The Making Of The British Army (16 page)

Learning of this, Charles Edward took the western route into England instead, as had the Jacobite army in the Fifteen. And despite the old Roman road which ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, Hawley was unable to intercept them. The Jacobite march rates were consistently impressive throughout the campaign, and a new road would be built
after the rebellion to allow troops to get from one side of the country to the other faster.

In Lancashire, however, the promised Jacobite support failed to materialize, the Lancastrian recusants proving even less ready to rally to the cause than they had been thirty years before. Just 200 deluded souls from Manchester joined the colours – and these were Anglicans not Catholics. About this time, too, the long-awaited French landing took place, but not in the strength that Charles had boasted of – just 800 men of Louis XV’s Écossais Royaux
³⁹
and the Irish Brigade. And they landed not on the English coast but in Scotland.

Still marching fast, by early December Charles was at Derby. When the news reached London there was a run on the Bank of England, whose collapse was prevented only by the chief cashier’s presence of mind in ordering payments to be made in sixpences to gain time. But at Derby came the habitual Stuart rift with advisers. Charles was all for marching on, but his generals, the capable Lord George Murray in particular, argued that it was futile: 3,000 men had deserted, there were more government troops covering the capital than first supposed, three armies were converging on them (there were in fact only two, the other the product of clever deception), and – perhaps more dismaying still – Murray had learned that Charles had deceived him about both English and French support. Back they turned for Scotland.

They paused to fight a rearguard action near Penrith, the last field battle on English soil, then left the Manchester Anglicans to hold the castle at Carlisle, a hopeless cause if ever there was one: government troops took the place in short order (visitors can still see the grooves in the walls of the dungeons where the Jacobites licked desperately for moisture). But still Hawley’s men could not catch the main body. By Christmas Charles’s army was in Glasgow, and in early January they had managed to restore themselves enough to lay siege to Stirling castle. Stirling proved no easier a nut to crack than in the Fifteen, however, and as government reinforcements began arriving from the north, Murray decided it was time to turn and meet their pursuers.

Accounts of the battle at Falkirk on 17 January are varied, and historians disagree over the detail – including the direction of the government attack – but what is not in doubt is that with around 6,000
men Lord George Murray inflicted a sharp reverse on Hawley’s superior numbers. It was raining hard, and without practice of late the government musketry had lost its edge. On top of this, some of the rawer troops showed scant inclination to meet steel with steel. Hawley, indeed, was furious: ‘Such scandalous cowardice I never saw before … The whole second line of foot ran away without firing a shot.’

The duke of Cumberland – a considerably more able general than his youth or appearance suggest.

The duke of Cumberland now hastened north and took personal command. This was ‘family’ business, and King George could have no greater reassurance in the final solution to the Stuart problem than having his son at the head of the army. Cumberland had taken command after Dettingen, and although he had been worsted at Fontenoy two years later, he had profited a good deal from his time in the field. He knew that the answer, as in Germany, lay in discipline and well-delivered volleys. The army would need to retrain and apply the lessons learned – a response that was to become a characteristic of the British army after a tactical setback.

But first Cumberland had to secure the Lowlands against a resurgence of the Highland host, and then disengage. Leaving a force to guard the passes south into the central Lowlands, and now augmented by 4,000 Hessians recently landed at Leith, he allowed the Jacobites to fall back on the Great Glen, and in early February marched to Aberdeen, resupplied along the way by sea. And for six weeks, in the relative comfort of that granite city, he drilled his regiments.

At the beginning of April he was satisfied that they were ready for battle, and on the eighth they began marching for Inverness, the Jacobite depot, by way of Banff and Cullen. It was a less direct route but more secure, the right flank guarded by the sea from which, again, the army could be supplied by the Royal Navy. And very deftly did the 24-year-old Cumberland handle his force of 9,000 infantry and cavalry: using his artillery to concentrated effect, he forced a crossing of the Spey, a tricky river and the only place the Jacobites had any real chance of holding up the advance, and reached Nairn on the fourteenth. It was a march of 100 miles, with a contested river crossing, in six days – and with the army in as hale a condition at Nairn as they had been on leaving Aberdeen, it was an impressive rate of advance.

On learning there were redcoats in Nairn, Charles left Inverness (and his supplies) and marched east with 5,000 men to block their further advance. They skirmished with Cumberland’s outposts, but little more, and that afternoon the Highland army bivouacked in the grounds of
Culloden House a dozen miles west of Nairn while Charles and his lieutenants rode over nearby Drummossie Moor (or Muir) to see if it would serve as a defensive position. Besides spectacular views (in good weather) of the Moray and Beauly Firths and the mountains beyond, the place had nothing to recommend it. Indeed its wet, springy, even boggy moss made the going for man and horse difficult, and since a quarter of Charles’s men were armed with broadswords only, the advantage would be to Cumberland’s regulars, whose powder and shot did not depend on good going. Lord George Murray objected to ‘so plain a field’ and urged a different course: leave Inverness uncovered, he begged the prince, and play to the Highlanders’ strengths by drawing Cumberland’s men into the hills south of Nairn. Charles, with predictable Stuart self-assurance, ignored him.

The following day, the fifteenth, was the duke of Cumberland’s birthday. To celebrate, and with the imminence of battle in mind, he provided extra beer and spirits for the army to drink his health – and beef. Indeed, his men had eaten beef every day thanks to the victualling ships coasting the Moray Firth.

The Jacobite army was not so fortunate, their supply meagre in the extreme. A local antiquarian writing in the early nineteenth century describes their condition – the very antithesis of the Marlburian ideal to which the duke of Cumberland had sensibly adhered:

Morale could not have been high in the ranks of Charles Stuart’s army, therefore. The hardy Highlanders may indeed have found the short and unwholesome rations familiar enough, but they were scarcely
sustaining. A third at least of the Jacobite army were Lowlanders, too, or men from the good farming and fishing country of Aberdeenshire and Angus – or Irish and Scots regulars in French pay: their table did not usually consist of sweepings. But Charles had one more idea. His army had caught the government troops napping at Prestonpans the year before: they might do the same at Nairn, where ‘drunk as beggars’ the redcoats would be sleeping even more soundly. ‘Heigh! Johnnie Cowp, are ye wauken yet?’ ran the Jacobite taunt after Prestonpans; they could surely pull off the surprise one more time?

They set off after sunset, about eight o’clock, though not all the foragers had returned, and for six hours they stumbled east in the moonless night. At two they halted, still with 4 miles to go for Nairn. But Murray knew there was not enough time left to get into position before Cumberland’s army would stand to for the dawn, and so he ordered his men to turn back. Before the night march the Jacobite army was half-starved; when it mustered on Drummossie Moor next morning it would be half-starved and exhausted.

And now it began to rain – driving, sleeting rain from the east.

Cumberland’s army was roused from its well-nourished sleep at four o’clock into a night even darker because of the cloud; but the rain was no more welcome to men with fuller bellies if they could not now get the cooking fires going: ‘A very cold, rainy morning,’ wrote one private soldier of the Royal Scots, ‘and nothing to buy to comfort us, but we had the Ammunition loaf.’ The ‘ammunition loaf (‘biscuit’, that is, bread double-baked) was a good deal better than the Highlanders’ nothing, however – and the weather would be at their backs, too, making it a good deal easier to keep their powder dry.

Cumberland was keen to press his advantage, and before first light he had his men on the march – three brigade columns, each of five battalions, with the cavalry on the left and the Highland auxiliaries scouting ahead. Twice they halted to form line, and twice they resumed the march when the scouts reported false alarm, until towards the middle of the morning, seeing the Jacobite army hastily forming on the moor, Cumberland ordered his regiments to deploy for battle.

Because the broadsword was not a weapon that rested easily in waiting hands, Cumberland expected the Jacobites to attack quickly. He therefore began deploying in three lines, the ‘continental’ way, but seeing Charles’s dispositions – two lines, guns in the centre and on the flanks, the Scots and Irish regiments of the French army, with the horse,
in the second – he reduced his reserve to just one battalion and strengthened his first and support lines (to eight battalions and six), and thereby managed to extend on the left to anchor his flank on a low stone wall running towards the Jacobite line.

Training told. ‘On our approach near the enemy, the army was formed in an instant,’ ran the account in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, which though
parti pris
seems to have given a fair picture of events. The gunners were quick about things too, with pairs of three-pounders run forward between the battalion gaps in the front line, and the mortars just in rear. Cumberland now spoke to every battalion, ‘yea, almost to every platoon’, continued the magazine enthusiastically: ‘Depend, my lads, on your bayonets; let them mingle with you; let them know the men they have to deal with!’

But before the enemy were allowed to mingle, they would take a deal of shot. Cumberland pushed the 8th Foot (Wolfe’s regiment) forward on the left flank to use the cover of the low wall to enfilade the Jacobite right, while sending dragoons and the Campbell militia round behind the wall and through the grounds of Culloden House to be ready to take them in the flank.

The Jacobite line should have numbered 6,000, of which the front rank of 4,000 Highlanders were to have made the irresistible charge, but a third of them were still missing after the fiasco of the night ramble. Colonel John O’Sullivan, the Jacobite chief of staff and one of the few professionally trained officers, therefore had to weaken the support line to strengthen the front. It did little for the morale of men who knew already that they were outnumbered.

With their dispositions thus completed in the early afternoon, the two commanders – both 25 years old, both with the future of their royal houses in their hands – could survey the battlefield in silence for a few minutes more. But whereas Prince William Augustus, the duke of Cumberland, could do so with confidence all round, it would not have served for Prince Charles Edward to compare his military credentials with those of his adversary – any more than it would for him to compare his army to the government’s in anything save courage. The sleeting rain continued to lash the faces and bare limbs of the Jacobite front rank – weary, wasted men, the bravest of whom could not but have been in some part overawed by the regular ranks of red which stood 600 yards distant with the rain on their backs and who ‘kept dry our flintlocks with our coatlaps’. Drummossie Moor was indeed ‘so plain a field’.