Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (29 page)

At eight o'clock that night the army marched, in two columns, toward Nairn. In his joyous excitement at the prospect of victory, Charles was moved to embrace Murray, thanking him for all that he had done and assuring him that neither his father nor he would ever forget it. Murray, inured by now to Charles's excited effusiveness and his equally passionate wrath, merely took off his bonnet and made a stiff bow in acknowledgment.

The men slogged on, their pace of necessity slow because of the darkness. When they had gone about eight miles they halted, as it was only an hour until dawn and they realized that by the time they reached Nairn the sun would be up and Cumberland's troops would be dressed and on the march themselves. They had lost the advantage of surprise. There was nothing for it but to go back—or so Murray believed. He ordered his men to turn around, and when Charles saw what was going on he was heard to mutter, " 'Tis no matter then. We shall meet them and behave like brave fellows."

The return march was punishing, coming as it did after a long hard night of walking with empty bellies. A ''prodigious murmuring" was heard among the men, many of whom ''exclaimed bitterly" even when Charles was within earshot. They were exhausted. The rumbling of their stomachs was louder than cannonfire. They had been pushed to their limit and beyond.

Dawn came, a sullen dawn with rain imminent. In the early morning light the train of weary men stumbled along the road, many stopping frequently to rest, others wandering off to find food, still others wrapping themselves in their plaids and lying down to sleep in the shelter of the gorse bushes. Charles, as weary as his soldiers from having made the night march on foot, managed to procure a little bread and whiskey and, after reaching Culloden, went to sleep for a while.

Within an hour or two, however, with rain pouring down and the wind rising, a Jacobite cavalryman rode up with the news that the Hanoverian cavalry were a bare four miles away. The infantry could not be far behind. Charles was up in an instant. Refusing the meal he was offered ("Would you have me sit down to dinner when my enemy is so near me?" he is alleged to have said. "Eat! I can neither eat nor rest while my poor people are starving"), he set out with Murray, Perth and Drummond to rouse the men and form them into battle lines.

All was confusion. Drums beat to arms, pipes played, trumpets sounded—a weird cacophony that underscored the general chaos. Only about a thousand of the men were ready to meet the enemy. Of the rest, some were in Inverness, where messengers were sent to summon them urgently, others were asleep, still others, kicked awake, were barely able to open their eyes and stagger to their posts. Some units were simply lost or overlooked, their posting having been turned over to old Sheridan who was so forgetful he could not account for them.
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Apart from their low numbers and shortage of equipment—many were without their targes, or shields—the soldiers were downcast and spiritless. Their will to fight, always in the past their preeminent characteristic, was weak. One officer recalled later the "visible damp and dejection" he observed among his men. Another remarked that ''they were not the clans that had fought with such verve and vigor at Prestonpans and Falkirk." Of course they were not, how could they have been after what they had been through in the past several days?

They formed up, after a fashion, and took their positions. Looking at them, Murray concluded with a sinking heart that there were not more than three thousand men in the field, "and those not in the best order." The storm was abating, the rain giving way to drizzle and then to overcast with fitful sunshine, though the wind continued to blow. The drenching had wetted the men's muskets and powder horns, which meant that the weapons might or might not fire. Still, the order was sent along the ranks for the soldiers not to throw down their muskets—which they had a bad habit of doing when excited and ready to charge—but to keep them firmly in hand no matter what.

D'Eguilles, watching the officers in their frenzied efforts to find and order their men, and with what sorry result, became alarmed. He was responsible for the French troops Louis XV had supplied, troops whose lives were now to be put at risk because the rest of the remnant Jacobite army was in such disarray. Watching Charles, whose face was set in determination and whose eyes showed his contempt for Cumberland and his army, the Frenchman saw clearly that it would be useless to try to dissuade him from meeting the enemy. Still, faithful to his responsibility, he tried.

In the midst of the chaos, d'Eguilles asked Charles for a brief audience, and when Charles agreed, he put his case. It was no use fighting, he argued, when half the army was absent, and the rest badly equipped. It would be far better to fall back upon Inverness, or to retreat even further, and put Inverness between themselves and the Hanoverians. After all, in the worst case they could still retreat into the Highlands, where no army could possibly reach them, and wait there for supplies of arms and money from France. D'Eguilles threw himself at Charles's feet in supplication, but to no effect. "The Prince," he wrote to King Louis, "who believed himself invincible because he had not yet been beaten, defied by enemies whom he thoroughly despised, seeing at their head the son of the rival of his father; proud and haughty as he was, badly advised, perhaps betrayed, forgetting at this moment every other object, could not bring himself to decline battle even for a single day." Charles was "immovable in his resolve," and would fight at any cost.
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In despair, d'Eguilles went to Inverness and burned all his papers, certain that the army would be defeated and uncertain what would happen to him when it was.

Presently the long Hanoverian line came into view, some nine thousand strong, the men marching ahead in battle order, their bayonets fixed, their step slow and steady as they paced to the solemn beat of hundreds of kettledrums. The pipes of the loyalist Campbells played, adding to the solemnity. As they advanced, twenty-odd masses of scarlet jackets topped by black tricornes, their regimental banners could be seen waving in the wind, each with its distinctive crest. They came still closer, and the sharpest Jacobite eyes could pick out their commander, the tall, many-chinned, hugely fat Cumberland, riding on a large gray horse.

The Jacobites began to call out to them, huzzaing and shouting derisively. But Cumberland's men kept silent, their discipline intact, staring straight ahead and marching mechanically, menacingly, forward. They came on, wrote an eyewitness, "like a deep sullen river," while the Jacobites, with their much smaller numbers and their fluid, not to say disordered, positions seemed more like "a streamlet running among stones, whose noise sufficiently showed its shallowness."
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Charles, meanwhile, rode up and down along his own lines, cutting a fine figure on a gray gelding. He carried his leather targe decorated with the Medusa head wrought in silver, and brandished two silver-mounted pistols.

"Here they are coming, my laddies!" he shouted to the men. "We'll soon be with them. They don't forget Gladsmuir, nor Falkirk, and you have the same arms and swords—let me see yours! I'll answer this will cut off some heads and arms today."

O'Sullivan heard Charles's harangue, and recorded it later. He had often heard it before, and knew how much it heartened the men and "set them in spirits." Charles had a talent for being "most cheerful and hearty" when in the midst of the greatest danger, O'Sullivan remarked. He radiated joy and fearlessness, and knew how to communicate it to his men. Even so, on this day his effusions rang somewhat false. "Go on my lads," he shouted, "the day will be ours and we'll want for nothing after." Yet in his heart Charles "had no great hopes," O'Sullivan thought, and his conviction of invincibility began to dissolve at the sight of the nine thousand scarlet-jacketed troops that came on so resolutely.
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It dissolved still further as the Hanoverian guns began firing. The cannonade was fearsome. The guns fired randomly, in bursts as loud as thunderclaps, and kept on firing, the huge explosions making the earth shake and setting the men's teeth on edge. With every cannonade huge puffs of thick black smoke were thrown up into the air, and driven by the wind into the faces of the Jacobite soldiers. Their own artillery fired back, but with far less effect. According to one account, the very first Hanoverian cannon shot killed Charles's groom who was no more than thirty yards away from his master. Another struck the ground beside Charles, wounding his horse and covering him with dirt. Charles was urged to retire to a safer position, but refused until the number of balls falling near him became so great that he was virtually forced to back away. Eventually he allowed himself to be led off to Culchunaig, a rise behind and to the right of his army, which unfortunately offered only a limited view of the entire field.
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Men began to fall by the hundreds, the thunderous noise of the cannonade all but drowning their screams.

"Close ranks! Close ranks!" the officers yelled, and the men, too shocked at first to do anything but obey, stepped over the bloody bodies at their feet and firmed their lines. Again and again the horrible blasts came, cannonballs flying toward them through the thick smoke and ripping away arms, legs and heads. According to some accounts of the battle, by this time the sky had clouded over once again and snow and hail pelted down into the faces of Charles's soldiers as they stood waiting for the order to charge, the destructive artillery fire maddening them. Their own guns soon stopped firing altogether, silenced by the enemy gunners, and they were helpless before the cruel barrage. It was a new and devastating experience for them to find themselves thus immobilized, unable either to escape the deadly fire or to assault the enemy. One of the Hanoverian officers wrote that when his gunners had fired two rounds he could plainly see that the Jacobites """fluctuated extremely and could not remain long in the position they were in without running away or coming down upon us."
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Caught like dumb beasts awaiting slaughter, held back by their loyalty to their officers and chiefs yet crazed by the terrible blasting of the guns, the rain and hail and smoke that blinded them, the agonized groaning of the dying all around them, the men could not keep still. The regiments in the front were so impatient that they were "like to break their rank," Murray wrote afterward. When the enemy guns began firing grapeshot, that lethal rain of leaden balls and nails and pieces of old iron that scattered in a wide arc and did furious damage, the men could no longer restrain themselves.

Some flattened themselves on the ground, an eyewitness remembered. "Some called out to advance, and a few broke their ranks and fled." The rest began to run forward into the dark maelstrom, throwing aside their muskets, waving their swords, and yelling at the top of their lungs.

"Run, ye dogs!" "Loch Moy!" "Death or Life!"

Through the smoke they began to make out the phalanx of red jackets that stood waiting for them, muskets lowered, sharp bayonets pointed at their bellies. On they ran, and now the enemy's boots and spatterdashes became clear, and their faces, covered with soot and devoid of expression. When the Highlanders were a bare twenty paces away the front row of infantrymen fired on them, halting many who swayed and fell, impeding the advance of those behind them. They rallied, and rushed on again, this time facing the bayonets.

'They came up very boldly and fast all in a cloud together," wrote one who stood against them. But within a moment or two the cloud was shot through and stabbed and shredded out of existence. The Jacobites were advancing on the right (the Macdonalds on the left, galled at not being given the position of honor on the right, standing where they were), but raggedly, out of order, so that they were vulnerable to opposing fire on all sides. The charge was swallowed up, the men cut to pieces by the wall of bayonets and ripped through by grapeshot and musketfire. The war cries ceased. Officers and men fell in heaps, their faces contorted in grimaces of rage, their bodies twitching and writhing in the death agony.

The heroic advance had been pitifully brief. "The Highlanders fought like furies," a government soldier thought. "It was dreadful to see [their] swords circling in the air as they were raised from the strokes. And no less to see the officers of the army, some cutting with their swords, others pushing with their spontoons, the sergeants running their halberts into the throats of the opponents, the men ramming their fixed bayonets up to the sockets."
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The heaps of dead mounted higher, three and four deep where the charge had been fiercest. And still the murderous fire continued, the bravest of the Jacobites slashing at the muskets with their claymores, swearing, wailing in fury, individuals lifting the fallen standards of their clans and regiments and plunging forward in suicidal attacks. Fathers avenged sons, brothers sought to avenge brothers, boys and old men flinging themselves vainly into the pitiless crossfire until their swords were bent and they died where they stood.

By this time even Charles, with his limited view of the field, could begin to perceive the full extent of the terrible slaughter. Many of the officers and clan chiefs were dead or grievously wounded. Murray, whose runaway horse had carried him almost completely through the Hanoverian lines, his sword broken and his coat torn with shot, managed to dismount and fight his way back through the melee to where his own men were. He called for reinforcements, but it was too late. The clansmen, having spent their fury, were running from the field, harried like fleeing deer by the Hanoverian cavalry. Charles, after making a futile attempt to rally his men, was led away to safety by Sheridan and a few others.

Murray managed to get his men into their ranks and to march them off, to the accompaniment of pipers, with dignity. But the rest of the remnant army was left to its fate, and to the scant mercy of Cumberland's cavalry. Excited by victory, and eager for revenge, the cavalrymen rode down the retreating soldiers and slashed at them with their swords, finishing off the wounded where they lay, stabbing at everything that moved. Their bloodlust aroused by battle, they forgot all but the urge to kill, not hesitating, as they rode toward Inverness, to harry the innocent townspeople they encountered on the roads and butcher them too. The rout brought them nothing but joy. Their dear commander, their own Billy, had won the day against the hateful rebel scum. The vermin deserved to be exterminated, down to the last shabby woman and dirty child.