Culloden: Battle & Aftermath
Paul O’Keeffe Bodley Head £25
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.
Brutally effective victories by rebel forces at Prestonpans and Falkirk, and an incursion deep into England, soon concentrated the mind. At Culloden, on April 16, 1746, Stuart’s 5,000strong army was finally pulverised in 40 minutes by the Duke of Cumberland’s superior might.
Paul O’Keeffe, author of the excellent Waterloo: The Aftermath, brings the last battle on British soil to life with page-turning 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 manmountain, ‘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. ‘Many… who came out of curiosity to see the action, or perhaps to get plunder, never went home again to tell the story.’ 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 the hangman. Many were sentenced to lives of ‘indentured servitude’ in the West Indies and Virginia. A few struck lucky. One ship was liberated by pirates near Martinique; a well-connected felon became a colonel in the Prussian army. As for the Bonnie Prince, he evaded capture for months before slip ping away to France. He may have been permitted to escape – ‘as a prisoner he would have become a more dangerous focus of disaffection than as either a fugitive or an exile’. The jingoistic fervour stirred up by Jacobite defeat had one particularly auspicious 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 post-mortem 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.