In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, on a moor near Inverness. The battle lasted about an hour and engaged only 15,000 troops, but Murray Pittock persuasively argues that Culloden was “one of the decisive battles of the world.” The last pitched battle fought on British soil, Culloden was decisive, Pittock argues, because the British Army’s victory over forces commanded by Prince Charles Edward Stuart (now popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie) helped propel Great Britain into becoming the dominant world power for 150 years.
Culloden has been written about extensively, but Pittock argues that “no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely.” Historians often describe Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army, which was outnumbered two to one, as a horde of sword-wielding Highlanders that recklessly took on a modern army. Pittock disagrees: Prince Charles’s army was “a much more modern fighting unit than it is given credit for.” Secondly, though one contemporary English historian has called Charles’s army “a Highland rabble,” at least half the Scots serving in it were not Highlanders. Pittock calls the forces under Prince Charles the Jacobite Army. Jacobites—not to be confused with Jacobins—were Britons who did not accept the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Stuart King James II, a Roman Catholic, was replaced by the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange and his wife Mary.
In the first half of the 18th century, there were two major attempts by Jacobites to restore a Stuart to the British throne. The first uprising took place in 1715, after Queen Anne died. A Scottish Jacobite leader said that the aim was to repudiate the Acts of Union of 1707, which united Scotland and England, and restore Scotland’s ancient liberties. The aim of the 1745 rising, which came to an end at Culloden, was the same: According to Pittock, the Scottish Jacobites wanted “a restoration of Scottish sovereignty within a looser confederal British state ruled by a single sovereign but with different royal capitals and parliaments.” The 1745 rising was not a civil war between Highlanders and Lowlanders. Many Lowlanders were sympathetic to the Jacobites. Lowland volunteers, Pittock argues, “provided as large a part of the army” as Highland volunteers. The Lowland Scots who fought on the side of the British worried that if a Stuart were restored to the throne—the aim of Jacobites—Scotland’s Presbyterian majority would be undermined. But only eighteen-hundred Scots served in the British Army, so it is wrong for historians to say that more Scots fought on the British side than on Prince Charles’s side.
The 1745 rising was not only about Scotland’s future; it was about Ireland’s and England’s as well. Irish Jacobites wanted to overthrow the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. There were Irish Catholic troops under French command serving with Prince Charles. English Jacobites had “an assortment of grievances.” They detested the two Hanoverian kings, George I and George II, and they disliked the decline in the power of the landed interest. How many English Jacobites were there? Historians have endlessly debated this question. One says that in the 1740s, 56 out of 140 Tory MPs were Jacobites. But English Jacobites played only a marginal role in the 1745 uprising, which began on July 23 when Prince Charles landed on the coast of Scotland with seven men. He had counted on the support of at least two contingents of Franco-Irish marines, but they suffered heavy casualties when their ship was bombarded by the Royal Navy.
Yet, in an astonishingly short time, Prince Charles managed to put together an army of 5,500 men. On September 15, the Jacobite Army entered Edinburgh, where it was greeted by 20,000 cheering Scots; by October, the Jacobites had gained control of most of Scotland. On October 9, Prince Charles declared the Act of Union no longer in effect; he also repudiated the 1701 Act of Settlement, which stipulated that future British rulers come from the Protestant House of Hanover. Buoyed by his military successes in Scotland, the 25-year-old prince wanted to invade England and make a rapid dash for London. The British Army was bogged down in the War of the Austrian Succession, so the Jacobites’ chances of reaching London were good. Yet many Scottish Jacobite leaders disapproved of this plan because they disliked and distrusted the English Jacobites; their preference was to consolidate Jacobite power in Scotland. In the Council of War, the decision to invade England passed by only one vote.
Marching towards London, the Jacobite Army encountered almost no opposition. Yet after they reached Derby, only 130 miles from London, the Council of War voted to return to Scotland. The Council decided that not enough English Jacobites—only 500 recruits—had joined their side. It was also rumored that one or two British armies stood between the Jacobites and London, though some claimed this was false information provided by a double agent. Prince Charles strongly opposed the council’s decision.
What if the Jacobite Army had marched on to London? Pittock doubts that it would have succeeded: “Foreign invasion of England did not have a good track record,” he writes. What if the Jacobite Army had French support? A major French invasion was expected early in 1746, but it never came. The what-ifs, Pittock says, “are intoxicating.” Playing the counterfactual game, Pittock speculates that if a Stuart had been restored to the throne, Britain would have had a rapprochement with France, so there would have been “no war in Quebec and consequently no independence for the American colonies, which would have been unable to play the powers off against each other.”
While the Jacobite Army was returning to Scotland, the British Army was retaking a number of Scottish cities and blockading the coast: “The net was tightening round the Jacobites.” Nevertheless, Scots were still signing up to fight the British, and by January 1746, the Jacobite Army had 10,000 troops. But it was not doing well on the battlefield. The military failures, Pittock says, were partly Prince Charles’s fault; he was “a fine strategist but a poor tactician.” He was also “young, captious, and sulky.” In April, the Jacobite Army was forced to take a stand at Culloden, near Inverness, the only Scottish city it now held. And of course, the battle itself (which Pittock describes in detail) was a disaster for the Jacobite Army, which lost anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 men compared with roughly 250 losses for the British Army. The British took few prisoners, and most of those who were taken prisoner died because of horrible conditions in captivity.
The British Army was brutal in the aftermath, continuing to fight irregular Scottish forces for years. Pittock cites one historian who says that Jacobitism was finally defeated by “systematic state terrorism,” and most Jacobite leaders (including Bonnie Prince Charlie) escaped abroad.
What are we to make of the Jacobites? Adam Gopnik recently called them reactionaries. It’s possible that the English Jacobites could be called reactionaries, but not the Irish or Scottish Jacobites. The Irish could be called freedom fighters and the Scots were fighting for a different political settlement with England, what Pittock calls “an alternative modernity.”
In his final two chapters, a note of exasperation creeps into Pittock’s prose when he writes about historians who continue to claim that at Culloden progressives triumphed over reactionaries. He notes that the National Trust for Scotland, in its audiovisual materials, describes Culloden as “the last battle of the Highlanders.” The website Education Scotland claims that “far more Scots fought on the Hanoverian side than on the Jacobite.” Wrong, wrong, wrong, Pittock declares. Romantic Scottish nationalists get Culloden wrong as well: They don’t call Charles’s forces a rabble, but they, too, believe that the opposition to British rule was mainly from Highlanders fighting to defend their feudal way of life.
Culloden may not dispel all the myths about the battle, but it does call attention to the real meaning of the 1745 uprising, which is the nature of Scotland’s relationship to England. That issue remains alive and well, especially after Brexit.
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.
