The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (56 page)

Though the rebellion was doomed, it did not seem so when the tartan army streamed into Derby, only 127 miles from London. Even though government forces were closing in from behind, there was now just one army between Bonnie Prince Charlie and the capital, and the crown. So desperate did the situation seem, with reports of the Highlanders having their broadswords sharpened at a blacksmiths in Derby, that there was a run on the Bank of England. George II put all his treasures on a yacht in case he had to flee to Hanover.

It all changed at Derby. The prince was for pressing on to London. Who knew what would happen if there was a pitched battle with George II? But his advisers convinced him to retreat: Scots and Irish soldiers in the service of the French king had arrived in Scotland, and they preferred to regroup and launch another assault on England the following year. Meanwhile Wade and the Duke of Cumberland were getting far too close behind him. Cumberland was in Staffordshire. The rebels therefore limped back towards the northern port of Inverness on the Moray Firth, where reinforcements were believed to be awaiting them. But the Scottish army was running out of steam, money and arms, while Cumberland’s men were having new boots and good food sent up to them from boats which landed daily on the Scottish coast. Even the Highlanders, austere though their lifestyle was, were completely exhausted by the time they faced Cumberland’s men on Drumossie Moor at Culloden in April 1746. It was a cold windswept plain above Inverness, with no natural advantages for the defenders and a very poor place to give battle. It was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s choice. His military advisers tried to dissuade him, but he paid no attention.

Though the celebrated, bloodcurdling whoops of the Highlanders were only a faint echo of the sounds which had terrified the people of Derby, the kilted warriors still managed to break two regiments of Cumberland’s front line. But after that it was a massacre. Culloden was a battle decided by firepower. The well-fed, well-armed redcoats who outnumbered the Jacobites by 3,000 men destroyed the clans. Those who were alive fled, hobbling along secret ways across the mountains to the west coast and then on to fishing boats to France. Back at the battlefield Cumberland gave orders for the wounded rebels still lying on the field to be bayoneted to death, earning himself the name of Butcher.

The prince himself made for the Western Isles and would have been captured on South Uist had he not been rescued by a brave local lady named Flora Macdonald. She dressed him up as her maid, and very peculiar he looked too, because like his great-uncle Charles II he was exceptionally tall. For five months Prince Charles Edward wandered the west of Scotland like his followers, trying to evade the government soldiers. In an orgy of revenge, to terrorize the locals into betraying Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hiding place, the soldiers raped their women, took their cattle, destroyed their humble dwelling places, burned their lands, and broke their ploughs, with the result that many of these crofters died from exposure and famine. To the English government’s fury, although the reward on Bonnie Prince Charlie’s head was £30,000, not one of the Highlanders betrayed him.

At last Charles managed to find a boat willing to take him back to France via Skye, and he bade a grateful farewell to Flora. The famous song ‘Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye, carry the lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye’ refers to this moment. But the prince, who was emphatically not born to be king, would live on for another forty-two years until he died at last in 1788 in Rome. By then a sad drunkard, full of fond reminiscences of his adventures, he was a curiosity to travellers doing the Grand Tour. But in his gross, swollen features the observer could see no trace of the youth who had fired a nation to arms.

Old age was something few of Prince Charles’s followers lived to enjoy. This time, as far as the Hanoverian government was concerned, the Jacobites had come far too close for comfort. Severe measures were taken to deal with them and make sure such a threat never arose again. The Highland way of life was proscribed. The wearing of tartan to mark clan memberships was forbidden; the chiefs’ important hereditary sheriffdoms and jurisdictions which had made them a law unto themselves were abolished. No Highlander was allowed to carry or own a sword, small arms or rifle, and where there was even the remotest suspicion that they had been Jacobites they were thrown off their land. Although some of these holdings were returned forty years later, that did not help those who lost their homes and had to rely on the goodwill of relatives for their daily bread. The leaders were all executed on Tower Hill, including the wily old Lord Lovat. He had hedged his bets, pretending to be loyal to King George II while sending his son to fight for the prince. Though he was eighty-three years old, Lovat managed to escape to a mountain cave in a glen leading to the west coast before he was betrayed.

But though the last of the Stuart threats to the Hanoverians had been conclusively dealt with, abroad the war went on. Though the Austrian Netherlands had been completely overrun by the French, they had not succeeded in breaching the United Provinces defences. At the same time, under Admirals Anson and Hawke Britain had regained supremacy of the seas. The French lost Cape Breton, the eastern tip of Canada, and its capital Louisburg to Britain; they had been captured by the American colonists. By now it was clear that the two chief protagonists of the War of the Austrian Succession were France and Britain, with Maria Theresa’s Austria playing a poor third and minor role. In all this the war with Spain had been forgotten. In fact the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which at last ended the war in April 1748, did not even mention the original cause of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Spanish right to search British boats.

The treaty restored most of Austria’s territories to Maria Theresa. Nevertheless the empress was outraged by the way she had been treated. Frederick of Prussia kept her Silesian duchies, while Sardinia took some of the Milanese, and she had to give Parma to the King of Spain’s younger son. Though the war had been fought on her behalf, Austria had come off worst of all the countries.

Prime Minister Henry Pelham presided over a country growing ever more prosperous. The Old Pretender was expelled from France, whose rulers once again recognized the Protestant Succession. The Battle of Culloden had truly ended the threat of the old dynasty supplanting the new. When the Old Pretender died in 1766 even the pope did not hail the once bonnie prince as King Charles III. By his tact Pelham held together the old coalition of the Whigs as before. His premiership saw Britain in 1752 adopt the improved Gregorian calendar and lose eleven days in the process. The calendar had been calculated in the sixteenth century by Pope Gregory XIII, to correct errors in the old Julian calendar–it had taken Britain only one and a half centuries to join the rest of western Europe.

But if the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty and thus Parliament and the Revolutionary Settlement were at last secure–the next Hanoverian would have an English accent and pride himself on being British–the threat from France had not vanished. The rivalry was intensifying in two different arenas: among the trading posts of the two great powers in India, several oceans away, and in the colonies of North America. In the coming world war France and Britain would battle it out for colonial supremacy–and Britain, though she was a quarter the size of France, would emerge the victor. By the end of the Seven Years War she would control immense territories on two of the seven continents, and have become an empire encircling the globe.

While Pelham’s government cut back the army for peacetime conditions, in India the struggle continued between France and Britain to fill the power vacuum caused by the death of Aurangzeb, the last Mogul emperor of India, some forty years before. Previously the European settlements which had been founded round the coast of India since the sixteenth century had been no more than trading stations within the local rulers’ territories. The companies which went out to India saw themselves as merchants only. They were not
conquistadores
, a role which would in any case have been impossible under Mogul rule.

Under the auspices of the East India Company, the English settled at Madras on the south-east coast, at Bombay and at Calcutta, which was founded at the end of the seventeenth century as Fort William, beside a branch of the Ganges. Interspersed with these English ‘factories’ or trading stations were those of other nations: the French in particular had factories at Pondicherry in the south near Madras, and in the north-east near Calcutta they founded another one named Chandernagore. But by the 1740s the many warring Indian principalities into which the Mogul Empire had disintegrated had become a battleground for English and French influence. The Marquis de Dupleix, the French governor-general, had embarked on a programme of training the local Indian peoples, who were known as sepoys. Dupleix’s schemes for a few French leaders with guns and money gradually to dominate India’s immense continent was about to bear fruit. His candidate for the nawabship of the vast Karnatic region of southern India, which contained both Madras and Pondicherry, was poised to take the throne. Most of southern India would now be in effect a French colony.

At the same time the enormous, unpopulated tracts of virgin land in North America lying to the west of the eastern seaboard became another flashpoint between France and England. From 1749 onwards the French built forts along the Rivers Ohio and Mississippi and the Great Lakes, to pen in the English colonists and prevent new settlers moving west into the empty prairies beyond the Ohio Valley. When Pelham died unexpectedly in 1754, the covert enmity between the French and English settlers in North America had just erupted into a frontier war. The Virginians, led by Major George Washington, a young Virginian plantation-owner, tried to destroy Fort Duquesne. It was the opening move in their campaign to prevent the French putting limits to their expansion.

Over the next two years the fighting grew so furious that it became clear that it would have to receive official recognition from the two mother countries, and reinforcements were sent out by Britain and France, before war was declared once more in May 1756. In India, too, the undeclared race to control the great subcontinent was given official sanction by the French and English governments. There British morale had been hugely improved since 1751 by the astounding exploits of a former clerk of the East India Company called Robert Clive. Clive had foiled Dupleix’s attempt to control the Karnatic by capturing its capital, Arcot. He had had no military training whatsoever, but he was a voracious reader who spent all his spare time learning about battle tactics, and from Arcot onwards he put his studies to amazing effect. Clive had audacity, charisma and strategic judgement in equal quantities. With only 200 British soldiers, many of whom were raw recruits just arrived from England, and 300 sepoys, he gave such heart to his troops that they marched fearlessly into enemy country and captured Arcot without losing a man.

Although General Dupleix returned with massive Indian and French reinforcements to besiege Arcot, under Clive’s indomitable leadership, the British and their sepoy allies kept the army of 3,000 men at bay for fifty days. In the end Dupleix had to retire, because Clive’s men simply refused to give in. Notably heroic was the behaviour of the sepoys, who declined to drink any of the last supplies of water, believing that Europeans had more need of it than they. The siege of Arcot passed into legend. Dupleix was disgraced and left for France, and Britain controlled most of the Karnatic.

Not only was Britain at war in India and America, she had also begun very unsuccessful hostilities in Europe. The three wars together are known as the Seven Years War. The underlying cause of the European war was Maria Theresa’s continued obsession with the duchies of Silesia. Outraged at the way she had been treated by her former ally England, in order to retrieve the duchies from Frederick II she allied herself with her old enemy France, as well as with Russia and the Elector of Saxony. Although George II disapproved of his aggressive nephew Frederick, he saw intense danger in the new line-up of Catholic powers on the continent. Accordingly, in January 1756 the king agreed to a defensive alliance between Great Britain and Prussia.

But the dynamic Frederick the Great, as he became known, was not going to wait to be attacked by the great powers now surrounding him. In August 1756, he once again started a war in Europe. He invaded Saxony, seized the war-plans detailing Prussia’s dismemberment and published them in the newspapers as justification for his own behaviour. As Prussia, Britain’s only ally, struggled against the invading armies of France, Austria, Saxony and Russia, bad news came from every part of the globe. Though Clive in India followed up Arcot with a series of victories, the situation seemed to be turning in favour of the French; the same was true in America. News had just arrived of the tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta, in Bengal in north-east India: the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, one of the chief allies of the French, had overrun the English trading post and shut up its defenders in a tiny jail. One hundred and forty-seven prisoners had died of suffocation overnight. In America the French forts on the St Lawrence and Ohio were holding the line against the English colonists, and inflicting serious damage on them.

In Europe the situation was yet more alarming. Hanover had been overrun: the king’s second son, the Duke of Cumberland, had been forced to sign the Capitulation of Klosterzeven, handing over George II’s beloved electorate to the French. The French fleet had triumphed over the English navy, traditionally its superior. It had captured Minorca, the best harbour in the Mediterranean, owing to the incompetence of Admiral Byng, who had been sent with a fleet to relieve it. Though Byng was the son of the man who had won the great victory of Cape Passaro, he was cast from a less glorious mould. Flushed with success, the French were now mustering boats at the Pas de Calais to invade England. The country was on the brink of catastrophe, and no one seemed able to take control, as the government had been riven by faction ever since the death of the tactful Henry Pelham in 1754.