Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (37 page)

Lord George Murray had feared that the greatest danger to the Jacobite army would come from Wade. In fact Wade once again made no attempt to intercept them. All he did was to send a squadron of horse across the Pennines under General Oglethorpe to harry the retreating Highlanders.

The threat, unexpectedly, came from Cumberland, who had originally intended to follow the Jacobites no farther north than Macclesfield.
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False rumours of a panic-stricken rabble throwing down their weapons in a mad rush for the Scottish border encouraged him to press on with the pursuit.

News of this chase brought out all the stubbornness in the prince’s nature. He had been forced to retreat against his will; that was one thing. But he would not accept this further humiliation of seeming to flee before Cumberland. To Lord George’s alarm, the prince began to slow the march up.

He was narrowly persuaded out of spending a second night in Manchester.
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But, quoting back at Lord George his confident assurances at the Derby council that the army would be safe once it crossed the Ribble, the prince dug in his heels at Preston and insisted on spending an extra day there.
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The danger now was that Cumberland would catch up with the retreating army well before the Scottish border. In fact he would have done so, had he not also lost a day attending to a false report that the French had landed on the south coast.
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Fuelled by arguments from both Perth and d’Eguilles, the prince was already increasingly inclined to turn and face his pursuers. At Lancaster his irritation at retreating so fast in face of ‘the son of a usurper’ came to a head.
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Come what might, he decided that Saturday 14 December would see a battle.

Lord George Murray, Lochiel and O’Sullivan selected a battlefield outside Lancaster. All seemed set for an encounter with Cumberland.
Then
Wade’s advance guard under Oglethorpe blundered on to the scene. They had been dispatched across the Pennines by ‘Grandmother Wade’ in partial atonement for his earlier failures to intercept the Highlanders. There was a skirmish with Elcho’s Lifeguards. Some of Oglethorpe’s rangers were taken prisoner. Their intelligence seemed to suggest that both Wade’s and Cumberland’s armies were close at hand.
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Even the prince did not want to call on such a hand. On the 15th the army marched on to Kendal. Lord George Murray could not resist a taunt as they quit Lancaster: ‘As Your Royal Highness is always for battles, be the circumstances what they may, I now offer you one in three hours from this with the army of Wade which is only about three miles from us.’
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The prince made Murray pay for the jibe. Beyond Kendal loomed the dreadful Shap Fell, a dismal prospect of snow, ice and mud. At Derby Lord George had sugared the pill of defeat for the prince by promising always to be in the rearguard on the retreat and to oversee the baggage and the artillery. Now the prince took advantage of this. In the interests of the safety of the army, Murray proposed abandoning the big guns at Kendal. The prince refused adamantly: not a single cannonball must be left behind, he averred.
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The consequence was that while the van got to Penrith with some difficulty (it took two days and a stopover at Shap), Lord George and the Glengarry men, in the rear with the unwieldy baggage waggons, took the same time to get only as far as Shap.
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Cumberland sent a flanking column under Oglethorpe (who had linked up with the duke at Preston) to get round in front of the Highlanders and catch them in a pincer movement. Fortunately for Lord George, Oglethorpe bungled his part of the plan.
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Even so, Cumberland’s vanguard was now close on Murray’s heels.

The inevitable happened. On the 18th, while struggling along the dreadful road to Penrith, Murray and the Jacobite rearguard were overhauled by the first of Cumberland’s dragoons and mounted infantry.
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All afternoon a running fight raged in and around Lowther Hall and the approaches to Clifton village. As dusk fell and the Highlanders were in danger of being surrounded, Murray learned from a prisoner that this was not Cumberland’s main force (which numbered some 8,000 men) but merely the first 2,000 of them, commanded by the duke.

Here was a great opportunity to apply the maxim of concentration of force. For once the Hanoverians were outnumbered. A severe defeat this night would tarnish Cumberland’s image, perhaps irremediably.
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To the fury of Lord George and his faction, the prince would not hear of returning. All he was prepared to do was to send back sufficient reinforcements to prevent Murray from being engulfed. Piqued at his lieutenant-general’s reluctance to fight pitched battles, the prince now paid him back in his own coin. As Elcho, already disenchanted with the prince, remarked: ‘As there was formerly a contradiction to make the army halt when it was necessary to march, so now there was one to march and shun fighting when there could never be a better opportunity for it.’
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Cluny MacPherson’s regiment and the Appin Stewarts raced back to Clifton on the double. In the early evening moonlight Murray drew up his men in strong positions in hedges on either side of the Clifton road. A roughly equal number of Cumberland’s dragoons dismounted and advanced on foot. A short, sharp, furious fight took place. Accurate shooting by Cumberland’s men merely had the effect of drawing the snake from its hole. At the cry of ‘claymore!’, Cluny MacPherson’s, one of the prince’s crack regiments, drove Bland’s regiment out of the Clifton ditches. After half an hour’s fighting Murray had done more than enough to secure an unpursued Highland retreat.
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Lord George joined the prince in Penrith. Next day the Jacobite army moved on to Carlisle. Cumberland, left in Clifton to lick his wounds, felt no inclination to follow them.
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The prince expressed himself very pleased with the night’s work. But in effect, consciously or unconsciously he had sabotaged what could have been a decisive check to the Hanoverians.

This was not the prince’s first eccentric decision. The desire to stay in Manchester for a second day; listening to Perth and d’Eguilles’s siren song about a stand in Preston; the extra days spent in Preston and Lancaster; finally Clifton: already Charles Edward was exhibiting clear signs of self-destructive behaviour. But all this faded into insignificance alongside the decision he took at Carlisle. At a council called to consider the next move, now that Cumberland had called off his immediate pursuit, the prince proposed and carried the idea that a garrison be left in Carlisle.
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The Manchester regiment, some two hundred and fifty strong, plus about a hundred Jacobites in the service of France, were left in Carlisle Castle.

What was widely predicted came to pass. On arrival outside Carlisle, Cumberland summoned heavy cannon from Whitehaven, blasted down the defences, and compelled the unconditional surrender of Charles Edward’s few English volunteers.
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The ill-fated Manchester regiment was led away to trial and barbarous execution.

The prince’s action in leaving behind a garrison has always seemed inexplicable. Such military justification as can be adduced is remarkably flimsy. To explain the inexplicable, Chevalier de Johnstone proposed a hypothesis that the prince left the English volunteers in Carlisle to a certain fate as a calculated act of vengeance against an England that had failed to rise to his standard.
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Johnstone was on the right lines in suggesting a pathological origin for the prince’s behaviour, but his explanation is too pat and contrived. This egregious error, one of the prince’s worst mistakes in the ’45
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is so out of character that it seems more convincingly explained by an unconscious impulse of self-destruction. It is note-worthy that, throughout the ’45, the worst excesses of the prince’s self-destructive behaviour occurred after bruising encounters with Lord George Murray. This is compatible with the notion that at an unconscious level Charles Edward consistently conflated Murray with James as parents who had failed him. At a conscious level, he simply hated being thwarted.

It was a sombre and despondent prince who crossed the Esk into Scotland. The Jacobite army had achieved great things. Its five-hundred-mile round trip to Derby and back would long be remembered as an outstanding military exploit. But the prince was numb to the positive side of what had been achieved.

(January 1746)

THE PRINCE CROSSED
the Esk back into Scotland on his twenty-fifth birthday (20 December OS; 31 December NS). Immediately on gaining Scottish soil, the army split into two columns: Lord George and the Lowland regiments trekked up through Ecclefechan, Locherby, Moffat, Douglas and Hamilton, aiming for Glasgow.
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It was the intention that the Lowland brigade would enter Glasgow one day ahead of the prince and make all ready for him.

Charles Edward meanwhile travelled ‘over cruel roads’ via Dumfries and Drumlanrig.
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Marching up Nithsdale, he crossed the Mennock pass by Leadhills and spent the night of 23 December in Douglas Castle.
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The next day he came to the castle at Hamilton. This pleased him so much that he halted for a day and went hunting.
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On the 26th the prince entered Glasgow.
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The reason for this choice of rendezvous was mainly financial.
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The Jacobites intended to levy contributions in cash and kind from these hostile burghers, who had already shown a spirit of defiance to the prince.
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Charles remarked that Glasgow was indeed a fine town. But it was clear he had no friends in it; what was worse, the Glaswegians did not trouble to hide their feelings.
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During the week in Glasgow Charles Edward reviewed his entire army on Glasgow Green and brought himself up to date on Scottish developments in his absence. The general review showed that remarkably few men – no more than two dozen – had been lost during the invasion of England.
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Scottish developments, on the other hand, presented a mixed picture. Edinburgh had been reoccupied by the Hanoverians almost the second the prince crossed the border into England.
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Cope’s successor General Handasyde had marched up from Berwick and
entered
it without opposition. Then General Hawley had been appointed as Wade’s successor and moved the army of the north across the border. Hawley despised the Highlanders as a rabble, and was so confident of an imminent victory over them that he erected gibbets in Edinburgh.
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Meanwhile in the north Lord Loudoun still held Inverness for the Whigs.

On the other hand, a second Jacobite army had been assembled at Perth and Dunblane. Although Lord Lewis Gordon had experienced great difficulty in raising the Gordons, he had collected many men from Aberdeenshire as well as the Farquharsons of Deeside.
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Lady Mackintosh had raised her husband’s clan under MacGilvray of Dunmaglas. Another Jacobite wife of a pro-Hanoverian magnate – Lady Fortrose (Seaforth), whose husband was with Lord Loudoun – had herded together a few Mackenzies.
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Lord Cromarty and Lord Macleod brought in the main Mackenzie regiment. MacDonald of Barisdale and young Glengarry had gathered reinforcements from the west. Glengyle brought in some MacGregors from Perthshire.
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The most dramatic developments had taken place in the north. At last Lord Lovat had committed himself to the prince. Lord Loudoun had finally forced the issue. On 3 December he marched a force to relieve Fort Augustus, then threatened by the Frasers under the Master of Lovat.
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On 11 December Loudoun took Lovat in person to Inverness as his prisoner.
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This ended the old fox’s prevarication. Escaping from Loudoun’s hands with contemptuous ease, he finally brought out his clan.

At about the same time Loudoun sent a strong force under Norman Macleod and Grant of Grant to relieve Aberdeen. Lord Lewis Gordon soon demonstrated that the prince had not entrusted him with high command for nothing. On 23 December he marched out from Aberdeen and routed Macleod at Inverurie, forcing him to retire across the Spey. As a result of Inverurie, Lewis Gordon held all the country between Aberdeen and Speyside for the prince.
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In addition, following this reverse a large number of men in Loudoun’s independent companies deserted.
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But the most heartening news of all was the arrival from France of Lord John Drummond with some 1,100 troops of the Irish brigade. Drummond immediately took over the Jacobite command in Scotland from Strathallan.
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The psychological boost of this landfall at Montrose was immeasurable. Not only had Drummond warned the Dutch that their participation in the fighting would be an infringement of international law, but he published Louis XV’s declaration,
which
made it clear that Drummond’s contingent was only the first of many troops France intended to pour into Scotland.
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Since the prince had ordered that no more formal council meetings would be held after his humiliation at Derby, the chain of command began to fall apart at Glasgow. It was suggested privately to the prince that the Jacobites should proceed to a second occupation of Edinburgh, or at least a march to East Lothian to keep the new Hanoverian commander ‘Hangman’ Hawley guessing and so force him to bivouac his men out at night in the cold.
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There was something in this idea, since the particularly cold weather would have taken a toll on Hawley’s troops and sapped morale. But this action would commit the prince sooner or later to a battle with Hawley. For the moment he wanted to keep his options open. He had still not given up hope of a second invasion of England and hoped at any minute to hear that the French had landed with his brother.