Did the man behind the legend of the Young Pretender measure up?
Words JACQUELINE RIDING
After eight long months, the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion came to a bloody end at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. A combination of exhaustion, hunger, the decision to stand and fight rather than wait for the whole army to gather on an exposed, boggy moor and against a well-fed, rested and broadly better-armed opposition were all factors that led to the Jacobite army’s defeat. But the question is how did a campaign described by contemporaries as madcap, even reckless, get off the ground in the first place?
We could point to the enduring, although dwindling, support for the House of Stuart, particularly in Scotland, its ancient seat. Or the certain belief among some British and Irish Catholics that they would fare much better under a Catholic monarch. Add to this the fervent desire among some to tear up the Acts of Union that had forged a new nation from the old Kingdoms of Scotland and England.
Then there was the recent deployment of the majority of British troops in Flanders, fighting the old enemy, France, leaving Great Britain more or less undefended. Or even the pragmatic, some might say cynical, manner by which King Louis XV used the threat, as well as the reality, of a French invasion in support of his poor, disinherited Stuart cousins to keep the British government and the new Hanoverian dynasty, France’s European and colonial rivals, on constant alert.
Collectively, these circumstances go a long way to explain how the Jacobite cause was still very much alive in 1745. But they don’t clarify why and how the arrival of a lone ship – not the hoped-for French fleet – off the coast of the Western Highlands, carrying a handful of men and guns, a modest war chest and precious little else, quickly turned into, as Tom Holland has described it, “the greatest 18th-century crisis to menace the Union of Great Britain.”
The extraordinary success, initially at least, of what was to be the last Jacobite rebellion can only be explained by one factor: its leader, Charles Edward Stuart. To have organised even this low-key descent on Britain in complete secrecy from his own father, the so-called James VIII & III, along with a majority of his supporters and even under the very nose of the Stuarts’ most important sponsor, King Louis, took guile, patience, determination and the ability to judge as well as seize the moment.
But then, after a somewhat lacklustre arrival in Scotland, to persuade the loyal but unimpressed clan chiefs that this attempt was worth risking everything once more, to march across Scotland, gathering a sizable army en route, occupy the great city of Edinburgh with barely a shot fired, defeat a contingent of the British army in battle, and then cross into England requires something else. A good amount of luck and the element of surprise were essential, but so too was
