thousand brave and resolute men than ten thousand tainted with cowardice. Whatever their feelings his men were wise enough not to put this offer to the test.

  With barely time to absorb this fine rhetoric the Government army was off again, to the beating of drums and the defiant wail of the Campbell pipes. They marched with fixed bayonets wondering what the outcome would be. To a Jacobite onlooker they resembled a deep sullen river, ‘while the Prince’s army might be compared to a streamlet running among stones, whose noise sufficiently showed its shallowness’. As they caught sight of the Government troops the clans let out a mighty roar but it was greeted with dogged silence by the advancing red line.

  The Jacobite army waited. It was only some five thousand strong and faced a foe almost double that number. The first line consisted almost exclusively of the clan regiments with the chiefs at the head of their men, their henchmen and pipers by their side, figures out of Celtic legend. The rigid hierarchies of this most ancient of societies dictated the position of each man. First came the landowners and others equally well-born. Then came the lesser mortals in descending order. In some clans the ranks were as many as six deep with the poor felt-haired humblies at the rear. Whatever their status, they were all in kilts as Charles had decreed several days earlier. The white Stuart cockade was in every bonnet.

  Lord George, as befitted his position and his inclination, commanded the right wing of the first line which consisted of his Athollmen, the Camerons and the Appin Stuarts. The Athollmen had the place of honour on the far right to the anger and the distress of the Macdonalds, but, as Maxwell of Kirkconnell observed, this was hardly the moment for ‘a dispute of that kind’. The Athollmen’s right flank grazed the edge of the Culwhiniac enclosure. There had been sharp arguments about the stone enclosures of Culloden Park. Lord George saw this one as a hindrance and wanted it pulled down. O’Sullivan on the other hand thought its dry stone walls would provide excellent cover for the Jacobite right flank. As usual his arguments held sway with Charles and as usual they proved fallacious.

  The Camerons — some seven hundred strong — stood to the left of the Athollmen. Their bloodthirsty pibroch could be heard loud and clear: ‘You sons of dogs, of dogs of the
breed, O come, come here on flesh to feed!’ The Appin Stuarts to their left were commanded by their chief’s tutor since the chief was only a child.

  Lord John Drummond was in command of the centre with the Frasers and some five hundred men of the Clan Chattan, an ancient confederation of tribes that included the men raised by ‘Colonel Anne’. They were led by the huge Alexander MacGillivray, ‘a clean pretty man’ over six foot tall with red hair and a white skin. The battlefield was close to Clan Chattan’s traditional burial places and it was said with irony that those who perished were ‘much obliged to the soldiers, for by their means many of them died on a spot nearer by one half to the usual place of their burying than if they had expired in the arms of their wives’.

  To their left stood a collection of smaller clans, each with their own proud history and traditions like the Chisholms. This particular family was divided, like so many, between the two sides as a way of hedging their bets. Two of the chief’s sons were with Cumberland while his youngest son Roderick Og was for the Prince. His piper stood at the youngster’s shoulder holding the mystical black chanter of the Chisholms known as ‘The Maiden of the Sandal’. The Chisholms were Catholics and had brought it from Rome. It was believed to have strange powers and that if a member of the chief’s family was about to die not a single note could be coaxed from it. Young Roderick Og waited in the heather and scanned the enemy lines for his two brothers who were with the Royal Scots on the right of Cumberland’s line. He must have been wondering what it would mean if the chanter failed to sound. Would it be heralding his death or his brothers’?

  The Duke of Perth commanded the Jacobite left. The first line consisted of the Macdonald regiments, muttering angrily at finding themselves fighting in this position. Perth tried to inspire them with the idea that ‘If you fight with your usual bravery you will make the left wing a right wing,’ and promised that if they did well he would change his name to Macdonald from that day forward. Such sophistry did not move the thousand or so men of Clanranald’s, Keppoch’s and Glengarry’s regiments.

  Chevalier Johnstone had forgotten that he had never got to bed in Inverness the preceding night and was preparing to fight at the side of his friend Donald Macdonald of Scotus, one of Glengarry’s captains. It was soon to become clear to him and to others that the Jacobite frontline was uneven. The right wing was only some five hundred yards or so from where Cumberland’s forces had finally halted, but the left stretched back more than eight hundred yards — a misalignment which was to have desperate consequences.

  The Lowlanders made up most of the second line behind the clans. Cavalry made up a kind of third line, grouped around the Stuart standard, but by now many were without horses like Kilmarnock’s regiment, Pitsligo’s Horse and Baggot’s Hussars. Their last surviving beasts had gone to strengthen Charles’s Life guards and FitzJames’s Horse. They were hardly, as Cumberland nastily observed, what one generally understood to be cavalry. Neither was Charles’s artillery up to much. It was, as it had always been, a liability rather than an asset, poorly served and consisting of an odd assortment of cannon.

  At first there was a sense of unreality as the two expectant forces faced each other. The Highlanders were ready to leap to the attack as soon as the command was given, but there was nothing but the sound of the pipes and that silent solid wall of red clearly visible through the sleet. At last, just after one o’clock, the battle began. The Jacobite batteries in the centre of the line delivered the opening salvoes — seeking Cumberland, or so the story goes — but the shots went wide. The Government artillery, ably commanded by thirty-four-year-old Brevet Colonel William Belford, responded, the dull boom of their massed three pounders crescendoing across the sodden fields. To eye-witnesses it looked as if their gunners were in turn firing on the Stuart Prince: ‘The battle being now begun, the whole fury of the enemy’s artillery seemed to be directed against us in the rear; as if they had noticed where the Prince was … seeing the imminent danger from the number of balls that fell about him, he was by the earnest entreaties of his friends forced to retire a little off ….’ Charles had a close shave when his groom, Thomas Ca, was decapitated by a cannon-ball and he was spattered with his blood. Minutes later his horse was hit in the flank, forcing Charles to dismount from the terrified animal and find another. Lord Balmerino’s men escorted him to a safer place, but it gave him a less clear view of what was happening which was more than unfortunate given that he was in personal command.

  Meanwhile Cumberland’s gunners were wreaking havoc, ‘making a great slaughter house of the rebels’ battery’. As a new rainstorm burst from the blackening sky, the Hanoverian artillerymen switched their attention to the front of the Jacobite line. It was the first time that Charles’s men had faced disciplined and professional artillery fire. Its influence was crucial. Cumberland was pleased to note that the artillery was ‘rapidly thinning the Jacobite ranks without experiencing any loss in return’. Their next tactic was to switch to grapeshot which swept over the fields ‘as with a hail-storm’ and scythed through the Highlanders like corn as they waited exposed and impotent for their officers to sound the attack. This was truly the day when the Jacobites’ luck ran out. Murray begged Charles to order the attack. Charles did so but his messenger was felled by a cannon-ball which took off his head. Another messenger — Brigadier Stapleton — had to be found, but the delay proved too much for some of the clansmen. With a blood-curdling yell of ‘claymore’ the Athollmen on the right charged without waiting for the niceties of Stapleton’s say-so. The Macdonalds on the other hand refused to budge from their position on the left when Sir John Macdonald passed on Charles’s orders. Neither would they respond to the Duke of Perth and his brother. The disastrous consequence was that the Jacobite right went forward alone.

  It was a brave and strangely beautiful act, the last great Highland charge in Scotland. The clansmen ‘came up very boldly and fast, all in a cloud together, sword in hand’. They attacked with all the ferocity that was their birthright, ‘like Wildcats cutting and hacking and hewing’. Clan Chattan reached the enemy first, their mighty, red-haired, white-skinned colonel, MacGillivray, at their head, but as they charged they swerved to the right seeking firmer ground. The centre joined with the right, ‘and in a sort of mob, without order or distinction of corps, mixed together, rushed in and attacked’. The clansmen were so tightly packed that they could hardly wield their broadswords. Also the stampede to the right had the effect of exposing the flank of the charging centre clans directly to the fire of the Hanoverian centre. The Athollmen charged forward almost at once to support them but got jammed between the swerving centre and the park wall and became target practice for the men of Barrel’s, Monro’s, Wolfe’s and Campbell’s. Some of the Hanoverian troops, including the Campbells, had now got into the enclosures to the right of the park wall and poured in further flanking fire, resting their muskets on the stone walls.

  Maddened by the fierce musketry, the smoke-blackened Highlanders fought and clawed their way through the ranks of Barrel’s and Munro’s regiments to the second line, MacGillivray still in the lead. Bligh’s and Sempill’s fought them off with well-drilled volleys and cold steel. Most of the Highlanders who penetrated to the second line were bayoneted, MacGillivray — pretty no longer — crawling off to die face down in a puddle as he tried to drink. Cumberland’s training was paying handsome dividends. ‘We gave them an English reception,’ boasted one officer ‘and plied them with continual fire from the rear and fixt bayonets in front.’ Barrel’s claimed that after the battle the regiment had not a bayonet ‘but was either bloody or bent and stained with blood to the muzzles or the musket’. Their Lieutenant Colonel Rich tried to parry a broadsword and instead lost both hand and sword. Still he stood and encouraged his men, taking six sword cuts to his head, his face one bloody mess. Lord Robert Ker supposedly ran through the first Cameron Highlander, but was killed immediately afterwards, ‘his head being cleft from crown to collarbone’ by Gillies MacBea
n of Clan Chattan.

  Lord George lost his horse, his hat, his wig and his sword during the desperate assault of the right, and his coat was rent with bayonet slashes, but he found another weapon and stormed back through the ranks of his own men searching desperately for reinforcements. He found some of Lord Lewis Gordon’s men and Lord John Drummond’s Royal Scots and led them back into the eye of the battle. They advanced in good order giving and receiving ‘several fires’ but it was too late, ‘the day was irrevocably lost; nothing could stop the Highlanders after they began to run’. Dynamic in attack, they were equally unstoppable in flight. For a few moments Clan Chattan held their ground, hurling stones and defiance at Cumberland’s men. Then they too turned and ran and limped back through the sulphurous black smoke, but not without their yellow and blue standard. The original bearer, a young Mackintosh, had fallen early in the charge. Now a private soldier held it aloft until the clan began to retreat. Then he ripped the silk from its staff, wound it about his body and fled. Carrying it safe home to the glens he came to be known as Donuil na Braiteach — Donald of the Colours — and his sons were called Angus and Charles of the Colours. Roderick Og, the young leader of the Chisholms, was dead, wounded early by one cannon-ball and killed by another when being carried from the field by his brave henchman. The Chisholms charged the Royal Scots, among whose officers were Roderick’s two brothers. Later when these two found his body among the dead of their clan they washed it and protected it from mutilation.