On April 16, 1746 the last battle to be fought on British soil took less than an hour to reach its bloody conclusion here on what is now know as Culloden Moor.  It was not, as often portrayed, a battle between the Scots and the English: in reality the Scots on the Government side outnumbered those fighting for the Jacobites.  Rather it was the last chapter in a sporadic civil war for succession to the throne that had been under way since 1688.  That was the year in which King James VII of Scotland and II of England was deposed in favour of William of Orange by a Protestant nobility fearful he was starting a Catholic dynasty.  Efforts to restore the Jacobites to the throne had subsequently led to conflict in 1689, 1708, 1715, and in 1719 when Spanish troops landed in Glen Shiel.

     1744 saw the French planning to invade Britain to replace William's successor George II with James II's son, also called James, known to history as the Old Pretender, who would have become James III (and James VIII of Scotland) if the venture succeeded.  It didn't.  A storm wrecked the French invasion fleet and the French gave up both their plans for an attack on the south coast and a diversionary plan to land a smaller army in Scotland.

     Undaunted, the Old Pretender's son, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie, took it upon himself to restore the crown to his father.  The following year, 1745, he landed in Eriskay, then at Arisaig before raising his standard at Glenfinnan.  He gathered an army largely of Highlanders, but included some Irish and French troops, to take on the Government.  They quickly reached Perth and then Edinburgh, before heading south towards London.

     The Jacobites reached Derby on December 4, 1745.  It was becoming clear that support from English Jacobites was not emerging as Charles had hoped.  And it was becoming equally clear that the French were not going to invade in a time-scale that would be of any help to Charles' Jacobite army.  Meanwhile Government armies were gathering and the military situation looked increasingly bleak. 

     Charles Edward Stuart met with his key advisers in what is today the upstairs room of a Derby pub through most of December 4.  Charles was all for pressing on to London, but the majority wanted to retreat to Scotland.  Charles finally angrily accepted the need to retreat as night fell.  The Jacobites began their retreat from Derby on December 6, 1745.  What none of them knew was that the Welsh Jacobites had risen in support and others in Oxfordshire were on the point of doing so.  Neither did they know that London was in panic and that George II's court was packing his belongings onto ships on the Thames ready to flee to the Continent.

     It has been said that had the Jacobites pressed on, George II would have fled; that the English and French would have avoided a further 70 years of conflict; that the English would therefore not have had to raise taxes in the colonies to pay for the French wars; and that the Americans would therefore have had no cause to fight a war for their independence.  And, arguably, the French revolution would not have happened.  The world might have been a very different place but for a closely argued decision taken in the upstairs room of a pub in Derby one dark winter's evening in December 1745.

     Once the retreat was under way, the eventual outcome was probably inevitable as the Government had the time it needed to assemble and marshal its much greater forces.  By February 1746 Charles was based in Inverness, while the Government forces under the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, were based in Aberdeen and Dunkeld.

     If the outcome after the retreat from Derby was inevitable, the outcome of the Battle of Culloden was doubly so.  The Jacobites moved out of their Inverness base on 15 April and assembled on Culloden Moor, five mile to the east.  They had succeeded in leaving most of their food and other supplies behind in Inverness.  They had also selected a battlefield ground recorded as "treeless", "boggy" and "bare moor" that was much more suited to the weapons and tactics of the Government forces than to their own charge and slash approach.  The higher ground to the south would have suited them much better.

     April 15 was the Duke of Cumberland's 25th birthday, and his army spent the day drinking his health at his expense in Nairn while the Jacobites waited, hungry, on Culloden Moor.  As night fell, the Jacobite commanders came up with the idea of marching to Nairn, some 12 miles away, to surprise the drunken Government army.  However, by dawn next morning the Jacobites were still two miles short of Nairn, and Government troops were stirring.  So they marched the twelve miles back to Culloden.

     When the Jacobite army did finally face the Government army across 500 yards of Culloden Moor at 11am on April 16, 1746, most had not eaten for more than two days; they had endured a pointless forced march and retreat throughout the previous night; and they were on ground ideally suited to the Government army's artillery and dragoons, and totally unsuited to their own single tactic of charging down the enemy.  They were also at a numerical disadvantage.  The Jacobites numbered at most 5,000 men, while the Government army facing them was perhaps 8,000 strong, including 800 mounted dragoons.  To make matters worse, many of the Jacobites had dispersed in search of food, while others had simply fallen asleep in ditches and buildings. When you add to all of this the much better equipped and trained artillery available to the Government forces, the outcome of the battle was certain before it began.

     When the battle commenced, the Government artillery proved decisive in picking off the Jacobites at long range, eventually provoking them into a charge.  This reached the Government lines at the southern end of the line of conflict, but was repulsed after savage hand-to-hand conflict.  Elsewhere the mass of charging Highlanders did not even reach the Government lines. They were simply stopped by musket and cannon fire before they came close enough to use their main weapons, the spear and the broadsword.

     In less than an hour it was all over.  364 Government troops had been killed or wounded.  A much larger number of Jacobites and others had been killed during the battle.  Many more were killed as they lay wounded on the battlefield or after being taken prisoner.  And the Government dragoons dispatched to hunt down fleeing Jacobites roamed far and wide, indiscriminately killing rebels, bystanders, spectators, residents and anyone else who was within reach in the aftermath of the battle.  It is estimated that the total dead on the Jacobite side was well over 1,000.  A total of 3,470 Jacobites, supporters and others were taken prisoner in the aftermath of Culloden.  Of these 120 were executed and 88 died in prison; while 936 were transported to the colonies and 222 more "banished".  Many of the rest were eventually released, though the fate of nearly 700 is simply unknown.

     Culloden marked the end of a sporadic civil war for succession that had lasted 60 years.  But the brutal reprisals and suppression of the Highlands that followed under the command of the Duke of Cumberland ("Butcher Cumberland") brought about the end of a way of life, including the end of a meaningful clan system.  The clan chiefs who survived, or who had supported the Government (and some did), ended up less tribal chiefs than landowners with tenants who might happen to share the same name.  The way was thus opened for the Highland clearances that took place some decades later, when vast numbers of Highlanders were cleared off their land by the landowners to make way for more profitable sheep.  Bonnie Prince Charlie eventually made good his escape to France, but the price of his adventure for the Highlands was high indeed.

     As for Culloden Moor itself, the battlefield has over the intervening years been treated almost as badly as the wounded left lying on it at the end of the conflict.  The supreme insensitivity came in 1835, when a road was built through the mass graves of the clans.  Later the whole area was turned into a conifer plantation.

     However, gradually over recent years much of the battlefield has been reclaimed, and today there is an excellent visitor centre run by the National Trust for Scotland.  And the conifers that covered the battlefield have been removed, though we still feel it is much more heavily overgrown than illustrations and accounts show it to have been in April 1746.  As a result it still needs an act of imagination to visualize two armies peering at one another across 500 yards of open moorland before the cannon fire of the Government artillery provoked the mass charge of the Jacobites. 

© 2003 Undiscovered Scotland

A small contingent of the MacDougalls of Lunga were thought to have fought in the battle.

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