FOR centuries it has been characterised as the ill-disciplined and poorly equipped Highland savages falling to the red-coated professional army of Empire.

But 270 years after the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden, one of Scotland's leading historians claims Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops were professional in their weaponry and formations and that "redcoat blades not bullets" won the day.

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In what is described as a ground-breaking new look at Britain's last great land battle and based on written evidence and battlefield archaeology, Professor Murray Pittock said Culloden was the pivotal moment in the transformation of the United Kingdom.

Far from claymore wielding Highland savages being routed muskets and cannon fire, the Glasgow University historian has claimed the battle was a clash of modern armies with the outnumbered Jacobites defeated by their opponents use of cavalry and swords.

In 'Culloden', Professor Pittock also claims the rebels were immediately cast as primitive agents of absolutism, a description he states which was expanded by 18th and 19th century government propagandists to characterise colonial enemies of the British Empire.

Professor Pittock said: “Arguably no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely. On Culloden Moor what was in some ways the last Scottish army sought to restore the Stuarts to a multi-kingdom monarchy more aligned to European politics than colonial struggle. They were in many essentials a regular army.

“Outnumbered but not outgunned, cavalry proved their downfall. My own archival research and the battlefield archaeology of the site shows that it was not British ball that brought down kilted swordsmen as much as British dragoon blades that cut down Jacobite musketeers. Culloden as it happened is in fact much more interesting than Culloden as it is remembered.”

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Claiming a Jacobite victory in the 1745 Rising could have ended Britain’s struggle for empire with France and potentially prevented the emergence of an independent United States of America, he said references to savages in relation to Culloden were better applied to the slaughter meted out by the victorious government forces under the Duke of Cumberland.

Professor Pittock estimates in the book that 3000 men died on the battlefield, but no more than a third in action. The wounded, he said, were finished off where they lay with atrocities continuing for weeks as the British Army sought to ‘pacify’ the Highlands of Scotland.

He added: “Seldom has the adage that history is written by the victors been more accurate or appropriate than in the case of Culloden. For two centuries after the battle, British historiography framed Jacobitism as primitive because of the threat it posed, and the function the defeat of that threat had in a national narrative of foundational reconciliation and the development of the British Empire.

“The Jacobite period has been strongly and systematically misremembered in order to emphasise a secure framework for the development of ‘Britishness’ and the British imperial state. From as early as the 1740s historians often took their cue from the language of anti-Jacobite propaganda.”

Culloden adds that by the middle of the 19th century, and with Jacobitism no longer a military threat, it could be romanticised, with the affection Queen Victoria held for Scotland, coupled with the massive military contribution made by Highland troops in the advancement of Empire, rehabilitating former rebels into ‘noble savages’.

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Professor Pittock said: “Scotland’s role in the Empire was largely expressed in terms of its military contribution, and that contribution suggested that the Scottish soldier was an example of how ‘primitive’ peoples like the Jacobite Scots could be domesticated into the Pax Britannica. The myth remembering of Culloden was central to the British Empire’s image of itself.

“Culloden was neither the end of highland history nor a catalyst for the triumph of British modernity. It was the last battle fought on British soil and ended the last armed conflict in which the natures of Britain, and indeed its existence, were at stake. But it no more ended Scotland and Scottish identity than it encapsulated it.”