by Sam Heughan
SAM
There were three James Frasers killed at Culloden but no James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. It’s extraordinary to think that on that freezing day of 16th April 1746 you even had a ‘Dougal McTavish’ (a hybrid of Graham and his Outlander character), a ‘Jamie Fraser’ and a cohort of MacKenzies all charging into battle together. One wonders how well they knew each other (after all, they’d been together for a while). Had they already fought alongside one another? Perhaps they had shared the meagre amount of food together. But one thing is for certain: they would have run towards those British lines together, screaming their clan war cries, and were among the very few who made it to the British lines.
GRAHAM
The muster roll does not contain the names of all present at the battle, only those for whom records were kept. It is entirely possible that at the close of battle, McTavishes, Frasers and MacKenzies lay dead, side by side, on the cold ground of Culloden Moor.
The McTavishes are listed as finally surrendering in Inverness on 17th May 1746, almost exactly a month after the battle. One can only imagine what they went through for those thirty-one days. Evading government troops, hiding where they could, until, like so many others, starvation forced them to surrender.
SAM
You can only hope the McTavishes who fought at Culloden had more grit than the latte-loving ladyship that stands before me, because imagine poor James Fraser standing next to someone who looked the part until, after standing around for too long on the moor, wanted to put his wee scarf and fleecy on and needed a snack . . . and then a coffee . . . moaning, ‘Urgh, will they just get on with it?! We’ve been here twenty minutes, lumps of metal falling out of the sky, freezing our man nipples off. I want to go and cleave some heads in!’ And then finally the signal to charge comes but Graham – ‘is not ready yet!’ – and is spilling his latte on his brand new fleece, and he hasn’t tucked his plaid into his thermals!
However, when he’s ditched the coffee and is properly tucked in, he charges through the enemy lines raging with anger and battle cries, wielding his broadsword like a scythe through butter. His eyes are wild, he’s splattered in blood, he has a six-pack drawn on with mud, snarling and shouting: ‘Come on your bastards. Come on!’
Brave and savage, he is the epitome of a warrior . . . for a full five minutes. Before needing a little sit-down because – ah – cramp! I’ve got cramp! But there is no director shouting ‘Cut’ in this scene. And Jamie’s already lying in the heather, his mortal enemy on top of him.
For two seasons, with the backdrop of the Battle of Culloden fast approaching, ‘Black Jack’ Randall would become Jamie Fraser’s most feared enemy. He has a thing for lavender oil and for Jamie. Having been raped and tortured by him, Jamie had come to terms with and, indeed, ‘cut out’ the memory of his vile deeds, only for ‘Black Jack’ to appear again at Versailles in Paris in Season Two. Now, amidst the Culloden battlefield (Episode One, Season Three), covered in blood and sweat, Jamie spies his enemy amongst the violence. He smiles, knowing that his fate is to die on the battlefield with the rest of the Scots, but at least he will get the chance to take vengeance on the sadistic British officer (played by the brilliant Tobias Menzies), or die trying.
We rehearsed the final showdown for weeks. Everyone was excited to shoot the famous battle, made all the more poignant that it was the last time I would work with Tobias. He is a softly spoken, charming and generous actor. His natural features, with deep creases down his face, serve like scars from a previous battle and, in spite of being such a nice guy, he plays the most excellent villain. Before a take, I’d see Tobias raise his shoulders and snort like a wild boar, as he channelled his predatory, vicious energy. His torture of Jamie is methodical and emotionless – he is a psychopath in every sense, unable to empathise with or understand his victims. He is fascinated by Jamie’s sense of honour and passion for Claire because he doesn’t understand loyalty or love.
We shot the battle sequence over two weeks during the Scottish summer of 2016. Every day hundreds of extras would gallantly line up and run across the battlefield, take after take. It was quite a workout, I remember going to shoot after an intense session at gym and my legs were like lead. I recall the extras sweating, exhausted and laughing whilst recounting their scuffles with the Redcoats. One had even broken his leg whilst running toward the enemy line. To thank them for their hard work, I ordered a bunch of pizzas one night (but really it was to slow them down so I didn’t have to run as fast!).
The battle was chaotic. Everyone knew their place amongst the larger battle but there were several groups who had set actions that could be moved around. The showdown between Tobias and me was to be in the midst of the madness. Cannons roared and ‘squibs’ (small explosions) were set off as I ran past – it was absolutely terrifying because you couldn’t see where they were in the chaos, until one blew up in your face!
The fight between Tobias and me was strange and poetic. We were to die in each other’s arms in an embrace – the two characters tied in blood and fate, their stories interconnected. During the fight, our characters lose themselves and enter a dreamlike world. A nightmare, surrounded by fire and death, they have been fighting so long they are hallucinating. Eventually, the lethal blows are struck, ‘Black Jack’ severs my femoral artery and then falls onto my sword. In his last moments he calls to Jamie and I believe you can almost hear him whisper, ‘Claire?’
Having sent Claire, pregnant with his child, safely back through the stones, Jamie is released to die with his men on the battlefield. Earlier we had shot a sequence when Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) appears and saves Jamie during a fight. I had been suffocating a man in the mud, beating his brains out with a rock, the violence messy and animalistic. Murtagh is prepared to die by Jamie’s side and Jamie is thankful he’s there.
We shot the night-time sequence with all the bodies on the field, the aftermath and mass destruction of the Jacobite army. Tobias was replaced by a stuntman and then a dummy, as we had to lie there most of the night. Jamie bleeds out and approaches death. Wendy appears; she’s been having a blast the last few days. ‘A bloody hot mess’ is how she describes the Jamie look. Muddy, bloody, but always looking his best. There’s a photo of me, holding a coffee, week two, dazed, tired and covered in sticky fake blood. The blood is so sweet, it attracts the summer wasps and you have to be very careful when you sit down that one hasn’t gone up your bloodstained kilt!
Jamie was finally about to die and it was strange because I had sweated off all the make-up and now looked extremely clean. Wendy wanted Jamie to look porcelain, deathly white and cold. The post production team thought this strange so we had to reshoot much of the sequence, which was a shame as in the original shoot I’d virtually lost my voice from screaming, so my breathing was laboured and raspy. It added a real death-rattle to the whole dreamlike sequence. Just as Jamie is about to take his last breath, Claire appears in a dream and he realises he wants to live. Jamie is rescued by a few Highlanders and carried to safety off the battlefield; however there is one last surprise that our showrunner Ron Moore wanted to shoot. Back on the battlefield, the corpse of ‘Black Jack’ Jonathan Randall, deathly pale with bloodstained lips, opens his eyes and takes a large breath. The producers wanted to keep their options open on whether to bring him back. But, of course, they didn’t.
It was here we said goodbye to many popular characters and, of course, the Highland way of life. Jamie survives, however many of the original cast do not. Shooting the last scenes, especially the execution of Rupert and other Highlander crew, was deeply moving and really sad as we had become a tight band of performers who had all been through a lot together. Grant gets on with the business of dying honourably giving a note-perfect final performance and Jamie survives, but as a shadow of himself. Not wanting to live without Claire, he at first is catatonic, lost, then feral and alone. Claire’s ghost haunts him and he lives within the memory of her, unable to engage properly in the real world. Finally,
he finds some peace at Hellwater in England, resigning himself to being a servant and groomsman for the rest of his life. As an actor, Season Three for me was the most rewarding to shoot. The story was so strong for Jamie and all the guises he has to assume to survive – Dunbonnet, MacDubh, Mac the Groomsman and eventually, Alexander Malcolm, the printmaker. He goes on to rebuild himself and his life, without his true love. It was so sad and bittersweet to go to work each day, playing a man who is only half of himself. However, eventually, Claire returns to him (through the stones once again) and they find themselves on a journey to Jamaica and the New World so the production travels to South Africa, to shoot on the boats and sets outside of Cape Town. I found myself there years later, shooting Bloodshot with Vin Diesel, desperate to see the tall ships we used still sitting in the desert, driven around on four wheels like they were sailing.
The Battle of Culloden marks the decimation of the Highland clans and their way of life and is a pivotal moment for Scotland. Only four years later (1750–1860), a silent revolution began in the Highlands (and later the Lowlands) as the ‘cottars’, who lived in cottages and farmed small lots of land, and tenant farmers were forcibly evicted to make way for sheep. Undoubtedly a part of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions happening across Europe, many historians feel it was also a form ethnic cleansing of the pugnacious Highlanders who had been a thorn in the side to all invaders or powers who tried to quell or subjugate them.
John Prebble in Glencoe writes, ‘The Highland people were once the majority of Scotland’s population, a military society that had largely helped to establish and maintain her monarchy. This society, tribal and feudal, could not change itself to meet a changing world, nor did it wish to.’
During the ‘Clearances’ it’s estimated that 70,000 people left the Western Highlands and Isles between 1760 and 1803, although no one can be sure as many left no record of their departure. Overcrowding and repeated famines hit the ‘crofters’ (formerly farmers) left behind who were unable to work the land that had been communally shared for generations; the land was now owned by landlords and lairds running estates as businesses, which were expected to turn a profit. Around the time of the Scottish Potato Famine (1846–56) the Highlands lost one third of their population to emigration.
Just nine years after Culloden it’s estimated that just over 50% of the Scottish population lived in the Highlands; by 1981 it was 21%, much of the heritage and traditions lost forever. However, some of the culture lived on in the Scots communities who settled in the ‘New World’, particularly in North America, which is possibly why Outlander has captured the imagination of so many Canadian and American fans today.
In the direct aftermath of Culloden all weapons were banned, plaid and Highland dress was outlawed and the bagpipes were declared by the government as a ‘weapon of war’, only to be played by certain people, such as the Highland regiments of the British army. Gathering in large groups was also off the list which, given we have been writing this book during the coronavirus lockdown of 2020, we all know how tough it is not seeing family, friends or clansmen.
Contrary to popular belief, Gaelic wasn’t banned after Culloden (as it has been in 1616). Instead, there was a continual creeping death caused by British educational policy (making English the first language) and a unity between (unequal) trading partners who needed to conduct business in the international language of trade: English.
Catriona explains the only way the Highlanders could start to get certain freedoms back was to assimilate or join the British army in order to protect what was left of their culture. So that’s exactly what happened and it explains why General James Woolf, aged nineteen, was fighting the Highlanders on the British side at Culloden, but only twelve years later was to fall mortally wounded into the arms of a Fraser Highlander on the Heights of Abraham after taking Quebec. A regiment of 1,500 Fraser Highlanders (the 78th Regiment) had been raised by the clan and sent to America to fight alongside the British, helping to win Canada for George II.
GRAHAM
For me the Jacobite story is but one chapter in the rich history of Scotland. One of the things that got me involved in the study of history generally is that it always reveals there were no easy answers. Scotland is no exception to this. Hence why I studied Glencoe so thoroughly – I wanted to see beyond the binary version of events. Good/bad, heroes/villains, black/white. As with Glencoe, the Jacobite Risings are a fantastic example of how history can be perverted. There are some incontrovertible facts. It did mark the end of Highland culture. Atrocities against the local populace were committed by the Crown. But beyond that, it becomes a matter of perspective. The love of the underdog, particularly in Scottish culture (just look at our football team!), leads to a romantic view of Jacobitism. The handsome prince trying to reclaim his homeland. The skirl of the pipes, brave Highlanders plunging to their deaths. But perhaps we should ask, what would Britain have been like if Charlie boy had won at Culloden?
Britain would have fallen under the control of Catholicism and, by extension, Rome.
Many, many people were very afraid of that outcome.
The lot for the average Scottish Highlander would not necessarily have improved (although admittedly they would have been spared having their crofts burnt down). Would the Highland Clearances have happened? Probably. As we have shown, clan chiefs were not necessarily known for their love of the common man. Many, however, had a great love for wealth. Outlander is, at its core, romantic fiction. Enjoyable and popular, but dramatic fiction nevertheless, and as such it needs villains and heroes; it can’t necessarily afford the nuance or close examination of history that reflects what actually happened.
Arguably, one of the most interesting conflicts in the series was the one between Colum and Dougal. Dougal, the headstrong romantic Jacobite; Colum the leader who had to make hard choices. He was a character who reflected how real clan chiefs had to think, as instanced by the different branches of the same clan covering both sides, Jacobite and Crown, in order to survive.
SAM
So what became of the Bonnie Prince? Well, this part really does play out like something from the pages of romantic fiction – he hides out in the moors and mountains, evading capture with the assistance of many clans, none of them betraying him despite the £30,000 bounty on his head (which in today’s money is around £5.5 million!). And he is famously helped by Flora MacDonald, who takes him in a small boat to the Isle of Skye, disguised as her Irish maid, ‘Betty Burke’. Charles returns to Paris, and later Rome, continuing to live a louche life of wine, women and song (as portrayed by Andrew Gower in Season Two), conducting many affairs, one even with his first cousin (what are the upper classes like?) before dying in obscurity in 1788.
After a bracing day on the moor Graham gives me a hug. ‘Thank you for today and for helping make this trip happen.’ I hug him back. A man so passionate about Scotland and so well versed in its history, it is my pleasure to share the journey with him.
We raise our hip flasks to all those souls who perished on that cold April day on Culloden moor. Graham makes a toast to his ancestors and to John Tovey, a private in Munro’s 367th regiment of foot, who was fifty-nine years of age (Graham’s age) when his jaw was shot away that day in April 1746.
We are running out of light and once again darkness is claiming the battlefield. Yet we have one more surprise to honour the fallen. Piobaireachd, literally meaning ‘pipe playing’, is the classical music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. After the banning of bagpipes they created mouth-music, a way to continue to pass on the music through word of mouth, and Ian, a young clan chief and master piper, plays us a slow lament.
It’s the hauntingly beautiful ‘Moladh air Piob-Mhor Mhic Cruimein’ (‘In Praise of MacCrimmons Pipes’) by Clanranald poet Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c.1695–1770).
Thy chanter’s shout gives pleasure,
Sighing thy bold variations.
Through every lively measure;
The war note i
ntent on rending,
White fingers deft are pounding,
To hack both marrow and muscles,
With thy shrill cry resounding . . .
You shamed the harp,
Like untuned fiddle’s tone,
Dull strains for maids,
And men grown old and done:
Better thy shrill blast,
From gamut brave and gay,
Rousing up men to the destructive fray.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Great Escape
Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out shouting ‘Holy Shit, what a ride!’
Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman
SAM
Graham is surprisingly chipper this morning and hasn’t complained once about my driving or his knees being wedged against the dashboard. He is entertaining me with squeaky impressions of the tiny Highland coo dangling by the neck from our rear-view mirror. I think he might have actually relaxed. He even said he’ll think about getting on a motorbike later today.
That’s not just progress, it’s a bloody miracle given the hissy fit he threw over kayaking. Oh, let’s not forget the tandem!
I take a bend faster than I should, throwing Merlin off the sofa bed into the toilet – argh! Sorry! Graham doesn’t flinch, now deep in conversation with the coo and doing his best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.
Arnie: You are zo strong, dareleeng coo. Mighty and hairy. You remind me off me.
Coo (falsetto voice): Oh, Mr Schwarzenegger you’re such a tease!
Arnie: And ve are both vegan.
Coo: You’re no from around here are ye, pal?