Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (47 page)

On arrival at Drummossie Moor the prince soon revealed his incapacity as a battle commander. He began by refusing Lord George Murray’s request for a close inspection of the terrain, which would have revealed a marshy hollow over which the Highlanders later had to charge.
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Next, he overruled Murray’s urgent plea to throw down the western walls of the Culloden Park enclosures. This dry-stone wall ahead of the Athollmen was directly in front and to the right of his men and was likely to impede their charge. The prince and O’Sullivan alleged that an advance to break down the walls would fracture the Jacobite battle line right under the enemy’s gaze.
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They ignored the fact that Cumberland was not yet on the field.

At eleven o’clock the two armies came in sight of each other, still two and a half miles apart. Cumberland’s men came on in good order. A French officer told the prince ‘he feared the day already lost for he had never seen men advance in so cool and regular manner’.
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Lord George Murray was equally pessimistic. ‘We are putting an end to a bad affair,’ was his doleful reply to Elcho’s query about Jacobite prospects.
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Yet the clansmen themselves seemed to fetch a second wind once they caught sight of the enemy.
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Cumberland’s first move was to send the Campbells with a body of dragoons to the river Nairn to outflank the Atholl brigade.
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This carried the threat that the Jacobites would be taken in flank and rear if the Hanoverian cavalry advanced over the dead ground in Culloden Park. To do this they would first have to throw down the park walls that Lord George had earlier wanted to dismantle.
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O’Sullivan was sure they could not do this in the thick of a battle, but Lord George did not share his optimism.
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Perth, called over from the left to investigate, advised lining the park walls. Murray did not have the men to spare for such an operation. He ordered Ogilvy’s regiment to guard the flank.
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Meanwhile Cumberland’s artillery had become bogged down in marshy ground. This was the first flaw in the duke’s streamlined arrangements. The prince had withdrawn to a small hill behind the gap in the centre of the second line. He cut a fine figure in the last moments of exhortation before the battle proper. He was mounted on a newly acquired horse and brandished a pair of silver-mounted pistols. His leather targe was embossed with a silver head of Medusa. Now from the ‘eminence’ he saw Cumberland’s cannon sink into the swampy ground. The duke’s right was temporarily uncovered. In one of his good decisions, the prince sent O’Sullivan to Lord George with orders to attack.
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Lord George demurred, probably because he did not yet have sufficient numbers to mount the operation. Jacobite troops were still streaming on to the field as the battle got under way. The other factor in Murray’s hesitation was that the Campbells had already occupied some of the park houses to his right. Murray wanted Cumberland’s first line to proceed as far as the Leanach enclosures before he launched his attack; he feared that otherwise his Athollmen might be flanked by the Campbells and the dragoons.
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The late arrival of the Highland regiments, particularly the MacDonalds on the left, caused very great confusion. They were still getting themselves into their assigned positions when Cumberland’s artillery, now clear of the marsh, came within range.
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On the extreme left the Jacobites came up against a similar obstacle to that facing the Athollmen on the right. The Glengarry regiment was pinned against the south-east corner of a wall surrounding the Culloden enclosures. The effect of park walls on both sides of the army was to funnel the Jacobite front line into a narrow space no more than three hundred yards wide.
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Moreover, since the enclosure wall on the left did not end at the same point as the park wall on the right, the Jacobite front line became slanted, with the MacDonalds on the left much farther away from the enemy than the Athollmen on the right.
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This skew effect was multiplied when the Athollmen advanced beyond the park wall on the right. The MacDonalds on the left showed a reluctance to follow suit. They were still sullen because they had not been assigned their traditional place of honour on the right.
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Since the only hope of victory was a simultaneous attack by the whole of the Jacobite front line, Perth, commanding on the left, was at his wits’ end. He called out to the MacDonalds to promise them that he would ever afterwards bear their surname if only they would advance.
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Shortly after one o’clock the artillery cannonade began.
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The
prince’s
miscellaneous batteries in the Jacobite centre fired the opening shots from a range of five hundred yards. But his gunners had no professional ordnance training. Their aim was feeble and ineffective. Just for a moment Cumberland’s dragoons seemed to stagger, probably from nervousness at the sound of the bombardment. They soon recovered when they saw the enemy salvoes going wide.
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Two minutes later Cumberland’s more expert artillerymen replied with their ten 3-pounders. The opening volleys appeared to onlookers to be directed towards the Jacobite rear, almost as if they were seeking out the prince.
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One of his servants, thirty yards behind him, was killed.
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So many cannonballs fell around the Stuart standard that Balmerino’s corps escorted the prince away from the immediate danger, but not before his horse had taken a hit in the flank.
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The previously docile horse began to kick. Seeing the blood gushing from its side, the prince dismounted and found another.
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The salvoes from Cumberland’s accurate gunnery did a lot of damage among the prince’s hussars in the rear.
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For the first time, and in the most unfavourable circumstances, the clansmen were exposed to rapid and accurate artillery fire. The Jacobite guns, by contrast, were largely manned by scratch crews and did little damage. A contributing reason for this was the varied calibre of their guns (1½-pounders, 3-pounders, 4-pounders) which complicated the ammunition supply.
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Lord George now contemplated a flanking movement on the enemy left but Cumberland spotted the danger and posted a regiment at right angles to his left to pre-empt such a move.
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Things were already going badly for the Jacobites when a squall of rain sprang up. Heavy precipitation of hail and rain lashed into the Highlanders’ faces, dampening their powder horns.
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This was Falkirk in reverse.

The Hanoverian guns were then trained on the Jacobite front line. To his astonished pleasure, Cumberland found his cannon ‘rapidly thinning the Jacobite ranks without experiencing any loss in return’.
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The prince’s post at Culchunaig had been singularly ill chosen. He could not see the havoc and mayhem being carried out in his own front line.

After ten minutes of this, Cumberland’s gunners switched to grape-shot ‘which swept the field as with a hail-storm’.
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Because of the funnelling of the Highlanders in the front line, it was impossible for the Hanoverians to miss. They scythed great swathes through the ranks of the clansmen. In some places large holes were torn in the battle line.
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Still no order to attack came from the prince.

It was clear that this situation could not be allowed to continue.
Lochiel
and Lord George sensed that their men were only minutes away from headlong flight. Murray sent urgently to the prince for the order to attack. The prince gave it.
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But the delay was not yet over. On his way back to Lord George with the prince’s ‘attack’ order, MacLachlan of Inchconnel was decapitated by a cannonball.
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The prince sent Brigadier Stapleton with a repeat order.

This was the moment for right and left to surge forward in a cloud. But while the Athollmen, their patience already exhausted, burst without waiting for Stapleton’s authorisation, on the left the MacDonalds declined to move.
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When Sir John MacDonald delivered the prince’s order for an immediate charge, the MacDonalds refused. All the pleas of Perth and his brother Lord John could make no impression on them. The consequence was that the Jacobite right attacked alone.
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When the cry of ‘claymore’ was finally uttered, the bottleneck in the battlefield meant that it was clan Chattan in the centre who got to grips with the enemy first.
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The Highlanders are sometimes said to have fought below their best on the day of Culloden, but there was nothing inferior about this charge from the viewpoint of heroism or courage. What did the damage was clan Chattan’s sudden swerve to the right, probably caused by a desire to charge along the firm ground of the old moor road rather than through waterlogged terrain.
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This swerve not only prevented hundreds of the prince’s best men on the right from getting into the fight, but pushed many of them into the mouth of the deadly fire coming from Cumberland’s centre.
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The charge continued in a turmoil of fire and smoke. Half-blinded by the smoke which the wind blew strongly into their eyes, the men of clan Chattan gradually narrowed the gap between themselves and the enemy. Survivors later described themselves as being caught up in a whirlwind of thick smoke without seeing where it was coming from.
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Within two minutes Lord George released the Athollmen to support them. But now the bad consequences of being penned in by the park wall and the Leanach dyke showed themselves. The tightly packed Athollmen became the victims of a ‘most terrible fire’ at pistol-shot range both from Barrel’s and Munro’s regiments in front and Wolfe’s and Campbell’s on the flank.
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Winnowed by this raking fire, most armies would have faltered. But, taking terrible losses, the Highlanders completed their charge and fell like furies on Barrel’s and Munro’s regiments.
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Hacking and cleaving through the ranks of men, they would soon
have
cut the two regiments to pieces but for support from Cumberland’s second line. The stiffening of Bligh’s and Sempill’s regiments turned the tide. Staggering through the inferno of thick smoke and the bloody bodies of their comrades lying four deep, the Highlanders were mown down in droves. The few clansmen who got through to the second line were skewered on bayonets.
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Finally the wild impulse of the charge petered out. Heavily outnumbered, having taken dreadful casualties, the Jacobites began to stream back in retreat. Five hundred penetrated Cumberland’s lines. Very few of them came back alive.
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The Camerons behaved badly. Most of them fled without helping Lochiel, who had been wounded in both legs by the flanking fire of the Campbells.
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But the men of clan Chattan, without any effective reply to the devastating fire power of the overwhelmingly superior Hanoverian regiments, defied their butchers. In their fury and despair they stood for two minutes and hurled stones at Cumberland’s men before the general rout began.
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Yet even now the ordeal of the right was not over. As they retreated past Leanach dyke, the Campbells swarmed out on them, claymore in hand. Furious swordplay ensued. The Camerons took further casualties.
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The Jacobite left never got into the fight. Even while Perth and Drummond made frantic efforts to bring the MacDonalds into the engagement, the repulse of the right became evident.
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Shamed by the cowardice of his men, Keppoch and his brother charged forward without their regiment. Keppoch fell dead from gunshot almost immediately.
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Clanranald was severely wounded in the head just as he had finally persuaded his clansmen to charge. At once the attack was called off.

Cumberland’s cavalry now advanced on the centre of the Jacobite second line.
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The Royal Scots were saved from encirclement by the Irish picquets, who directed a steady fire on the Hanoverian horse. Stapleton’s Irishmen were the heroes of the Jacobite left, for their flanking fire from behind the walls of the Culloden enclosures enabled the retreating MacDonalds to get off the field.
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But on the right Cumberland’s horse came within an ace of encircling the Jacobites. Following an absurd confusion in orders, Ogilvy’s regiment had been withdrawn from its position guarding the walls of Culloden Park. The Campbells now made a breach in the west wall, wide enough for cavalry to pass through three abreast.
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Through this gap poured Cumberland’s dragoons. They were already almost in the rear of the Jacobites, behind the prince at Culchunaig.
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At the last moment Lord George Murray spotted the danger, which O’Sullivan had discounted so cavalierly. He ordered the pitiful remnants of the Jacobite cavalry to face about to meet this new threat. Elcho’s Lifeguards and Fitzjames’s horse faced the dragoons on either side of a hollow near Culchunaig. There were barely a hundred of them, ill-mounted on starving horses. They confronted five hundred of Kerr’s and Cobham’s dragoons, well-mounted and well-armed. Yet so resolute was the demeanour of this Jacobite cavalry that it was ten minutes before Cumberland’s men attacked.
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When they did, Elcho’s and Fitzjames’s were forced to give way, taking heavy losses as they went. But they had bought precious time and saved the prince and the rearguard from being surrounded.

By this stage of the battle the extent of Jacobite defeat was evident. Of the regimental commanders, only Ardshiel, Lord Nairne and Lord George Murray were left unwounded. Murray bore himself with great bravery. He lost his horse, had several cuts from a broadsword in his coat, had lost or dented two of his own swords, and lost his wig and bonnet.
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A third of all the men in the centre and right-wing regiments were already dead. Only three men survived among the Mackintoshes. It hardly needed O’Sullivan to come galloping up and tell the prince: ‘You see, all is going to pot!’
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