Map of a Nation (2 page)

 

 

P
ROLOGUE

 

O
N THE EVENING OF
16 April 1746 two men dined together in a castle on the south bank of the Beauly River, in Inverness-shire in Scotland. One was nearly eighty years old, stout but frail. His face was twisted by adversity and guile and dominated by an enormous yellowing periwig. Beneath it, heavily lidded eyes regarded his guest with concern. The second man was much younger, twenty-six years old. He had a naturally clear
complexion
, delicate lips and large eyes that were contorted with despair. In the months that followed, a tide of pamphlets, newspaper reports and
biographies
would speculate about the conversation that passed between the two men that evening. The younger, it was believed, had collapsed on the older, Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, in hysterical grief. ‘My Lord,’ he had cried, ‘we are undone! My Army is routed! What will become of poor Scotland?’ He was said to have fainted dead away on Lovat’s bed.

Charles Edward Stuart had good reason for such misery. Since the
so-called
Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had seen the ‘abdication’ of his grandfather James II (VII of Scotland), there had been several armed
rebellions
aimed at reinstating the Stuart monarchy. Most Lowland Scots and the greater part of the English had not supported them: they had welcomed, or at least not strongly opposed, James II’s departure. But the Scottish Highlands were different. The inhabitants of this often sublimely beautiful region were organised into clans to whose chiefs they looked for security and
authority. For both religious and political reasons, the clans were drawn much more strongly to the absolutist and often Catholic Stuart kings than to the Protestant monarchs who reigned over Britain after 1688. In 1715 and 1719, serious Jacobite (from
Jacobus
, the Latin for James) uprisings had broken out in the Highlands, with the aim of ousting the Hanoverian British king, George I, and restoring the Stuarts. The situation then largely
quietened
for a quarter of a century until, in early 1744, whispers of renewed unrest started to circulate. After an initial attempt at rebellion failed, in July 1745 James II’s grandson Charles Edward Stuart, known as the ‘Young Pretender’, had travelled from exile in Italy to board a frigate at Saint Nazaire on France’s west coast. After a voyage fraught with danger, he had landed a month later on Eriskay in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Over the ensuing months, the Young Pretender had gathered a Jacobite army of several thousand, largely consisting of Highlanders. He had
pronounced
James II ‘King of Britain’, gained control of Edinburgh, and won a devastating victory against George II’s army at Prestonpans, a few miles east of Scotland’s capital. Stuart had then led his troops down through Scotland into England, arriving as far south as Derby on 4 December 1745, a mere 130 miles from the Hanoverian capital. North Britain’s most
popular
newspaper, the
Caledonian Mercury
, described in fearful awe how ‘the desperate Highlander’s trusty broadsword and targe [is] headed by a person who can lie on straw, eat a dry crust, dine in five minutes and gain a battle in four’. But as the Hanoverian troops set out for Derby to face the Jacobite army, their opponents had suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, done an
about-turn
. The Jacobites’ commander, Lord George Murray, had never much respected the Young Pretender, whom he considered something of a reckless adventurer. Should the rebels march on London, Murray had predicted a resounding defeat at the hands of the London militia. And to Charles Edward Stuart’s utter dismay, his commander’s motion for a retreat had won the vote.

Over the following four months, the Jacobite soldiers had travelled back into Scotland. George II’s army was placed under the command of his fanatical, rotund son, William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, who led his men in pursuit of the withdrawing Jacobites. After four months of sidestepping one
another in a martial
pas de deux
, on 16 April 1746 the Hanoverians and the Jacobites finally met on Culloden Moor, a few miles north-east of Inverness. Stuart’s army was sadly dispersed, ravenously hungry and had not slept for two days. By contrast Cumberland’s men were well rested, well fed and
outnumbered
their opponents by around three thousand. The Battle of Culloden began chaotically at around one o’clock in the afternoon. Forty-five minutes later it was over. In that short duration, the time it takes to enjoy a soak in the bath, between 1500 and 2000 Jacobites lost their lives. Only fifty of Cumberland’s men had died. It was the last military battle to this day to be fought on the island of Great Britain. Stuart had not been able to watch its awful final throes. He had fled, ignominiously, with the cry ‘Run, you cowardly Italian!’ ringing in his ears, riding sixteen miles westward, towards Lovat’s old stone fortress, Castle Dounie.

In the hours that followed the Battle of Culloden, the King’s soldiers
exercised
little restraint in their retribution against the surviving rebels. One Hanoverian redcoat recalled that the ‘moor was covered in blood; and our men, what with killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in the blood, and splashing one another, looked like so many butchers’. A decade after the event, the Scottish writer Tobias Smollett described the horrific aftermath of the battle:

The bloodshed during and after Culloden earned Cumberland the
nickname
‘the Butcher’ and the bitter quip that he should be made a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers.

On Stuart’s arrival at Castle Dounie, Lovat realised that neither man was safe for long. After a long, fraught career, Lovat had become infamous for his
duplicity. Switching his allegiance back and forth between the Pretender’s ancestors and those of the Hanoverian king had landed him with a
conviction
for high treason, a death sentence (later quashed through Lovat’s notorious charm), outlawry, arrest in France as a double agent and a
significant
spell in the Bastille prison. During the rebellion of 1745–6 Lovat, who was then an elderly man, had tried to stay out of sight, placing his son in charge of the Fraser clan and commanding him to support the Young Pretender’s cause, while he himself feigned illness and took to his bed. But as the rebellion had escalated and even seemed likely to succeed, Lovat’s enthusiasm had got the better of him. He had left his bed to openly rally the rebels against the King with such zest that one journalist described him as ‘the chief Author and Contriver of this wicked Scene’.

When Stuart told Lovat of the relish with which the King’s forces had dispatched the rebels at Culloden, the old man realised how false was his hope that, should the rebellion fail, no government ‘would be so cruel, as to endeavour to extirpate the whole Remains of the Highlanders’. An impassioned conversation took place between the two men in which Lovat tried to persuade the Young Pretender to make one further attempt,
invoking
the memory of Robert the Bruce’s multiple defeats and his eventual success. But Stuart was disconsolate, and sought only a safe escape back to the Continent. Lovat concluded that, as an old sparring partner had recently put it to him, ‘the double Game you have played for some Time past’ was up.

On the morning of 17 April 1746, Lovat, Stuart and their retinues fled west into the Scottish Highlands. Numerous pamphlets published later that year liked to imagine them scaling the peak of Sgúrr a’Choir Ghlais, one of Scotland’s most inaccessible mountains. From the hill’s summit, over 3500 feet above sea level, the two men would have gazed over an extensive panorama of destruction, as George II’s redcoated soldiers mercilessly
pursued
the fleeing rebels: ‘Heaps of their Men lying in their Blood; others flying before their Enemies; Fire and Sword raging everywhere, and a great deal of it upon [Lovat’s] own Estate, and among his Tenants.’ The redcoats pursued a brutal strategy to subdue rebel clans to the King’s authority in the months after the battle. They seized livestock, horses, gold and coin from
the Highlanders, and burned houses and farms to the ground under a
variety
of pretexts, such as the failure to deliver up fugitive rebels, refusal to surrender weapons or sometimes for the sheer joy of pillaging. One soldier, who was posted at Fort Augustus in the summer of 1746, recalled: ‘we had near twenty Thousand Head of Cattle brought in, such as Oxen, Horses, Sheep, and Goats, taken from the Rebels (whose Houses we also frequently plundered and burnt) by Parties sent out for them, and in Search of the Pretender; so that great Numbers of our Men grew rich by their Shares in the Spoil’. The redcoats were intent on driving out supporters of the Young Pretender from every corner of the Scottish Highlands. They sought to ‘put an end’ to the spirit of Jacobitism ‘so effectually now, that it will never be able to break out again’.

Looking down on this scene of murder and horror, Lovat and Stuart decided to part company. It was the last time they would meet. The Young Pretender fled towards the Western Isles but Lovat made his way alone to Loch a’Mhuillidh, a small piece of water seventeen miles west of Castle Dounie in the midst of Glen Strathfarrar, where he turned a bothy on a small island midway down the loch into a temporary home. When the King’s soldiers closed in on the glen, his hideaway became untenable. Evading the redcoats, the old man travelled south-west, swiftly disappearing into a
seemingly
impenetrable cluster of peaks which he had known since childhood. Detailed maps of the Scottish Highlands now allow anyone to name these towering mountains: Sgúrr na Lapaich, Carn nan Gobhar, Sgúrr nan Clachan Geala, Braigh a’Choire Bhig, An Riabhachan, Mullach a’
Ghlas-thuill
. We can trace their dramatic ascensions in closely bunched orange contour lines, quantify the immensity of their altitudes and pick out a safe path among teetering rocky outcrops, fields of boulders, vigorous streams and obscured lochs. But in 1746, the King’s soldiers had no such assistance. They were beaten back by the formidable, seemingly unreadable scenery, and Lovat was able to make his way sixty miles south-west, unchallenged, around Loch Mullardoch, through the Kintail Forest, over the Five Sisters peaks, between Loch Hourn and Loch Quoich, through Glen Dessary, until, just short of the Scottish mainland’s western extremity, he reached Loch Morar. Here Lovat secreted himself on an island towards the west end of the
vast lake with his Roman Catholic bishop, his secretary and a band of
followers
, and for the time being considered himself safe.

 

T
HROUGHOUT THE COURSE
of the rebellion, the redcoats had
suffered
from poor intelligence about the Highlands’ geography. This was exacerbated by inadequate maps of the region. The surveying of strategic sites such as fortifications and barracks across Scotland had been an integral part of military practice since the seventeenth century, and the flatter,
gentrified
landscapes of the Lowlands possessed a number of estate and county maps. But there was no complete map of the whole Scottish nation that
provided
an accurate overview of the Highlands’ mountains, rivers, lochs and paths. In March 1746, only a month before Culloden, Captain Frederick Scott had written to his commander from Castle Stalker, a fifteenth-century tower-house poised on a picturesque islet on Loch Laich, in Appin, on Scotland’s west coast. Scott’s letter betrayed his frustration that ‘this Place is not marked on any of our Maps’. He had also noted the differences between the place names on his chart and those actually used by the locals.