Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (40 page)

It was not entirely surprising, then, that desertions began to occur.
¹⁰⁵
In retrospect, the empty ten days from 17 to 28 January was for the Jacobites the most ruinous period in the entire campaign. They did not so much lose the initiative as throw it away.
¹⁰⁶
Some of the blame must be laid at the prince’s door, as he dealt with illness, Clementina, and his own inner demons. But Lord George must also be brought into the dock. Why did he go along so lamely with the proposal to prosecute the siege of Stirling, knowing the likely consequences in the Highland ranks? The ‘book’ excuse about not leaving strongholds in the rear was a poor argument at this stage. Why did he not suggest to the prince that after driving Hawley out of Edinburgh, they should take the first step towards constituting an independent kingdom of Scotland, perhaps summoning a Convention of the Scottish Estates and making a public call to France for recognition and support?
¹⁰⁷

The time for remonstration was the 18th of January, not ten days later. Perhaps the strain Lord George was under was just too great. The prince preserved his equilibrium on the surface by his retreat to Bannockburn. His lieutenant-general had to exert an iron grip on the army night and day. As he wrote poignantly to his wife: ‘What would I not give for a little rest! I have heard of a person being turned into a post-horse (by those who believe in transmigration) as the worst change that could happen. If I continue much longer in the way of life I am in now, a post-horse would be an ease to me.’
¹⁰⁸

There are some grounds, then, for thinking that Lord George was under excessive strain when he got the clan chiefs to sign his remonstrance. Certainly his nightmare estimates of mass desertions were very far from the mark, as later became plain. Lord George’s demand for a retreat to the Highlands was a very bad mistake, on a number of counts, and his gross overestimate of the desertion rate showed an untypical tendency to panic. But the stress of the tough campaign, then (in his case) in its fifth month, should not be underestimated. Since early September the destiny of the Jacobite army had been in his hands. He was permitted no breather, no interludes. By contrast the Hanoverian captains benefited from fighting in relays. Cope, Wade, Ligonier, Hawley, all served their limited time and then handed on to someone else. Cumberland spent December in the saddle, took January off, returned to Scotland at the end of that
month
, and then spent six weeks relatively stress-free in Aberdeen. Only Lord George kept unceasing vigil over his army. He made a disastrous blunder in advising the retreat to the Highlands, but the context in which he did so should be appreciated.

When the fateful remonstrance arrived at Bannockburn, Murray of Broughton read it incredulously and then passed it to O’Sullivan for his opinion. The prince was asleep (this was late on the evening of 28 January). Realising that his rage would be terrible when he did read it, the two advisers decided not to wake him and to leave the storm until next morning.
¹⁰⁹
Murray of Broughton rode back to Falkirk that night on a fruitless mission to persuade the chiefs to change their minds.

The storm next morning was every bit as bad as had been feared. When the prince read the document, it was as if all the rage he had ever felt in his life came gushing out in a single, highly significant act. The prince dashed his head violently against the wall, ranting and cursing about Lord George. ‘Good God! Have I lived to see this!’ he exclaimed.
¹¹⁰

Eventually, conquering his irrationality, the prince sat down to answer the remonstrance. He began by pointing out the preposterous nature of the chiefs’ demands. Had history ever recorded an instance where an army
retreated
after winning a victory: ‘is it possible that a victory and a defeat should produce the same effects, and that conquerors should fly from an engagement whilst the defeated are seeking it?’
¹¹¹

Charles went on to point out the obvious flaws in Murray’s argument. If morale was the issue, the existing psychological condition of the army would be made many times worse by a retreat. Moreover, Murray’s arguments were nonsensical, since Cumberland would not simply leave them alone in the Highlands to regroup. The Jacobites would have to fight him sooner or later. Better to meet him now on terms more favourable than would obtain in a few months’ time. By the spring the Jacobite army could well have shrunk to its Glenfinnan core. Cumberland, too, would claim that his name inspired such terror that the enemy ran away.
¹¹²
Most important of all, a retreat into the Highlands would finally destroy Jacobite credibility and kill off all hopes of help from France and Spain. ‘For my part,’ he concluded, ‘I must say that it is with great reluctance that I can bring myself to consent to such a step, but having told you my thoughts upon it, I am too sensible of what you have already ventured
and
done for me, not to yield to the unanimous resolution if you persist in it.’
¹¹³

The myth of Charles Edward the autocrat is not really compatible with that last statement. Indeed, if anything, the prince can be faulted for the mildness and feebleness of his reply. He should have rebutted some of Murray’s specious arguments more vigorously. It was clear that Murray had not thought through his proposed strategy, that it had been plucked from the air and hurriedly improvised. There were solid grounds for arguing that an arithmetical rate of desertion would become a geometrical one in the Highlands, thus producing an exactly opposite result from that predicted by Murray. If it was acknowledged on all sides that population density in the Highlands already made subsistence precarious – and indeed was sometimes cited as being itself a precipitant towards Jacobite risings that would allow the clansmen to plunder ‘in the plain’ – where was the army to get its supplies? There were no magazines in the Highlands and certainly no food to feed an army of 10,000 men, given the marginal quality of existence there. Meanwhile, the areas of Scotland that
did
produce resources capable of sustaining an army – the Lowlands and the north-east – would have fallen to Cumberland without a fight.
¹¹⁴
But then it was Lord George’s contention that in the struggle for those areas, sea power gave Cumberland a great advantage.
¹¹⁵
What he failed to see was that the logic of the decision to retreat to the Highlands entailed a withdrawal into the very locale where the army could not be adequately fed.

Charles Edward might also have asked Lord George how it was possible that an army that was thought capable of beating Cumberland on the 28th had suddenly become one in danger of imminent destruction on the 29th. But the prince had no middle gear. After his lurch to extreme irrationality, he swung back to a passive, almost deferential posture. There is no sign in Charles Edward’s temperament of the psychology of the true autocrat.

The prince dispatched Sheridan from Bannockburn with the letter. Sheridan was now weak and ailing, and he crumbled too readily in face of the battery of arguments the chiefs brought to bear at Falkirk.
¹¹⁶
Acknowledging himself convinced by their advocacy, he asked them to send some of their number to Bannockburn to put the same points to the prince in person.

Cluny and Keppoch came back with Sheridan and reiterated to the prince with some force the arguments in the remonstrance. Their mulish doggedness during the meeting made Charles lose his temper. He quickly recovered and apologised, but showed a shrewd appreciation
of
the way the incident would be distorted by remarking in his second letter to the chiefs: ‘I doubt not but you have been informed by Cluny and Keppoch of what passed last night and heard great complaints of my despotic temper.’
¹¹⁷

Finding that he was unable to make any headway against the dogged clan chiefs, who were adamant for retreat, the prince in effect washed his hands of the whole affair. Prophesying that Stirling would become a second Carlisle through artillery losses, and that the trickle of deserters would soon become a flood, he concluded:

After all this I know I have an army that I cannot command any further than the chief officers please, and therefore if you are all resolved upon it I must yield; but I take God to witness that it is with the greatest reluctance, and that I wash my hands of the fatal consequences which I foresee but cannot help.
¹¹⁸

This exchange between Charles Edward and Lord George Murray is singularly revealing. The breakdown in communication between them was now total. Their incompatibility made effective co-operation impossible. Even if both men had not been under excessive stress, their collision was still inevitable. Their very styles clashed violently: Lord George’s cold, aloof, aristocratic hauteur against the prince’s flamboyant showmanship. Murray could survive Derby and Falkirk and still make something of what was left. It was the prince’s tragedy that he could not.

(February–March 1746)

IT WAS TIME
to decide on the arrangements for the retreating Jacobite army. On 31 January Charles Edward and Lord George Murray finally came face to face. Lord George behaved tactlessly. He made no attempt to salve the prince’s wounded pride, but launched into a complaint that his Athollmen were still being kept on siege duty at Stirling Castle. However, the prince kept his temper. The two men worked on the details of the retreat.
¹

They agreed that the combined forces should be drawn up at St Ninian’s at 9 a.m. next day; Lord George would then select one hundred men from each regiment to form a strong rearguard. All cannon would be spiked and all surplus ammunition destroyed. Lord George would deploy the rearguard in such a way that Cumberland could not follow.
²

But Murray made another bad mistake on this last day of January. Flushed with his triumph in the battle of wills with the prince, he refused to discuss the administrative details of the retreat with O’Sullivan and Murray of Broughton. The result was that no proper instructions were issued for the army’s orderly withdrawal. In particular, not enough carts and horses had been requisitioned to convey the artillery.
³

Even if efficient administration had been in evidence on 31 January, it is doubtful if the next day’s chaos could have been much palliated. The problem, as Charles Edward had accurately foreseen, was morale. As soon as word of the retreat leaked out, large numbers of clansmen headed north without waiting for further instructions.
⁴
The result was that when the prince set out for Bannockburn next morning, he found only a skeleton army on the road.

At first he tried to bring back those who had jumped the gun by
sending
cavalry detachments after them.
⁵
But it was already too late. Even the troops at Stirling had taken alarm at sight of the general exodus and had quit the town long before the agreed hour.
⁶
Trying to make a virtue of necessity, the prince told O’Sullivan and Murray of Broughton to order a general retreat at once, without waiting for the 9 a.m. rendezvous at St Ninian’s.

Unfortunately, Lord George Murray was asleep while all this was going on. He woke to find ‘barely the appearance of an army’.
⁷
Everything was chaos and confusion. There was no question of saving the artillery. The Jacobites even left their wounded and prisoners on the road as they fled.
⁸
And because the agreed general review had not taken place, there was no infantry to support the cavalry patrols. Elcho’s Lifeguards had been ordered to wait on the Bridge of Carron to cover the precipitate retreat. No further orders were sent to them. While they fumed impotently, they came within an ace of being caught in a pincer between Cumberland’s van moving up from Edinburgh and Linlithgow and the garrison at Stirling Castle, now free to sortie at will.
⁹

Lord George’s own position was perilous. A sally from Stirling Castle at this point would have been devastating. Murray was left with so small an escort that he had no option but to gallop off northwards at great speed.
¹⁰

While the army staggered north in disarray and confusion, the general shambles received its apotheosis at St Ninian’s. The Jacobites had been using St Ninian’s church as an ammunition dump. The prince ordered that all the gunpowder in the church there should be exploded on waste ground behind the church to prevent its falling into Cumberland’s hands.
¹¹
But the villagers were trying to secrete quantities of powder to resell it to Cumberland; pillaging was taking place.
¹²
Meanwhile, as the troops opened the casks and lugged them to the waste ground, casual powder spillage had taken place. One of the clansmen observed the pilfering and fired a warning shot over the villagers’ heads. Unfortunately the colfing from his gun fell into the trail of gunpowder leading back into the church.
¹³
The sparkling snake of lighted gunpowder wound its way back, and the resulting explosion blew St Ninian’s sky-high.
¹⁴
The blast was heard for miles. Lochiel, already suffering from a wound sustained at Falkirk, narrowly escaped serious injury. Murray of Broughton’s wife was blown out of her chaise and left unconscious on the ground.
¹⁵
Fortunately, Charles Edward himself had left the church eight minutes earlier.
¹⁶

Meanwhile Lord George Murray, riding furiously northwards,
came
upon O’Sullivan vainly trying to drag some cannon over a bridge without horses. The sight of his
bête noire
once more revealing his ineptitude was too much for Lord George. His temper snapped. Reining in his horse, he began to berate O’Sullivan. In full hearing of the already demoralised clansmen, a furious slanging match took place.
¹⁷
Murray accused O’Sullivan of incompetently altering the orders that had been agreed the night before. O’Sullivan struck back furiously: they were only retreating in the first place because of Lord George’s treachery.