Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (18 page)

Throughout the Highlands scarcity and austerity were norms of life, for rich and poor alike. The clan chiefs lived in huge, turreted fortresses with wide moats and capacious courtyards. Yet such castles provided grandeur without luxury; indoors, the bare plaster walls were unadorned, the small, bare rooms were dark and freezing cold. Travelers were amazed to discover how simply the chiefs lived, rising early, eating gruel and oatmeal cakes from wooden or pewter plates, dressing in rather shabby plaids, and, as likely as not, slipping further and further into debt each year. Even the wealthiest and most powerful among them reckoned the value of their estates in the number of fighting men they could supply, not in money. Coins were scarce throughout Scotland; the only banks were in Edinburgh, and barter was common. Highland landowners in need of money drove their black cattle down to the market at Falkirk or Crieff and sold them to English graziers. They were a colorful sight in the cattle market, threadbare but dignified in their plaids and blue bonnets, their poniards and broadswords gleaming at their sides, speaking Gaelic and trying to make themselves understood.

The chiefs were princely, despite their relative poverty; the common folk, on the other hand, lived in uncommon squalor. "The nastiness of the lower people is really greater than can be reported," one traveler wrote. "Their faces are colored with smoke; their hair is long and almost covers their faces."
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Indeed it was nearly impossible for them to keep clean, for the peat smoke that warmed them left their skin brown and tough, and they had to share their cramped, smoke-filled hovels with their cattle. Besides, the layers of dirt helped to keep them warm. "Muck makes luck," went one proverb. "The mair dirt the less hurt."

Prosperous cottagers had two rooms, but most families had only one, whose walls were of turf or unmortared stone. A hole in the roof let out the thick smoke, but there were no windows; the only light came through small gables—which had to be stuffed with rags or straw when the wind blew. The workday began, between March and October, at four in the morning, and went on until seven or eight in the evening—even later during harvest time. The prized self-sufficiency of the Highlanders was earned at the cost of feeding and watering the cattle, digging peat and carrying it on horseback from the moors, spinning flax and woolen yarn to weave into cloth, and dozens of similarly time-consuming tasks. And all this labor often had a sordid ending, for when the Highlanders brought their cattle to market they were at the mercy of the shrewd buyers, who knew how far they had traveled and how desperate they were to sell their emaciated beasts. More often than not the cattle brought only a few shillings a head, and the cycle of Highland poverty continued.

Such was the view outsiders had of the harsh life north of the Highland Line. Its ugliness repelled them, its inconveniences astounded them, its culture alienated them, and its squalor inspired in them more revulsion than pity.

But theirs was a partial and myopic view. For if the Highlands were not the mist-enshrouded paradise of the Romantic imagination, and if they were largely Irish in culture, their own distinctive traditions being thin in depth and recent in origin, still there was more to Highland life than most visitors perceived.
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For one thing, they tended to underrate the extent to which clan attachments compensated for poverty and physical hardship. "Though poor, I am noble," went one saying among the Macleans. "Thank God I am a Maclean." Who carried the clan chiefs name carried at least some of his power and dignity; one chief claimed that the members of his clan, however lowly, were "all gentlemen." Pride of clan was a cohesive force that no outsider could fully comprehend; it gave each individual his or her identity, indeed it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that it gave life meaning.

The clans began and ended with the chief, the
Cean Cinne
or Head of the Kindred. As the senior member of the great extended kindred to which all clan members theoretically belonged, the chief was revered and loved with a fervor approaching idolatry. The Highlander's most sacred oath, wrote the historian John Home, was to swear by the hand of his chief. "The constant exclamation, upon any sudden accident, was, may God be with the chief, or may the chief be uppermost." Every clansman was ready to die for the chief. Highlanders had been known "to interpose their bodies between the pointed musket, and their chief, and to receive the shot which was aimed for him."
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The clan chiefs, and the heads of the septs (the principal cadet branches of the family), or chieftains, looked on themselves as virtually independent sovereigns, secure in the natural fortresses of the inaccessible mountains and protected by the fighting men of their clans. They feared one another, but no outside power—certainly not the power of the English king, many hundreds of miles away to the south, or his ministers or Parliament.

The chiefs were a law unto themselves, and when disputes arose between them, they went to war, as often as not, for legal decisions of the Court of Session in Edinburgh had little practical force in the Highlands. To their clansmen, the chiefs were magistrate, judge and general rolled into one. They arbitrated conflicts and the decisions made at their tribunals were final.

There was something of the feudal lord about a clan chief, and even more of the patriarch. "His habitation," Home wrote, "was the place of general resort, the scene of martial and manly exercises; a number of the clan constantly attended him both at home and abroad, the sons of the most respectable persons of the name lived a great part of the year at his house, and were bred up with his children." Though the chief was not necessarily a landholder, and the ties that bound him to his clan members were strictly ties of blood and not of place or tenancy, in many cases the chiefs lands were given out to his closest relatives, who in turn divided them among their relatives and adherents. Thus territoriality, along with a common surname and common ancestry, made the clan cohere.

To be sure, by the middle of the eighteenth century, changes had begun to come to Highland society. Some chiefs' and chieftains' sons were sent to the Lowlands to college; there they learned refinement in dress, speech and manners, and unlearned to despise Lowland culture. Some chiefs had begun to cultivate business interests, with contacts in the Lowlands and elsewhere. Others invested in the West Indies trade, or speculated in land in the New World. There were small signs, here and there, that the absolute, unquestioned power of the chiefs was marginally eroding. But only marginally: if clansmen occasionally disregarded the interests of their chiefs, it was only in small things; they were still his to command, particularly in war.

Indeed it was the archaic, near-mystical force of the chief himself which made the clan system work. The Macdonald chiefs were called
Buachaille nan Eileanan
, Shepherd of the Isles, and the idea of the chief as the protective shepherd of his flock, or father of his children, was pervasive. In the Hebrides, according to Martin, the MacNeill chief took responsibility for seeing to it that every widow and widower among his people remarried—and he chose new spouses for them all. The MacNeill also gave shelter to elderly members of the clan too feeble to care for themselves, and fed the clansmen lavishly at his own table. The fact that the chiefs, in their capacity as supreme judge, sometimes hanged members of the flock who displeased them—and hanged them, it must be added, for trifling offenses—did not diminish the reverence in which they were held. Rather it was a harsh reminder of the chief’s superiority, and of the stark ferocity that made him a valued leader in time of war.

That the clan chief should lead his men in battle was long-established custom. His sons or nephews were his principal subordinate commanders; together with his piper, his swordbearer and armorbearer, they fought beside him and died, if necessary, to save him. When the clan marched out to make war, the chief drew blood from the first animal he encountered, sprinkling it on his banner to baptize it for the combat to come. He and his clansmen pledged one another's health in cups of their own blood from time to time as well. Such gory rituals were commonplace in the bellicose Highlands where feuding clans did their best to exterminate each other, burning and killing with exuberance and carrying on the quest for vengeance generation after generation. One ferocious clan chief earned the admiration of his clansmen for having killed an English officer by tearing out his throat with his teeth.

In such a climate of barbarity it was not surprising that neither the king's peace nor the law of the land was heeded. Within each clan the chiefs word ruled, but when it came to conflict between clans, as Home wrote, "the sword was the arbiter of all disputes." Reprisal, rapine and revenge were ever-present facts of life. "Hence, fierceness of heart, prompt to attack or defend, at all times and places, became the characteristic of the Highlanders."
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If they were to be perpetually ready for war, then they had to dress and arm themselves as warriors. And indeed they carried their broadswords and dirks, muskets and pistols everywhere they went—in defiance of the legislation which, in the aftermath of the Fifteen, banned all weapons in the Highlands. Even Highland clergymen carried broadswords when they went to church; their parishioners followed suit, and went to fairs, weddings, and other public gatherings accoutered as if going to war.

It was this warlike cast of mind, combined with the outlandish magnificence of their plaids and bonnets, that made outsiders fear the Highlanders—these things plus the knowledge that in facing a Highlander in battle, one was not facing an individual but an irresistible phalanx of clansmen. As soldiers they lacked discipline, Home remarked, "but the spirit of clanship, in some measure, supplied the want of discipline, and brought them on together; for when a clan advanced to charge an enemy, the head of the kindred, the chief, was in his place, and every officer at his post, supported by his nearest relations, and most immediate dependents."
      

The force of blood was stronger than the force of discipline. Father, son and brother stood together, with cousins and uncles on all sides. Against such a force of nature, the hastily recruited, badly trained and bedraggled government regiments might be expected to lay down their arms and run. Or so Charles hoped, as he marched his men out of Perth on September 11, intent on capturing Edinburgh.

Chapter 11

At midmorning on Sunday, September 15, the alarm bell began ringing and the citizens of Edinburgh, many of whom were in church, rushed out in panic into the High Street to try to find out what was going on.

The sound of the bell shattered the normally austere silence of the old walled town on its craggy height, for Sundays in Edinburgh were devoted to worship and good works, and the citizens crept about under the watchful eye of the clergy. "Seizers" patrolled the narrow closes and wynds that led off the High Street, looking up and down every alleyway, peering around corners, listening for whispered conversations and furtive footsteps in hopes of catching truants who were breaking the Sabbath. Malefactors were reported to the church officials, and fined by the town magistrates. Nearly every sort of activity was banned on Sundays, not only such evident offenses against the Lord's Day as dancing, gambling and attending the theater, but pulling weeds, daydreaming and wandering idly in the open fields. Sundays were to be consecrated to serious and prolonged worship, and to nothing else.

Thus when the alarm bell rang it shattered the silence, and temporarily distracted even the seizers from their grim rounds. In a moment or two the High Street was filled with people, and word was spreading that the Pretender's son, with his Highland hordes, was only a few miles away.

A few weeks earlier, when the citizens of Edinburgh learned that Charles had landed on the west coast, the
Evening Courant
had belittled the threat he posed. 'The Highlanders are only a pitiful crew, good for nothing," the paper assured them, "incapable of giving any reason for their proceedings, but talking only of tobacco, King James, the Regent, plunder, and new brogues." Now these pitiful good-for-nothings were about to capture the capital.

That Charles and his Highlanders had come this far meant that the government forces had been inadequate to stop them, making them seem more formidable than ever. Wild stories spread: that the French were about to land, or had already landed, in strength to join the Pretender's army; that the army was already five or ten, or even fifteen thousand strong; that Cope and his troops had been decimated; that the Highlanders would sweep into the town, waving their murderous battle-axes, and slaughter every man, woman, and child they encountered.

The hatred of the Lowlanders for the Highlanders was proverbial. Even in those towns that lay along the border between the two regions, where one segment of the population spoke Gaelic and the other spoke English, there was little or no mixing between the two groups, and a great deal of suspicion and sometimes open hostility. In Edinburgh the only Highlanders normally to be seen on the streets were servants—porters carrying their masters in sedan chairs, elbowing their way savagely along through the crowds and swearing mighty Gaelic oaths. Seen through the eyes of the Low-landers, the Highlanders were dangerous barbarians—and now a whole host of these barbarians was about to descend on the city to seize it in the name of a Catholic and a foreigner.

Of course, there were those in the town—particularly the women, according to contemporary accounts—who were overjoyed that the dull and oppressive Hanoverian monarchy was being challenged by the Stuart heir. Ardent Jacobites, and those who since 1707 had opposed the union of the two crowns and hated the English, were inclined to welcome the Stuarts. So too were the Catholics, and the most committed of the Scottish patriots, and those Episcopalians who on religious grounds alone wanted to see the end of Presbyterian domination.