Culloden and the great 'what if?'

Published on Friday 20 March 2009 21:11

EXPERTS see it as one of the great "what ifs" of Scottish history.

On the eve of the battle of Culloden a few thousand men drawn from Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army planned a night raid on the government troops led by the Duke of Cumberland stationed ten miles away.

The idea was to surprise the larger and better prepared enemy. But the mission – carried out in pitch dark and driving rain – was aborted and the men returned exhausted.

A few hours later they were massacred in less than an hour, in the last land battle fought on British soil.

Now, 263 years on, historian Dr Tony Pollard is to re-enact the Jacobite night march for the first time.

Dr Pollard, director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University and a presenter on the television show Two Men in a Trench, will undertake the march with a group of volunteers to raise money for the Erskine charity which looks after ex-servicemen.

He told The Scotsman: "The idea of the night march has always intrigued me. It's a forgotten element of the battle.

"Reading the accounts, what astounded me was these guys went to all this effort, ten miles there and ten miles back and then had to fight a battle the next day."

Having trudged across moor and rough roads, the Jacobites turned back in the early hours of 16 April, the day of the Battle of Culloden, with some reportedly just a mile from the enemy camp.

Dr Pollard said: "It was a good tactic, but it was a straggling column which must have been stretched back over more than a mile. Basically it all fell apart, some got lost, some were too far behind and they lost the initiative by the time dawn was rising. The government troops under Cumberland were very well supplied, were well rested and well fed. By contrast the Jacobites for weeks and weeks had been on the edge of subsistence and were in very poor shape.

"But it's one of the great what ifs – what if they had persevered and been a little more together?"

Dr Pollard and about 20 others will follow as much of the original route as possible. "It will give us an idea how long the march took and how exhausted the men would have been," he said. "It was pouring rain and freezing cold, so it must have been absolutely horrific.

"At the end of it we can look forward to a hot cup of tea. The best that some of those guys could look forward to was a very violent death."

Duncan Cook, a learning officer at the Culloden visitor centre, said: "If they had surprised the government army at Nairn that night there may not have been the famous battle here.

"But while that may have kept Jacobite hopes alive a little longer, it would have just been a stay of execution."

Capital assault would change history

THE real "what if" about the Jacobite Rebellion was not what would have happened if they had pressed on at Nairn, but what would have happened a few months earlier if they had pressed on to London from Derby. (The Jacobites advanced to Derby in 1745 before retreating.)

Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to press on and the chances are the Jacobites would have been annihilated.

But there was at least a chance of them walking into London, and if they had attacked the whole government structure, I think it would have collapsed like a pack of cards.

By the time of the march to Nairn the Jacobite Rebellion was so far gone, and the Hanoverian state was so effectively mobilised against it, that even if they had been successful against Cumberland's army then it would only have staved off the evil hour.

There would rapidly have been another army sent from the south to deal with it.

It was an imaginative piece of tactics by the Jacobite army.

But the Jacobites were half starved and not fit to fight and the whole thing had become a bit of a shambles by that point.

The astonishing thing about the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 was not that it failed, but how close it came to success. Here was an essentially Scottish army far further south in England than any Scottish army had ever been before.

The government in London was in a state of abject terror and alarm in the closing weeks of 1745.

It was really remarkable what they achieved. The consequence of that was the government had become so terror-struck there was no way they were going to let the Jacobites off the hook and were mobilising the whole resources of the British state to dispose of the Jacobites.

So even if they scored a tactical victory over Cumberland, either at Culloden or the night before in Nairn, I don't think the eventual outcome would have been all that different.

&#149 Professor James Hunter is director of the Centre for History at the UHI Millennium Institute.