Killing Fields of Scotland

by R J M Pugh

  The engagement began between 5pm and 6pm, when Wightman’s mortars lobbed shells into Murray’s men on the right wing of the Jacobite army. Clayton’s regiment supported by the men of Clan Munro attacked Murray but were repulsed until Murray’s position was compromised by steady fire from Clayton’s men, compelling him to withdraw to an exposed position which he had to abandon. Lacking sufficient men to attack the Hanoverian left wing, the Jacobite right wing was now vulnerable to attack. Murray’s unsupported 150 men were forced to retreat. Now Wightman ordered his right wing forward against Seaforth on the Jacobite left; Seaforth’s men occupied a strong position sheltered by rocks, but they gave way before they could be reinforced. All the while, Wightman’s mortars had pounded the Jacobite front line, pinning down the Spanish marines in the Jacobite centre. The 250 or so Spaniards held their own until they saw their Highland allies deserting in droves; they had no other option but to surrender at 9pm. Wightman’s losses at Glenshiel were negligible, with twenty-one dead and 100 wounded. On the Jacobite side, casualties were 100 dead, many wounded and most of the Spaniards taken prisoner. Three of the Jacobite commanders were seriously wounded – Lord George Murray, the Earl of Seaforth and Rob Roy Macgregor, although all three survived to fight another day. Cameron of Lochiel went into exile in France, the Earl Marischal to Prussia; the latter never returned to Scotland. The Spanish prisoners were taken to Edinburgh to be re-united with their compatriots from Eilean Donan Castle; all 274 were repatriated to Spain in October 1719.22 Glenshiel was fought on the thirty- first birthday of James Francis Edward Stuart, recognized as James VIII and III of Britain by both France and Spain. On 1 September, James married Clementina Sobieska of Poland; a year later, she presented him with a son, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria – a mouthful for any registrar of births’ book – better known in Scotland’s history as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender.

  Here, it must be said that the political history of Scotland between 1715 and 1719 was a period of government unacceptable to her people. Many unpopular measures were introduced by the Hanoverian parliament, beginning in 1715 when the government passed the Disarming Act forbidding the carrying of weapons in public but not banning their possession. The year 1716 began with the execution of the Earl of Panmure in February for his part in the ‘Fifteen. Equally unpopular was the transfer on 3 September of thirty-nine Jacobite prisoners incarcerated in Edinburgh Castle to Carlisle where they were tried under English law. This incident was deplored by Scottish Whigs and Tories alike, as well as the majority of the population. A further bone of contention was the composition of the Commission set up to deal with the sale of estates forfeited by landowners who had taken part in or sympathized with the Jacobite rebellion in 1715. Four of the six Commissioners were Englishmen and members of the House of Commons, not the House of Lords. Sir John Dalrymple the Lord Advocate was against the punitive Commission; he advised the government that the proprietors should be pardoned but fined. The government rejected Dalrymple’s advice as being a clear indication that Jacobitism was still rife in Scotland. The Commission laboured under Scots law to meet its obligations; their efforts brought the government little by way of profit. The sale of the forfeited estates totalled £84,043; offset against that sum were the expenses of the Commissioners which totalled £82,956, leaving a meagre profit of £1,087. Perhaps the government might have gained more had they heeded Dalrymple’s advice.

  During the three Jacobite rebellions, the government failed to appreciate that it was not fighting solely against Jacobite sympathizers but the old complaint before and since the Union: the Scots resented English meddling in their domestic affairs. In 1725, the Anglo-Irish soldier General George Wade was placed in command of Scotland’s security; between 1725 and 1737, Wade built over 250 miles of military roads and forty bridges in the central and western Highlands, not for the benefit of the local populace but the government. Should the Jacobite threat ever raise its ugly head again, the government would be able to quickly suppress any rising. Only time would tell whether this was a wise development.

  Notes

  1 Ross, The Killing Time, p243.

  2 Holmes, Richard, Marlborough, p172.

  3 Hill, Celtic Warfare 1595-1763.

  4 Drummond, Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, p276 (Abbotsford Club, Edinburgh 1842).

  5 Papers Illustrative of the Condition of the Highlands of Scotland, pp67 and 71 (Maitland Club, 1845).

  6 Douglas, The Scots Book, p318

  7 Hume Brown, History of Scotland, vol. iii, p20.

  8 Quoted in Mackay, A J, A Memoir of Sir James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount Stair (Edinburgh, 1873).

  9 According to G Burnett, History of His Own Time (Oxford, 1823-33).

  10 Hume Brown, op. cit., vol. iii, p157.

  11 Culloden Papers (1625-1748), pp34 and 37 (London, 1815).

  12 Ibid., p42.

  13 Pugh, Swords, Loaves and Fishes: A History of Dunbar, p327; Warrender Letters, The Correspondence of Sir George Warrender of Lochend, Dunbar, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, 1715.

  14 Hume Brown, op. cit., vol. iii, p160.

  15 Brotchie, The Battlefields of Scotland, p206 footnote.

  16 Pugh, op. cit., p73.

  17 Brotchie, op. cit., p207 footnote.

  18 Ibid. p208 footnote.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Quoted in Brotchie, op. cit., p209.

  21 Dickson, The Jacobite Attempt in 1719.

  22 Hume Brown, op. cit., vol. iii, p198.

  Chapter 12

  Jacobites: 1745 – 1746

  Between 1719 and 1745 the political scene in Scotland was dominated by two factions. One was known as the Squadrone Volante (The Flying Squad), led by the Marquis of Tweeddale and the Duke of Roxburghe; the adherents of this party described themselves as independent patriots, Tories and Jacobites. Opposing them was the the faction which looked to John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll (‘Red John of the Battles’ on account of his participation in several of the battles of the War of the Spanish Succession and the battle of Sherrifmuir). Argyll’s party was known as the Argathelians, Argathelia being Latin for Argyll; the Argathelian faction was predominantly Whig and supported the House of Hanover. Argyll had supported the accession of George I. Along with his brother, Archibald Campbell, Lord Islay, Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, Argyll virtually ruled Scotland; Islay founded the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1727.1

  In the General Election of 1722, the Whig party gained a large majority in the House of Commons. Argyll and Sir Robert Walpole worked together in the administration of Scotland although their different temperaments made them dislike each other intensely. Walpole, regarded as Britain’s first prime minister, was a staunch Whig and what Dr Samuel Johnston would have described as a ‘clubbable man’; possessed of a coarse wit and cheerful disposition, Walpole was loose in his morals and inelegant in his general manner. Argyll was a man of entirely different stamp, aristocratic, cultured, well-read, haughty, impetuous, selfish with an almost feudal sense of his superiority over the common man, although he treated his own household servants with respect. The writer Jonathan Swift described him as a petty intriguer, a greedy courtier and a factious patriot.

  It became government policy to play the rival Squadrone Volante and Argathelian factions against each other, employing the age-old principle of divide and rule. From the accession of George I in 1714, the Tory Squadrone faction considered itself the most likely to enjoy royal favour and for a few years this was the case. However, in Scotland, it soon became obvious that the Argathelian Whig faction enjoyed the support of the majority of the nation; Argyll went from strength to strength, particularly after Sheriffmuir. In 1719, Argyll was appointed High Steward of the [Royal] Household, then he was elevated to Duke of Greenwich in 1720. When Walpole became Chancellor of the Exchequer and ex officio Prime Minister, the Argathelian faction exercised an authority in England which it had not hitherto enjoyed. However, it was not long before Argyll and Walpole clashed over the
latter’s fiscal policy in relation to Scotland. For example, in June 1725 Walpole levied a tax on every barrel of ale brewed in Scotland, a measure which Walpole believed would be more acceptable to the Scots than the hated Malt Tax they had resisted in 1713. The new tax was seen as a devious English imposition, an attempt to rob the poor man of his daily ale. Riots occurred, notably in Glasgow, a town which had proved the most loyal of the Scottish burghs to the Hanoverian government; the Edinburgh brewers took a more sanguine approach by refusing to brew ale until the obnoxious tax was repealed. The Squadrone’s foremost adherents, the Duke of Roxburghe, Secretary of State for Scotland and Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate also protested against the tax. Walpole resolved this problem by first removing Dundas from office, then Roxburghe and abolishing the post of Secretary of State for Scotland in 1725. Henceforth, Scotland would be administered by an English Secretary of State. (The post of Scottish Secretary would be reinstated a few years later, then abolished again in 1746 until 1885.) The new Lord Advocate, Duncan Forbes of Culloden received the news of Roxburghe’s dismissal with ill-concealed delight. In principle, responsibility for Scottish affairs was given to an English minister; in practice, Scotland was administered by Archibald Campbell, Lord Islay, Argyll’s brother, known as ‘the King of Scotland’.

  As for northern Scotland, measures were introduced in 1725 to ensure peace would be maintained in the Highlands, still regarded as a hotbed of Jacobitism. Lord Advocate Forbes introduced an Act for Disarming the Highlands as the previous act of 1715 had been largely ignored. Forbes’s measure was based on a report by General George Wade who had surveyed the Highlands in 1725. Wade was appointed commander in chief of the army in Scotland; his mission was to keep the unruly north pacified which Wade believed would be achieved by the creation of several forts linked by good military roads.

  When George II ascended the throne in 1727 on the death of his father, he retained his father’s ministers, the Argathelians remaining the predominant faction; even so, Argyll and his brother Islay had become unpopular on account of their autocratic, overbearing hold in Scotland. Their unpopular policies drove many to join the Squadrone faction which began to attract Tory and Jacobite peers and commoners. By 1733, the Squadrone faction had grown strong enough to challenge the Opposition, entertaining hopes of a majority in the General Election of 1734. Although neither faction achieved their desired majority, the Argathelians continued to enjoy the support of Walpole despite their unpopularity in Scotland. In 1741, another General Election brought the Squadrone faction to power; the Duke of Argyll defected to the rival faction, chiefly on account of the animosity between himself and Walpole. As for Walpole, he resigned from the House of Commons; on his departure, the Marquis of Tweeddale was appointed to the revived office of Secretary of State for Scotland. Argyll had lost his former authority, power and credibility in Scotland; when he criticized Tweeddale’s administration of Scotland, the English Secretary of State, Baron John Carteret, bluntly informed Argyll that Scotland would now be governed differently. Argyll’s ego was bruised; his haughty temperament could not bear the humiliation and in March 1741 he resigned from the House of Lords. Argyll had dominated Scottish politics for seventeen years; in that time he had been criticized by his enemies for putting his own interests and those of his party first and favouring English interests at the expense of Scotland. On 27 May 1742, Argyll delivered his farewell speech in the Lords, retiring to his birthplace in Sudbrooke, Surrey where he died on 4 October 1743.2

  In the period 1707 to 1744, Scotland’s disaffection with England and the London government was not only political but geographical; the Scots felt that Westminster was too far removed from Edinburgh which they rightly believed meant that they were being overlooked and dismissed by their supposed partner; for its part, England regarded Scotland as a nation which from the thirteenth century had been the cause of so many wars in the past and more recently the Jacobite uprisings. Since 1707, to many Englishmen, Scotland had become little more than a colony, her political voice irrelevant, her people backward, particularly in the Highlands which were considered bordering on the barbaric, a region disposed to rebellion, discreetly and openly seeking the return of the Stuart dynasty. The Jacobites believed that the return of James VIII and III would restore Scotland’s prestige and greatness; the events of 1745 would certainly confirm the views of the English regarding the exiled Pretender to the throne.

  The main agent for the Jacobite cause in Scotland was George Lockhart who had been approached by the Old Pretender in 1718 to keep him appraised of developments in Scotland. Lockhart remained in constant correspondence with the Jacobite court in Versailles and St Germain-en-Laye until 1727. By then Lockhart had come to the conclusion that the Jacobite cause was dead in the water and so he retired from public life.There had always been the hope that events in Europe might raise enemies against England who would rekindle the Stuart cause; by 1727 there seemed virtually no prospect of this occurring and Lockhart, together with many supporters of the exiled House of Stuart, had lost any surviving confidence in James Francis Edward Stuart’s ability to regain his throne. Under Walpole’s guidance, England continued to remain free from policies which might lead to war with Europe. However, a key moment arrived in 1739 with the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession which offered hopes of a Jacobite revival in the same way that the War of the Spanish Succession had provided an opportunity for the Jacobite disruption of 1708.

  It all began with the affair known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, an incident which would not have been out of place in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In 1731, Captain Richard Jenkins, master of a brig out of Glasgow had been involved in trade with Spain’s Caribbean colonies since the Treaty of Utrecht had settled the War of the Spanish Succession. But Spain had grown tired of the foreign traders and in 1731 Spanish coastguards boarded Jenkins’s vessel; during an argument, they cut off Captain Jenkins’ ear with a sword. When Jenkins reported the incident to parliament in 1739 – why did he take so long? – there was uproar in an England demanding redress against the outrage. On 19 October 1739 Walpole, the man of peace, reluctantly declared war on Spain, the incident of Jenkins’s Ear melding with the War of the Austrian Succession. Apart from some British naval successes, little of note occurred until Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Austria in 1740 to dispute the accession of Empress Maria Theresa which had been settled in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht. France and Spain supported Frederick; what had begun with a mutilated ear exploded into a major international incident. Jacobite sympathizers in Scotland welcomed the news, France and Spain both being longstanding supporters of the House of Stuart and enemies of the House of Hanover. Although Britain did not formally declare war on France, support for Austria was a tacit admission of hostility; both Britain and France took part in battles but described themselves as ‘auxiliaries’. Matters came to a head on 27 June 1743, when George II at the head of a combined Hanoverian and English army defeated Louis XV of France at the battle of Dettingen. War between France and England had always presented the surest guarantee of a Jacobite resurgence; the most direct and effective way of threatening the security of Britain was to strike at England through Scotland, with support from the exiled House of Stuart. Louis XV needed a diversion to distract Britain, so he approached James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, offering military aid and money for another Jacobite rising. But, by 1743, James was old and had lost interest in any hope of regaining the British throne, so he delegated the task to his twenty-three-year-old son Charles Edward Stuart, a young man who had never set foot in Scotland nor led an army into battle. The appointment of the Young Pretender as he became known would prove disastrous.

  A French invasion fleet on a scale much in excess of that of William of Orange in 1688 was planned for the year 1744; the fleet, commanded by Admiral de Roqueville set sail from Brest in February. It consisted of twenty-two warships carrying 4,000 troops, augmented by an army of 15,000 commanded by Marshal
Maurice de Saxe to be conveyed in transports from the port of Dunkirk. Yet again, Britain was saved by the elements, February being a particularly stormy month. To make matters worse, Roqueville was challenged in the Channel by a superior British fleet commanded by Admiral Sir Charles Norris; the Frenchman was reluctant to risk his command and decided to make for home when another storm erupted. While the storm saved the warships, it destroyed de Saxe’s troop transports and the invasion was aborted. That should have been an end to the matter but fate took an unfortunate turn in the person of the young Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The Prince alienated the people of Britain by his association with France, the enemy of England, if not the entire British nation; it was an association he would learn to regret for a variety of reasons, not least France’s failure to support him when the moment arrived.