The Last Highlander (36 page)

MacLeod discovered his whereabouts and sent a ‘little sneaking gentleman here with his treacherous letters’, to ask Lovat to commit himself to King George. Waiting for a reply, Lovat drew himself up. ‘I told him to tell his chief that he was a traitor to the King, and a murderer of my son and me, which he might be sure I would resent, if I was able; but that I would never black paper to a man that had so basely betrayed me; that since he went to the devil I would leave him there.’ MacLeod’s messenger slunk away, Lovat’s curses ringing in his ears. He speculated that if MacLeod had kept his oaths and his word, ‘I had so managed this part of the north that about 6000 men had marched south to the Prince’s service.’ If only; they could have drawn out so many lingerers and lookers in the combined wake of Frasers and MacLeods.

Letters kept him connected to the action drawing closer all the time. He wrote to his son daily. ‘I have done more against this government than would hang fifty lords, and forfeit fifty estates … Loudon told me the day before I made my escape that he had as much to say against me as would hang all the Frasers of my clan,’ he told Simon. ‘I shall send you my fine pistols and furniture after I put them … in a new portmanteau; for it would be a pity to spoil them; for there will be few so good in the army’ – he still had his gifts from Louis XIV. ‘My dear Simon, for Christ’s sake, don’t be a week without writing to me,’ he cried. ‘I beg over and over again my dear child to let me hear more often from you.’

By the end of January 1746, the Jacobites were at Bannockburn, between Stirling and Perth. Cumberland was only a few days behind them, and ready to retake Edinburgh. The Jacobite leadership pressed the Prince to retreat further north and not make his stand at Edinburgh. Since they were now heading for the Highlands, the Master of Lovat obtained permission to ride ahead and muster more men from his father’s estates. Fraser of Inverallochy took command of all the Frasers, and Simon rode away through the snow.

The Jacobites trudged deeper into a Highland winter. The ladies among them struggled with the conditions. Miss Isabel Stuart, who had come to march with them from her parents’ home south of Dunkeld, wanted to go home, as the Jacobites kept their faces heading north into the empty snow-fogged spaces of the Drumochter Pass. Plains of peat bog 1,500 feet above sea level stretched ahead of them, scoured to sour granulated mud and moor grass, ice and water. But ‘the storm was too great’ for her to go home just yet, Miss Stuart said. She hauled up her skirts and plodded through fourteen miles of frozen mud and the intermittent relief of some time on one of General Wade’s roads. Murray of Broughton’s wife rode along, but the wind chilled her so badly she had to be taken down off her horse and put in a chaise.

In Inverness, Lord President Forbes and the Earl of Loudon regarded the closeness of the warring sides with trepidation. Inverness lay right in the path of the battle that Charles fled and Cumberland chased. They had been informed that the Prince had reached the Mackintosh house, Moy Hall, just ten miles south of Inverness. Loudon tried a surprise raid on Moy to grab the Prince, but they were ambushed and most of Loudon’s troops panicked and fled. With a groan, Loudon collected his remaining men and retreated to Inverness. Casualties of the fighting were tiny. But 200 government soldiers deserted their posts in the hours that followed. The encounter resulted in a loss of confidence in the government officers that they could defend the town. To prevent Inverness being reduced to rubble in a siege and street battle, Duncan Forbes, Loudon, MacLeod of MacLeod and the other officers, decided it was best to make a strategic withdrawal across the Beauly Firth to the Black Isle. Loudon ordered a garrison of 300 up to the castle, marched the rest of his troops to the River Ness, across the bridge and to the harbour area at Kessock.

When the news came to Lovat and Gorthleck in their beds in Stratherrick, they rejoiced. Perhaps all was not lost. The Prince had still never lost an encounter. His Highland army had won several skirmishes and a major battle.

The Prince left Moy and took up a position on the high ground to the south of the town. They could see the government army below them on the flat land by the harbour, and prepared for battle. Miss Isabel Stuart never made it back to Castle Menzies, and her mother and father. Now officers crowded round her and ‘gave me some of their watches and purses and other things, their pocket books and anything valuable’. If they fell, she could return the keepsakes to their families. The Highlanders got ready to unleash the juggernaut of their charge down the hill.

Instead of fighting, they watched in amazement as scores of boats came in and ferried the British forces away. The Jacobites streamed down into the town, but the Hanoverian garrison guarded the bridge from the castle, and the tide was too high to ford the River Ness. Loudon and his fellow officers and men kept retreating until Loudon was at Dornoch, ‘twenty-eight miles and three’ sea crossings from Inverness; and Duncan Forbes and MacLeod were at Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye. Back in Inverness, Major George Grant, a cousin of Sir James Grant, and a cousin by marriage to Lovat, commanded the garrison in charge of the castle. He had a company of Grants and one of Rosses under him, and about eighty regulars from Loudon’s men.

The Jacobites reconnoitred the castle; the improvements carried out in the 1720s under Wade had exposed the foundations. Loose rock and sandy ground invited undermining operations. On the morning of 20 February, the Jacobites opened fire and engineers scuttled up under its cover, to mine into the base of the castle walls. The Hanoverians leant out from the battlements to drop hand grenades on them. The grenades fell wide. The Hanoverian soldiers tried without success to retrain their cannon far enough to lower the barrels that they might fire down the walls.

Major Grant could see no option but to surrender or see his ramparts blown up. He did so. Cumberland was furious when he heard. The skirting wall the Jacobites were trying to mine was over five feet thick. Behind it was thirty-five feet of open ground to the wall of the castle itself. Grant could have put up a fight. He might have held the Jacobites down for a few days. Storming the castle, Prince Charles and his men plundered the well-stocked armoury and provisions for much-needed food and ammunition. Then the Prince ordered the flattening of the outer wall and bastions. The mining engineers set to. One charge failed to ignite and set off the gunpowder. A French explosives expert and his dog padded up gingerly to see what was wrong. He fiddled about and found too late there was nothing; the whole thing went sky high, launching the engineer and his dog a huge height. The dog thumped to earth on the river bank, got up and trotted away. The engineer had died.

The rebellion was in Lovat’s land, and he had no role. His son was in Inverness with the Prince, but Lovat had not seen him. He knew Simon had been in the Aird trying to make the rest of the clan rise, and threatening to take their plaids and cattle if they would not. The Jacobite leaders argued about whether to pursue Loudon through the north, or go out east to meet Cumberland, now advancing towards them from Aberdeen. The deeper they went into the Highlands, the more the Jacobites suffered desertions as men disappeared home to help their families. Cumberland had issued orders to his officers to ‘attack all whom he finds in arms against the government, and to burn the habitations of such who have left them and are with the rebels’. Women and children and the elderly were to be regarded as combatants, and none of the Jacobites were to be respected as soldiers. They were rebels and traitors to their King. He would not give them the rights of captured soldiers to decent treatment under the terms of war. The Duke of Cumberland recorded that this ‘has had a very good effect’ as the men whose families were made homeless and destitute tended to run off and try to help them. He noticed that harshness sent the rebels home from Inverness, where leniency, as used by the Lord President towards Lovat’s clan, was abused.

The Jacobite leaders in Inverness recognised their forces were worryingly thinly spread. Some had stayed around Blair Atholl under Lord George Murray to siege and take it from Murray’s brother, the Duke of Atholl. Another force had already gone to chase the Earl of Loudon north of Inverness across the firths and hills of Ross-shire and Sutherland.

When Gorthleck’s health improved, Lovat sent him to his son Simon with a letter. Lovat mentioned that Prince Charles was expressing a desire to ‘go some of these days, and view my country of the Aird, and fish salmon upon my river of Beauly’. But, ‘I do not much covet that great honour at this time,’ Lovat continued. ‘My house is quite out of order … I am not at home,’ he explained, slightly unnecessarily. If the Prince insisted, the Master ‘must offer to go along with him and offer him a glass of wine and any cold meat you can get there’. If the Prince went by himself and met with ‘no reception, it will be an affront, and a stain upon you and me while we breathe. So, my dearest child, don’t neglect this, for it is truly of greater consequence to our honour than you can imagine, though in itself but a maggot. But I fancy, since Cumberland is coming so near, that those fancies will be out of his head.’ Even in the shadow of battle, he spoke to his son of the need for hospitality and good manners.

In the hub of the Highlands, in wintry sleet and snow, the two sides ploughed through sodden land for a sovereign cause. No more than 16–17,000 men joined in battle here, small compared with the monumental battles on Continental Europe. But the fight here was bitter, personal and hugely ambitious. Settled in Inverness, the Jacobite forces lost their edge. Eventually the Master of Lovat managed a visit to Gorthleck to see his father, to describe what was happening, and discuss tactics.

It was clear to Lovat that, from being a tightly knit group in Derby, in great spirits and red-hot keen to charge on to London, the Jacobites were now scattered across a huge area of the Highlands, with the Prince at the centre and left trying to pull them all back in for the big confrontation with Cumberland. It had to come soon. Cumberland marched towards them along the coast from Aberdeen. Lovat thought that unless they could gather all the Highlanders back from this dispersed position, they were far too weak to fight a pitched battle and should retreat into the high hills and narrow glens to regroup and recover. The Prince had actually ordered home the men who lived locally. He simply did not have enough supplies to maintain them. There was no money, and soon there would be no oatmeal. Charles could not remain in the town, getting weaker. He decided to send a body of men to Elgin to meet Cumberland thirty miles east of Inverness and hold him up while the Jacobites regrouped. They must all muster at Inverness.

Lovat repeated that they should retire into the hills, but some of Charles’s Irish officers thought this was a terrible idea. This was not their country. They had hauled themselves through the sub-arctic desert of those hills in winter. Sparsely populated, ill supplied with meat and meal, how could they keep an army together there? If they broke up into guerrilla groups, how could they communicate and act effectively? That was not the army or the war they wanted.

The Master of Lovat returned to the camp and tried to rally the officers around him. He said to his cousin and fellow officer, Charles Fraser of Inverallochy, that armies often ran short of money. It did not matter they could not pay the men. It was better to pay them in full upon a decisive victory, than drip it out day by day to be spent on drink, food and women in the towns they conquered. Simon then returned home to Castle Dounie, to recruit more fighting Frasers.

By the beginning of April 1746, frost and snow, sharpened by easterly winds, were weakening both sides. When Cumberland’s men mustered in the morning, hundreds hunched over with bronchial diseases. They moved painfully, suffering the effects of chilblains on their fingers and toes from being continually icy cold and wet. It was like walking on razor blades. Their split and reddened skin ached and burned. Most of the officers could dry off in warm billets at night, but even some of them succumbed, though mostly to gout. Fevers – flu-like or dysentery – flared up. Disease compounded the struggle to move men, artillery and supplies through the mud. The men were used to being in winter quarters. Cumberland needed to go back to Flanders. He had to bring this to a swift end.

The Duke did not understand the Scots at all. He was here to support the well-affected majority. They did less than support him. Even the many loyal Scots harboured a residual sympathy and respect for the Jacobite elements among them. ‘A petty insolent spirit’ kept them aloof from admitting defeat, he observed. Cumberland concluded that when he had crushed this rebellion, something, a ‘stroke of authority and severity’ perhaps, would be unavoidable to subdue this independent-minded part of the Scottish soul for good and all. The Fraser chief, Lord Lovat, whom Cumberland knew from his father’s Court, had been loud in his loyal and submissive talk, and also nurtured Jacobites behind his back. Cumberland did not completely trust any of them, including most of those on the Hanoverian side, such as Duncan Forbes.

The part of the Jacobite army that Charles sent out to Elgin was in no way substantial enough to impede the approaching Hanoverians. The Duke of Perth and his brother Lord John Drummond pulled out when Cumberland got near enough to engage and poured back down the road to Inverness. Another Jacobite leader, Colonel O’Sullivan, riding out to meet them, said they retreated too fast. The Prince was not ready. Too many of his officers and their men had not returned from the different parts of the Highlands.

The Prince retired south of the town to Duncan Forbes’s home, Culloden House, with his men. Charles lay awake all night and spent the daytime trying to find food and bedding for his men. The Camerons and Lochiel arrived on 14 April, closely followed by the Drummonds and their troops returning from Elgin, forty miles east of Inverness. The Jacobites lined up on the moor outside Culloden House on the morning of 15 April, knowing the Duke was closing on them. Poised to attack, they shouted whenever anyone claimed to have sighted the enemy. Hours passed. Their nerves jangled. Cold and tiredness set in.