Behind the Palace Doors (26 page)

It was then that the new Hanoverian commander in Edinburgh, Lieutenant General Henry Hawley, decided to march on the Jacobites assembled at Stirling. Though Hawley fully expected the “rascals” would run when confronted by his cavalry, Charles’s forces instead gathered at Falkirk Muir and entrenched themselves, muskets held at the ready. It was nearly dark, in the midst of strong winds and a heavy downpour, when Hawley sent three cavalry regiments to confront them. When the horsemen were just ten feet away, the order was given to fire. Scores of horses and men, including the cavalry commander, fell in this lethal volley. The remainder spurred their horses to trample the rebel infantry.

“The most singular and extraordinary combat immediately followed,” James Johnstone recalled. “The Highlanders, stretched on the ground, thrust their dirks into the bellies of the horses. Some seized the riders by their clothes, dragged them down, and stabbed them with their dirks; several again used their pistols; but few of them had sufficient space to handle their swords.”

It was a magnificent rout, yet another in a long series of triumphs for Charles Stuart. It would also be his last. Rather than take advantage of the victory and pursue Hawley’s forces,
Charles decided to refocus on the siege of Stirling. That came to nothing, however, and by the end of January he was persuaded that the best course of action would be to retreat north to the town of Inverness and wait out the winter. His men were “struck with amazement,” according to Lord Elcho, “for everybody expected a battle and it appeared very strange to run away from the very army that had been beat only a fortnight before.”

It was a miserable trek north. Not only had victory been snatched from them, but they were weary and bitterly cold. “Men were covered with icicles hanging on their eyebrows and beards,” wrote one member of Charles’s army, “and an entire coldness seized all their limbs, a severe contrary wind driving snow and little cutting hail down upon our faces, in such a manner that it was impossible to see ten yards before us.”

The situation was little improved in Inverness. Charles became dangerously ill with pneumonia, and though he did recover, the gathering of supplies had been neglected. So had the maintenance of discipline among the fighting men, many of whom returned to their homes for the rest of the winter. Such was the dismal state of affairs when, on April 13, the Young Pretender learned that his nemesis, the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, was marching toward them.

Charles rallied what remained of his army, about forty-five hundred men, and marched the ill-equipped, underfed band to Culloden Moor, a flat, featureless plain about four miles north of Inverness. It was not an ideal spot—far better suited to Cumberland’s mighty artillery—but it was the place Charles had chosen to confront his enemy at last. He was not going to be dissuaded. What followed was one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on British soil.

The Jacobite army slept fitfully after arriving at Culloden, fully expecting to fight Cumberland the next day. But the duke never arrived. He was celebrating his birthday at Nairn, the Hanoverian encampment some twelve miles away. While
Cumberland’s men were swilling brandy distributed among them for the occasion, Charles’s were scrounging for food—that day’s ration having been one biscuit. With supplies so low, the clash would have to come immediately or be abandoned.

With no sign of Cumberland, it was decided to ambush him late that night at Nairn. The twelve-mile march began at eight in the evening, but it was nearly paralyzed due to the darkness of the night and the unfamiliar terrain. This, one officer recalled, “did not allow us to follow any track” and was “accompanied with confusion and disorder.” Dawn began to break after eight miles, and the element of surprise would be lost entirely once they arrived at Nairn. The only solution was to turn around and march back to Culloden. “ ’Tis no matter then,” Charles was heard to say. “We shall meet them and behave like brave fellows.”

But the futile endeavor depleted what little strength remained among the Stuart army. Some men simply lay down in the bushes to snatch whatever sleep they could that cold, wet morning; others straggled away to find food. Even the ever resilient Bonnie Prince Charlie collapsed in exhaustion. Then, suddenly, came word that the Hanoverian army was a mere four miles away.

Officers struggled to form their men into battle lines in preparation for the coming onslaught, but the once fierce warriors had been driven way past the point of endurance, and the fight had simply left many of them. One officer recalled the “visible damp and dejection” he saw in his men, while another noted that “they were not the clans that had fought with such verve and vigor at Prestonpans and Falkirk.”

The Marquis d’Éguilles, Louis XV’s special envoy, observed the terrible disarray and lack of spirit in the Stuart army and tried desperately to persuade Charles to avoid the clash, which he feared would become a massacre. His pleas were entirely unsuccessful. “The Prince,” he reported to King Louis, “who
believed himself invincible because he had not yet been beaten, defied by enemies whom he thoroughly despised, seeing at their head the son of the rival of his father; proud and haughty as he was, badly advised, perhaps betrayed, forgetting at this moment every other object, could not bring himself to decline battle even for a single day.”

The Hanoverian line emerged at Culloden—a mighty force of nine thousand men, dressed in scarlet, marching in order, bayonets as fixed as their determined expressions. “The enemy being by this time in full view, we began to huzza and bravado them in their march upon us,” recalled one Jacobite. “But, notwithstanding all our repeated shouts, we could not induce them to return one: on the contrary, they continued proceeding, like a deep sullen river; while the Prince’s army might be compared to a streamlet running among stones, whose noise sufficiently showed its shallowness.”

As Cumberland’s army pressed menacingly forward, Charles did his best to rally his men. “Here they are coming, my laddies! We’ll soon be with them. They don’t forget Gladsmuir, nor Falkirk, and you have the same arms and swords—let me see yours! I’ll answer this will cut off some heads and arms today.” But, as one of his officers noted, there was something missing from the Young Pretender’s normal vigor and assurance. He saw Cumberland’s great scarlet horde and “had no great hopes.”

Indeed there was no hope. After an initial Jacobite volley, Hanoverian guns and cannonade began ripping through the Young Pretender’s ranks. Legs, arms, and heads were torn away in the lethal barrage, as the men waited in vain for the order to charge. One government officer wrote that he could see they “fluctuated extremely and could not remain long in the position they were in without running away or coming down upon us.” It was in fact a hideous situation for the Jacobites, especially as the Hanoverians began to literally shred them with grapeshot.
Some ran, or fell to the ground for cover. The rest ran screaming toward the wall of red coats. “They came up very boldly and fast all in a cloud together,” wrote one government soldier. Then they were slaughtered.

“The Highlanders fought like furies,” reported one of Cumberland’s soldiers. “It was dreadful to see [their] swords circling in the air as they were raised from the strokes. And no less to see the officers of the army, some cutting with their swords, others pushing with their spontoons, the sergeants running their halberds into the throats of the opponents, the men ramming their fixed bayonets up to the sockets.”

It was all over in less than an hour. Thousands of Jacobites lay dead or dying. Those who managed to escape the massacre were hunted down mercilessly by the government troops whose bloodlust had barely been sated in battle. And Bonnie Prince Charlie began a five-month odyssey as a fugitive as he tried to make his way back to France. It was a storied adventure, filled with peril, extreme deprivation, and even an episode when he escaped detection disguised as a woman. Charles was eventually picked up by two heavily armed French ships on Scotland’s west coast, near the spot where he had first arrived a year earlier. He was safe at last, but the rescue also marked the end of a dream. There would never be a grand Stuart restoration, and the Young Pretender would spend the rest of his life as an embittered paper prince.

George II was preceded in death by his despised son, Prince Frederick, so when the king died in 1760, he was succeeded by Frederick’s oldest son, who became George III. Frederick’s youngest daughter, Caroline Matilda, married King Christian VII of Denmark. It was a disastrous union
.

Life for an English princess was very rarely pleasant. Exalted rank aside, she was really little more than a commodity, a diplomatic tool sent off to a foreign land and wedded to a stranger as a matter of statecraft. Few of these arranged marriages were fairy tale. Most, in fact, were utter misery. And so it was for Caroline Matilda, the youngest sister of King George III, sent away at age fifteen to marry Denmark’s mad monarch, Christian VII. The union was a disaster, but Caroline Matilda, unlike so many other princesses before her, refused to accept her unhappy state. Her determination to liberate herself in the name of love unleashed forces that very nearly destroyed her.

Marriage to the Danish king, her first cousin,
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meant that
Caroline Matilda would have to leave everything she loved in England forever. And the prospect of being queen in her new country was small comfort, especially since she would not be allowed even one English companion. The severance of all ties to home was to be brutally efficient.

“It is worse than dying,” wrote the princess’s contemporary Elizabeth Carter; “for die she must to all she has ever seen or known; but then it is only dying out of one bad world into another just like it, and where she is to have cares and fears, and dangers and sorrows, that will all yet be new to her.” Prophetic words indeed, if a bit understated.

Before she was sent away to Denmark, Caroline Matilda was married at St. James’s Palace. The bridegroom was not present, however, a common enough occurrence in arranged royal unions. Instead, the princess’s older brother stood in for King Christian.
^†
The teenaged girl had been calm in the months leading up to the wedding, but as the actual date approached she became increasingly agitated, and by the time she arrived for the ceremony on October 1, 1766, she was a complete mess. The Duchess of Northumberland reported that “before she set out on the procession,” Caroline Matilda “cried so much that she was near falling into fits,” and that her brother William, who escorted her, “was so shocked at seeing her in such a situation, that he looked as pale as death, and as if he was ready to faint away.”

All that weeping and wailing, and Caroline Matilda had not yet even met her crazy cousin across the North Sea. King Christian had come to the Danish throne the previous January,
just before he turned seventeen. His favorite pastimes were picking up prostitutes, masturbating excessively, and breaking things. He also loved to be punished, especially being tied to a chair and whipped like a common criminal.

One thing Christian VII most certainly did not like was being king. The fearful and delusional young man found his royal role repressive and sought any means of escape. Sometimes he would disguise himself and pick fights with people on the streets of Copenhagen or, after a night of whoring, smash windows and break furniture. Mostly though, Christian lost himself in his disordered, racing mind.

“I have to talk to him all through the night, or read to him,” the king’s valet reported. “Such an extraordinary imagination and so much wit are given to few people. He notices everything that happens around him and afterwards points out all the things that annoy him, as well as the oddest and most ridiculous. In this way words stream out of him the whole night through, and I sweat with fear and try to hide my reserve and fatigue with trivial answers. Often things happen that I can in no way understand.”

It was with this exceedingly unbalanced person that Caroline Matilda—or the Danish Mathilde, as she would henceforth be known—would be forced to spend her life. The day after her proxy wedding, weeping bitterly, she set off for Denmark. “May the most cordial affection ever subsist between you and the King of Denmark,” wrote her brother King George III, “may you be happy in your children and may you always look on those private blessings as the sole objects worth your concern.” Alas, not one of the king’s banal blessings would ever come to be.