Who won the Battle of Prestonpans?
On 21 September 1745 the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, destroyed Sir John Cope's government force at Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh, in a quarter of an hour at most. Guided by night along a track through a marsh, the Highlanders fell on the government line at dawn before its raw troops could steady themselves, and the charge swept them away. It was the first great victory of the 1745 rising.1
It was over almost before it began. In the space of a quarter of an hour, on a September morning east of Edinburgh, a charge of Highlanders broke a government army so completely that the battle passed into song. Prestonpans was the moment the 1745 rising looked, for a while, as if it might just succeed.2
The prince in the Highlands
In the summer of 1745 Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, came ashore in the western Highlands on 25 July with only a handful of companions. On 19 August he raised the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan, and the clans who answered the call gave him an army. It was small, poorly equipped and almost entirely Highland, but it moved fast, and by mid-September it had taken Edinburgh without a fight, although the castle above the city held out for King George.3
The dates here are Old Style. Britain still used the Julian calendar, which by then ran eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar of most of Europe, and switched only in 1752. The battle of 21 September 1745 therefore fell on 2 October 1745 by the modern reckoning.4
Cope's long march
The man charged with stopping the rising was Lieutenant General Sir John Cope, commander in Scotland, a former member of Parliament with a long career behind him. He had only about 3,000 men in the whole country, and few of them had ever seen action. He marched north into the Highlands to meet the rebels, declined to fight them in the mountains and went on to Inverness, which left the road to the south open. Charles walked through it.5
Cope then took his army down the coast to Aberdeen and shipped about 2,500 men to Dunbar, east of Edinburgh, where they came ashore on 17 and 18 September and joined his dragoons. On the 19th he marched west, crossed the Tyne at East Linton and camped near Haddington, meaning to retake Edinburgh.6
Two armies above the marsh
On 20 September Cope left the main road and drew up on the flat, open fields west of Seton, between the village of Prestonpans and the sea. It was good ground for regular troops with artillery, and it barred the coast road east from Edinburgh. The Jacobites, coming out from their camp at Duddingston, swung south and occupied the ridge west of Tranent, looking down on him. Between the two armies lay a stretch of boggy meadow, crossed by ditches, that made a frontal attack from the ridge impossible.7
The afternoon passed in maneuver. Cope shifted his line several times as the Highlanders moved along the ridge. A party of about fifty of Lochiel's Camerons slipped into Tranent churchyard and drew the fire of the government guns, and the Camerons took the first losses of the battle there before pulling back. As night fell, neither side could see a way to come to grips.8
The government army counted somewhere between 2,000 and 2,800 men, depending on whose return is believed. It had two regiments of dragoons, Gardiner's 13th and Hamilton's 14th, and foot from the regiments of Lascelles, Murray, Lee and Guise. The six light guns and six small mortars were served by sailors and a few invalid gunners, with hardly a trained artilleryman among them. The Jacobites had roughly 2,400 men, almost all infantry, with a troop of a few dozen horse in reserve; contemporaries put the figure anywhere from 1,800 to Cope's own 5,500.9
The night march
The solution came from a local man. Robert Anderson of Whitburgh, who had hunted over the marsh, told the Jacobite commanders that a dry track ran through it to the east. Lord George Murray and the council seized on it. It meant giving up the high ground and fighting on open fields against an army with guns, but it also meant attacking a force that did not expect them. The prince, who wanted to lead the charge himself, was persuaded by the chiefs to take the second line instead.10
Around midnight the Highlanders formed column in the dark and filed along the track in silence, past the narrow defile at Riggonhead and down onto the plain east of Cope's camp. Government pickets heard them and raised the alarm at about four in the morning, and Cope wheeled his whole army to face east, toward the coming sunrise. In the early mist the Jacobites shook out into two lines, the Duke of Perth on the right with the MacDonald regiments of Clanranald, Glengarry and Keppoch, Murray on the left with the Camerons and the Stewarts of Appin.11
The charge
At about five o'clock the Highland line came forward. Each government gun fired once, the mortars lobbed a few bombs, and then the gun crews ran, leaving their officers to fire the pieces themselves. The Highlanders fired a ragged volley at close range, threw down their muskets and charged with broadswords and bill hooks.12
The dragoons on the right, already shaken by the fleeing gunners, broke first. Colonel James Gardiner, whose own house at Bankton stood behind the line, tried to rally them and then stayed with a knot of infantry, fighting on foot until he was cut down. He died of his wounds later that morning. On the left, the second regiment of dragoons fled almost as soon as its commander was hit. The foot in the center managed a volley, perhaps two, before Murray's wing rolled up their flank, and then the whole line dissolved.13
Most estimates put the decisive part of the action at ten to fifteen minutes, and one eyewitness claimed four and a half. By half past five, as a historian of Parliament puts it, it was all over. The infantry ran west and found themselves trapped against the high walls of the Preston and Bankton parks, where many were cut down trying to climb out, and the pursuit ran on for more than a kilometer. A few officers, among them Lieutenant Colonel Sir Peter Halkett, kept small groups together long enough to surrender in order.14
Counting the cost
The figures are uncertain, and the sources give ranges. Historic Environment Scotland, weighing the contemporary returns, gives between 150 and 300 government dead, while the London press reported 300 killed and 500 captured. Colonel Whitefoord counted 956 prisoners, and one modern estimate based on his papers comes to about 300 killed, 368 wounded and 836 captured. Only about 170 of the government foot got clear of the field. Jacobite losses were light, about 30 killed and some 70 wounded in most counts, and around 100 killed and wounded in all.15
The guns, the baggage and Cope's war chest fell to the victors. The baggage guard of Highland companies near Cockenzie surrendered once a captured senior officer had arranged terms. Cope himself rode off with what remained of his dragoons, first to Coldstream and then to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he arrived with about 450 men. The satirists never let him forget it.16
The high tide of the '45
The news stunned London. On the day of the battle the Duke of Newcastle wrote that "The Pretender has now got possession of Scotland," and for a few weeks it was true. Charles spent the night at Pinkie House and returned to Edinburgh, which the Jacobites held until the start of November. Recruits came in, and the government had to recall regiments from the war in Flanders to deal with a rebellion it had not taken seriously.17
In November the Jacobite army crossed into England. It reached Derby in early December, about 125 miles from London, but on 6 December it turned back. The army won once more at Falkirk on 17 January 1746 and was destroyed at Culloden on 16 April 1746. It took the government seven months after Prestonpans to put together an army that could end the rising.18 › Battle of Culloden, 1746
Johnnie Cope and the battlefield today
Cope and two of his senior officers went before a board of inquiry, which cleared them all. It did not save his reputation. Dragoon officers traded public accusations about who had run first, and in Scotland Cope became a figure of fun in the song and pipe tune "Hey, Johnnie Cope". Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson both wrote the battle into their novels, and it has been sung in ballads ever since.19
The ground has changed a great deal. The marsh has been drained and partly lost to open-cast mining, a main railway line runs along the southern edge, housing has spread out from Prestonpans and Port Seton, and the site of the coal-fired Cockenzie power station lies close by. Yet the core of the field, the farmland around Seton West Mains, is still open, and a stretch of the 1722 waggonway that carried coal from Tranent to Cockenzie harbor, which both armies crossed during the rout, survives. Archaeologists from the University of Glasgow have recovered musket balls, grapeshot and buttons from gardens near the core of the battlefield.20
A stone cairn raised in 1932 stands beside the B1361 road, and the obelisk to Colonel Gardiner, put up in the mid-19th century, stands near Bankton House, which survives as flats. The Battle of Prestonpans (1745) Heritage Trust looks after the Gardiner monument and the viewpoint above the field, and the battlefield is listed in Scotland's Inventory of Historic Battlefields, designated in 2011. The anniversary falls on 21 September.21
