Battle of Culloden, 1746: the end of the Jacobites

Seven months after the triumph at Prestonpans, the Jacobite dream ended on a bleak, wet moor east of Inverness. In less than an hour, on ground that could hardly have suited them worse, the Highlanders were broken by the guns, and a whole way of life was broken with them.⁶

The road to Culloden

Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had driven the Catholic King James VII and II from his thrones, his supporters had risen again and again to bring the Stuarts back, in 1689, 1708, 1715 and 1719. The last and most dangerous attempt began in July 1745, when his grandson Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, arrived in Scotland from France, and on 19 August he raised his father's standard at Glenfinnan. A few Highland chiefs joined him with their clansmen, and an army of just over 1,000 men, mostly MacDonalds and Camerons, marched east to gather more.⁷

The rising began in triumph. The Jacobites entered Edinburgh without a fight, routed Sir John Cope's government army at Prestonpans on 21 September, and in November crossed into England. They reached Derby with some 5,000 men, but the English Jacobites they had counted on never rose. With two government armies closing in, and fed false reports of a third between them and London, Charles decided to turn back. Historic Environment Scotland dates that decision to 6 December, while the National Army Museum has the retreat begin on 5 December. The army won one more victory, at Falkirk on 17 January 1746, but it was falling back into the Highlands, and by late February it was at Inverness.⁸ › Battle of Prestonpans, 1745

The two armies

Charles had been born and raised in Italy and had almost no military experience. His ablest general was Lord George Murray, a veteran of the risings of 1715 and 1719, but by the spring of 1746 Charles distrusted him. The Jacobite army was dominated by the clan regiments, with Lowland units and a small number of Scots and Irish regulars in French service, and its men had beaten government troops twice. It was also hungry, unpaid and scattered: about 2,000 men were away on other operations when the government army came.⁹

Facing them was Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the third son of King George II, who turned 25 on the eve of the battle, recalled from Flanders to take command. His army of about 9,000 men was disciplined and experienced, many of its regiments veterans of his campaigns on the Continent, and four of its units were Scottish, among them Highland militia from Clan Campbell's Argyll. Cumberland drilled his infantry in a new bayonet drill meant to defeat the Highlanders' broadsword and targe. He crossed the River Spey on 12 April and marched on Inverness, supplied all the way by the Royal Navy, which shadowed the army along the coast.¹⁰

The night march

On 15 April, Cumberland's birthday, his army rested in camp at Nairn, and the Jacobites, drawn up for battle, waited in vain on the moor. At Murray's suggestion they tried to surprise the enemy camp that night, some 9 miles away. About 4,500 men set off in the dark, but progress over rough, boggy ground was painfully slow. With dawn approaching and drums beating in the government camp, Murray called the attack off and led the column back.¹¹

The march had gained nothing and cost a great deal. Many men had dropped out to search for food or sleep, and those who returned to the moor had had almost no rest and little to eat. When Cumberland's army came into view, about 3 miles to the east, around 5,000 weary Jacobites fell back into line.¹²

The wrong ground

Against Murray's advice, Charles chose to fight on Drummossie Moor, the open moorland above Culloden House, which blocked the road to Inverness. The Jacobites anchored their right on the stone walls of the Culwhiniac enclosure and their left on the walls of Culloden Parks. Cumberland halted about 700 meters to the east, a distance that gave his guns the longest possible killing ground. Ten 3-pounder guns stood in pairs between his front-line battalions, with six small mortars; the Jacobites had a dozen guns of mixed calibers, poorly served.¹³

The ground itself worked against them. The northern part of the moor, in front of the Jacobite left where the MacDonald regiments stood, was wetter than the south. Archaeological surveys have shown subtle rises in the terrain that may have partly shielded the Jacobite right and center, but none on the left, which helps explain why the MacDonalds never reached the enemy.¹⁴

The charge into the guns

The battle began with an exchange of cannon fire that the government gunners quickly won. For nearly half an hour round shot plowed into the waiting Highland ranks. Then Clan Chattan in the center surged forward, followed a little later by the right wing with the Atholl Brigade. Boggy ground, a track across the moor and the gentle slope pushed the charge diagonally toward the government left. The MacDonalds, starting from further away, were stopped in their tracks by the guns.¹⁵

As the Highlanders came on, the government guns switched to case and grapeshot, and at about 45 meters the infantry fired a volley into them. The losses were terrible, but the charge still smashed into Barrell's 4th and Munro's 37th Foot on the government left and hacked its way into the front line. There, the Jacobites found themselves caught between the bayonets of the front line and the muskets of the second, while Wolfe's and Ligonier's regiments swung forward to pour fire into their flank. Britannica records that each redcoat had been taught to bayonet not the man in front of him but the exposed side of the Highlander to his right.¹⁶

Behind the Jacobite right, Campbell militia had broken gaps in the Culwhiniac walls, and government dragoons rode through to fall on the rear of the line. Within an hour the Jacobite army was streaming from the field, covered by its cavalry and the Irish and French regulars of the second line.¹⁷

The rout and the reckoning

The government's official return gave 50 killed and 259 wounded, some of whom later died. Jacobite losses were far heavier: estimates of the dead range from about 1,000 to 1,500, with several hundred taken prisoner on the day and many more in the days after. The National Trust for Scotland puts the total killed at around 1,600, of whom 1,500 were Jacobites. Only the Irish and Scots in French service were treated as prisoners of war; the rest were rebels.¹⁸ › Battle of Bannockburn, 1314

The government line advanced over the field, killing the wounded and anyone too slow to escape, and the pursuit ran all the way to Inverness. Stories of wounded Jacobites dragged from hiding and shot, and of a barn full of them burned with the doors barred, have become part of the battle's memory. In the weeks that followed, Cumberland's troops burned homes and drove off cattle across the Highlands, and Britannica estimates that about 1,000 more Jacobites were killed in the hunt. Cumberland was hailed as a hero in London, and Handel composed the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus in his honor, but in Scotland he became "the Butcher."¹⁹

The prince in the heather

Charles escaped from the field. Murray tried to gather the remnants of the army at Ruthven Barracks, but the prince had given up, and the rising was over. For five months Charles was hunted across the Highlands and islands by troops and spies. In the Hebrides, Flora MacDonald, a young woman of South Uist, took him into her party disguised as Betty Burke, an Irish spinning maid, and brought him over the sea to Skye. She was later imprisoned in the Tower of London for it and pardoned in 1747.²⁰

Five months after Culloden, Charles finally escaped to France. He never again openly returned to Britain, and he died in Rome in 1788, embittered by his defeat. Murray, too, went into exile at the end of 1746 and died in Holland in 1760; he never saw Scotland again.²¹

The end of the clans

Culloden ended almost sixty years of Jacobite risings; never again would an armed rebellion try to restore the Stuarts. The government set out to make sure of it. Highland dress and the carrying of weapons were banned, and laws were passed to break the clan system and the old powers of the chiefs. The destruction of the clan world helped create the conditions for the Highland Clearances that followed.²²

The defeat also had consequences far beyond Scotland. With the Jacobite threat gone, Britain could turn its full strength against France overseas. Within ten years many Highlanders, some of them former Jacobites, were being recruited into the British Army for service in Germany and North America, and James Wolfe, who had fought at Culloden as a young officer, led the army that took Quebec in 1759.²³ › Battle of Stirling Bridge, 1297

Culloden today

The battlefield is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, which runs a visitor center beside it with a museum and a 360-degree battle immersion theater. Flags and regimental markers on the moor show where the two lines stood, about 700 meters apart, and the Trust has reconstructed the Leanach enclosure and part of the Culwhiniac wall. Leanach Cottage still stands.²⁴

The clan graves lie in low mounds beside the old road, each marked by a rough stone carved with a clan name, placed by Duncan Forbes of Culloden House in 1881. Forbes also completed the memorial cairn, a circular stone tower about 6 meters (20 feet) high begun in 1858. Later memorials honor the Irish and the French who fought for Charles, and the Well of the Dead and the stone said to mark the grave of the English are protected monuments. Tens of thousands of visitors come every year, many from the Scottish diaspora overseas.²⁵ › Battle of Edgehill, 1642