Allan Mallinson

Muskets v. the Highland charge

Trevor Royle gives an even-handed account of this last desperate throw of the dice for Bonnie Prince Charlie

What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without a fight in 1688, and the battlefield of the Boyne in 1690 earning him the unaffectionate nickname Séamus an Chaca, ‘James the Shit’. During the Jacobite rising of 1715 on the death of Anne and the accession of George I, his son Prince James Edward, coming late to the fight from France, fled Scone palace, telling his hapless supporters to ‘shift for themselves’ after the defeat at Sheriffmuir. In turn his son, Charles Edward, the Bonnie Prince, brought up in Rome, hurried from the field at Culloden in 1746, the culminating battle of the second major rising, the ‘Forty-five’, having mismanaged the whole affair. ‘There goes that Italian coward,’ spat Lord Elcho, one of his ADCs.

Only in the Scottish Highlands at that time, ‘one of the last feudal societies in 18th-century Europe’, could such a bloodline be thought worthy of the throne, let alone dying for. To admit otherwise would have been to undermine the very notion of feudalism, where blood was legitimacy. Paradoxically, Highland society had been under no danger from the House of Hanover, only where it threatened rebellion. Even its religion, chiefly, but by no means only, Catholicism — there were nonjuring Episcopalians (and south of the border the higher end of the Church of England) long after the death of King William, to whom they had found the oath of allegiance so repugnant — was largely tolerated. There was of course much resentment over the Act of Union, though Prince Charles Edward showed no marked enthusiasm for a return to the status quo ante; his sights were always set on London. He was never at home in the heather, contrary to the myths, the ballads and the pictures on shortbread biscuit tins.

His nemesis was a man the same age as he, 25, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland — clever, educated, soldierly and brave (if somewhat harsh even by the standards of the time).

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