Many in the Jacobite army came from north-eastern Scotland and were Episcopalian Protestants with no
Many in the Jacobite army came from north-eastern Scotland and were Episcopalian Protestants, with no particular sympathy for the Pope or the Highlands. Those who died were not just peasants who did not know how to read and write but shopkeepers, students, young men starting careers in the law.For a long time, the accepted view of the Forty-Five was that it was a form of Scottish civil war between Highland and Lowland, between romantic supporters of a Catholic dynasty and hard-headed Presbyterians who had made their peace with the Hanoverian dynasty because it was a Protestant succession. The muster lists of the Prince's army include the followers of sophisticated chiefs who were perfectly at home in 18th-century Edinburgh or in the cities of Holland and England. The Highlands and Islands were changing fast already, and the clans which turned out to fight for the Prince were not always the most traditional. On 16 April 1746, outside Inverness, the Highland army of 6,000 faced a Hanoverian force of 9,000 led by the Duke of Cumberland. The Highlanders were outnumbered and badly placed, so that they had to charge uphill into a north-easterly gale Unlike their enemy, they were rainsoaked and hungry A thousand of them were killed at Culloden.
The Jacobite generals assumed that the campaign could go on with a good chance of beating Cumberland next time. But the Prince ran away, and a lost battle became a final rout.GEORGE Mackay Brown wrote about three young men of the Prince's army whom he imagined there that day, after they had charged the "old iron- mouth" cannon and the "red men" of the Hanoverian regular army: "Three piercing shapes/ Drifted about me in the drifting smoke./ We crossed like dreams./ This was the last battle./ We had not turned before." He is talking about the end of a world, the last attack of the Gaelic peoples against a modernity and a way of life which was about cash and calculation Culloden was that, but many other things too. But I do not think that those who fought there felt dwarfed by the landscape, or bothered their heads about human insignificance. When they began to fight, the earth stopped and the hills and sea gathered round them to watch. For that hour, they were the centre.Nobody goes to Culloden, which is just a few stones and mounds and shelters half-way up an immensity, without inhaling its gloom But its significance holds.
It was the end of the last Jacobite rebellion, which began when Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") landed in the Outer Hebrides on 23 July 1745 and ended here less than nine months later. In those months, the Jacobite army won spectacular victories and marched south into England as far as Derby before the Prince was persuaded to turn back. It does deserve its name of "the last battle" in some respects. This was fought in the old way, charging or shooting at point-blank range or struggling with sword and bayonet. At Culloden, they all went at each other at once, and at the end of that hour those who were still alive and on their feet scarcely had the energy left to run away. It remains a silent place, near the top of an upland landscape which is a whole corner of Scotland, tilting down from the glitter of distant mountains to the sea The scale is very big.
