Michael Fry: New theories on Battle of Culloden still emerging 276 years on

In April 1746, during a spring of bitter weather like the one we have seen this year, the prince and a tiny group of close companions came to the end of a Highland road they had first trodden nine months before. From their final destination, Culloden, there was no way forward and no way back. But let’s make what case for them we can. If the harbingers had won in that inclement season, how might a Jacobite narrative have gone on?

These Seven Men of Moidart, as legend has dubbed them, led the Jacobite army they gathered behind them as far as Derby, only 125 miles from London. King George II was not actually in his English capital at the time but on holiday in his native Hanover, though he wondered if he would be able to return.

The reason was that the clansmen beat the redcoats in every clash except the very last one. These were not the achievements of a backwards-looking cause, as depicted in most tellings of the tale since. But the winners are the ones who write the history.

For most of their journey, the Jacobites had the literal and metaphorical edge over their enemies. While their fierce warriors bestrode the battlefields with the terrifying Highland charge, Bonnie Prince Charlie made a credible bid for the political and ideological high ground.

To his prospective kingdoms he offered religious toleration and a monarchy working in co-operation with an empowered and accountable Parliament. Not only did he draw on traditional loyalties, he opened his arms to the enlightened spirit of a new age as well.

His Jacobite idealism and legitimacy, after all, made a telling contrast to the corrupt and demeaning Hanoverian government. Ever since the Union of 1707, politicians in Edinburgh and London had been honing their skills in petty abuses. When we look at the public and private records today, it is not far-fetched to find in the rising of 1745-6 a potent, modernising force that could have turned lesser norms on their head. But here what I am going to do is to capsize the historical conventions in a different way, to see where that may take us.

An admirable Jacobite scholar is Christopher Duffy of the Royal Military College Sandhurst and De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a military historian who gives impartial due to the reasons for ultimate Hanoverian victory. Notably, he lauds the role of William, Duke of Cumberland, who could turn a blind eye to the massacre of rebels yet was also an inspiring general with the measure of the strength and weaknesses of the British army. He developed the cautious, systematic kind of war that robbed Highland enemies of all their initiative and brought them to their knees on Drummossie Moor.

Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie

Conversely, the Jacobites had been dogged from the start by failure to reconcile two perspectives. On the one hand Prince Charles strove to reclaim a British crown for the House of Stewart in London. On the other hand it was the patriotic vision of the rebel faction most committed to Scotland that moved men such as Lord George Murray, a fine commander in the field but less sure-footed in his politics. In person he advocated retreat from Derby and, in the night before Culloden, dispersal of his force along the road to Nairn in hope of an ambush.

With arguments like these flourishing, we can understand the vigour in what are today being called “Jacobite studies”, adding depth and colour to a topic that was starting to show its age. Nowadays we like, for the sake of fresh insights, to rescue neglected figures from the risk of historical obscurity. Sound new material has appeared on the syllabus of the universities of Aberdeen, Cambridge and Glasgow, and the scope continues to widen.

A search for further primary materials has had impressive results. They have been found in the autobiography of General Henry Hawley, in Lord George Murray’s own map of Culloden with his explanations of key episodes, in the material collected by Whig officials towards an official history of the rising and in the Rev John Home’s detailed interrogation of survivors.

With all this at his fingertips, Duffy argues that feeling for the ’45 lingers on an appeal to our instincts. Its elusive nature was even in its own time dubbed by realistic critics as something “epick” and “miraculous”. With a clear rationale often lacking, it has to be renewed through our imaginations. While reserving its own character, it allows a contribution from us. It is quite unlike one modern school of history, especially in Scotland, all sociology and statistics. While Duffy focuses on human aspects, Paul O’Keeffe, an independent scholar from Liverpool, has brought out the stirring visual legacy of the ’45. It ranges far, from the arguments about authentic portraits to the voluminous iconography of Stewart symbolism to the creation of a romantic Jacobite school of art.

THIS may be morally ambiguous in projecting as subject matter the murder of helpless wounded men or the fugitives cut down by pursuing dragoons or the prisoners shipped off to slavery in the colonies or the peasants harried by pacifying patrols. But Unionist patriotic paintings and martial music sprang from just the same sources, and it may be that we as objects of propaganda could not have had the one genre of commemoration without the other.

O’Keeffe writes detailed and vivid accounts of the key battles, which do not spare the faint-hearted. The Highlanders did not need a military genius to lead them. Their tactics were simple: they fired a mass volley of musket shot at the enemy ranks, threw aside their guns and charged, wielding broadswords, axes and dirks. The scene was gory.

In the face of this terrifying horde, the king’s forces at first crumbled. The Battle of Prestonpans finished inside ten minutes. At Falkirk, the fighting was over in half an hour. By Culloden, Cumberland had taken command, reinforcing discipline and organisation.

Prince William, Duke of Cumberland

In contrast, O’Keeffe details the weakening state and tactical mistakes of the Jacobites. Their numbers had shrunk not least because many men went home for the sowing season.

While in the long term the doomed Stewarts’ cause won its aura of romanticism, the Jacobite rising of 1745-46 remains one of the most bloody and divisive conflicts in British history.

This was true for the prince and the duke too, not only for the clansman and the redcoat. At every social level, fate could take an unsuspected turn. The Duke of Cumberland went from idolised national hero to discredited butcher. Charles Edward Stuart’s went from Bonnie Prince to embittered alcoholic.

Episodes of Scottish history can be so complex, and so obscured by selective national amnesia, that they need explained by hypothesis as well as factual narrative. Culloden is one of them.