Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (35 page)

The army pressed on to Manchester, through Wigan and Leigh. The road from Preston to Wigan was lined with onlookers, who stood at their doors and watched the Scots go by. Most of them wished the prince success but declined to fight when offered arms, on grounds of lack of training.
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There was no opposition from the militia. The Jacobite commanders had correctly read them as ‘small beer’. Whenever the prospect of a fight loomed, the militiamen dispersed or decamped. On the afternoon of 29 November the prince made another triumphal entry, riding to Manchester city centre by way of Salford.
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Manchester was another triumph in the style of Edinburgh though on a much smaller scale. Once again the prince captivated a town in which he had a lot of latent support.
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Once again he made a particular impression on the ladies.
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Here, too, as in Edinburgh, a regiment was raised from among the poor, dispossessed and socially precarious.
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But for the clan leaders the similarities ended there. They were now deep in England, in the heartland of supposedly Jacobite Lancashire, and to show for it they had no more than three hundred volunteers. There was no sign either of the English Jacobites or of a French landing.

The council held on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, was the most acrimonious hitherto. The movement in favour of returning to Scotland had not yet become the earth tremor it was to appear at
Derby
, but for anyone less confident and utterly sanguine than the prince, the rumblings would have been alarming. Once again Charles Edward got his way, just, but it took the intervention of Lord Nairne to sway the vote, plus some successful obfuscation on the prince’s behalf by the Welsh Jacobite David Morgan.
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A lawyer and former secretary to the Jacobite duke of Beaufort, Morgan was one of just two Welshmen who had joined the prince on his march south. So much for the legions of Watkin Williams Wynn. As Charles Edward later cynically remarked: ‘I shall do for the Welsh Jacobites what they did for me; I shall drink their health.’
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Lord George Murray agreed to give the English Jacobites one last chance. The army would march the length of Derbyshire.
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If at the end of that time there was no sign of Lord Barrymore, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn or the other Tory squires, retreat would be the only practicable option. In the euphoria of the moment the prince heard only the agreement to advance, not Murray’s ominous rider.

Crossing Crossford Bridge, the Jacobite forces marched through Stockport to Macclesfield.
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At Macclesfield they took stock of the situation. It was clear that they had easily outpaced Wade’s army of the north, but now they were in the orbit of the second army which General Ligonier had been preparing (and which had been transferred to the command of the duke of Cumberland). Twenty-four-year-old Cumberland, who had moved up from Lichfield to Stafford, was puzzled by the movements of the Jacobite army. The pointers were still ambiguous: the clansmen’s destination could still be either Wales or London.
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Lord George Murray tried to make up the duke’s mind for him. Feinting towards Congleton with 1,200 men, he then swung in an arc back to Ashbourne, planning to link up there with the prince and the main army. Convinced at last of Jacobite intentions, but in reality sent the wrong way by Murray, Cumberland selected a battlefield at Stone and placed his army athwart the route to Wales. The battle of Stone would have put the issue of the 1745 rising beyond doubt, but it never took place.
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While Cumberland waited in vain for his enemy, the prince’s army pressed on to Leek, linked up with Lord George’s column at Ashbourne, and reached Derby on the evening of 4 December after a twenty-four-hour march.
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The prince was now ahead of Cumberland in the race for London. The clansmen were on a knife-edge of expectation. Everyone expected a battle with Cumberland in the next forty-eight hours. Instead, on 6 December, the Jacobite army was retreating to Scotland. How did this happen?

The blame for the débâcle at Derby must be shared equally by the prince and Lord George Murray. Both suffered for ever afterwards from the momentous decision taken at the council on 5 December 1745. For Murray the retreat meant ruin and exile. For the prince it was the beginning of the collapse of his own personality. What exactly went wrong?

Charles Edward was at fault for not taking seriously the repeated warnings from Lord George and the clan leaders, at Carlisle, Brampton, Preston, Manchester and Macclesfield, that the advance of the Jacobite army into England was provisional only: it was contingent on the ultimate appearance in the field of the French or the English Jacobites with their levies. A good politician would have found a way to conciliate Lochiel and the MacDonald regimental colonels long before the moment of truth was reached. By sedulous lobbying, the prince could probably have detached Lochiel, Keppoch and Clanranald at least. But Charles was on such a remarkable winning streak that it did not occur to him that not everyone saw him as destiny’s darling or his army as invincible. Such was his blithe confidence that he opened the proceedings at the Derby council meeting by taking it for granted that he and his advisers had gathered merely to discuss the line of march for 6 December.
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Lord George Murray brought him down to earth with a crash. The situation, as he saw it from the vantage point of a sober field commander, was that they had two armies (Wade’s and Cumberland’s) behind them and another ahead of them at Finchley. Each of these armies was twice the size of the Jacobite force. At the end of their journey loomed London, with a million inhabitants. Even assuming they kept ahead of Cumberland all the way to the capital, and then defeated the army at Finchley, they would arrive in London exhausted and with depleted numbers. A determined and numerous militia would be able to eat them up in that condition. The only thing that could justify an advance was the definite appearance of the English Jacobites or the French. Neither had appeared, so that was that. Only a fool or a madman would advance in such circumstances.

Charles Edward made a spirited reply, arguing that one final push was needed to bring the Hanoverian dynasty toppling down.
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The very boldness of their advance had the enemy puzzled and disturbed. The psychological initiative would swing violently to Cumberland and the Whigs if the Jacobite army turned its back on England now.

The trouble with this argument was that the council members had heard it all before, in Edinburgh, at Carlisle, in Manchester. This
time
the prince’s word alone was not enough. They demanded proof. Where were the letters from Louis XV explicitly and unambiguously promising a landing in England? Where were the written promises from the English Jacobites? If they had pledged themselves to rise, they must have specified a time and place.

At this juncture it dawned on the prince’s officers just how much of a gamble they had committed themselves to. The prince was forced to reveal that he had no specific pledges from Watkin Williams Wynn, Barrymore, Hynde Cotton and his other English supporters. To general incredulity it emerged that he had not made contact with them once since his landing in Moidart.

This would presumbly not have mattered too much if the English Jacobites were a credible organisation, since they would have used their initiative to meet the prince at the Mersey with their levies. The fact that they had not done so tended to clinch the Scottish thesis that the English Tories were merely Jacobites of the mouth or the wine-bottle.

Lord George and his associates may have been right in regarding the English Jacobites as paper tigers but for the wrong reasons. According to Aeneas MacDonald, it was the old Tory/Whig conflict of land versus money that finally put the English Jacobites out of the reckoning. When the prince crossed into England, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn had just £200 in ready cash. As MacDonald, with a banker’s shrewdness saw clearly, in an emergency what is important is not so much wealth (in land) but liquidity. Once again the fatal consequences of the prince’s failure to co-ordinate his movements with the English Jacobites were underlined. Williams Wynn, if given sufficient notice, could have raised, instead of £200, the £120,000 he had spent on the previous two general elections.
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Further probing by the council members threw up the alarming intelligence that Charles Edward did not know what stage French planning for an expedition had reached, since he had no established channel of communication with them either. The third weakness in the Jacobite army’s strategy was already well known to the Scottish commanders themselves: they had no proper espionage system and were thus in the dark as to the enemy’s true numbers and location.

It was on this issue of credibility that Charles Edward conclusively lost his audience. The arguments between the prince and Lord George Murray had been heard before. By their willingness to come this far, the chiefs had shown a ‘will to believe’ in the prince, even though every extra ten miles they went without seeing the French or the English Jacobites increased their scepticism. Yet at this display
of
political ineptitude by the prince, they decided enough was enough. The canard that had been whispered among them – that the prince cared nothing for Scotland and its interests, that his sights were always set on England and England alone – now looked increasingly like the sober truth. Why else would Charles have abandoned a secure and promising base in Scotland, in pursuit of a chimera south of the border?

From this point on the prince could win no support. Even Perth, who was initially sympathetic, dropped out when he saw the prince’s cavalier way with solid objections. In danger of being conclusively outvoted there and then, the prince adjourned the meeting until the evening. He spent the afternoon trying to drum up support for his increasingly isolated stance. But if anything the tide of feeling by late afternoon was running even more strongly against him.
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The council resumed its deliberations in the evening. The prince found that erstwhile supporters had abandoned him. Any lingering hope of being able to swing the council round by a bravura display of rhetoric or magnetic charm was dashed when the English spy Dudley Bradstreet was introduced into the chamber. Bradstreet barefacedly spoke of a third army, 9,000 strong and commanded by Hawley and Ligonier, barring the way at Northampton (there was no such army).

Bradstreet’s intervention infuriated the prince. ‘That fellow will do me more harm than all the Elector’s army!’ he bellowed.
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The glib and plausible spy was hustled out of the chamber. A vote was taken. The prince was alone: ‘he could not prevail upon one single person to support him,’ he later testified.
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He was like Alexander the Great at the Beas, convinced that it was his destiny to march on, but unable to get any of his officers to see his point of view. ‘You ruin, abandon and betray me if you do not march on!’ he raged at them.
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The councillors sat impassive and stony-faced. Finding that he could not even get old stalwarts like Tullibardine to break rank with this solid phalanx, the prince sullenly agreed to retreat. But, he added bitterly, ‘In the future I shall summon no more councils, since I am accountable to nobody for my actions but to God and my father, and therefore shall no longer either ask or accept advice.’
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The prince remained convinced to his dying day that an earth-shattering victory that would have realised his destiny had been snatched from his hands at Derby by the cowardice, defeatism and treachery of his officers. This attitude has often been dismissed as the delusion of a sick, autocratic mind. Yet once again, a close examination of the situation reveals much more rationality in the
prince’s
position than his critics give him credit for. To disentangle all the skeins in the decision at Derby, we need to make an important distinction between the subjective perceptions of the actors involved, and the facts available to the later historian with a privileged Olympian overview.

The first point to note is that Lord George Murray and the Scottish leaders made their decision in the dark. They did not know what the military situation of their enemies was. It is not an unfair criticism of Murray to say that he postulated the worst-case scenario for his own army, while giving the benefit of the doubt to the Hanoverians. Murray’s argument was that an army of 5,500 was in danger of being gobbled up by the three armies, each in close proximity and each of 10,000 men. But in fact there was no third army. As Bradstreet admitted: ‘Observe that there was not nine men at Northampton to oppose them, much less 9,000.’
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Wade was far to the north at Wetherby and posed no danger. There was an ill-trained rabble of perhaps 4,000 at Finchley. That left Cumberland.

The desperate situation that George II’s second son was in cannot be better conveyed than in this dispatch, written to the duke of Newcastle on 5 December by his aide the duke of Richmond:

Are we all mad, that you don’t send for 10,000 more forces, be they Hessians, Hanoverians or devils if they will but fight for us.… The whole kingdom is asleep. Our cavalry can’t be here before February and the Pretender may be crowned in Westminster by that time.
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In London Henry Fielding spoke of ‘a panic scarce to be credited’.
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Even the incurably eupeptic Horace Walpole allowed himself a scintilla of doubt: ‘There never was so melancholy town (sic) … nobody but has some fear for themselves, for their money, or for their friends in the army.… I still fear the rebels beyond my reason.’
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The military situation was grave enough to warrant these panicky reactions. By his own admission and that of the duke of Richmond, Cumberland could have got no more than 4,000 troops from Lichfield to Northampton to contest the passage to London.
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There was no serious doubt about the outcome of a battle between 4,000 of Cumberland’s exhausted soldiers and 5,500 eager Scots. The clansmen’s morale had never been higher than at Derby.
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In his obsession with the total numbers facing him, Lord George Murray forgot the vital military principle of concentration of force.