The allocation of stations to the various Jacobite regiments was also inept. Even worse was the truly appalling system of communications. Charles Edward later testified that he sent the order to attack eight times to Lord George before his command was acted on.94 The fiasco over the uncoordinated order to charge shows all the negative factors coming together to produce disaster. The centre charged before they had received the order. The left did not charge when they did receive it. No account was taken of the sloping formation, which meant that the MacDonalds on the left would have farther to run before falling on Cumberland’s right.95 A good general would have ordered the MacDonalds forward a minute before the Athollmen to compensate for this. If they had refused to move, the Jacobite right would then have been saved from the certain annihilation involved in a unilateral charge.
The worst single order of the day was the incomprehensible one to Ogilvy’s regiment, previously detailed to prevent flank attack through Culloden Park. Not only were they ordered away from this crucial station, but they were then withdrawn to form a reserve, with idiotic instructions not to fire unless ordered to do so.96
On the other hand, there may be answers to some of the more common military criticisms levelled personally at the prince. One is that he should not have demoralised his men by allowing the reality of Cumberland’s greatly superior numbers to sink in on them while both sides manoeuvred for flanking positions.97 The prince was alive to this consideration, which was why he gave Murray the order to charge when he saw Cumberland’s artillery floundering in the mud. He had earlier opposed the retreat across the Nairn for this very reason: that it would give the clansmen the opportunity to ponder pessimistically Cumberland’s larger numbers.98
The second criticism is the most obvious. Why did he allow Cumberland’s artillery to play uninterruptedly on his men for more than twenty minutes, first with cannon, then with case and grapeshot? Surely to stand by doing nothing was unforgivable incompetence? The answer here is that the prince was vainly trying to work out a Culloden Park flanking movement in reverse. He sent John Roy Stewart’s Edinburgh regiment to cross the Nairn and work its way round to the rear of Cumberland’s forces.99 If he could contrive this, the Edinburgh regiment would then mount a diversionary attack in force with the advantage of wind and rain. When Cumberland’s rear wheeled about to face this new threat, the Hanoverian battle line might then become hopelessly confused. But while Stewart and his men were vainly trying to find an unguarded way across the Nairn, terrible punishment was being meted out by Cumberland’s artillery.
Yet the question of Charles Edward’s military competence must ultimately go beyond his contingent actions on Culloden field. What happened there that afternoon between 1 and 2 p.m. was the end point of a long causal chain. Ultimately, the reason for Jacobite failure at Culloden has to be sought in the relations between the prince and his lieutenant-general.
One of the prince’s problems from the outset was that he did not possess among the ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ anyone of real military ability. Charles Edward himself had neither the innate aptitude nor the experience to be his own captain-general. Although history provides many examples of young men achieving military distinction, in most cases they had a single mentor or a core of battle-hardened veterans to lean on. Even Caesar had his Marius and Alexander his Parmenion.
But because of an intrinsic clash of personalities, the prince had to rely on a man he neither liked nor trusted. If there had been anyone comparable in military ability with Lord George, the prince would have discarded Murray. Yet Murray was by common consent far and away the most able Jacobite commander. He stamped his authority on the clan army from the very first. His military dominance was as clear-cut as the prince’s personal one. Murray carried the council with him by reason of his military brilliance alone. Before the ’45 he barely knew the clan leaders he won over to his point of view.100 Murray was neither an active Jacobite nor a great territorial magnate.
Yet because the prince felt a visceral dislike for Murray, he followed the advice of the hopelessly incompetent O’Sullivan. This was almost an ‘objective correlative’ of the internal process whereby the prince’s negative feelings triumphed over positive ones. Murray himself eventually came to glimpse the truth of this. During the period of ‘skulking’ after Culloden, he was filled with a morbid conviction that he had failed the prince, that his brusqueness, impatience and lack of deference had played into the hands of Charles Edward’s evil geniuses among the Irish and had encouraged the prince’s worse side to prosper.101 The decision to fight at Culloden was a self-destructive act. Even so, the damage could conceivably have been limited if Murray had been given the command.
The experience of Culloden temporarily threatened to unhinge the prince. He was adamant that he had lost only because he had been betrayed.102 Whereas the retreat on the night march was a genuine shock and might well have elicited cries of ‘betrayal’, it is difficult to see how any rational person could have responded in this way to defeat at Culloden. It was evident to everybody that, at the very least, defeat on Drummossie Moor was probable rather than possible. Why, then, the insistence on ‘betrayal’?
The obvious answer is guilt. The prince was guilty because at some level he had willed his own destruction and with it that of hundreds of his followers.
But it is interesting that in propagating the idea that he was betrayed, the prince was unwittingly helping to build up his own legend. Here is a modern estimate of the genesis of such a legend in a very different context:
A hero who has only a small army with him, their enemy racial or national aliens sworn to destroy the hero’s people and culture. As the one-sided battle becomes hopeless, and the hero is worn down by superior numbers, a last stand is called for and the hero is defeated. But it is part of the archetypal appeal that not even the greatest numbers of the enemy, it is felt, could have overcome the hero, unless he had been betrayed.103
The prince’s disturbed state of mind explains the unhappy sequel to Culloden. After leaving the battlefield on the afternoon of the 16th, the prince and his party were guided by Alexander Macleod’s servant Edmond Burke to the Fraser country, using the best roads.104 At the house of Gortlick that evening the prince met the old fox Lord Lovat for the first and only time. Over supper they discussed what to do next. Sheridan urged the prince to return to France at once to bring back the long-promised aid. Elcho angrily dismissed this as a chimera: the only choice now was between utter ruin for all time for the Jacobite cause and guerrilla warfare in the mountains.105
Charles Edward was caught between advocates of his positive and negative sides. Like good and bad angels respectively, Elcho and Sheridan argued the case for guerrilla warfare or an immediate return to France. Lord Lovat, doubtless still feeling that he could cover his own treacherous tracks if he could but bundle the troublesome prince off to France, weighed in on Sheridan’s side.106 How, he asked, could a mountain campaign be sustained without money or food? The Jacobite army had been starving when it still possessed the threat of military execution. How could it do better without any enforcing sanctions?
If there had ever been any intention of fighting guerrilla warfare, a supply of provisions should have been laid up in readiness. Lord George Murray had proposed early in March that a food dump be set up in Badenoch to which supplies should be brought from Inverness ready for a campaign in the mountains, if the worst came to the worst.107 Charles Edward had turned this down as timorous defeatism, and now the original self-immolating decision was used to provide the good reasons that answered to the prince’s real desire. Yet at Elcho’s prompting, the issue was left open pending further developments.
It was at this juncture that Lord George Murray’s anger and exasperation led him in turn into a piece of self-defeating indulgence. There was considerable confusion about the arrangements for a rendezvous in case of defeat. Some Jacobite units were under the impression that it was sauve qui peut immediately after any reverse. Others unde
rstood that Fort Augustus was to be a rallying point.108 Yet Ruthven in Badenoch had often been mentioned as the official mustering place. Accordingly, from 17–20 April units of the shattered Jacobite army began to drift in from Coorybrough, Balnaspiech and Aviemore.109
On Lord George’s arrival at Ruthven on the 17th, he found that the prince had kept back for his own use a sum of money that was to have been distributed among the starving troops.110 This seemed such a bizarre departure from the previously agreed arrangements that the rumour gained ground that the prince had no intention of keeping the rendezvous at Ruthven. The clans had been enticed there, it was alleged, to lure Cumberland after them while the prince made good his escape.
Angry at what he considered Charles Edward’s duplicity, and in the hot-blooded frustration of defeat, Lord George Murray dashed off a furious letter, excoriating the prince for everything from arriving in Moidart without French assistance to his direction of the battle the day before. This coldly self-righteous letter, when received much later, destroyed whatever slim chance Elcho’s advocacy might have had.111 Even if the prince had gone to Ruthven, Murray’s letter would have given him the pretext for doing what he wanted to do anyway: abandon the enterprise. Sheridan and the Irish had by now dinned it into him that it was dangerous to trust the Scots, since to save their own skins they would do to him what they had done to Charles I: betray him to the enemy.112 Moreover, they insinuated that the losses sustained at Culloden were much greater than they were. The prince sincerely believed Lochiel had been killed as well as Keppoch. Besides, since Murray had virtually accused the prince of bad faith, he could hardly maintain that he stood in need of such a leader.
The prince therefore sent his final orders to the army at Ruthven. First there was a verbal message: ‘Let every man seek his safety in the best way he can.’113 Then came a formal written communication. He told them he was going to France to bring back an army; in his absence the Jacobite leaders should look to their own salvation: in other words, sauve qui peut.114
When this message was received at Ruthven, the wailings and ululations of the night after Culloden were rekindled. Dazed and staggered, the clansmen suddenly realised that they had been left to Cumberland’s dubious mercies. They did not see things at all in the same way as the prince. They were confident the struggle could be continued, that a guerrilla campaign was feasible. Now it was their turn to feel betrayed. It seemed to them that the prince was deserting an army that was bigger than ever. The prince’s reputation in Scotland never recovered from his message to his troops in Ruthven. Even stalwart supporters like John Roy Stewart became disillusioned at this point.115
Whether a guerrilla campaign was feasible at this stage is a moot point. About 4,000 men eventually assembled at Ruthven. On the other hand, only Ogilvy’s and Cluny MacPherson’s regiments were intact. And there were no adequate food supplies. But the prince, it was widely felt, had gathered his men together in Badenoch as bait for Cumberland while he saved his own skin.
The accusation that it was the instinct of self-preservation that led the prince to abandon his followers is a valid one, though true in a sense other than that normally used by his detractors. It was not cowardice or self-preservation in its ordinary sense (‘saving one’s skin’) that led the prince to abandon his men, but a desire to be free of the strains of responsibility. It was stress and depression that placed him hors de combat for the first three months of 1746. It was the absence of stress that enabled him to bloom like the heather through which he was hunted as a fugitive for the next five months.
19
The Prince in the Heather
(April–June 1746)
AFTER THE CONFERENCE with Lord Lovat, the prince did not tarry long in Fraser country, thinking it dangerous to rest so near the enemy the night after a battle.1 He and his party pressed on to the Glengarry country. At 2 a.m., just after the setting of the moon, they arrived, exhausted, at Invergarry Castle.2 Ned Burke, the guide, produced a scratch meal of two salmon and an oatcake. Then the party napped fitfully.3
At 3 p.m. on the 17th the prince set out again, with Ned Burke, O’Sullivan and Father MacDonald.4 Riding along the north-western side of Loch Lochy, with the dark and steep mountains on their right, they swung west to Loch Arkaig. After locating the cottage of Donald Cameron of Glenpean at about 2 a.m., the prince lay down to sleep in earnest for the first time in five days and nights.5
The pattern of resting by day and travelling by night continued. It was 5 p.m. before the prince resumed his journey. After eating a meal of milk and curds, he waited to hear the latest news of his army.6 The prince later disingenuously claimed that he waited until all hope of reassembling his forces was gone.7 If it was gone, the reason why was clear! But he did receive a message from Lochiel, whom he believed dead. Lochiel informed him that after being carried from the field of Culloden by his clansmen, he was placed, wounded in both legs, in a crofter’s cottage nearby. By mere chance, Cumberland’s troops, who were on the point of entering the cottage in search of Jacobite fugitives, were called away on other duty by their officer.8 Lochiel was then conveyed to Cluny’s house in Badenoch.
After leaving Glenpean in the early evening, the prince and his companions confronted the Braes of Morar. The way ahead was so rough that the horses had to be left behind.9 Walking by a winding path, they marched the eighteen miles to the glen of Meoble south of Loch Morar in darkness. They arrived at 4 a.m. on the 19th.10 Here they were put up ‘in a little sheal house near the wood’11 by Angus MacEachine, sometime surgeon in Glengarry’s regiment and Borrodale’s son-in-law. The prince was so tired that he could neither eat nor drink and required the help of one of his party to get into bed.12
The prince slept most of the day. That night, under a moon ‘four days from the full’ he walked to Borrodale on the north shore of the sea-loch Nan-Uamh where he had landed nearly a year before.13
He remained at Borrodale for five days. For greater security he chose not to sleep in Borrodale’s house but in a cottage in nearby Glenbeasdale. He was able to rest and recuperate from the exertions of the past few days. O’Sullivan recorded that the prince did well: he had lamb, meal and butter to eat and straw to lie on.14 This was the prince’s first regular food since the supper at Lord Lovat’s the night after Culloden.
At Borrodale Charles made serious plans for the crossing to France. Still harbouring the illusion that the Skye chieftains were his friends, he asked Donald Macleod, a seventy-year-old loch seaman from Dunvegan, to carry a message to Macleod and Sir Alexander MacDonald, asking for their assistance.15 Macleod (tenant of Gualtergill on Loch Dunvegan), who had been sent to the prince as a guide by Aeneas MacDonald, knew very well what the sentiments of the Skye chiefs were. Angrily he remonstrated with the prince for wanting to trust men who would deliver him to the Hanoverians as soon as look at him; he refused the commission. Instead, he proposed to take the prince over the Minch to the Hebrides.16 There they should easily be able to find a ship bound for France or, failing that, a boat for the Orkneys, whence the prince could escape to Norway.
The prince fell in with this proposal. Macleod departed to find a suitable boat. Charles stayed on in the neighbourhood of Borrodale, holding daily conferences with young Clanranald and MacDonald of Boisdale.17 It was probably at Borrodale that Lord George Murray’s angry letter of 17 April caught up with him and confirmed him in his decision. This would explain his reiterated farewell to the clan chiefs.18
One event soured his stay in Borrodale. Hearing that Elcho was now at Kinlochmoidart House, the prince ordered him to seek out Lochiel and put himself at the Cameron chief’s disposal. Elcho indignantly replied that he intended never to fight under the Stuart banner again.19 His long vendetta with the prince, destined to last for forty years, had begun.
The Elcho message revived all Charles Edward’s worst feelings about the Scots and their alleged potential for treachery. He wrote to Sheridan to say that one of the principal motives for his immediate depar
ture for France was fear of betrayal. Because he suspected that there were traitors in his entourage at that very moment, the prince added, his location and planned departure must at all times be concealed.20
Donald Macleod returned with a stoutly-built, eight-oared boat and a crew of seven.21 At nightfall on 26 April the prince embarked, together with Macleod, O’Sullivan, Ned Burke, O’Neill and Father Allan MacDonald.22 Donald Macleod warned the prince not to put to sea at this time as he could sense a storm in the offing, but Charles was adamant.23 By the time they were out in the Sound of Arisaig, about 9 p.m., one hour after putting to sea, a full gale was blowing with accompanying thunder and lightning.24 Donald Macleod turned the boat to steer north-west through the Cuillin Sound. Their track would take them to Benbecula, with Eigg, Rhum and Canna on the port side and Skye to starboard.25 The prince’s original intention was to make for Eriskay. Had he gone there, he would have run smack into three English men o’ war.26
Violent south-easterly winds beat against the boat. As they rounded the point of Arisaig, the bowsprit broke.27 They were now making headway by dead reckoning, in the pitch-black and with no compass. Macleod suggested putting in to Skye, protesting that they would never reach the Outer Hebrides in such weather. But the prince insisted that landfall had to be somewhere on the Long Island.28
Macleod hoist sail and prepared to run before the wind. So good was his seamanship that they sighted the coast of the Outer Hebrides by daybreak. The prince, never a good sailor, had lived through a nightmare. He was too sick and dispirited to appreciate Macleod’s skill in keeping them off the rocks of Skye, to admire the many times when he cried ‘luff’ to steer the craft temporarily into the wind.29 Seasickness blotted out everything else. It was compounded by the ‘bloody flux’ from which the prince suffered throughout his time in the heather.30 But characteristically Charles Edward hung on grimly and uncomplainingly. Lack of physical courage was never his problem. As the worst of the seasickness abated, he led the sailors in Highland songs and took his turn at bailing.31 This was a crucial part of the trip: at one time the boat seemed to be filling with water faster than they could bail.32
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 35