Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (28 page)

Whether Edinburgh would put up a fight was now the burning question. Morale in the city had been grievously shaken by Cope’s departure for Inverness, leaving the Scottish capital exposed. On the other hand there were 50,000 people in Edinburgh, enough to supply copious volunteers. It was protected by a garrison in the castle, and was surrounded by a wall on three sides and a boggy morass on the fourth.
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The earliest inclination of the city fathers had been to resist.
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But Charles Edward moved too quickly for them. While the proposal to raise a defence regiment was plagued by the usual eighteenth-century legal pitfalls surrounding the association of irregular forces in arms, the authorities in Edinburgh failed to provide vigorous leadership; whether this was through incompetence or crypto-Jacobite sentiment is unclear. Gardiner’s and Hamilton’s dragoons were heavily outnumbered. General Guest, commanding Edinburgh Castle, would commit the dragoons to the town’s defence only if the burghers provided infantry volunteers as back-up. Volunteers to face a Highland charge were naturally not plentiful. In any case, the Lord Provost advised the citizens that their best efforts should be concentrated on the defence of the city walls, not in meeting the clansmen in pitched battle.
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This was the confused situation when Charles Edward’s letter, breathing fire and the sword, arrived. The prospect of an unsuccessful defence followed by wholesale pillage and plunder by the Highlanders did not appeal to the citizens. It has to be remembered that the eighteenth-century civilian mind was still heavily imprinted by the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the dreadful fate meted out to cities taken by siege. Magdeburg then had the emotional charge that Dresden has today. Besides, the numbers in the Jacobite army were not known and were greatly exaggerated. The prospect of a holocaust of rape and butchery loomed.

It was while the people of Edinburgh dithered that the dragoons’ nerve cracked.
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Gardiner’s men had retreated to Coltbridge, west of Edinburgh, where they were joined by Hamilton’s dragoons, coming
up
from Leith. The combined dragoons stayed for no more than an exchange of shots with the Highlanders before bolting at full tilt through Leith, Musselburgh and Haddington. They did not pause until they got to Dunbar. This ignominious retreat, the third by the dragoons in the face of the Jacobite army, increased the panic in Edinburgh and virtually decided the authorities on surrender.
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Their natural Jacobite sympathies had been given the excuse they needed. The magistrates sent a deputation to the prince, asking for time to consider the surrender. The time was approximately 8 p.m. on 16 September.

Suddenly news reached Edinburgh that Cope had reached Dunbar and was disembarking his army. This was the selfsame force that had turned aside at the Corriearrack. From Inverness it had marched to Aberdeen, where it was embarked on transports and sailed down the coast.
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The news placed the Lord Provost and his cronies in a dilemma. If they surrendered Edinburgh to the prince now, and a battle was then fought which Cope won, they, the city fathers, would certainly be indicted for high treason. It was a race between Charles Edward and Cope. What the magistrates needed was more time.

Stalling, they sent a second deputation out to the prince’s quarters – the miller’s house at Gray’s Mill in the parish of Colinton.
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The time was 2 a.m. on the morning of the 17th. But the prince had heard the news from Dunbar too. The magistrates’ game was transparent. Angrily Charles Edward sent back the deputation with a demand for immediate surrender or liability to the full rigours of martial law.
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There are conflicting accounts of exactly how the Jacobites took possession of Edinburgh, but the departure of the unsuccessful deputation was clearly a trigger. According to the usual account, when the hackney coach conveying the unsuccessful postulants entered the city at the Netherbow gate, the Highlanders stormed in. Jacobite sources tell a rather different story. According to them, the occasion for the opening of the Netherbow gate was the departure from the castle of an officer in a coach to rejoin his regiment at Leith.
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It seems that what we are witnessing here is another effect of the mutual recrimination between General Preston in the castle and Provost Stewart and the city authorities below. Preston testified that it was the blundering ineptitude of the peacemongering deputation that let the Highlanders in. The city fathers responded with a story of incompetence by the military. It is of course possible that both incidents took place. Perhaps the Netherbow gate was even left open a longer time than usual to accommodate two sets of traffic, outward and inward. What is certain is that the Jacobites had already identified
this
gate as a weakness and had foreseen that it would have to be opened for some such purpose.

Accordingly, the Camerons and MacDonalds (Keppochs, Clanranalds and Glengarrys) had already stationed themselves in the vicinity. They had even tried to introduce one of their number in the guise of a Lowland servant to try to open the gates from within, but the ruse had been spotted and the ‘servant’ fired on.
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When the gates were opened, a silent torrent of Highlanders poured in and secured the other gates. The burghers of Edinburgh awoke to find their city in Jacobite hands, All regular troops retreated to the castle or fled to Haddington.
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Lochiel, Keppoch and O’Sullivan presided over the proclamation of James III in the market square.
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The stage was now set for one of the great showpieces of the prince’s career: his triumphal entry into the capital of his ancestors’ ancient kingdom. At noon he made his appearance, swinging in an arc via Prestonfield and King’s Park so as to enter the palace of Holyrood from the south and avoid coming within range of the castle artillery.
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Charles Edward had always had shrewd instincts when it came to propaganda or showmanship. He knew how to milk an occasion like this. The crowd wanted to see a fairy-tale prince; he would oblige them.

Trotting slowly, with Perth riding on his right-hand side and Elcho on his left (the reward for the 1,500 guineas he had loaned the prince),
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Charles Edward cut a heroic figure. He wore a blue bonnet decorated with gold lace, topped with a white satin cockade. On his chest was the Star of the Order of St Andrew. His Highland dress consisted of a tartan short coat without the plaid, red velvet trousers and military boots. On his head he had a light-coloured periwig with his own hair combed over the front.
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At Arthur’s Seat the army halted and the prince held a short review, so that the crowd could inspect him at close quarters. He made a very favourable impression, grudgingly conceded even by his enemies. Tall, handsome, with brown eyes and a fair complexion, clearly a magnificent horseman and at the peak of physical fitness, he seemed to combine the attributes of a perfect prince with the rougher qualities of a martial hero.
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There is no question but that the prince’s entry into Edinburgh created a sensation. His reception was almost riotous.
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Once again his personal magnetism proved itself. Everyone remarked that there were two sections of the crowd that were particularly enthusiastic: the so-called ‘common people’ and the women.
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The soubriquet ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ was first used by the jubilant crowd on this
joyous
Tuesday.
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High-born ladies clustered at the windows and threw their handkerchiefs into the street. When he continued to Holyrood, the prince was mobbed by prodigious crowds of enthusiasts.
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On the steps of Holyrood palace Hepburn of Keith, who had made his reputation as an unregenerate opponent of the Act of Union, acted out a piece of theatre. He ostentatiously went ahead of the prince in a gallery touch meant to convey to the crowd both that Scotland took precedence over the House of Stuart and that to oppose Union with England was logically to be Jacobite. It had always been the principal aim of Charles’s propaganda to equate Scottish nationalism with Jacobitism.
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The babel of excited voices continued all that night in the outer courtyard of Holyrood House, with the crowd huzza’ing and halloo’ing every time the prince appeared at the window.
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Throngs of aristocratic ladies pressed into the palace to kiss his hand.
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Tuesday the 17th was a day for euphoria and riotous excitement. And Charles Edward had indeed every reason for self-congratulation. Just twenty-eight days after Glenfinnan he was master of Scotland’s capital. Within a month he had outdone all previous achievements in the Jacobite risings. Speed, mobility, success: these were the marks of Charles Edward’s captaincy. Cope had been outmanoeuvred; Scotland’s Hanoverian administration had been either intimidated or outwitted. The prince’s campaign of rapid momentum and superior mobility convinced many waverers. Others who were ambivalent or neutral towards the Stuarts thenceforth became apathetic. Here seemed a striking vindication of the prince’s view that revolutionary willpower was all.

Yet when the dust settled, Charles Edward knew he still had to settle accounts with Cope. The Hanoverian commander’s disembarkation at Dunbar was now reported complete. He had been joined by the lacklustre dragoons.
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Cope showed himself eager to erase the memory of the Corriearrack. On 18 September the prince ordered on pain of military execution 1,000 tents, 2,000 targes, 6,000 pairs of shoes and 6,000 canteens for cooking.
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In Edinburgh 1,200 weapons had been found to arm the clans properly. Shortages of arms were always a problem in the Jacobite army: Lochiel had already sent some of his men home for lack of guns and swords. And now at the right psychological moment Lord Nairne arrived with two hundred and fifty men from the Atholl brigade, closely followed by MacLachlan of MacLachlan with one hundred and fifty of his clansmen. There was even a dribble of volunteers from Edinburgh itself; these were enlisted in Perth’s regiment.
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On the 19th the army moved out to Duddingston to meet Cope, leaving guards only at Holyrood. It might have been expected that the garrison in Edinburgh Castle would have seized this opportunity to make a sortie in hopes of regaining the city. But the Highlanders had cunningly bruited it about, as if by drunken indiscretion, that there was a secret corps of three hundred clansmen in hiding, waiting for General Preston to make precisely that move.
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Cope moved up to Haddington on the 19th and to Prestonpans on the 20th.
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A battle could not now be long delayed. On the 26th the prince received another important last-minute boost to morale in the shape of the arrival of one hundred Grants from Glenmoriston.
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He was ready for his ordeal by battle.

(September–October 1745)

YET THERE WERE
problems. One was to plague the Jacobite army all the way to Culloden. There was a running dispute between the MacDonalds and Lord George Murray’s Athollmen as to who should have the place of honour on the army’s right wing. This problem first surfaced just before Prestonpans and was solved only by Murray’s statesmanlike decision to station the Athollmen in the reserve.
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Another headache was the prince’s desire to lead the army from the front in the coming battle. Like his father, Charles Edward was always physically courageous. His desire was overruled: the prince was told firmly that his royal person was too precious to be risked in this way.
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On the night of 19 September mounted patrols were sent to reconnoitre the roads to Musselburgh. Lord George Murray put the army on maximum alert. He now had about 2,400 men under his command, though Cope imagined it was double that number. Cope himself had roughly the same number.
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On the morning of the 20th, at about 9 a.m., the prince addressed his army. Accurately gauging the mood, he kept his speech short, ending with the rousing words: ‘Gentlemen, I have flung away the scabbard; with God’s help I will make you a free and happy people.’
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When these words were translated for the clansmen, they threw their bonnets in the air and set up a whooping cry of triumph. In high spirits the army set out eastwards for Musselburgh in a long column of threes, with Lochiel and the Camerons in the van.
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Hearing that Cope’s forces were in the vicinity of Prestonpans, Lord George Murray determined to seize the high ground to the south and west, in particular Falside Hill. The Highlanders moved out on the double and secured their objective. When breasting the
hill
they came in sight of the enemy encamped below.
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Despite his later reputation for incompetence, Cope had selected his battleground well. A flat plain, running east and west, about a mile and a half in length and three quarters in width, without any cover, provided the ideal field for his regulars.
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Covered in the stubble of a recently garnered corn harvest,
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the field was very well protected. To the north was the sea, plus the covering line of the villages of Port Seton, Cockenzie and Prestonpans. To the west were the ten-foot park walls surrounding Preston House and grounds. To the east, flanking almost the whole of the south side of Cope’s position, was a deep morass, criss-crossed by ditches (the largest eight feet wide and four feet deep).
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Unless the Highlanders were to launch a suicidal charge down from the high ground through the morass, it seemed they could only approach from the west. It was therefore facing this direction that Cope drew up his troops.