Culloden: sorting truth from fiction over the last battle fought on British soil

As a result, the word “Culloden” has become useful shorthand to predicate Scotland’s history in terms of battles fought a long time ago, such as Bannockburn, a justly famous victory for the Scottish King Robert Bruce over the army of King Edward II in 1314, or Flodden – a disastrous setback 200 years later when King James IV, an otherwise sensible king, led his country’s army to a quite unnecessary defeat at the hands of the English Earl of Surrey on September 9, 1513.

To be fair, modern historians have managed to correct those impressions and most recent accounts of the Battle of Culloden place it firmly within the context of a doomed French-supported rebellion raised in the name of the Catholic Stuarts and aimed at unseating the reigning Hanoverian royal family. It was also one of the battles in the contemporaneous War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), which took its name from the failure of the ruler of the Hapsburg monarchy to produce a male heir and which involved most of the European powers. This violent struggle was fought initially in continental Europe between Britain and her allies against the combined forces of France and Spain, both Catholic countries, and the threat of French invasion was rightly feared.

This was not simply a religious war with Protestant fighting Catholic, but as the fighting spread into the Caribbean and North America, it gave British foreign policy a religious dimension by stimulating anti-Catholic sentiments.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart was a Catholic supported (albeit somewhat half-heartedly) by King Louis XV of France. At a time when Britain was engaged in a conflict aimed at suppressing what seemed to be Catholic tyranny, the Jacobites were viewed as part of an international conspiracy in which the Stuart cause was linked to the global interests of France and her allies. It was taken seriously too: when Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in Moidart with his followers during the summer of 1745, the government in London began enforcing long dormant laws aimed at preventing Catholics from bearing arms, owning horses or gathering in large numbers for worship or other purposes. As one contemporary verse put it, the Jacobite Antichrist had “join’d with a Hellish Band of Catholic Thieves”.

And therein lies another issue with the battle. Many of the men serving in Cumberland’s army were not only supporters of the Hanoverian dynasty but they actively disliked and feared their opponents, viewing them as “vermin” or “popish savages” beyond the pale of civilised society (both terms were used repeatedly). Reading the private papers of the company commanders is to be introduced to a litany of bloodcurdling bigotry in which the Jacobite army is dismissed as “wild monkies in a desert ... jabbering, screaming and howling together” or as idolators “under a popish arbitrary power sent from Rome”. The language of vilification was widely used during the Culloden campaign and was not dissimilar to the phraseology used later by many of the same soldiers in north America while fighting the French and their native American allies.

Soldiers have always denigrated their opponents as a means of dehumanising them – in the recent operations in Helmand in Afghanistan the Taliban became “Terry” – but Cumberland’s officers took it a stage further. To them the Jacobites were not just rebels but supporters of a French-backed Catholic prince who had to be defeated to secure the “liberty” and “true religion” of the “legitimate Protestantism” which underpinned the rule of the House of Hanover. From that point of view the victory at Culloden was all very satisfactory.

In time, though, Culloden spawned its own mythology, much of it anti-English in tone, which can be summarised in the following terms. After the defeat of the Jacobite army, the vengeful British government inflicted a policy of savage retribution in the Highland areas which had supported the rebellion. Those measures included the passing of laws which banned the practice of bearing arms and wearing tartan and the legislation was followed by the enforced eviction of Gaelic speaking communities to make way for sheep and cattle as income generators for the landowners. When the time was right the same British government took advantage of the ready supply of recruits to form Highland infantry regiments dressed in sanitised and highly romanticised versions of the clothes worn by the clansmen in the Jacobite army.

There is a lot of truth in all this but in time the facts were employed to suit the needs of an argument which sees cause and effect between the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden and the demise of the indigenous Gaelic culture in the Highlands and Hebridean islands. An alternative reading, equally contentious and open to debate, is to view the post-Culloden period as a natural progression which culminated in the Highlands embracing the economic and commercial benefits of the political union between Scotland and England, as well as its military and imperial ethos. Both sides of that argument are still hotly debated.

Be that as it may, the experience did have an impact on the development of the British Army. At the time of the Jacobite uprising there was already one Highland regiment in existence – the 43rd Highlanders, later the 42nd Royal Highlanders, better known as The Black Watch. It had been in existence since 1739 as a pro-government force of “Independent Companies” to guard or “watch” the Highland areas in Scotland and had won its spurs at the Battle of Fontenoy in May 1745 and most of its soldiers were solidly unionist.

During the Seven Years War, the global struggle between Britain and France fought between France and Britain between 1754 and 1763 other Highland regiments, notably Fraser’s Highlanders and Montgomerie’s Highlanders, were formed to fight in North America largely because their men were regarded as good soldiers whose fighting qualities had become evident during the Jacobite rebellions. The concept was supported by Cumberland and by the prime minister, William Pitt the Elder, who persuaded a doubting King George II that a crisis in military recruitment could be resolved in the Highlands. Here was a ready supply of soldiers who would do their duty without complaint while their clan loyalties would bring a sense of coherence and reliability which would translate into good military practice. As the days of the clan system were numbered after Culloden and would soon disappear, other than as a sentimental entity based on chiefdoms, tartan and yearning for a lost past, the Highland regiments became handy substitutes.

Not that their creation was universally popular, either in England or in Scotland. Memories of Highland violence and lawlessness were still vivid but the recruitment of the Highlanders served two purposes – a steady supply of good soldiers for service in Europe, North America and India and a means of finally pacifying a previously troublesome area by ridding it of its warlike young men. If they were killed in the process, then that might be no bad thing either: it was clear that many Highlanders would not return to their native lands, especially if they were fighting in colonial wars. And if the policy of raising the regiments was intended to further the depopulation of the Highlands, the wars certainly helped the process. Once their regiments were disbanded, many Highland soldiers settled in America where it was hoped they would provide a loyalist bulwark against any dangerous secession movement. Within the space of 20 years, rebel Highlanders, the despised “bare-arsed banditti”, had been transmogrified into loyal patriots and servants of the British Crown.

The success of Pitt’s thinking is self-evident from the contemporary manpower statistics. During his period in office a quarter of the officers serving in the British Army were Scots, proportionally more than English. Of 208 officers who were also members of parliament from 1750 to 1794, 56 were Scots. At the same time, one in four regimental officers were Scots and Scots were used to receiving high command while fighting in the European and colonial wars waged by Britain throughout the 18th century. Between 1725 and 1800, no fewer than 37 Highland regiments were raised to serve in the British Army and by the end of the period the numbers involved are estimated at 70,000 men.

These are impressive figures which underline the importance of the Scottish regiments to the British Army but there was more to their emergence than what happened in the Highlands after Culloden. Most of the senior officers in the Duke of Cumberland’s army came from English or Irish backgrounds or were Lowland Scots – in other words they considered themselves to be British – and after Culloden many of them went on to enjoy solid and in some cases spectacular careers in the British Army as a result of the patronage of their commanding general. They were Cumberland’s men and they quickly became an identifiable military grouping within the British Army when they served in the European, North American and Indian theatres of military operations.

In so doing they showed that they had learned the lessons of the campaign and remembered them in later operations. Perhaps the most pertinent, because it was the most potent, was the value of sustained and disciplined musket fire. At Cumberland’s insistence the lines of government infantrymen had been instructed in new drills to counter the ferocious charge of claymore-wielding clansmen when they clashed at Culloden but it was the unrelenting volleys of accurate and quick-firing muskets of the infantrymen which won the day. Backed by artillery, the tactics soon became a battle-winner as was made evident during the later Battles of Minden and the Plains of Abraham, two of the most successful set-piece battles (from a British point of view) of the Seven Years War.

Equally, in the counter-insurgency phase which followed Culloden, battalion commanders used tactics which would be employed later against native American allies of the French in the fighting in north America – displacing the population and destroying their property as part of a group punishment for supporting the opposition. Although the methods were deplorable and achieved nothing other than alienation and a long-lasting bitterness, the tactics were not untypical of the period.

Unfortunately, even otherwise sensible and professional officers such as Major James Wolfe and Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Cornwallis, both Culloden veterans, were guilty of unleashing violence against the civilian populations in Scotland and in North America when they served there 10 years later. However, more astute commanders such as General Humphrey Bland and General William Blakeney came round to the belief that in low intensity warfare, the population had to be won over and during the post-Culloden period there was considerable discussion about the value of using the army as a force for good in restoring order and obliterating the root causes of rebellion.

In turn the use of the army as an instrument of state policy came to represent an acceptable way of fighting frontier wars against the French and their native American auxiliaries along the Ohio, Missouri and St Lawrence rivers in north America even if the use of such tactics would later be viewed as unacceptable repression. Cumberland’s young men had learned their lesson well and the result was not only the defeat of France but also the consolidation of lucrative British trading interests across the globe. For the Stuarts and the Jacobites, Culloden was the end of the road, but for the victorious Hanoverians and their supporters it seemed that a new age of British prosperity and eventual world domination was at hand.

Trevor Royle is the Sunday Herald's diplomatic editor and a distinguished military historian. His new book, Culloden: Scotland’s Last Battle And The Forging Of The British Empire, is published this week by Little Brown, £25.

Trevor Royle will be in conversation about Culloden at Aye Write, Glasgow on Sunday, March 20 at 1.30pm. The Sunday Herald is the literary festival's media partner www.ayewrite.com