A History of Britain, Volume 2 (55 page)

As a portrait of group energy this is distinctly a back-handed kind of flattery. Somehow, Hogarth asks us to believe that this disorderly rabble will compose itself into the disciplined troop seen in the background marching off towards Highgate Hill. But this is the miracle of England, patriot-style, strength from liberty. To spite the king, when he heard about his well-publicized objections Hogarth dedicated the engraved version to Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, ‘Encourager of Arts and Sciences' (in invidious contrast to the philistine Hanoverians). But perhaps there was a shade of irony there too, for his vision of bloody, bruising, riotous England was precisely the opposite of machine-tooled Prussia, the barrack-house kingdom.

Whether Hogarth's scratch army could pass the test of combat, few (other than Cumberland) were at all sure. Until Culloden in April 1746, the Hanoverian armies did not defeat the Jacobites in anything like a serious battle. At Falkirk, in January 1746, where 8000 soldiers had been committed on each side, much the biggest engagement of the war, the Jacobites had won the day but failed to press home their temporary advantage, wasting time, men and money until all three ran out in a futile siege of Stirling Castle at the end of the month. In the end, as in 1715, the Jacobites defeated themselves, and less on the battlefield than in the council room. At Exeter House in Derby, on 5 December 1745, five days before the march out to the Finchley camp, another critical debate had taken place on the future strategy of the campaign. Much the same arguments that had divided the Prince from Lord George Murray continued to exercise them. London is just 130 miles (200 km) off, said Charles Edward; a handful of militiamen and Finchley stands between us and a glorious Restoration. Move on the capital and the French will undoubtedly come. Our friends in England will declare themselves, and 1688 will seem a bad memory.

Murray was not to be moved. For months the Prince had been promising the imminent appearance of the French and they were still nowhere to be seen. The 3000 English Jacobites who were supposed to be rallying to the cause had proved equally elusive. All he could see was a
pyrrhic victory: the Jacobite army trapped in London, its rear cut off by Cumberland, the reinforcements arriving daily from the Continent. It was time, he insisted, to cut their losses, to make a stand in the heartland of their cause: in Scotland. The very force of his argument betrayed a fundamental insecurity about the viability of the whole enterprise. For in the last resort, successful as he had been, Murray was uncertain whether armed Jacobitism could survive anywhere other than Scotland, north of the Firth of Forth; or at least he wanted to pitch his tents as close as possible to a safe refuge should the balance of military power turn ugly. Perhaps folk memories of his ancestor Andrew Murray and of Robert the Bruce may yet have played over in his mind? Whether the cult of honour could survive in the new Britain of cash contracts and the drilled bayonet was increasingly moot. At any rate, this time he had the better of the debate. The Jacobite army, with the Prince sulking on his horse, turned about and retreated north. Needless to say, they had barely begun their long tramp home when Louis XV and his ministers were finally impressed enough by the progress of the Jacobites into England to send the long-awaited invasion fleet!

It was much too late. Battered by heavy winds and by the hero of Porto Bello, Admiral Vernon, the French probably would have been of little help. As it was, the Jacobite march north turned into a prolonged nightmare. Slowed by snowstorms and harried by Cumberland's pursuing army, now much reinforced, the retreat became ever more ragged and desperate. Garrisons manned by their troops on the advance into England were now left to treat with Cumberland as best they could. At Carlisle the Duke refused to accept the surrender of the Scots garrison in the castle, freeing him from treating the prisoners according to the conventions governing prisoners of war. This was a rebellion, not a war between gentlemen. Any Englishmen believed to have cooperated with the Jacobites were summarily hanged, and hundreds of their soldiers were crammed into a tiny, suffocating space, without air, light or water. Subjected to inhuman suffering, they were reduced to licking the slimy cavities of the interior rock wall for drops of moisture.

By the time that winter turned to spring in the Highlands it was clear to the Jacobites that whatever its temporary successes – as at Falkirk – their campaign was lost. With every week that passed, the Hanoverian advantage in men and guns told. By the time the two armies faced each other at Culloden, some 6 miles east of Inverness, on 16 April, Cumberland's force, about 9000 strong, was almost twice the size of the Prince's army of some 5000. And, more important, it was armed with heavy cannon and the new, lethal combination of stabbing and firing
machines – the bayonet. On a sodden piece of land his generals had begged the Prince not to make his battlefield, the Highlanders charged uphill, a northeaster blowing hard in their faces, and straight into the Hanoverian guns that tore holes through their ranks. The charge that had been so terrible at Killiecrankie turned into a stumble of survivors, carried along by their own fatal momentum and some desperate instinct of clan solidarity. An hour after the firing had started there were between 1000 and 1500 Jacobite Highlanders dead on the field and 700 more taken prisoner.

All things considered, it was better to be one of the dead and be spared the sight of the Hanoverian soldiers coming at the wounded to break their bones and further mutilate their bodies before finishing them off. As many as 1000 of the helplessly wounded may have perished in this gruesome manner. The cold-blooded slaughter of the wounded and the methodical hunt for those in flight was justified in England by orders, purportedly given by the Prince before Culloden, to give no quarter. But those orders were a pure invention of Hanoverian propaganda. In fact the march through England had been fastidiously careful to avoid alienating local populations and captured troops, who it was hoped, might yet be recruited to the cause of King James III. But Cumberland relied on the paranoid caricatures of the Highlanders as half-evolved primitives, the better to justify his own pitiless repression. And the bloodier he got, the better England liked it. Handel wrote
See the Conquering Hero Comes,
first performed in 1746, to celebrate his triumph. Medals and gifts poured in to express the gratitude of the boroughs and towns. In Newcastle, the Trinity House society of mariners and merchants presented him with an ornate gold box in appreciation for delivering them from the Scottish plague.

After Culloden it might still have been possible – as some of their leaders had always thought – for Jacobite resistance to continue in the fastness of the Highlands and islands, until they could at least extract some sort of amnesty out of the government. Only three-fifths of the Prince's army, after all, had been present at Culloden. But Charles Edward Stuart broke his cause with the same kind of carelessness with which he had made it, summarily declaring it irretrievably lost and ordering an every-man-for-themselves, going on the run himself until he could ship back to France. Behind him he left a population prostrated before a systematic exercise in state terror inflicted by one part of Britain against the other. Some of it was accomplished by physical force – whole villages burned to the ground without much close inquiry as to the sympathies of the local population. Cattle were stolen; thousands of crofters were turned off their land. What violence began, legal coercion completed. Hereditary
jurisdictions were abolished, thus destroying at a blow the patriarchal authority of the clan chiefs and the entire chain of loyalty that depended on them. Speaking Gaelic was forbidden, as was wearing the plaid
unless
serving with the royal army (in which case, in a stroke of psychological cunning, it was positively encouraged). Everything about the ancient Highland culture of tribal honour was uprooted and the broken remnants flattened into submission.

In London the trial and execution of Jacobite lords became public entertainment, just another of the shows for the diversion-hungry city. The drama, after all, beat anything to be seen at Drury Lane. King George reprieved George Mackenzie, third Earl of Cromarty, when his wife went sobbing before the king, falling to her knees and then fainting away in a pathetic swoon of grief and terror. Even a sovereign notorious for his indifference to the stage was shaken by the performance. William Boyd, fourth Earl of Kilmarnock, and Arthur Elfinstone, sixth Baron Balmerino, on the other hand, exited with heroic obstinacy, proclaiming their devotion to the divinely anointed Stuarts. The most colourful of the lot, Simon Fraser, twelfth Baron Lovat, had been found hiding in a hollowed-out tree-trunk in western Scotland. He had been a wicked opportunist, swinging between the two allegiances, remaining faithful to the king in 1745 but sending his son off to fight with the Prince. Now that the Jacobites had lost he blamed his predicament on the boy. Hogarth went to see Lovat and made an unforgettable print of the cackling old monster counting the clans on his fingers. En route to his trial, according to Horace Walpole, a woman stared into his coach and shouted, ‘You ugly old dog, don't you think you will have that frightful head cut off?' To which Lovat replied without missing a beat, ‘You damned ugly old bitch, I believe I shall.' He was right. So many people packed the site of his execution at Tower Hill, on 9 April 1747, that a specially built viewing stand collapsed (in yet another Hogarthian scene of downfall), killing seven, rather more than Lovat had ever dispatched in his life.

The London Scots looked on these terrible spectacles of retribution and humiliation (as well as what they heard of the miseries in the north) with a mixture of horror, pathos and rage. Tobias Smollett heard news of Culloden while drinking in a tavern and was so mortified by the raucous celebrations it set off among the English drinkers that, though no Jacobite, he felt impelled to write a dirge for the catastrophe that had overwhelmed his country, ‘The Tears of Scotland'.

With this wave of sorrow and self-pity washing over him Smollett must have asked himself, like so many of his compatriots in the aftermath of the '45, how it was possible, now, to be British. Some of them – a shrinking minority – would have answered flatly that it was not; that now they lived in a colony beneath the heel of the conqueror, with language, dress and customs outlawed. Henceforth, unrepentant Jacobites, the survivors of the cult of honour, had to live an occult life of relics and fetishes that could be hidden away and taken out for moments of furtive veneration: locks of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair; torn fragments of his plaid; goblets painted with an indecipherable smudge of paint that only the initiated, equipped with the right reflecting base, could see the colours resolve themselves into an icon of the lost loved one, the boy born to be king, the saviour across the water. The memorabilia remained hallowed while the real Charlie went horribly profane in Rome. Too many mistresses, far too much drink, years of tedious, sentimental prattle over the port about what-might-have-been made him bloated, prematurely decrepit and squalid, living off the charity of the gullible. Staring at the cracked masonry of the Forum he became himself a ruin, draped in the mossy weeds of his own bathos.

But except as romantic entertainment the Prince had become irrelevant to the real future of Scotland, which in the decades after Culloden did not surrender to sentimental grief but turned itself instead into the most dynamically modernizing society in Europe. In 1749, four years after the battle, Dr John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett accomplished a different kind of victory at Prestonpans, opening their plant making sulphuric acid. Even before the '45, the old Highland way of life was being altered by the capitalization of land, the change from customary communities to productive investments. Villagers were cleared off smallholdings they had occupied and farmed for centuries to make way for blackface and Cheviot sheep or Highland cattle, both supplying the burgeoning markets of the Lowland and English towns. And the aggressive engineers of the clearances, both Highland and Lowland, like the Camerons of Lochiel, could just as easily be Jacobite as loyalist. What was left of the old way when clan chiefs violated what had been the first obligation to
their tenants: guaranteeing them the security of their tenure?

At least there was somewhere for the displaced to go. The clansmen who had been unable to break Britannia were now given the option of joining it, and many took it. In the second half of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Highlanders were recruited into the British army and saw action in its many theatres of war around the world from India to Canada. Some 70,000 were said to have served in British regiments during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. And the annals of imperial government, as well as the barracks and the battlefield, are dominated to an extraordinary degree by famous Scottish names: Munros and Elfinstones, Murrays, Gordons and Grants. Even when some of the most obstinate Jacobites – like Flora MacDonald and her husband, who had famously helped the Prince make his escape – emigrated to America, they declared themselves (in North Carolina) as resolutely patriotic British loyalists during the revolutionary wars.

Instead of being colonized by the British Empire, then, the Scots colonized it themselves. Nearly half of those leaving fortunes worth more than £1000 in Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century were Scots. Glasgow grew rich off the transatlantic tobacco trade, and the great merchant capitalists like John Glassford and Alexander Speirs became some of the most economically powerful men in Britain. Speirs is a perfect example of the new kind of ‘North Briton' whom Defoe had in mind when he attempted to imagine a happier and more prosperous Scotland within the union. Speirs had been a merchant of modest means until he married into one of the older tobacco families, the Buchanans. After that there was no stopping him, and Speirs, Bowman and Co. became one of the meteors of the transatlantic trade, sending their own Clydeside-built ships (using a dry dock constructed in 1762) on sixteen voyages to Virginia and the Carolinas between 1757 and 1765. In America, Scottish agents had established company warehouses that dealt directly with the growers, cutting out middlemen. Cheaper costs of handling and shipping the crop and a booming market throughout Britain meant a doubled turnover between the middle and the end of the century, and higher profits. Those profits (interrupted for a while by the depression of the early 1770s and the War of American Independence) in turn capitalized other sectors of the economy in which Speirs and his fellow Glaswegian tobacco lairds made investments: glassmaking, sugar refining, linen weaving.