Down Memory Lane: Blood lust united people in horror after Battle of Culloden
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The Duke of Cumberland was in his glory this month 275 years ago after crushing the Stuart dynasty’s last stand, writes Bill McAllister.
His actions, however, in the aftermath of Culloden, would eventually ruin his reputation.
Initially feted as the hero for ending the rebellion, a thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral saw a Handel oratorio performed, which included See the Conquering Hero Comes.
But as news filtered through of the atrocities he encouraged or endorsed, he earned the tag ‘Butcher’ Cumberland.
His elder brother, the Prince of Wales, is said to have encouraged criticism of the Duke.
His victory was acclaimed as symbolising the unity and modernisation of Britain but gradually Cumberland’s star dimmed, his brutality seen as blocking the image of that very unity.
Eleven years after Culloden, he relinquished military command and turned his focus to politics and horse racing.
Cumberland was still only 44 when he died in 1765 – 23 years before the passing in Rome of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, whose dreams Cumberland had dashed into the mud of the moor. Cumberland is buried in Westminster Abbey; ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
Three years after he died, the statue of Cumberland on his horse was quietly removed from London’s Cavendish Square and the name ‘Culloden’ was obliterated, it is claimed on Queen Victoria’s orders, from his memorial obelisk in Windsor Great Park.
The blood lust of Cumberland’s dragoons as they galloped to Inverness saw rebels and innocents alike cut down. In a town where the merchants had no great taste for Jacobites, their conduct soon united people in horror.
Colonel Cockeen was to confess that he could not control his troops who “spared neither sex nor age they met with”.
Some 70 wounded Jacobites were shot by firing squad in the grounds of the Old High Church the day after the battle. More than 3000 Jacobite prisoners were taken, while 120 officers and men were executed and almost 1000 men were transported to slavery overseas.
Around 750 who fought for the Stuart cause were ‘pardoned on enlistment’ after signing up for the British Army in Jamaica.
The grim legacy saw the Inverness Courier only refer to the battlefield once before 1822, and only four more times between 1825 and 1841. In the late 19th century, tree plantations rose on the battlefield and were not cut down until the 1980s.
There was no call for a monument until more than a century after the battle, when Duncan Forbes of Culloden, whose family had opposed the Stuart cause, pushed for the 20ft high cairn to be erected in
1881.
Leading Jacobite scholar Murray Pittock, Vice Principal of the University of Glasgow, in his 2016 book Culloden, wrote: "Arguably, no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely."
He explained that it was not ‘Highlanders against strangers’ or ‘Scots against English’. Rather it was ‘the last Scottish army with its French and Irish allies, seeking to restore Charles Edward’s father to a multi-kingdom monarchy more aligned to European politics than colonial struggle’.
He added: “Culloden no more ended Scotland and Scottish identity than it encapsulated it.” The British Army which won the battle was “more British by some distance than the force commanded by Wellington at Waterloo”.
It is a myth, reckons Pittock, that the battlefield was poorly chosen by the Prince and his Irish adviser General John Sullivan against the advice of Lord George Murray, whose nearby proposal, and that of Dalcross Castle, would have left entry to Inverness uncontested.
Pittock stresses that the Jacobites fought Culloden because they had a regular army which was unsuited to a guerrilla campaign. He points out that it was not musket numbers but British cavalry numbers which was the decisive imbalance in the fighting.
To avoid another rising, the government agreed to build Fort George, work starting seven miles from Culloden at Ardersier in 1747 and taking 22 years to finish. A plan to locate it on Inverness’s Castle Hill was successfully opposed by Provost John Hossack.
Positive measures were introduced, with major road-building in the Highlands and the successful expansion of the linen industry while the cattle trade with the south flourished, bringing major new income to the area.
The memory of Cumberland’s atrocities, however, did not fade.
Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.
Related story: New Culloden map revealed
