Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (41 page)

10. Stuart Papers, p. 120.

11. Charles's letter is in Ewald, pp. 61-63.

12.
Stuart Papers
, pp. 126-21.

CHAPTER 9

1.
Stuart Papers
, p. 137.

2. Ibid., 135.

3. Ibid., 139.

4. There were in all, Youngson, p. 191, reckons, seven hundred Camerons and six hundred others for a total of thirteen hundred.

5. Details of Cope's march northward are in Katherine Tomasson and F. Buist,
Battles of the '45
(London, 1967), pp. 30ff.

6. Cited in Ewald, p. 101.

CHAPTER 10

1 . Cited in Henry Grey Graham,
The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century
, 3rd ed. (London, 1909), p. 3.

2. Martin Martin, Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, in John Pinkerton, ed.,
A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World III
(London, 1809), 572-699.

3. Martin, p. 575.

4. Cited in Graham, p. 178.

5. The myth of the romantic Highlands is exploded in Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland," in
The Invention of Tradition
, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15-41. Trevor-Roper's merciless and sardonic demythologizing reveals the modernity of the Scottish "national apparatus" of kilt, clan and bagpipe and shows how "the whole concept of a distinctive Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention." Western Scotland was, culturally, "the overflow of Ireland," he points out, and it was only in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising, when the Highlanders "combined the romance of a primitive people with the charm of an endangered species," that new Highland traditions were artificially created and presented as old and original. This is a tonic reminder that the Romantics were indeed responsible for a gross historical distortion, but Trevor-Roper goes too far in implying that the "inventors" of Highland tradition built on no foundation more substantial than their own imaginations.

6. John Home,
History of the Rebellion
(London, 1802), pp. 3-13.

7. Ibid., 3-12.

CHAPTER 1 1

1. According to one estimate, there were twenty-five to thirty-five thousand men fit to bear arms in the Highlands in 1745; Charles never had more than twelve thousand men, and not all of those were Highlanders. David Smurthwaite, Battlefields of Britain (New York, 1984), p. 181. In the far north, the Mackays, Munros and Sutherlands were Hanoverian, as were, of course, the Argyll Campbells. The Macdonalds, Macphersons, and most Macleods and Grants stayed out of the conflict. Others were divided in their loyalties.

2.
The Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle of lnveresk
, cited in Daiches, p. 130.

3. Cited in Lang, p. 150.

4. Later, at his trial. Cope testified that "the rebels were about fifty-five hundred in the field." Lang, pp. 152-53.

5. Charles was quoted in the
Caledonian Mercury
, cited in Lang, p. 155.

6. Youngson, p. 93.

7. Chevalier de Johnstone [James Johnstone],
A Memoir of the Forty-Five
, ed. Brian Rawson (London, 1958), p. 34.

8. This account of the battle of Prestonpans is taken in large part from Johnstone, pp. 34ff.

9. Cited in
Daiches
, p. 139.

CHAPTER 12

1. Newcastle wrote to Argyll on August 14 that he had never been so fearful that the French, having conquered all of Flanders, would embark from Ostend or Dunkirk intent on invading Britain.
State Papers
, Scotland, August 14, 1745.

2. Cited in Tomasson and Buist, p. 79.

3.
The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford,
ed. Peter Cunningham (Edinburgh, 1906), I, 386-87, 389, 392.

4. W. Coxe, Memoirs of the Administration of. . . Henry Pelham (London, 1829), I, 21.

5.
Walpole Letters,
I, 381.

6. Tomasson and Buist, p. 79.

7.
Walpole Letters,
I, 389-90 note. Holland added that "had five thousand landed in any part of this island a week ago, I verily believe the entire conquest would not have cost them a battle."

8. Cited in Lang, p. 167.

9. Ibid., 181-82.

10. Stuart Papers, p. 161.

11. Ibid., 162.

12. McLynn,
France and the Jacobite Rising
, pp. 86-87.

CHAPTER 13

1. It is difficult to estimate in how many cases coercion was used to enlarge the army of Charles Stuart. Naturally enough, the Jacobites in 1745 and afterward claimed that it was rare, and the Hanoverian partisans were inclined to exaggerate its frequency. Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London, 1980), pp. 257-58, is convinced that the incidence of coercion is far greater than most historians have realized. The rank and file of the Stuart army contained, he writes, "a very high percentage" of men who had been forced out. The legal evidence accumulated after the end of the rebellion is "overwhelming in this respect," even after allowances are made for the fact that those testifying were eager to exonerate themselves in the eyes of the British.

Lenman bases his conclusion in part on the correspondence of Lord Lewis Gordon, Lord Lieutenant of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in late 1745 and 1746. These letters, Lenman writes, "show quite clearly that the normal Jacobite technique for beating up recruits in the later stages of the rebellion was to threaten local landlords that their estates would be ravaged with fire and sword if they did not produce a set quota of men." The same techniques were used, according to Lenman, to force people to provide food for the army and to collect local taxes which were used to finance the rebellion.

2. Lenman,
Jacobite Risings
, p. 257.

3. Johnstone, p. 49.

4. Ewald, pp. 156-57.

5. Henry Fielding,
True Patriot
, November 19, 1745, cited in Rupert C. Jarvis,
Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings
(Manchester, 1971-72), II, 28, 121 andi passim.

6. Ibid., II, 29; Lang, p. 186; F. J. McLynn, T
he Jacobite Army in England: 1745, The Final Campaign
(Edinburgh, 1983), p. 49. The provincial newspapers used language that was sometimes genteel and sometimes coarse, referring to the rebels as, in one case, "nothing but a ragged crew of miscreants who commit every outrage without regard to life and decency," and in another, as "those shabby, scabby, scratchy, lowly, shitten Rebels."

7. Chester Courant, December 18, 1745, cited in Jarvis, II, 24.

8. R. C. Jarvis,
Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings
supplies much detailed information on the local reactions to the rising of 1745 and measures taken to counteract it.

9. A. A. Mitchell, "London and the Forty-Five,"
History Today XV
(November 1965), p. 722. A report drawn up on September 11, 1745 noted that "most of the public houses near St. James, Charing Cross, Whitehall and the hither end of Kings Street and Downing Street Westminster are not under the inspection of the justices for the liberty of Westminster, but solely under the clerks of the green, who never give themselves any trouble to do their duty, but leave it entirely to those known villains the 'Marshal Men' who get money by protecting these men, viz. Irishmen of all kinds, and the houses they use do every night swarm with multitudes of them to what intent anyone may easily imagine."

10. Fritz, p. 136.
The Bishop of London
observed with alarm in the fall of 1745 that "many poor Irish are making their way to London . . . London and Westminster are fuller of Irish papists than ever." However, within the City itself, municipal returns indicate a population of fewer than five hundred recusants. Mitchell, pp. 721-22.

11. Mitchell, p. 722;
Walpole Letters,
I, 398; Nicholas Rogers, "Popular Disaffection in London During the Forty-Five,"
The London Journal I
, 1 (May 1975), 5-27.

12. Rogers summarizes the events of fall 1745 in London and concludes that there was a strong undercurrent of anti-Hanoverian sentiment but that it was chiefly confined to Catholics, and in particular to the Irish. However, the City was staunchly Tory, and as the City aldermen were responsible for law and order within the capital, London's loyalty could not have been relied on had the army of Charles Stuart reached it.

CHAPTER 14

1. The foregoing summarizes O'Sullivan's judgment of Charles, and is understandably biased, though not as extravagant in its bias as the reverential comments of Lord Balmerino, who in his scaffold speech praised Charles for "the incomparable sweetness of his nature, his affability, his compassion, his justice, his temperance and his courage." "He wants no qualifications," Balmerino said, "requisite to make a great man."

2. Although Lord George had at one time taken an oath of allegiance to George II, his loyalty to the Stuart cause was beyond dispute. As he wrote to his brother Tullibardine in September of 1745, "My life, my fortune, my expectations, the happiness of my wife and children, are all at stake (and the chances are against me), and yet a principle of (what seems to me) honor, and my duty to King and country, outweighs everything." Cited in Daiches, pp. 122—23.

3. Lang, p. 164.

4. Ibid.

5. McLynn,
Jacobite Army
, p. 77.

6. Ibid., 80. McLynn concludes that it was "doubtful, though not impossible" that Charles had such letters.

7. Jarvis, I, 251. Charles was sending out "recruiting letters" at this time, telling prospective recruits that, given his successes in Scotland, and the longstanding promises of support offered by the English, he now presented them with an opportunity to "shake off a foreign yoke" and join his army. "I am persuaded you will not baulk my expectations," he wrote, "and you need not doubt but I shall always remember to your advantage the example you shall thus have put to your neighbors, and consequently to all England." Lang, p. 166.

8. The Jacobite army benefited from the capture of Carlisle in capturing with it 1,500 arms of various types, 160 barrels of powder, 500 grenades and about 120 good horses.
The Orderly Book of Lord Ogilvy's Regiment in the Army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart
, Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research, II (December 1923), 16—17, notes 1 and 2.

9.
Orderly Book of Lord Ogilvy's Regiment
, p. 15 note 1.

10. Lord Ogilvy's regiment book refers often to "women and children," though it also records "orders against all women but soldiers' wives," and notes that officers were told to "absolutely forbid to suffer any woman to follow" the men.
Orderly Book of Lord Ogilvy's Regiment
, pp. 17, 27. Jarvis, I, 273, counts eighteen women who "took a more or less prominent part in the rising," and fifty-six "regimental women" whose names appear in various sources. After the rebellion, some of the women, with their infants, accompanied their men into exile or overseas to the plantations, where it was their fate to die of disease or live out their lives in semislavery.

11. Daiches, p. 176.

12. Lists of prisoners tried after the rebellion reveal many young boys among those tried for treason: Thomas Warrington, a "boy of fourteen or fifteen," John Forrest of Elgin, "not fifteen yet," many unnamed boys listed as "under fifteen" or "not yet fifteen years old." Prisoners held at Chester included a boy of fifteen, three boys of fourteen, one of thirteen and two of eleven, plus two children aged six and eight, and Clementine Macdonald, aged twelve, and Margaret Douglas, aged three. Jarvis, II, 297fr.

13. Lang, p. 177.

14. Ibid., 220-21, citing "Letter from a Gentleman at Derby," in Marchant's 1746
History of the Present Rebellion.

15. Lang, p. 167.

16. Mitchell, p. 720.

CHAPTER 15

1. W. S. Speck,
The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the '45
(London, 1981), pp. 4-5 and passim. Horace Walpole noted that "for bravery. His Royal Highness [Cumberland] is certainly no Stuart, but literally loves to be in the act of fighting." According to Walpole, the men in Cumberland's command went north to meet the rebels "in the greatest spirits" because of their attachment to their commander and their confidence in him.
Walpole Letters,
I, 107.

2. Lang, pp. 167-68.

3. McLynn,
Jacobite Army
, p. 122.

4. Speck, p. 90. King George did not, as the Chevalier de Johnstone wrote in his memoirs, prepare the royal yacht and resign himself to abandoning his kingdom if the rebels reached London.

5.
Walpole Letters,
I, 407.

6. Ibid., I, 408-9.

7. Eveline Cruickshanks,
Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45
(London, 1979), pp. 90-91.

8. Cited in Cruickshanks, pp. 92—93.

9. Johnstone, p. 58.

10. Ibid., 61.

CHAPTER 16

1. In his
France and the Jacobite Rising
and elsewhere, F. J. McLynn demonstrates persuasively that the view of the French commonly met with in the secondary literature on the Jacobites is misguided. Far from being devious or insincere in their avowed intentions to aid the Jacobites, the French ministers were merely deeply divided in opinion. In 1745-46, McLynn points out, French foreign-policy-making was fragmented and chaotic. Six ministers competed with one another in Louis XV's council of state, with no clear leader among them. Even to refer to "France" or "the PVench" implies a coherence of policy that simply did not exist. Instead, different ad hoc factions gained the upper hand in the council at different times.

2. McLynn,
France and the Jacobite Rising
, p. 136.

3.
Walpole Letters,
I, 409-10.

4. Cruickshanks, p. 101.

5. O'Sullivan's narrative, cited in
Daiches
, p. 176.

6. Ewald, pp. 193-94.

7. Very little is known about Clementina Walkinshaw. C. Leo Berry, "Portraits of Clementine Walkinshaw,"
Notes and Queries
(November 1951), pp. 491-95, discusses the question of authentic portraiture of Clementina. Walter Scott's florid description of her in Redgauntlet as "tall, fair, and commanding in her aspect," with "locks of paley gold," "open, blue eyes" and a Junoesque figure "inclined to embonpoint" has no foundation in fact. Charles himself described her at the age of forty as "fair, of average height, freckled, with a thin face." That she was spirited is a reasonable inference, given her later history. Both her age and place of birth are uncertain, though the story that she and Charles knew one another as children in Rome is clearly legendary.