Culloden: Battle & Aftermath

Paul O’Keeffe Bodley Head €34 ★★★★★

Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign to seize the British throne on behalf of his exiled father was initially regarded in Hanoverian circles with smirking amusement. One mooted solution was to infiltrate the Jacobite camp with the working ladies of Drury Lane, and thus incapacitate the enemy with the pox.

At Culloden, on April 16, 1746, Stuart’s 5,000-strong army was finally pulverised in 40 minutes by the Duke of Cumberland’s might.

Paul O’Keeffe, author of the excellent Waterloo: The Aftermath, brings the last battle on British soil to life with pageturning vivacity. Using numerous first-hand accounts, he accumulates layers of often horrifying detail. Men are mutilated, corpses stripped, booty looted. We meet Duncan MacKenzie, a Lochaber man-mountain, ‘six feet four inches… who cleft the head to the chin through the helmet’ of one unfortunate combatant.

If anything, the aftermath of Culloden is more brutal than the event. A grim reckoning is meted out by the King’s men. When 40 injured Scots are discovered sheltering in a hut, the building is sealed and set alight. Rape is routine. Spectators are swept up in the vengeance. The road to Inverness ‘ran red with blood’.

O’Keeffe tracks the survivors from glen and isle to their final destinations: castle prisons, jail ships, gibbet, block, gallows. Of some 3,000 Jacobite men arrested, one-fifth died of typhus, and only one in 20 of those remaining faced trial for treason; lots were drawn to determine who faced hanging.

Many were sentenced to lives of ‘indentured servitude’ in the West Indies and Virginia. As for the Bonnie Prince, he evaded capture for months before slipping away to France. The jingoistic fervour stirred up by Jacobite defeat had one particularly notable consequence. In October 1745, two theatre productions in London concluded with a rendition of a new song called God Save

The King. The crushed rebellion gave Britain its national anthem.

Culloden defined its protagonists. The ‘Butcher’ Cumberland never won another battle. He died at 44, morbidly obese. A postmortem found ‘not one drop of blood in either of the vesticles of the heart’.

Charles returned to Paris before an enforced exile, according to the terms of a peace treaty between Britain and France. Life thereafter was one long debauch, 41 years ‘of decline and disappointment’. He died in the same room in which he was born, his legend resting entirely on the incendiary 14-month revolution that rattled, and reshaped, Georgian Britain.