War Paths E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 400

Beschreibung

Acclaimed historian Alistair Moffat sets off in the footsteps of the Highland clans and their definitive conflicts. In twelve journeys he explores places of conflict, recreating as he walks the tumult of battle. As he recounts the military prowess of the clans he also tells of their lives, their language and culture before it was all swept away.From the colonisers who attempted to 'civilise' the islanders of Lewis in the sixteenth century through the great battles of the eighteenth century – Killiekrankie, Dunkeld, Sheriffmuir, Falkirk and Culloden – this is a unique exploration of many of the places and events which define the country's history. The disaster at Culloden in 1746 represented not just the defeat of the Jacobite dream but also the unleashing of merciless retribution from the British government which dealt the Highland clans a blow from which they would never recover. Locations included are:Prestonpans • Glenfinnan • The Isle of Lewis • Edinburgh • Inverlochy • Tippermuir • Mulroy • Killiecrankie • Dunkeld • Sherriffmuir • Falkirk • Culloden Moor • Arisaig & Morar

Leseprobe

Alistair Moffat was born and bred in the Scottish Borders. A former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Director of Programmes at Scottish Television and founder of the Borders Book Festival, he is also the author of a number of highly acclaimed books. From 2011 to 2014 he was Rector of the University of St Andrews.

First published in 2023 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2023

The right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78885 587 7

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

To my sisters, Barbara and Marjie,with thanks for a lifetime of love and kindness

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue Barbarians

Prestonpans, 21 September 1745

1   High Tide

Glenfinnan, 19 August 1745

2   The Stockade and the Scaffold

Lewis, Edinburgh, 3 April 1613

3   The Year of Great Alasdair

Tippermuir, 1 September 1644

4   The Snow March

Inverlochy, 2 February 1645

5   The Perfect Ground

Mulroy, 6 August 1688

6   A’ Dol Sios

Killiecrankie, 27 July 1689

7   The Godly Commonwealth

Dunkeld, 21 August 1689

8   Blaeberries

Sheriffmuir, 13 November 1715

9   Rain, Sleet and Speed

Falkirk, 17 January 1746

10   The Army of the Dead

Culloden Moor, 16 April 1746

11   The Old Road

Arisaig to Morar

Epilogue

Charles III

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the team at Birlinn. We have worked together over the years on many books and projects. Visits to West Newington House are always made a pleasure by Hugh Andrew, Jan Rutherford and Andrew Simmons, consummate professionals and thoroughly good eggs all. When we sat down together to talk about the striking cover of this book, it felt like the nightmare of Covid was coming to an end as we exchanged positive, creative ideas. Thanks also to the lovely Patricia Marshall for her editing, and also to Debs Warner for helping with the maps and much else.

My agent, David Godwin, master of the one-liner (sometimes one-word) email and the art of getting straight to the point, was as ever a joy to work with. The other day I worked out that David had shepherded no fewer than thirty-one of my books to publication. How he survived these repeated ordeals, I have no idea.

I spoke to many people as I walked the war paths, and most were very helpful. At Falkirk Muir I met someone who was even inspirational, full of kindly insights and happy to share them. But perhaps my most constant companions were never quite visible, although I never ceased to hear their whispers, and sometimes the distant echo of their war cries on the Highland winds. The warriors whose ghosts I followed on my journeys back into the darkness of the past were always with me. Having walked where they charged, I was in awe of their physical courage and their unhesitating will to defend their beloved home-places. It was a privilege to walk beside them.

Alistair MoffatJuly 2023Selkirk

Prologue

Barbarians

Prestonpans, 21 September 1745

Burned offby the sun rising over the North Sea, the haar lifted in moments. As quickly as the mist had rolled in over the cornfields before dawn on 21 September 1745, the wisps of its grey veil dispersed and revealed what the soldiers in the ranks of the government army thought at first was a black hedge. Peering into the chill morning light, shading their eyes against the growing glow of the low sun, no one was certain what it was. But it did seem to some that the black hedge was moving.

Having marched his force of clansmen south from the muster at Glenfinnan, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, had taken Edinburgh without a fight, a party of Camerons having forced entry at the Netherbow Port at dawn on 17 September. When news came of the landing of General Sir John Cope and his army at Dunbar on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, the Jacobites moved quickly eastwards to meet him, eager for battle. But, when scouts reported that government troops had taken up a strong defensive position near Prestonpans by a run of protective walls on their right, placed cannon on a high embankment behind their ranks and had marshy ground below them to the south, there was disagreement.

Lord George Murray, the Jacobites’ most effective and experienced general, sent Colonel Harry Ker of Graden to look more closely at the terrain between the two armies. Here is a passage from John Home’s History of the Rebellion in the year 1745:

He came down from the Highland Army, alone; he was mounted on a little white pony; and with the greatest deliberation rode between the two armies, looking at the ground on each hand of him. Several shots were fired at him as he went along. When he came to a dry stone dyke that was in his way, he dismounted, and, pulling down a piece of the dyke, led his horse over it. He then returned to Lord George Murray and assured him that it was impossible to get through the morasse and attack the enemy in front without receiving several fires.

Nevertheless, the prince wanted to attack immediately but, after a fierce argument, was persuaded by Lord George Murray and the cool appraisal of Ker, also an experienced and professional soldier who had served in the armies of the kings of Spain, to seek better ground. The Highland charge, the Jacobites’ sole tactic, would have been much impeded by the morass in front of Cope’s lines and more importantly it would slow the charge and allow ‘several fires’, the opportunity for the government soldiers to reload and fire more than one volley. The ground had to be right.

A local farmer’s son, Robert Anderson, knew of a safe and hidden track through the marsh that would allow the clansmen to move east around the government army and confront them across sloping, well-drained and recently cropped cornfields. A keen wild fowler and sure footed, Robert was able to find his way through the half dark and the enveloping mist in the hours before dawn. Only three abreast and keeping very quiet, the Highlanders were led by the boy and 100 men from the Clanranald regiment. George Murray followed immediately behind them with the rest of the army, men keeping close contact with each other but moving only slowly. One of his officers remembered that ‘it was so difficult that every step men made they sunk to the knee in mud. This made them pass in some disorder.’

Through the dense, foggy hour before dawn, James Drummond, the Duke of Perth, led the three MacDonald regiments across the fields towards the sea to take up position on the right wing. Clan Cameron, a company of MacGregors and the Stewarts of Appin followed him to make up the centre and the left while the Atholl Brigade, the Menzies and the MacLauchlan regiments, other smaller companies of Robertsons and Glencoe MacDonalds and Viscount Strathallan’s small cavalry force took up positions as a second line. With his lifeguards, Prince Charles sat on a grey horse, trying to make out his enemy’s lines.

Behind the prince, out to the east, a pale dawn had begun to rise over the North Sea. But the mist still hid the small Highland army. Murray and the chiefs who led the clan regiments ordered their men to keep absolutely silent and with the front rank both commanders crawled slowly through the stubble of the cornfield to get as close as possible to Cope’s lines. The black hedge had begun to move.

As the sun warmed and the haar lifted, lookouts were at last beginning to detect some substantial activity and government officers informed their commander that the Jacobites appeared to be moving around to the east. Another report had them wheeling to the north-east. Immediately realising what was happening, General Cope quickly turned his army to face their enemy, disposing them in lines three deep with his dragoons and cavalry in two ranks.

Then it suddenly began. The claideamh mor, the order to charge, came as the war pipes skirled, echoing through the morning air. Erupting from the mist-strewn stubble field like an army of spectres rising from the bowels of Hell, the Highlanders began to run towards the government army. And then they broke into an all-out charge. Howling like wolves, roaring their war cries, they came on very fast, closing quickly. Many paused to fire their muskets or pistols, immediately threw them down and raced towards the ranks of redcoats.

Running as quickly as they could, low to the ground, their small, round shields covering their heads and their broadswords drawn, the brave Camerons hit first, smashing into Cope’s troops on the right of his line, scattering them instantly. Leading from the front, Lord George Murray and the Duke of Perth ploughed on into the murderous melee, knocking aside bayonet thrusts with their targes, swinging their razor-sharp swords, furiously hacking and cutting, knocking men down, driving the red-coated soldiers backwards. Momentum was everything.

The MacGregor regiment rushed towards the mounted dragoons and the cavalry. Some of these clansmen had no swords and so they had lashed the blades of farmers’ scythes to long poles to make primitive halberds. A few weeks before this first experience of battle, young James Johnstone of Edinburgh had volunteered to join the prince’s army and he left a vivid record of what happened on that blood-spattered morning as the MacGregors raced out of the rising sun across the yellow stubble field.

They had been frequently enjoined to aim at the noses of the horses with their swords, without minding the riders, as the natural movement of a horse, wounded in the face, is to wheel round, and a few horses wounded in that manner are sufficient to throw a whole squadron into such disorder that it is impossible afterwards to rally it. They followed this advice most implicitly, and the English cavalry were instantly thrown into confusion. Macgregor’s company did great execution with their scythes. They cut the legs of the horses in two, and their riders through the middle of their bodies.

Many redcoats panicked at the sight of the Highlanders coming on ‘like a living torrent’ and did not wait for the driving shudder of impact. James Johnstone again:

The panic-terror of the English surpassed all imagination. They threw down their arms that they might run with more speed, thus depriving themselves by their fears of the only means of arresting the vengeance of the Highlanders. Of so many men in a condition, from their numbers, to preserve order in their retreat, not one thought of defending himself. Terror had taken entire possession of their minds.

I saw a young Highlander, about fourteen years of age, scarcely formed, who was presented to the Prince as a prodigy, having killed, it was said, fourteen of the enemy. The Prince asked him if this was true. ‘I do not know,’ replied he, ‘if I killed them but I brought fourteen soldiers to the ground with my sword.’ Another Highlander brought ten soldiers to the Prince, whom he had made prisoners, driving them before him like a flock of sheep.

Prestonpans was a rout, a profound shock, a disaster for George II and his government. Many more men died in flight than in the battle ‘without firing, or being fired upon, and without drawing a sword’, according to a redcoat officer. The stubble of the cornfield was awash with blood and rang with the appalling agonies of the dying. Bladed weapons rarely kill quickly and the screams of the badly wounded rent the early morning air before the clansmen used their dirks and swords to put enemy soldiers out of their misery.

Even across two and a half centuries, the shock felt by James Johnstone is palpable: ‘The field of battle presented a spectacle of horror, being covered with heads, legs, arms and mutilated bodies: for the killed all fell by the sword.’

*

On a bright and unseasonably warm March morning, I parked next to a pair of giant pylons, their six arms carrying electricity south to the towns and cities of Lowland Scotland and, when I got out of the car, I heard the whoosh and whine of a high-speed train racing along the main line from Edinburgh to London. Behind me was the incessant hum of traffic on the A1. It seemed that the 21st century had the Battle of Prestonpans surrounded.

Battles not only make history, they can be submerged by it. I had come to look at the fields of blood – the place where the carnage that had so shocked James Johnstone had played out. Next to the road rose a high coal bing, a man-made mountain of mining waste that had been reshaped into a more or less conical hill. It was a very good vantage point, close to where the night manoeuvres around from the morass had forced Cope to turn his army, and it was also a grandstand that rose to the south of the stubble fields where the Highlanders charged. Despite all the upheavals the landscape had suffered during the Industrial Revolution and on into the 21st century, the nature of the ground, what obsessed Lord George Murray, could be much better understood.

From the top of the coal bing, I could see Birsley Brae rise up to the south, the first position taken by the Highland Army. It is now all built up with what looks like a large council estate that commands long vistas over the place where General Cope deployed his redcoats. Had it not been for the morass at the foot of the brae, it would have been an excellent position from which to attack. Geography made sense of the fierce arguments between Prince Charles and Murray the night before the battle.

The boggy ground found by Colonel Harry Ker has not quite disappeared. When the cutting was made for the railway line, it must have been drained because the trains now run just below where the government army had been drawn up. But, under the pylons to the east, I noticed several deep-cut drainage ditches and a large area, disfigured by fly-tipping, that looked soggy even though there had been no rain for a week. Telltale clumps of marsh grass grew in several places.

Brown direction signs at the foot of the coal bing would have been understood by those of Prince Charles’s clansmen who could read. Their Gaelic pointed me along Slighe Blar a’ Bhatail, the Battlefield Trail. The worn paths were black with the compacted dust of old coal waste and recent storms had blown down many trees, some fallers forcing detours, making it difficult to make sense of the Jacobites’ movements. But, when I reached the road from Longniddry to Prestonpans and crossed it, I began to understand the events of 21 September 1745 much better. A path between two ploughed fields with a wall on either side traces the route of a waggonway that took coal down the brae from the pits at Tranent to be loaded onto boats in Cockenzie harbour. Cope’s redcoats had re-formed their lines just to the east of it when they realised that the Jacobites had changed their position. I stopped and realised I was probably close to where the government general sat on his horse in the rear, looking over the heads of his soldiers, watching the black hedge suddenly become a furious charge. When Cope’s men broke and ran, the charging Highlanders streamed across the waggonway. As they roared their ancient war cries and raised their claymores, it was as though the past was unknowingly crossing the future. The old way would become a railway, as more and more coal was mined, and eventually a huge coal-fired power station would be built at Cockenzie, its tall chimneys a famous landmark on the Forth coast. Long since closed and its chimneys toppled, the huge pylons remembered how much electricity it produced.

Their rich, chocolate earth freshly ploughed, the fields of blood on either side of the old tracks were waiting to be planted, probably with barley or wheat. Screening out the rush of the trains and the grinding traffic, I found myself walking around the walls listening for echoes, to the fury of the clansmen and the panic of the redcoats as they turned and fled, streaming past me. I’ve sometimes found that places have memory and, against all expectations, these empty fields in the midst of busy roads and the thunder of speeding trains seemed to me to remember the slaughter, the chaos and the shock-waves that spread down the length of Britain like a tide. History was turned upside down at Prestonpans when an army from the past defeated the future.

The battle probably lasted less than ten minutes but its impact was enormous. Not only did it make Prince Charles master of Scotland, it brought to life an image that terrified all Britain. Out of the morning mist at Prestonpans, monsters had raced into history. Savages who howled and roared their war cries in a barbarous tongue had scattered and slaughtered a modern army in moments. Wielding ancient weapons with dazzling and deadly skill, they had cut to pieces modern soldiers who were equipped with musket and cannon and flanked by cavalry. When Clan Cameron smashed into the lines of redcoats, the government army all but collapsed, fear turning to panic in an instant. Men trained to aim and shoot their muskets so that they could kill at a distance were engulfed by the chaos of hand-to-hand fighting as the prince’s army surged through their ranks. In the bright morning sun, blood spattered the yellow corn stubble. But more than anything, what made the difference at Prestonpans was that the Highlanders were possessed of an atavistic physical courage that could sweep all before its fury. It was a courage that never faded.

*

At the end of May 1940, the Camerons found themselves at the edge of another cornfield. After breaking through the Maginot Line in their spectacular dash to defeat France, the Germans had crossed the River Somme and established a bridgehead. The Cameron Highlanders were ordered to mount an infantry advance to help drive them back. Even though there was no cover in the cornfield, B Company did not hesitate as they charged over the open ground, taking heavy casualties.

Suddenly, two German companies who had been lying flat, hidden by the high stalks of growing green corn, rose up when the Camerons were within 100 yards of the river. They quickly set up Spandau machine guns and the losses were severe as fire raked across the field. But the Highlanders kept coming. When they reached the riverbank only forty-six men out of the 126 who began the charge had survived.

In the days that followed, the panzer divisions broke through all along the front, crossed the Somme in force and made spectacular inroads as they raced towards the French coast. Coordinated with the Luftwaffe, blitzkrieg had succeeded beyond even Adolf Hitler’s wildest expectations. After the grinding, static trench warfare of the First World War, the speed of the advance amazed everyone. German panzers refuelled at roadside petrol stations as they rumbled on across the old battlefields of 1914–18 and far beyond them. As France quickly fell and its armies surrendered, the British Expeditionary Force was encircled at Dunkirk and evacuations began on 26 May and ended on 4 June. Meanwhile, the Cameron Highlanders, along with the rest of the 51st Highland Division, were still fighting a desperate rearguard action, hoping to reach the port at Le Havre and be evacuated from its quays. But General Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division quickly swept around from the southeast to cut off the retreat.

For eight days, there was fierce fighting around the small port of St Valery. Hemmed in by the encircling German army, the Camerons, the Seaforths, the Gordons and the Black Watch held the line with the support of the French IX Corps in the south. But evacuation proved impossible, the ships unable to get close enough to the shore. On 12 June, the 51st Highland Division was forced to surrender and 10,000 brave men were led away to four years of captivity.

Injured pride and incomprehension rippled through the ranks of the Camerons on that day. Donald John MacDonald remembered that the order to lay down arms, seen as a dishonour, was at first disobeyed and had to be forcefully repeated, even enforced. In 1999, interviewed at the age of eighty-nine, Archie MacPhee recalled it as ‘the saddest day of [his] life’. When Rommel himself appeared with three panzers and battalions of infantry marching behind them to invite the Camerons to surrender, a French liaison officer stepped forward to agree to the proposal. Gregor Grant MacDonald from Highland Perthshire remembered the humiliation and the anger in the ranks and the fact that ‘the island boys reverted to Gaelic to express their opinion of him’.

The old Highland regiments and the clan armies and companies that preceded them are all gone now, their identities fading, their war glory, their prowess and pride remembered by too few. What follows is a series of journeys back into that martial past and its traditions, an attempt to understand something of these remarkable warriors, the most feared in 17th- and 18th-century Europe: how they fought, why they fought and perhaps where that famous and much-feared physical courage came from.

Losers rarely write history. But, in the case of what Gaelic speakers call Am Bliadhna Thearlaich, ‘The Year of Charles’, they certainly did. The defeated had a stirring story to tell. The ’45, the rising of the clans between the summer of 1745 and the rain-soaked catastrophe of Culloden in April 1746, was remembered and recorded by many Jacobite sympathisers. They knew and intuited it was the last act in a century-old tragedy and, more than that, the passing of a world. When the Highlanders charged across Drumossie Moor, they disappeared into the smoke of history, their fading war cries echoing across the turning world. And, as they summoned their courage and raised their broadswords, they roared the names of their places – Craig Elachaidh! Creagan an Fhithich! Loch A’ Mhoigh! Dun Mac Glais! It was for their land and their clan and each other that these men fought like furies. It was the loss of their identity that broke their hearts when many were forced into exile after 1746 and during the infamous Clearances of the following centuries.

War Paths is a record of twelve journeys I made in the course of a year. All remember conflict, courage, hardship, change and loss as I tried to get closer to what sped the Highlanders into the charge, how it was they almost toppled the British state, what they looked like in their war splendour, why their prowess terrified those who faced them. But I did not make these journeys alone. As I sailed up Loch Shiel to Glenfinnan or climbed up to Glen Roy or waded through the bracken to a ruined shieling, the ghosts of warriors walked beside me, whispering their stories, remembering the glories of an immense past.

1

High Tide

Glenfinnan, 19 August 1745

On 22 July 1745, the French frigate Le du Teillay dropped anchor off the tiny Hebridean island of Eriskay. It was mid-morning on a day of high summer. In the shelter of the Wooded Bay, the bright shimmer of the sea was blinding and a warm breeze blew out of the west, over the sheltering shores of the neighbouring island of Barra. Under the shade of an awning on the foredeck, two remarkable men were talking animatedly to each other. They had agreed on English although it was the native tongue of neither. On that glad morning of brilliant sun, both were excited about the same thing – even though they had not met until that moment and had little or no idea of each other’s identity.

Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair had probably studied at both Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities before returning to his native Clanranald country to teach in Ardnamurchan and to compose some of the greatest Gaelic lyric poetry ever heard in the western Highlands. Nominally a Protestant, he had nevertheless come out to fight for the rightful king in the Jacobite Rising of 1715 even though he was only seventeen or eighteen years old. In 1745, he became the captain of a company in the Clanranald regiment. At Prestonpans, he and his clansmen had led the charge into the ranks of a startled government army and torn them to pieces with ferocious and dazzling swordplay. Less than a year later, he had raced across the heather on Culloden Moor as his dreams disappeared into the roar of cannon fire and the darkness of history.

Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair was a gifted poet, university educated and aware of the classical tradition of Greece and Rome. At the same time, he was a ferocious swordsman whose slashing blade inflicted horrific wounds as the terrified redcoats ran for their lives at Prestonpans. Modern sensibilities might find those contrasting attributes in the same man disconcerting but, in the context of the clans and their ancient culture, poetry and carnage, great lyric writing and a feral courage were part of the same tradition – the one often the subject matter of the other. Warriors were poets and poets would raise their claymores, roar their war cries and race into the charge. Who better to hymn the prowess of the Highlanders than a Highlander who knew how to fight, to wound and to kill without mercy in the ruck of vicious hand-to-hand combat?

On the frigate bobbing at anchor in the sunshine of the Wooded Bay, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair had sat down beside a tall young man half his age and begun immediately to engage him in conversation. After a few minutes, they were interrupted by a courtier who sniffed and pointed out that formalities were not being observed, to say nothing of a distinct lack of deference. The tall young man was formally introduced as His Royal Highness the Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the son and heir of James III of Great Britain and Ireland, the eighth of that name to be king of Scotland.

Perhaps because of the confusing length of his name – it uses the Gaelic patronymic and means ‘Alasdair, the son of Master Alasdair’, a title usually given to a priest or a minister and the equivalent of ‘Reverend’ – Alasdair is often referred to as Alexander MacDonald. A supremely gifted writer, he seems also to have had a passionate, independent spirit that did not always please his father. When the young man arrived late to a Presbytery meeting attended by other ministers, one of them asked where he had been. ‘Alasdair was in Hell,’ said his father, knowing the disreputable company he had been keeping. ‘What did you see when you were in Hell?’ asked another minister. ‘I saw nothing there but what I see here,’ said the bold Alasdair. ‘I could not get near the fire for ministers.’

He composed drinking poems and was at one point accused of much worse. The ministers of the Presbytery of Mull reported that Alasdair was wandering through the countryside ‘composing Galick songs stuffed with obscene language’. But he also created verse of great power and beauty. ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ harked back to the great sea culture of the Gaelic west, the Lordship of the Isles and the fast, trim little warships that were rowed by clansmen. Here is a short excerpt where the crew is urged to take hold of:

The smooth-handled oars, well-fashioned,

Light and easy,

That will do the rowing stout and sturdy,

Quick-palmed, blazing,

That will send the surge in sparkles,

Up to skyward,

All in flying spindrift flashing,

Like a fire-shower!

With the fierce and pithy pelting

Of the oar-bank,

That will wound the swelling billows,

With their bending.

With the knife-blades of the white thin oars

Smiting bodies,

On the crest of the blue hills and glens,

Rough and heaving.

The poet’s father, Maighstir Alasdair, was the Episcopalian minister of the ancient church on Eilean Fhionain, a small island in Loch Shiel where Irish missionaries had founded a monastery in the 7th century. In 1729, his son was appointed to the island school to teach children their letters and also the catechism. Long before then, he had begun to compose poetry but not in the sense of using pen and paper. In the Gaelic bardic tradition, Alasdair first created the verses in his head, lying on the grass, it was said, with a stone on his chest. He would recite them over and over until rhyme and metre fell into place. Only then would some of the poems be committed to paper.

In 1745, when he was probably about fifty years old, Alasdair sent three new poems to Paris, to Aeneas MacDonald, banker and adviser to the court of the exiled Stuarts. He translated ‘Oran Nuadh’ (‘The New Song’), ‘Oran do’n Phrionssa’ (‘A Song to the Prince’) and ‘Oran nam Fineachan Gaidhealach’ (‘The Song of the Highland Clans’) into English and read them to Prince Charles. Apparently they were inspirational, helping to persuade the Young Pretender that the time was right to come to Scotland and raise his father’s standard in the Highlands.

When Alasdair met the prince, he was twice as old as the young man he didn’t recognise but it seems likely that they had attitudes in common, if little else. Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart was named Charles after his great-grandfather, Charles II, Edward after Edward the Confessor, an 11th-century king of England, Louis after fourteen kings of France, John after his great-grandfather, king of Poland, Sylvester because he was born on 20 December, the feast day of St Sylvester, Maria after his mother, the Polish noblewoman, Maria Clementina Sobieska, and Casimir after Casimir III, another king of Poland. History was heaped on the young man’s shoulders – a great weight of expectation and a need to hold on tight to the aura if not the fact of royalty.

Charles was born in Rome. He spent much of his early childhood there in the close, even claustrophobic atmosphere of an exiled court – a group of people yearning for somewhere else, probably deeply resentful of their fate, bored, frequently engaged in meaningless rituals, enduring what they saw as snubs and slights and insisting on empty titles. The young prince’s parents appear to have argued constantly and, in 1725, when the boy was only five years old, his mother walked out, moving to live in a convent for two years. Charles was raised as a Catholic and spent much of his time not with other children but mainly in the company of older men, many of them Jacobite exiles, some of whom were with him on Le du Teillay. In addition to his fluency in Italian, the boy learned to speak English and French. With courtiers in attendance, he became an accomplished horseman who took an enthusiastic part in hunting in the countryside around Rome. It might have been a blessed release from the atmospheres and tensions at home.

When only thirteen, Charles joined his cousin, James FitzJames Stuart, on a military expedition. The son of an illegitimate son of James II and VII, James was Duke of Liria and Berwick, the sort of exotic and unlikely titles sometimes collected by well-connected exiles who had made a career in soldiering in Europe. In 1734, Charles III of Spain had moved to reconquer the kingdom of Naples and the young prince was given the nominal and more than faintly ridiculous title of General of Artillery at the siege of Gaeta, a port on the coast of Lazio, south of Rome. Watching the Spanish and French storm the city on 6 August was Charles’s first exposure to war. With his honorary rank, perhaps the boy felt he glimpsed his destiny as his guns pounded the ancient walls of the city and troops poured through the rubble-strewn gaps. What he was seeing was not a fantasy but real fire, smoke, death and the din of battle. Perhaps the foundations of belief in himself were laid that day – an ability to translate fancy titles and portentous middle names from a pretension into a reality as he witnessed men die for their kings.

Three years later, Charles’s father sent him on a tour of Italy and the courts of the northern duchies, statelets and principalities, and the Republic of Venice. He expected to be received as a royal prince but most of the Italian nobility, not wishing to sour relations with George II of Great Britain, addressed him by a courtesy title, the Duke of Albany. Only the Doge of Venice accorded him his rank. These rebuffs must have stung the young man. At the same time, perhaps to look the part ever more emphatically no matter what anyone called him, Charles began to spend money, much of which he borrowed, on fine clothes and also fine wine. Even at that early age, he began to drink to excess. But all of the early portraits show a very good-looking young man, confident, straight backed with brown eyes and a fresh complexion. The biscuit tin lid title of Bonnie Prince Charlie was more than a posthumous legend.

In late 1743, the Old Pretender – a title now freighted with various meanings but, in the 18th century, it meant a claimant – made Charles his Prince Regent, giving him complete authority to act in his name – a king in all but title. From that time on, the young man began actively to plot and make plans for an expedition to Britain and the restoration of the Stuarts.

The War of the Austrian Succession certainly presented an opportunity. To force the British to pull troops away from the main theatres of war in the Low Countries and Central Europe, the French agreed to mount an invasion of southern England in February 1744. An army was equipped and mustered at Dunkirk. Charles travelled to join the fleet, no doubt believing that destiny beckoned. But a spring storm scattered the ships in the Channel and eleven were lost. This disaster was followed by a British blockade that effectively closed off any future prospect of another expedition. But it seems that Prince Charles refused to be discouraged or deflected even when the French tried to force him to return to Italy by refusing to pay him an allowance. When he could no longer afford to rent a grand house in Paris, the prince moved as a guest to the country house of Anne, Duchess of Berwick, the wife of the man who had taken him along on the expedition to Gaeta and made him a teenage general.

The Young Pretender was determined that pretence should be translated into action and he became convinced that he did not need the French. To add to the emotional encouragement from the poems of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, an old exiled courtier, Sir Thomas Sheridan convinced the prince that support for him in Scotland was significant and Sir Hector MacLean, chief of the clan, sent a petition that listed sympathisers and stated that at least 5,000 clansmen would flock to his standard if Charles came. It was enough to persuade him and to prompt action. He borrowed the huge sum of 180,000 French livres to pay for weapons and to fit out two ships, the Elizabeth and Le du Teillay. But almost from the moment they set sail, things began to go wrong. In an engagement with a Royal Navy ship off the southern coast of Ireland, the Elizabeth, carrying most of the weapons and cannon as well as company of French marines, was damaged and forced to return to France. But Charles pressed on and Le du Teillay sailed north to the Hebrides to drop anchor in the Wooded Bay off Eriskay.

Knowing that events of great moment were likely to unfold after the arrival of the prince, Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair began to keep a diary. It has survived in a collection of documents known as ‘the Lockhart Papers’ and was cryptically entitled the ‘Journal and Memoirs of P----- C------ expedition into Scotland, by a highland officer in his army’. Here is an early extract of what happened after Alasdair had met the prince and they had gone on to make landfall on the mainland:

After we had all eaten plentifully [in the house of Angus McDonald of Borradel in Arisaig] and drunk cheerfully, H.R.H. drunk the grace drink in English which most of us understood; when it came to my turn I presumed to distinguish myself by saying audibly in Erse (or highland language), ‘Deochs laint-an Reogh’; H.R.H. understanding that I had drunk the King’s health made me speak the words again in Erse and said he could drink the King’s health likewise in that language, repeating my words; and the company mentioning my skill in the highland language, H.R.H. said I should be his master for that language, and so was made to ask the healths of the P. and D.

The Gaelic lessons seemed to have stuck for, when Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair passed close to Prince Charles at Prestonpans moments before the clans broke into the charge across the cornfield, the poet records in his diary that the prince ‘with a smile said to me in Erse, ‘‘Gres-ort, gres-ort.’’, that is, ‘‘Make haste, make haste.’’’

With only a handful of followers on board, Le du Teillay had weighed anchor and sailed the short voyage from Eriskay to the mainland and the hospitality of Borrodale House. The prince’s immediate retinue was not an inspiring group. The so-called ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ were mostly old, ill and peripheral. The eldest son of the Duke of Atholl, William Murray, the Marquis of Tullibardine, was a genuine Highland aristocrat and the brother of Lord George Murray but he was fifty-eight and suffered badly from arthritis and gout. With Colonel John O’Sullivan, a professional soldier who had fought in the French army, were three other Irishmen – the sixty-eight-year-old Sir Thomas Sheridan, Sir John MacDonald or MacDonnell who, according to George Murray, was ‘old . . . and much subject to his bottle’ and the Reverend George Kelly, who appears to have been a secretary for the prince and would later draft a manifesto. Having been involved in the 1715 rising, Colonel Francis Strickland had also seen military service on the Continent in his younger days but he too was in his fifties and in declining health. Considerably younger than the others, the seventh man was Aeneas MacDonald, who acted as the prince’s banker and fundraiser.

From the shores of Loch nan Uamh, Prince Charles and his retinue then eventually made their way south to Dalilea, a Clanranald house on the northern shore of Loch Shiel and the birthplace of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. With the help of the poet, who had the rare gift of being able to write in Gaelic and English, a stream of letters went out to the chiefs of the western clans. Some of those whom the prince had met off Eriskay had advised him to return home to France. There was no French support and the chiefs rightly believed that that was vital for a rising to stand any chance of success. ‘I am come home’ was the young man’s reply and he persisted with his efforts to gather support. Only twenty-five years old, Prince Charles was handsome, tall and glowing with charisma. But he knew he spoke too little Gaelic and most of his men knew no other language so, over the days at Dalilea, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair taught him as much as he could.

Meanwhile, in contrast to some of the chiefs, the Clanranald ladies showed faith. Using silk from their finest gowns, they sewed the royal standard, a white square on a red ground. A good, strong-voiced singer, Alasdair Mhor, as the ladies called him, composed a hymn to the prince, ‘Tearlach mac Sheumais’, ‘Charles, Son of James’. A final flurry of letters was dispatched to the chiefs with an ultimatum – a call to arms. An hour after noon on Thursday 19 August 1745, the royal standard would be raised at Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Shiel, and they were summoned to come there and do their duty for their rightful king.

Early that morning, boats were cast off from the jetty at Dalilea and, with fifty clansmen from Clanranald as an escort, the prince began to make his way to the head of Loch Shiel to meet with what he hoped would be his destiny. In the prow of the leading boat sat Colonel John O’Sullivan, the prince and Alasdair Mhor. After staying the night at Glenaladale, they rowed on towards Glenfinnan.

*

It had rained so heavily overnight that the little River Slatach was roaring, foaming white as it tumbled over boulders and poured into Loch Shiel. I’d found a place to park by its banks and was reassured to see that it ran through a rocky gorge. I’d come to Glenfinnan to see, as much as was possible, what Prince Charles and his group of old courtiers saw when they sailed up the loch on the morning of 19 August 1745 and to trace what happened when they came ashore. The mountains had not moved, the shape of the shoreline was no different and perhaps I would be able to intuit what the young man raised in the sunshine of Italy would have seen on his first glimpse of the elemental grandeur of Highland Scotland, the place where his destiny and that of his dynasty would be settled, for good or ill.

A few weeks before, I’d contacted Loch Shiel Cruises and booked a passage down the loch to Acharacle and then back up to Glenfinnan, the direction the prince had travelled. But the rain was so heavy that I’d called the day before to check that the MV Sileas would be making the journey.

‘Och, yes,’ said the cheerful young woman on the phone. She was somewhat distracted – one of her spaniels had run off and she was looking for it, calling its name as she spoke to me.

‘We’ll be going. I won’t but Jim will skipper the boat. He’s a good man – knows the loch better than anyone.’

When I walked down to the pontoon quay, I was consoled by the fact that I could see the far side of the loch. When I looked down it, south-west towards Acharacle, it seemed that the mountains rose up even more massive, dark, vast, glowering, the rain-mist clinging to their tops, their flanks very steep, diving almost sheer into the water. Loch Shiel looked like a Norwegian fj ord.

Moored out on the loch, someone was on board the MV Sileas, no doubt making all ready. That was encouraging but there was nowhere to shelter while I waited. A new building labelled The Jetty Hut was locked and I stood in its back doorway, hoping the lintel would keep off some of the rain. I found that the most efficient arrangement in this sort of relentless weather was a long-brimmed baseball cap to keep my specs dry and then the hood of my GORETEX coat pulled up over it to stop the rain from running down my neck. To my surprise, I was joined by an older couple, both well wrapped in waterproofs and wearing warm hats. A car appeared and another elderly man – Did that make three of us? Possibly – emerged, immediately pulling on over-trousers as well as a long waterproof coat and a broad hat. I looked at my already damp jeans and wondered.

The back end of the boat – ‘Aft,’ said the man in the over-trousers – was covered in a green canopy with plastic windows so streaked with rain it was impossible to see more than a blur out of them. A table in the middle was piled with books – ‘To pass the time,’ said the man who might have been thought of as the first mate – and a lot of blankets. Oh dear.

It was clear from the questions from the older couple that the principal attraction of the voyage down the loch was to see wildlife – sea eagles and golden eagles in particular. Not this morning, I thought. Even if they are flying, the cloud is so low that there would be little or no chance of spotting them. Up on deck, there were slatted wooden boards where hopeful birders might sit patiently looking up at the sky with their binoculars and cameras at the ready.

Jim, the skipper, managed some introductory commentary after we cast off and began to chug south-west. Eighteen miles long, Loch Shiel is the fourth longest freshwater loch in Scotland and, at 400 feet in places, very deep. ‘The catchment area for rain is very wide,’ said Jim, with no hint of irony, ‘at 350 square miles.’ It felt like it was all falling on the loch.

After several brief visits on deck, enough to soak my jeans below the knee, I retreated into the green canopy, sat on one blanket, draped another over my knees and used a third as a muff. The older couple smiled at me but I was numbed to the bone. There was no heating, of course, and a breeze flapped at the entrance to the canopy. At least it might dry my jeans, I thought. It was only 10 a.m. and the voyage had another six hours to run. Breakfast had been a couple of slices of toast and, even though I wasn’t hungry, I reckoned I needed calories. Relying on a half-forgotten and mostly misunderstood classical education, I remembered that the word derived from calor, Latin for ‘heat’ – internal heat. Rummaging around in my rucksack, I found a delight – a slice of Marks & Spencer’s millionaire’s shortbread – and devoured it. At least it tasted good.

‘The pier at Acharacle is under water,’ announced the first mate. ‘The level of the loch has risen by about six or seven feet in the last few days,’ he went on. ‘We’ve passengers to pick up. If I can get ashore, then maybe I could tell them to go around to Dalilea and we could possibly get them on board there.’ This man had told me earlier that he was the ‘wrong side of eighty’. Clearly agile, though.

I looked around the green canopy and saw a plasticised notice on how to inflate the life raft that was attached to the back of the boat – the aft, that is. There seemed to be plenty of lifebelts but, if it kept raining so hard, maybe the quay at Slatach would be underwater by the time we got back there. I found a suspiciously old, half-eaten bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut in one of the many pockets of my rucksack. I thought about saving it for an emergency but then ate it, sucking the rock-hard chocolate like a boiled sweet. More calories.

The rear of the green canopy was open to the elements and I sat looking at the wake of the Sileas and the steep mountainsides unspooling behind us as we chugged down the grey loch. The first mate pointed out a white cottage on the shore at a place called