Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
At first sight, Cope’s position seemed extremely strong. On their own admission, the Jacobite leaders grew despondent.
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The tension and anxiety produced the first open breach between the prince and Lord George. Without informing his lieutenant-general, Charles Edward gave orders for the disposition of the Athollmen on the Musselburgh road. When he learned this, Lord George burst into a rage: ‘he threw his gun on the ground in great passion and swore God he’d never draw his sword for the cause if the Brigade was not brought back.’
11
Faced with this outburst, the prince quickly ordered the Athollmen back.
Murray’s highhandedness as commander soon manifested itself elsewhere. To the despair of the military men of Moidart (O’Sullivan and Sir John MacDonald), Lord George took a unilateral decision to attack from the east and marched the Camerons away in that direction. Seeing this manoeuvre in broad daylight, and noting too that the Athollmen were on the move on the Jacobite left, Cope conjectured that a simultaneous attack was to be launched on both flanks. He changed front to the south-west, keeping his artillery on the left, rather than in the centre where it would have done most damage.
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That evening Lord George Murray met the Jacobite leaders to discuss final plans for the dawn attack. The bold and simple stratagem of marching round the eastern end of the morass and falling on the enemy flank was adopted. But at midnight a crucial refinement was introduced. Robert Anderson, son of a local laird, came to Lord George after the meeting with intelligence of a less roundabout approach to Cope’s position. He knew of a narrow track through the
morass
.
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Murray immediately saw the value of this information. The battle plan was amended. Orders were issued to march at 4 a.m.
The Highland army moved out silently across the marshes before daybreak. Before the clansmen left, the prince repeated his set speech to them: ‘Follow me, gentlemen, by the assistance of God I will make you a free people.’
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This was standard rhetoric, yet by all accounts the prince was in good spirits and well recovered from the brush with Lord George the day before. The effect on morale of the intelligence brought by Anderson was incalculable.
Clanranald’s, Glengarry’s, Keppoch’s and Glencoe’s detachments were followed by Perth’s, the MacGregors, the Stewarts of Appin and the Camerons. The van, or right, was commanded by Perth; the left, or rear, by Lord George.
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The reserve under the prince and Lord Nairne, principally composing the Athollmen, was to follow at a safe distance. No cavalry was to be used lest the neighing and snorting of the horses alert the enemy.
The Jacobites got through almost the whole of the morass before they were picked up by Cope’s scouts. As dawn broke and a cold morning mist hung over the marshland, the Highland vanguard entered the plain about 1,000 yards to the east of Cope’s left flank, having crossed the final four-foot ditches by a plank bridge.
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Perth continued to strike north in the half-light before veering to form line, so as to leave room for the rest of the army to emerge from the morass. Everything had gone smoothly, except for a fall in the mud by the prince when he tried to jump over a ditch. The superstitious Scots in the rear regarded this as a bad omen. Fortunately, they were too far away from the front-line regiments to communicate their misgivings.
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On reaching the plain, the prince and the reserve drew up fifty yards in the rear of the front line. A short prayer for victory was offered.
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As the sun rose the Highlanders attacked.
The Camerons fell on Cope’s left. Throwing away their plaids, with their bonnets pulled low over their brows, Lochiel’s men bore down on Cope’s right with hideous shouts and yells, coming on at terrifying speed. The stubble of the recently shaven cornfields crackled and rustled under their feet.
19
They received one burst of shell-fire, at which they split into three groups. The crack troops of the Cameron regiment then made straight for the artillery and overran the guns.
20
Then came the onrush of the MacDonalds. The fire from Cope’s infantrymen failed even to break up their line formation. The combination of speed and discipline in the MacDonald formation demoralised
Cope’s
low-calibre rankers. Swinging in towards Cope’s left flank in an oblique direction, the MacDonalds directed an accurate long-range fire at Hamilton’s dragoons.
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Seeing that their colleagues in Gardiner’s had already taken flight, the dragoons did not wait for more. Within minutes Cope’s infantry had been deserted by its cavalry.
Attacked now both by Lochiel’s clansmen and the MacDonalds, aware that their big guns had been captured and their horse had fled, Cope’s foot succumbed to panic. Successive waves of Highlanders crashed into them from right and left. Abandoning their muskets, the clansmen hacked and stabbed with dirk and claymore at the human wall of redcoats.
22
Defeat turned to rout. The narrow gap south of Preston House, the one obvious exit from Cope’s ‘perfect’ battlefield, soon became clogged with a mêlée of desperate, swearing, panic-stricken troopers and terrified, whinnying horses. Cope made a vain attempt to rally his dragoons at the far side of Preston village, but the contagion of fear had taken too strong a grip. The only way Cope could salvage anything from the rout was to ride off at the head of his fleeing horsemen, thus at least keeping them in one body.
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Trapped within Cope’s ‘unassailable’ redoubt, the redcoats had just two avenues of escape: over the high walls or through the struggling sea of human flesh in the defile. As the hapless regulars tried to get out of their man-made prison, they were cut down in scores by the broadsword.
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The savage cleaving cuts from the claymore produced a veritable charnel house. Limbs, trunks and heads littered the ghastly battlefield.
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The spectacle of horror, real enough, was to lose nothing in the telling. It was only with great difficulty that Lord George Murray was able to restrain the Highland blood-lust.
The prince meanwhile had seen little of the fighting. No more than five minutes elapsed from the first impact of the Camerons to the breaking of Cope’s front line.
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Though little more than fifty yards behind the enfilading wings of his army at the start of the battle, when the prince came up to the scene of the fighting, he could see plainly the results of the dreadful carnage.
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Nothing better illustrates the gulf between Charles Edward and William Augustus, duke of Cumberland than his reaction. Where Cumberland after Culloden was to regard the quality of mercy as the prerogative of ‘old women’, Charles Edward was immediately distressed by the butchery he saw. It was in his power to preside over a holocaust. Instead he did his utmost to call a halt to the slaughter. ‘Make prisoners, spare them, they are my father’s subjects,’ he called out.
28
Depressed by the moans and shrieks of the wounded and dying,
the
prince immediately ordered his surgeons to tend the enemy as well.
29
He even sent Oliphant of Gask back into Edinburgh for further medical aid. By his own estimate the prince thereby saved no less than thirteen Hanoverian officers from a lingering death from septic wounds.
30
Despite the brief slaughter, Prestonpans was remarkable more for its psychological effects than its casualties. Perhaps three hundred of Cope’s troops were killed and five hundred wounded (as against about two dozen Jacobites killed and some fifty wounded). The prisoners taken (at least 1,500), mostly broke their oath not to serve again against the prince.
31
Cope himself, broken in spirit, fled via Lauder and Coldstream to Berwick, where legend (but not fact) asserted that he arrived with news of his own defeat.
32
On the other hand, the battle at once delivered Scotland to the Jacobites and had a devastating effect on people south of the border. The previous London attitude – that the rising was but a trifle and would soon be extinguished – was exposed as a severe misjudgment.
33
Apart from the Highland forts and barracks and the castles of Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton, the prince was master of Scotland. It seemed that ties of blood, loyalty, courage and willpower could always defeat brute force and a soldiery that responded merely to the whip and the lash. Cope had had better weapons, fought on ground of his own choosing, and yet his force had been annihilated. There had never been a better demonstration of the superiority of the moral to the material.
This attitude brought the prince dangerously close to a fatal belief in the Highlanders’ invincibility in battle. Yet there are no signs that the signal triumph of Prestonpans made him complacent in the ordinary sense. Always a humane and merciful man, he had been sickened by the slaughter. It grieved him, he claimed, to have to kill his own subjects just because they had been poisoned against him by Whig propaganda. When congratulated by an officer in the post-victory euphoria, the prince replied sadly that seeing his enemies dead at his feet did not give him any satisfaction.
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Moreover, he had no illusions about what he had gained at Prestonpans. In his mind, the conquest of Scotland alone would solve nothing unless complemented by that of England.
35
And still the loss of the heavy artillery on the
Elisabeth
irked him. It will be remembered that the prince’s original strategy was to seize all Scotland’s forts and castles first. Without heavy siege guns, he had to leave these garrisons undefeated. Even with Scotland in his hands he could not take them.
Yet
how could he invade England if these dangerous gadflies remained on his flank?
It was therefore an elated yet cautious prince who returned to spend the night at Pinkie House while his army occupied Musselburgh. All opposition in Edinburgh was cowed. Feeling generous, the prince sent a message to the Presbyterian clergy, assuring them of religious toleration and inviting them to hold their Sunday services as usual.
36
The prince soon consolidated his growing reputation for affability and magnanimity. On the morning after Prestonpans another Edinburgh deputation came to see him, to ask for more time to assemble what the Jacobite army had requisitioned. Protocol required that the burghers see the prince’s secretary, but as Murray of Broughton was out, Charles saw them himself, saying he saw no reason why they should wait.
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He then capped the gesture by allowing the period of grace asked for. This approachability, plus a total absence of gloating over the defeated, won the Jacobite cause many friends.
When the prince returned to Edinburgh on Sunday 22 September, his first task was to decide what to do next.
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His own inclination was to press on into England at once. But at an improvised meeting of his officers it was put to him that the army was so weak and exhausted it could not even pursue Cope to Berwick.
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Besides, they had just 2,300 men. inadequate provisions, no espionage or intelligence network in England, and no contact with the English Jacobites. The defection of the Skye chiefs was never more keenly felt than now. In the circumstances a proposal to invade England was nonsense. The best policy was to await the large-scale reinforcements which must now surely come from France. To ginger up the tardy ministers of Versailles, George Kelly was sent back to France, with instructions to exaggerate the prince’s success and play down the unpromising aspects of the rising.
40
Jacobite decision-making now had to be put on a sounder footing. The prince decided to set up a permanent cabinet or Grand Council. To this were appointed his Irish favourites Sheridan and O’Sullivan and all the leaders of clan regiments, viz. Lochiel, Keppoch, Lord Nairne, young Clanranald, Glencoe, Ardshiel (commanding the Appin Stewarts) and Lochgarry (commanding the Glengarry regiment). Perth and Lord George Murray qualified automatically as lieutenants-general. The Lowlands and north-east were represented by lords Elcho, Ogilvy, Pitsligo and Lewis Gordon, by Glenbucket and Murray of Broughton.
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This council met every day in the prince’s chambers at Holyrood
House
and reviewed not just policy and grand strategy but day-to-day administration. There was an enormous amount of the latter: public monies had to be raised in all the Scottish counties, marching shoes and equipment ordered in Edinburgh for the ill-equipped clan regiments; caches of arms secured; further troops raised.
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There were also some hard political decisions to be taken. Almost the first action of the council was to advise the prince to make contact with the English Jacobites.
43
Unfortunately Charles Edward’s emissary was taken prisoner just after crossing the border into Northumbria.
44
The early days of the council’s existence were not a happy experience for the prince. The familiar cross-cutting rhythms of Jacobite factionalism were soon in evidence. Lord Elcho made the extraordinary suggestion that Charles Edward be declared king and his father’s formal abdication assumed. Even the prince, advised by Sheridan, baulked at this blatant attempt to drive a permanent wedge between king’s Jacobites and the prince’s party.
45
Next Lord George Murray, with his
bête noire
O’Sullivan in his sights, proposed that in the interests of propaganda all Catholics should be banned from the council. Charles retorted angrily that he would never be the one to ask Perth to give up his position, and besides there were too many Catholics on the council (himself included) to make this feasible.
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Soon the battle lines on the council were drawn in a way that was to become familiar. Two parties emerged: the prince’s and Lord George’s. The prince could count on the support of Sheridan, O’Sullivan and Murray of Broughton. Perth, Lord Nairne, Kilmarnock and Lord Pitsligo also deferred to him openly, whatever their private feelings. But such was Lord George’s prestige that the others invariably sided with him, creating a natural majority for his party.
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