A History of Britain, Volume 2 (54 page)

The failure of the rising of 1715 had set back the Jacobite cause, but it had done nothing to rob it of its burning sense of righteousness and of the inevitable triumph of Stuart legitimacy over the usurping Hanoverians and their lackeys in parliament. The Jacobites still had their court-in-exile in France and a network of agents and diplomats throughout Europe that promised a rising, not only in Scotland but in England too. A war fought against the British, not only in Europe but in America, the Caribbean and southern India, would, at the very least, put an enormous strain on its military manpower, giving the Jacobites their best chance of success in many years.

All the same, when on 19 August 1745 Prince Charles Edward Louis John Cazymyr Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, the son of the elderly James VIII and III and the grandson of James II, stood in his plaid at the head of the loch in Glenfinnan, watched his standard being raised and told the assembled clansmen that he had come to make Scotland happy, he was putting a brave, bold face on what was already proving to be an unlikely gamble. He had arrived at Glenfinnan from the Hebridean island of Eriskay with the ‘seven men' of folklore, as well as a chaplain, valet, pilot and clerk. And he had nearly not made it at all. The two French vessels carrying the Prince and his party across the Irish Sea had run into a British warship, the
Lion,
100 miles west of the Lizard. Although the Prince's ship, the
Doutelle,
lay safely out of range of British fire, the
Elizabeth
was badly damaged. In a long and murderous exchange of broadsides with the
Lion,
the two ships smashed each other to pieces so comprehensively that the
Elizabeth
had to heave to and offload some 1500 muskets and 1800 broadswords intended for the Jacobite campaign. So Charles Edward had little to give the 200-odd clansmen other than hope and the undoubtedly glamorous charisma of his personality. What turned the day from quixotic adventurism into something more serious was the arrival, later that afternoon, of another 800 men led by Cameron of Lochiel.

It says something about the complicated allegiances in what was, in effect, another round of a Scottish civil war that had been going on for nearly two centuries that Cameron of Lochiel was not the epitome of the stag-chasing backwoods primitive clan chief. If anything, he was like an increasing number of Highlanders, more obviously part of the new than the old Scotland: a hard-headed businessman who capitalized on harvesting timber from his estates. As someone with a foot in the new economy as well as his heart in the old cult of honour, Cameron had mixed feelings about the arrival of the Prince. Before he would entertain the idea of committing his followers he asked the Prince for an insurance policy
– not the sign of reckless patriotism. Should the entire enterprise come to grief, could the Prince promise that he would be reimbursed for all the sacrifices that would undoubtedly be asked of him? By the end of the afternoon, though, romance had defeated prudence; the tug of loyalty had triumphed over business acumen. Cameron pledged himself and his men to the Prince, and the Rubicon was crossed.

A thousand men did not a Restoration make. For although Scotland was the entry-way, the prize for the Stuarts was always meant to be Britain. And for there to be any chance of success, three interlocking strategies had to click together at exactly the right time. It went without saying that most of Scotland needed to come out in open revolt. But as the unhappy precedent of 1715 had shown, that would be of no avail unless Jacobites in England rose in the numbers their spies had promised. And, not least, a French invasion force of not fewer than 10,000 men had to be landed somewhere to complete the pincer effect and disperse Hanoverian attempts at repression. To the pessimists who observed that such invasions had a long history of failure, the Stuarts might well have ground their teeth a little and invoked one wholly successful invasion: from the Netherlands in 1688!

For some weeks the government in Westminster was unsure whom or what to believe about the rumours that the Prince had landed and begun a march south through Scotland. It divided between complacency and panic. The complacent view was that Charles Edward would waste his minuscule force attempting to besiege the impregnable Highland forts William and Augustus, by which time his untrained Highlanders could be picked off by the regular soldiers of Lieutenant-General Sir John Cope. But there were some in the government who had a much gloomier diagnosis of what was in store, believing it to be inconceivable that a landing of any kind would have been made without the assurance of a prompt French or Spanish invasion to follow soon afterwards. ‘The undertaking,' one of these pessimists wrote, ‘in its present appearance seems (as it is the fashion to call it) rash and desperate. But I cannot think it is altogether to be despised. We are so naked of troops that if a body of men was to be flung over no-one can say what may be the consequences.' The gloomy truth, Henry Pelham wrote, was that in England there were hardly enough soldiers to stand guard at the royal palaces or put down a smugglers' riot, much less resist an invasion of any strength.

The collapse was much faster and much more shocking than anyone in London could possibly have imagined in their worst nightmares. Charles Edward had sensibly bypassed the fool's target at Fort William and moved directly to take towns like Perth, where he knew he had the edge
in numbers over local defences. Nervous that all he could put in the field was 1500 troops against the (wrongly) reported Jacobite army of 5000, General Cope made a tactical retreat all the way north to Inverness, leaving the Scottish Lowlands virtually undefended. On 17 September the Prince took Edinburgh. Dazzling though the prize seemed to be, it was a long way from being a complete triumph. The Provost and his council had decided against resistance. But their prudent decision was not at all the same as enthusiastic endorsement of the Prince's cause. Should the military balance of power change, they could as easily revert to Hanoverian loyalism. There were, in fact, still two well-supplied regiments of dragoons holed up in Edinburgh Castle, defying all attempts to winkle or starve them out. Most of these soldiers were Scots, and their continued loyalism was not atypical of many of the Lowland population. Even in the Highlands only about half the clans rallied to the Prince, so that through most of the ‘45 there were probably more Scotsmen fighting against Bonnie Prince Charlie than for him.

Increasingly, business got in the way of sentimental allegiance. Running short of money to pay their troops, the Jacobite officers were informed that the necessary funds were locked up in the castle along with the dragoons. None the less, they thought it worthwhile inquiring whether – at reasonable rates of interest – some of the cash might be made available to stop their men taking their desperation out on the city. It must have seemed like a reasonable proposition, since it met with a favourable response. Money was delivered from the castle to the Jacobites so that the two camps could carry on pretending to fire at each other.

Freshly supplied and financed, morale high and bellies full, on 21 September 1745, the Jacobite army marched out to meet General Cope's troops at Prestonpans, 8 miles east of Edinburgh, each army some 2500 strong. What ensued was one of the most notorious fiascos in British military history. Cope had managed to station his soldiers between the river and a bog, but, informed by a deserter about the Hanoverian positions, the Jacobites used a track through the mire to march to their rear and caught them literally napping before dawn. In the rout 300 British soldiers were quickly killed. The only professional loyalist army in Scotland had been destroyed. Needless to say, in London the disaster was blamed not on the incompetence of the officers but on the cowardice of the rank and file.

The almost unexpected completeness of their success forced the Jacobite army to consider what it was they were truly supposed to be: the liberators of Scotland or the restorers of the Stuart dynasty to all of Britain? The issue was thrashed out on 30 October at Holyroodhouse,
where the Prince had taken up residence in the palace of his royal ancestors. Charles Edward argued that, even tactically, the right decision was to take the campaign into England. He and his followers had enjoyed extraordinary success only because of the temporary absence of concentrations of Hanoverian troops in continental Europe, but the day could not be far off when numbers of those soldiers would return. A far more formidable threat would face them than the soldiers they had surprised at Prestonpans. The question was: where would be the best place to confront it? The Prince insisted that the other two pieces of Jacobite strategy all pointed to the necessity of a march through England. Without a campaign there, catching the enemy while he was still weak, the English uprising was unlikely to be at all successful – and without that rising the French invasion might not happen at all. It was imperative to be able to demonstrate to Versailles that this was not to be a repetition of 1715, that they were in earnest.

Lord George Murray, the ablest of the Jacobite generals, was much more cautious; still nervous about their position in Scotland, much less in Britain overall, wanting to consolidate a position in the Highlands where the war could be fought on their own terms, systematically breaking down the pro-Hanoverian clans, making the Stuarts the impregnable masters of the north and daring the English to come after them and risk more defeats like Prestonpans.

The differences aired at the council of war at Holyroodhouse were not just about military strategy. They went to the heart of why everyone in the Jacobite war was risking their neck. Was it, as Murray and the Highland soldiers believed, for Scotland, to restore the old world before the union and to recover a free and independent Scotland? Or was it, as the Prince imagined, a crusade to undo 1688: to throw the Hanoverians off the throne of Britain, to restore not just James VIII but James III?

After intense debate, the Prince won the argument – at least about strategy – by a single vote. The Jacobites marched south, moving at such a brisk pace that General Wade, based at Newcastle, who had expected to bar their way, instead found himself constantly outpaced. In rapid succession Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester all fell to the Prince's army, virtually without a shot being fired in their defence. Each time Wade's troops attempted an interception by crossing the Pennines terrible weather held them up, and by the time they reached their destination on the western side of the mountains the Jacobites had moved on. It was the British, not the Jacobite, soldiers who were suffering the worst privations. On 19 November James Cholmondeley, the colonel of the 34th Foot, wrote to his brother, the earl, about one of the worst of those marches
across the Dales. They had, he said, endured ‘miserable roads, terrible frost and snow. We did not get to our grounds till eight and as my quarters were five miles off I did not get there till eleven, almost starved to death with cold and hunger but revived by a pipe and little good wine. Next morning we found some poor fellows frozen to death for they could get nothing to eat after marching thirteen miles.'

By the beginning of December the Jacobites were closing in on Derby. The predicted mass uprisings in the English cities had not yet materialized, but nor could it be said that northern populations in the path of the march had risen as a man to defend the house of Hanover. Instead there were reports of merchants, landowners and bankers in Northumberland, Yorkshire and Lancashire taking to the highways along with their movable wealth and families. As the sense of an unstoppable momentum became more ominous, London caught a violent attack of the jitters. There was the usual run on the Bank of England, and the usual atrocity stories to feed the hysteria, featuring children tied to the walls of Carlisle Castle so that, if royal troops attempted to take it, they would be obliged first to massacre the lambs. But there were also the first stirrings of some patriotic resistance and Scottophobia. ‘God Save the King', which in an earlier form had actually been a Stuart song, was now sung for the first time as a national anthem in the theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Volunteer associations in some sixty counties had produced men willing to serve in the militia.

On 10 December, three regiments of infantry and one of horse guards were ordered out to a camp at Finchley, which the commander of the army, George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland, had established ‘just in case', he said, the Jacobites whom he meant to engage at Northampton should give him the slip, as they had done so many times to Wade. Four years later Hogarth painted the scene along the Tottenham Court Road, and although he had the luxury of hindsight, his teeming, riotous picture – a huge and profitable success when it sold as a print from 1751 – does say something about England at its chaotic moment of truth. No wonder, when George II saw the painting, he erupted in fury: ‘What, does the fellow mean to make fun of my guards?' For the soldiers in the picture (and everyone else for that matter) are not exactly paragons of martial discipline. This England is less parade ground than fairground (Hogarth's preferred metaphor over and over again for its sprawling, unruly energy). Bare-knuckled prize-fighters go at it under the sign of the Garden of Eden like Cain and Abel. On the right hand the realm of vice assembles by the King's Head, featuring the likeness of Charles II and one of the late monarch's favourite pastimes, the whorehouse. A falling soldier spurns his
Good Samaritan's water for what he really wants: a tipple of gin; a groper makes the milkmaid spill her milk while a crazed hag, probably meant to be Irish, with a cross on her cape, brandishes a Jacobite broadside. Opposite them are the
relatively
virtuous. The trees are in leaf. The courtyard in which the pugilists battle is the Nursery of ‘Giles Gardiner'; a mother suckles her baby. And the forlorn mother-to-be clinging to the departing soldier's arm carries ‘God Save the King' and a portrait of the Duke of Cumberland in her basket.