The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  Since her daughter was still having the vapours about the ‘odd muckle trallup’ with her gang wide steps’, Mrs Macdonald was forced to enter the room where Betty Burke was sitting to fetch her keys. As she did so the great gaunt creature rose and saluted her. Her suspicions were thoroughly roused by now and she rushed back to Kingsburgh to demand an explanation. ‘Why, my dear,’ he told her, ‘it is the Prince. You have the honour to have him in your house.’ Her response was one of fear rather than gratification and she said they would all be hanged if they were caught. Kingsburgh merely told her to go and get some food. With trembling hands she produced a meal of ‘roasted eggs, some collops, plenty of bread and butter’ and some beer, worrying that this was no fit meal for a prince. After supper Charles poured himself a large glass of brandy and drank to the health of his hosts, saying proudly, ‘I have learn’d in my skulking to take a hearty dram.’ He sat up far into the night with Neil and Kingsburgh, smoking and drinking punch.

  The next morning while the rest of the household was up and about Charles slept on, enjoying the novelty of clean sheets, but Flora was anxious. The boatmen had been sent back to South Uist and, as Kingsburgh’s wife pointed out to her, they were likely to be seized by the militia who would torture them until they told what they knew. She tried to persuade Kingsburgh to wake him but he did not have the heart to rouse the exhausted young prince. Later, when Charles was up, there is a story that Flora came and asked for a lock of his hair at the request of Kingsburgh’s wife. ‘When Miss came in he begged her to sit down on a chair at the bedside, then laying his arms about her waist, and his head upon her lap, he desired her to cut out the lock with her own hands in token of future and more substantial favours.’ Flora kept one half of the lock for herself and gave the other to Mrs Macdonald according to Bishop Forbes. Charles was already assuming something of the character of a saint. Among the other ‘relics’ were the sheets from his bed which were put away unwashed. Kingsburgh’s wife decided she wanted one of them for her shroud and so, apparently, did Flora.

  The ribbon Charles had worn about his head was even to inspire an ode by an admiring lady:

  Most honoured ribband, of all else take place,

  Of greens and blues, and all their tawdry race.

  Thou wast the laurel the fair temples bound

  Of Royal Charles, for greatness so renown’d.

  Thee I’ll reserve, as Heav’n reserves his crown,

  Till his rebellious foes be overthrown.

  Then in thy place a diadem shall shine

  His by his virtues, as by right divine.

  The object of all this veneration was preparing to go on with his journey. He left the house still dressed as Betty Burke. Anne had had to help him because, she claimed, he was so useless at dressing himself he could not even put in a pin without help and ‘was like to fall over with laughing’. Once out of sight of the house he stopped and changed into a new suit of clothes. Kingsburgh had advised him to get out of women’s clothes as soon as possible because ‘he was very bad at acting the part of a dissembler’ and his airs were ‘all so man-like’. The awful journey of the previous day with Betty Burke was burned into Kingsburgh’s memory. The dress was later retrieved and used as a bedcover and Flora was given Betty Burke’s apron.

  Charles hurried on to Portree with only a boy to guide him across the boggy ground. It was raining hard and by the time he arrived at the inn at Portree and met Flora, Neil and Donald Roy, he was soaking. Donald Roy was worried about him but Charles replied that he was more sorry that ‘our Lady [as he called Flora] should be abused with the rain’. Donald tried to get Charles to put on his own kilt and shirt which were dry but the Prince refused to change in front of Flora and said he would eat first. He also called for a dram as the best way to keep out the cold and seems to have ordered a bottle or two. The innkeeper MacNabb had a shrewd idea of who his guest was. He told Donald Roy that Charles looked ‘very noble’ but when questioned by the ferocious Captain Ferguson a few days later he swore he had no idea who his visitor had been.

  Charles and his ‘fair conductress’ parted in the early hours of 1 July, eleven days after they had first met. According to Donald Roy he kissed her hand and said, ‘For all that has happened I hope, Madam, we shall meet in St James’s yet!’ Her reply is unknown but she was to feel the effects of those eleven days for the rest of her life. In fact she was about to be arrested, and if the stories are true Charles had a premonition of this. He had some sugar in his pocket and said to Donald Roy: ‘Pray, Macdonald, take this piece of sugar to our Lady, for I am afraid she will get no sugar where she is going.’ He was right. Within ten days of their parting Flora had been arrested and General Campbell knew every detail of Charles’s escape down to the lilac sprigs on Betty Burke’s dress. Many others who had helped him were also to pay a high price. Kingsburgh was taken. So were the boatmen who, as Kingsburgh’s wife had foreseen, were brutally dealt with.

  North of the border such suffering only added to the power of the legend. South of the border the legend was also quick in the making. It was not long before readers of the London Magazine were being enthralled by accounts of Charles’s escape ‘under the Disguise of a young Lady’s Maid’, and their appetites whetted by promises of further accounts of his ‘adventures’. Even the spiteful Horace Walpole was intrigued: ‘he is concealed in Scotland and devoured with distempers: I really wonder how an Italian constitution can have supported such rigours!’

  These rigours were not over yet. After parting from Flora, Charles had to face another ten weeks on the run. He set off for Raasay, ever hopeful, with a bottle of whisky tied to one side of his belt and a bottle of brandy and a cold hen on the other. His saviours now were the young men of the laird of Raasay’s family, in particular Captain Malcolm Macleod, who had agreed to help Charles make the crossing. However, the island had been thoroughly pillaged with most of the houses burned down and the animals wantonly slaughtered, and could offer little shelter. Charles found refuge in ‘a mean, low hut’, so low, in fact, ‘that he could neither sit nor stand, but was obliged to lie on the bare ground, having only a bundle of heath for his pillow’ and relying on the young laird of Raasay to bring him food ‘viz., a lamb and a kid in the nook of his plaid ….’ He pondered on what he had seen of Cumberland’s revenge on the Highlanders: ‘Surely that man who calls himself the duke, and pretends to be so great a general, cannot be guilty of such cruelties. I cannot believe it,’ was his horrified reaction.

  Charles returned to Skye in fierce gales, with the faithful Captain Macleod and others of the family. When the crew begged to turn back again he urged them on ‘with a merry Highland song’. Back on the island he had so recently left he decided to head for Mackinnon country with Malcolm Macleod as his guide. Once again it was a time for disguises with Charles pretending to be the Captain’s servant, using the name Lewie Caw. He was becoming tired and dispirited and was still suffering from the flux and from lice. He told Macleod he had removed some four score of them but ‘the fatigues and distresses he underwent signified nothing at all, because he was only a single person; but when he reflected upon the many brave fellows who suffered in his cause, that, he behoved to own, did strike him to the heart, and did sink very deep with him.’ He was in an introspective mood, wondering whether he had been put on earth for a purpose and not inclined to take advice on practical things. He had an interesting exchange with Macleod about drinking cold water when he was hot. Macleod told him not to, but Charles was adamant: ‘If you happen to drink any cold thing when you are warm, only remember Macleod … to piss after drinking and it will do you no harm at all.’

  They managed to make contact with the Mackinnons. Charles was looking so appalling with ‘a dirty white napkin’ tied on his head that ‘With hands lifted up [they] wept bitterly to see him in such a pickle.’ It was only with difficulty that Macleod had dissuaded him from blacking his face. The dirty napkin was a compromise to try and conceal Charles’s ‘odd remarkabl
e face’ but was no real disguise. He was lucky to evade detection as they continued their dangerous journey — Charles was a bad play-actor. However, he had other trials to face as well. At one house a serving wench was instructed to wash his muddy feet and legs but ‘offering to wash his Thighs a little too high’ an alarmed Charles instructed Macleod in English to tell her to stop at once.

  He had a fraught voyage back to the mainland he had left ten weeks before, with his companions just managing to outrow a boatload of ‘blood-thirsty pursuers’. Now Charles was confronted with further ample evidence of what had been going on, and he was ‘struck with horror at sight of the devastation and solitude he observed as he went along’. He heard how the homes of Lochiel, Kinlochmoidart, Keppoch, Cluny and many others had been burned to the ground; how women and children had been stripped naked and turned out into the cold to fend for themselves; how the cattle had been driven off and the crops destroyed, how the Highlanders were ‘starving in their lurking holes’. This ruthlessness heightened his resolve to escape because he suspected that if he was captured by Cumberland’s bloodhounds he was likely to be killed out of hand. The Mackinnons shared his sense of danger and tried desperately to find another clan to help. It was like a dangerous game of pass the parcel.

  Old Clanranald refused to take him, so did Macdonald of Morar who was living in a hut since the loss of his house, although his wife, Lochiel’s daughter, greeted the Prince with tears and a dish of reheated salmon. The stakes were simply too high and it was a sobering experience for Charles to realise that he could not rely on all his ‘brave Highlanders’ to risk life and limb for him anymore. Their own circumstances were too desperate.

  However, Angus Macdonald of Borrodale was prepared to shoulder the burden and took Charles to the cave where he was skulking. This was the begining of a twilight life. There were too many redcoats in the glens for him to move by day so it was under cover of darkness that his helpers moved him on from place to place, leading him over the heather and guiding him across deep ravines and hidden gullies. There were some close shaves, but he managed to evade the net. This went on until 24 July when the exhausted young Prince met the eight Glenmoriston men. They had risen for Charles and subsequently turned to a life of banditry, delighting in raiding redcoat patrols. They were not quite in the Robin Hood mould but undoubtedly loyal to Charles. They took a famous oath to him: ‘That their backs should be to God and their faces to the devil; that all the curses the Scriptures did pronounce might come upon them if they did not stand firm to the Prince in the greatest dangers’, and they meant it. They offered him comforts that seemed to him miraculous: ‘making a bed for him, his royal highness was lulled asleep with the sweet murmurs of the finest purling stream that could be, running by his bedside, within the grotto, in which romantic habitation his royal highness pass’d three days, at the end of which he was so well refreshed that he thought himself able to encounter any hardships.’ Charles seems to have enjoyed the camaraderie as they hunted together by day and sat around the fire at night, all in the same disreputable old clothes. According to the accounts, Charles was wearing a dark coat, a tartan vest, plaid and trousers, a saffron-coloured shirt, a scarf around his neck, an abominable wig and bonnet and his shoes were tied together with string. Not the sort of garments to inspire an ode.

  However, news came that the militia were drawing closer and the Glenmoriston men had to leave their cave for the greater security of the mountains. Charles went with them but he was anxious to keep in touch with news from the coast. He was sure the French would be looking for him and a bizarre game of hide-and-seek began, with French officers trying to dodge the militia to find the Prince. As they discovered it was not easy. Maurepas put it in a nutshell writing in mid-June: ‘It seems certain that the Stuart Prince is in one or other of the small islands of the north of Scotland. But he is so well concealed from his enemies and from those who would help him, that both seek him with the same lack of success.’ Charles’s return to the mainland did not make things any easier.

  By 13 July the fact that he had left the islands was known to the Government who unleashed five hundred redcoats and the Highlanders of the Munro and Mackay Independent Companies who began to move westwards to block off the passes and hill tracks from Loch Hourn to Glenfinnan. The cordon was closing and Charles’s only hope was to make contact with his rescuers. As he moved on with the Glenmoriston men through the remoter fastnesses, they tried to learn what was happening in the wider world. What French ships were at hand? Were any French agents seeking the Prince? It was hard to get any clear intelligence and for the Prince it was like trying to play chess without being able to see his opponents’ moves. For much of the time he and his protectors could only guess at where the redcoats were, although there were other occasions when they picked up useful information from the newspapers which were reporting the chase with gusto.

  Charles’s wanderings with the Glenmoriston brotherhood brought him at last to Lochiel’s country. He had not seen Lochiel since Culloden when the chief had been carried from the field, his ankles shot through with grapeshot. His handsome house at Achnacarry where Lochiel had been planting trees when he heard of Charles’s landing had been destroyed. The Cameron chief was reduced to skulking some twenty miles away in Badenoch but was anxious to see his Prince. He sent his brother Archibald Cameron and Mr John Cameron to seek him out. The two Camerons set off and a bizarre sequence of events took place. Almost at once they encountered the messenger sent by Charles to Lochiel, but in this suspicious world of spies and secret agents he was only prepared to reveal Charles’s whereabouts to Lochiel himself. So the party returned to Lochiel and Charles was sent for. After various alarms he and Lochiel were at last reunited in early September. John Cameron described his un-Princely appearance: ‘He was then bare-footed, had an old black kilt coat on, a plaid, philabeg and waistcoat, a dirty shirt and a long red beard, a gun in his hand, a pistol and durk by his side. He was very cheerful and in good health, and, in my opinion, fatter than when he was at Inverness.’ Perhaps the large amounts of brandy he consumed helped Charles keep his weight up during his months as a fugitive.

  It was an affectionate if rather jumpy reunion. Cluny Macpherson’s youngest brother Donald left a vivid description: ‘the joy at the meeting was certainly very great and much easier to be conceived than express’d. However, such was his Royal Highness circumspection that when the other would have kneeled at his coming up to him, he said, “Oh! no, my dear Lochiel,” clapping him on the shoulder, “you don’t know who may be looking from the tops of yonder hills, and if they see any such motions they’ll immediately conclude that I am here, which may prove of bad consequence.”’ However, this was followed by a hearty feast ‘with plenty of mutton newly killed, and an anker of whiskie of twenty Scotch pints, with some good beef sassers made the year before, and plenty of butter and cheese, and besides, a large well cured bacon ham ….’ Charles was in excellent spirits and ‘took a hearty dram, which he pretty often called for thereafter to drink his friends healths; and when there were some minch’d collops dress’d with butter for him in a large sawce pan that Lochiel and Cluny carried always about with ’em, which was all the fire vessels they had, he eat heartily, and said with a very chearful and lively countenance, “Now, gentlemen, I live like a Prince,” tho’ at the same time he was no otherwise served than by eating his collops out of the sauce pan, only that he had a silver spoon.’ The whisky no doubt went down even better with them all. As Captain Burt had observed on his travels, ‘Some of the Highland gentlemen are immoderate drinkers of whisky, — even three or four quarts at a sitting; and in general, the people that can pay the purchase, drink it without moderation.’

  This reunion lasted for two days when it was judged safer for Charles to move on. While he was with Lochiel he had met two French officers who had been nervously scouring the hills for the Prince but their own ship had been captured and there was no news of any other vessels. So it was decided that the c
apable Cluny Macpherson would now take charge of Charles. The last leg of his extraordinary journey was to be a fitting end to all his adventures and features large in the folklore. Cluny decided that the safest place for his royal charge was his ‘cage’, the refuge he had built high on Ben Alder after his graceful colonnaded house had been burned down by Government forces. It ‘was really a curiosity, and can scarcely be described to perfection’, wrote Donald Macpherson who nevertheless did his best. ‘Twas situate in the face of a very rough high rockie mountain called Letternilichk, which is still a part of Benalder, full of great stones and crevices and some scattered wood interspersed. The habitation called the Cage in the face of that mountain was within a small thick bush of wood … This whole fabrick hung as it were by a large tree, which reclined from the one end all along the roof to the other, and which gave it the name of the Cage ….’ It could hold six or seven people, ‘four of which number were frequently employed in playing at cards, one idle looking on, one becking, and another firing bread and cooking.’

  Charles spent some ten days in this ‘very romantic comical habitation’ hidden from the eyes of the world, but it was only a temporary solution. Lord Loudon’s army was a mere ten miles away and it could not be long before news of his whereabouts began to leak out despite all the precautions. Cluny was already preparing him a ‘subterranean house’ in which to face out the winter, if it should come to that, but escape was the real objective. Charles’s heart leapt at the news that two French ships had landed on the west coast and he set out on foot ‘even though at that very time he was troubled with a looseness or flux’. Two privateers from St Malo, L’Heureux and Le Prince de Conti, had slipped into Loch Boisdale on South Uist in early September. After various fruitless enquiries they switched their attention to Loch nan Uamh across the Minch from where contact was at last made with the Prince through a chain of intermediaries. This last stage of his journey was fraught with danger. Again he was travelling by night. He and his companions who included Lochiel had to cross the River Lochy by moonlight in a ‘crazy’ leaky old boat, but their spirits were raised by copious amounts of brandy, all the more palatable because it had come from Fort Augustus. Lochiel said, ‘“Will Your Royal Highness take a dram?” “O” said the Prince, “can you have a dram here?” “Yes,” replies Lochiel, “and that from Fort Augustus too” Which pleased the Prince much that he should have provisions from his enemies ….’