(Read time: 10 mins)

Forty-five minutes. That is how long the Battle of Culloden lasted on 16 April 1746. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men ran like dead weights across 350 yards of boggy ground, their ranks shredded by grapeshot and musket fire before they ever reached the bayonets of Cumberland’s infantry.

There’s a long-standing quip in England — propagated, naturally, by those good folk in the north — that southerners think the known world ends at Watford Gap — a rather unglamorous service station on the M1, some 75 miles north of London. Venture beyond it, the jibe goes, and you risk a nosebleed.

Southerners, for the most part, have never heard of Watford Gap. Which, I guess, is the point.

It turns out that civilisation doesn’t stop at Watford Gap. Run your finger up a map of the UK and you roll over the Midlands and sprawl of Birmingham, then Manchester — billed as the world’s first modern industrial city.

Road signs appear for towns you thought only existed in soap operas and history books about the Industrial Revolution: Wigan, Stockport, Bury, Bolton, Oldham.

Keep running your finger north and off to the right lie the proud former shipbuilding cities of Newcastle and Sunderland.

Press on through the wild beauty of Northumberland and you’ll slip over the border into Scotland, reaching the latitude of the nation’s two great cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh. You feel, at this point, that you must surely be near the top. You are not.

Keep heading north — a long way north. Cross the Cairngorms, glimpse Aberdeen away to the right on the North Sea, and eventually you arrive in Inverness — the northernmost city in the United Kingdom and capital of the Scottish Highlands.

In 1746, Inverness sat 570 miles from the throne of George II — ten days’ hard riding from London, assuming the weather cooperated. In Scotland, it rarely did.

Five miles east of Inverness, there is a patch of open moorland where the silence has never quite recovered. Culloden. There is little drama in the landscape — a treeless, boggy heath with no obvious reason why 1,500 men died here in under an hour on a grey April morning in 1746.

But they did.

​

​

And with them died something else. A dynasty’s last military gamble, a Jacobite dream and the last serious attempt to put a Stuart back on the throne of Britain.

​

Bonnie Prince Charlie

The man responsible for the audacious attempt to reclaim the British throne nearly sixty years after his grandfather was removed from the old English throne was Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria Stuart — quite the name to grow up with.

History would remember him rather more simply as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Charles was born in 1720, but not in Scotland. It turns out that one of Scotland’s greatest romantic heroes was born in Rome, spoke English with an Italian accent, and had spent precisely one week on Scottish soil before 1745.

His father was James Stuart — the Old Pretender — son of the deposed James II of England and VII of Scotland. His Jacobite supporters styled him James III of England and VIII of Scotland — royal titles that existed only in their toasts and their dreams.

The Stuart court originally decamped to the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France in 1689, as honoured guests of Louis XIV. The French, never ones to pass up an opportunity to inconvenience the English, received them with considerable warmth.

James Stuart never relinquished what he saw as his rightful inheritance. By 1719, yet another scheme to reclaim the British throne had collapsed miserably, and the French — now shifting towards peace with Hanoverian Britain — felt the Stuarts had outstayed their welcome.

The entourage decamped to the Palazzo Muti in Rome, a handsome if rather draughty residence, courtesy of Pope Clement XI.

And it was here, in the dying hours of 1720, that the future of the Stuart claim arrived.

​

​

Out of Curiosity

To understand the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart family tree needs a moment’s attention. There were James’s and Charles’s everywhere, the dynasty having exhausted its imagination for first names somewhere around the second generation, so a recap might help:

The Stuarts had ruled Scotland since 1371. When James VI of Scotland also became James I of England after Elizabeth I died without leaving an heir in 1603, the crowns were united.

James I inherited the Henry VIII problem — England was now Protestant, but a restless Catholic minority still simmered. He survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, though his son Charles I would prove less fortunate, losing his head by parliamentary order in 1649.

Charles I’s son, also Charles, spent more than a decade in exile while Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan regime ran England with the joyless efficiency of a man who had cancelled Christmas — which, in fact, they had.

When the English experiment in republicanism faltered in 1660, Parliament asked Charles if he would kindly come back, which he did — as Charles II.

Charles II did a reasonable job of steadying the ship, but when his brother James II took over, he proved rather too Catholic and was bundled off-stage after barely three years, in 1688.

Now thoroughly confused about succession, the English invited a Dutch Protestant called William to come over and take charge. He was married to Mary, James II’s Protestant daughter — are you keeping up with this? The pair ruled jointly as William III and Mary II until Mary’s death in 1694, after which William soldiered on alone until 1702.

The last Stuart monarch, Anne — another of James II’s Protestant daughters — then ruled as Queen until her death in 1714.

Anne, inconveniently, left no surviving heir, so the English found themselves hunting Protestants abroad again and, with some desperation, settled on George of Hanover — a 54-year-old German prince who spoke no English, had never visited England and didn’t particularly want to.

And it was into this world — a German on the British throne, the Stuart claim very much alive in the imagination of the French and the Jacobites — that Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was born in Rome in 1720, son of James Stuart and grandson of the deposed James II.

Clear as mud?

​

​

​

Bonnie Prince Charlie grew up multilingual, charming and restless. He was tutored in the arts of kingship, military strategy and statecraft — groomed, in short, to occupy a throne that existed purely in his father’s imagination. He became an excellent horseman, a passable musician and, crucially, charismatic. People liked him.

This was his life — heading only in one direction.

​

​

‘The Forty-Five’ — The Jacobite Uprising of 1745

By the summer of 1745, Charles realised that the French had lost interest in a grand invasion for his sake. He was on his own.

After a couple of false starts, and with rather more courage than strategic sense, he slipped out from the Loire coast — probably near Saint-Nazaire — and in July came ashore on the tiny Hebridean island of Eriskay.

So far so good — but here’s the problem: The accompanying French ship, the Elisabeth, was so badly mauled in a running fight with a Royal Navy warship that she had to limp back to France, taking with her practically the entire arsenal for the campaign.

By the time Charles stepped ashore on Eriskay, he had seven companions, no meaningful weapons, no French troops and no money.

The first clan chief he met told him to go home. With commendable speed, Charles responded that he was home.

​

​

Bonnie Prince Charlie’s plan was to whip up Jacobite sympathisers as he marched south through Scotland, gathering an army the way a snowball gathers momentum on a winter mountainside — all the way to the front door of George II at St James’s Palace in London.

Somehow, against every reasonable calculation, it worked.

Clan after clan rallied to the white cockade. By September, Charles had taken Edinburgh without firing a shot, held court at Holyroodhouse and routed a government army at Prestonpans in a matter of minutes. It was audacious. It was exhilarating. And it was, as events would prove, as good as it was ever going to get.

Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army pushed south into England. At Derby, in early December 1745, they were only 125 miles from London.

But then a wave of common sense overcame his Highland commanders as they checked their arithmetic: The expected English Jacobite support had amounted to a trickle. Despite word of the march already spreading fear throughout London, they still had little chance of defeating the British Army.

Charlie’s outrage could not stop the Jacobites voting to turn around. The snowball was heading back up the mountain.

In that moment, the Jacobite dream evaporated.

​

Back north and into trouble.

The retreat north began on 6 December 1745 — Black Friday, as the Jacobites called it. It was grim and demoralising. Charles’s army was cold, hungry and dwindling, with government forces under William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland closing in behind them.

By the night of 15 April 1746, Charles was back in the Highlands, trudging towards Inverness. His men had been on the march for days, some hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours and many had simply melted away into the hills. They could go no further.

Ahead lay Culloden Moor — a bleak, boggy expanse of open ground five miles east of Inverness. Charles decided it was a good place to make a stand.

It wasn’t.

​

The Battle of Culloden

Forty-five minutes. That is how long the Battle of Culloden lasted on 16 April 1746.

Cumberland’s artillery opened up on the Jacobite lines across the open moor, and Charles — positioned at the rear — waited too long to order the Highland charge.

As the artillery fire rained down, the helpless — and freezing — clansmen were torn apart. By the time the order to charge finally reached the front line, it was too late.

The exhausted men ran like dead weights across 350 yards of boggy ground, their ranks shredded by grapeshot and musket fire before they ever reached the bayonets of Cumberland’s infantry.

​

​

Within an hour, around fifteen hundred men lay dead or dying on the moor — most of them Jacobites. It was over almost before it had begun.

Not content with victory on the moor, Cumberland pursued the remnants of the uprising with a ferocity that would earn him the nickname ‘The Butcher’. Wounded men were put to the sword where they lay. Suspected sympathisers saw their homes plundered and burned.

What followed would reshape Highland society for a generation: clan structures dismantled, tartan banned, the carrying of arms forbidden.

Scotland would never be quite the same again.

​

As for Charlie….

Having led his men disastrously from the back, Bonnie Prince Charlie left the field once it was clear the battle was lost.

For five months, he was hunted across the Highlands and islands. He slept in caves, crossed mountains in driving rain and ate what he could find.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more