I recently visited the site of the Battle of Culloden, the final battle of the 1745-46 Jacobite rebellion against the British government and Hanoverian dynasty. Located a few miles east of Inverness, I had long appreciated the importance of this location, having studied the rebellion both at school and at university. Here – so the narrative goes – the Jacobite Highlanders engaged in a valiant last stand against the British redcoat army, who had pursued them north from their advances into England the previous year. It marked the end of Charles Stuart’s, or Bonnie Prince Charlies’s, rebellion, and the end of a fifty-year-long attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty to the British throne. The Jacobite defeat also led to a government campaign to pacify the Highlands, dismantling the clan system of governance and suppressing Highland culture through banning clan tartans and suppressing the use of the Gaelic language.
So, a very important moment in Scottish history. For a site which was essentially left over two centuries as a field full of mass graves, I wasn’t sure what to expect. However the visitor centre, opened in 2007, does an expert job of providing the historical background for the battle. There are the standard museum displays showing Jacobite- and Hanoverian-branded items, 18th-century weapons, clothing and so on, annotated by boards chronologically detailing the events of the rebellion. These are interspersed with more visual illustrations of the conflict, including an animated map showing the movement of armies throughout the eight-month insurrection, an instalment which particularly appealed to me. Perhaps the best design decision was to display the opposing narratives of each army on either side of the wall, combining primary sources from soldiers with the wider historical context. At the end of this rather traditional museum experience, although expertly put together, we entered a room with video footage of a battle re-enactment projected on all four walls. With surround-sound, it felt as though we were in the centre of the battle itself. We watched and listened as the armies lined up against one another, began to fire cannons, and finally as the Jacobites charged into the slaughter.
Afterwards, we were able to explore the battlefield itself, guided by useful – if temperamental – audio headsets. These were helpful as it’s difficult to appreciate how the field would have looked during the battle, a problem worsened by the fact that the battle site was simply a random field neither side had particularly chosen. I had always imagined a grander setting for the end of the rebellion. We followed paths cut through the field, including two particularly long paths along the army lines, giving a sense of how many people fought in the field that day (15,000 in all). These were annotated by flags to illustrate the distance between the opposing forces as they lined against one another.
The most shocking and, for me, unexpected feature of the battlefield were the mass graves. I hadn’t realised the bodies, overwhelmingly Jacobite (about 1,500 compared to 50 on the government side) had been buried on the battlefield itself. I was touched to discover that they been buried by clan; at least the governing army awarded them that final respect. These would have remained anonymous mounds had it not been for the local landowner Duncan Forbes who, in 1881, placed stones marking the clan buried in each grave. Somewhat amusingly, a stone described these graves as marking the brave Highland soldiers who had fought against the ‘English’, despite many clans having actually fought on the government side, most notably the Campbells. I found it interesting how Forbes, perhaps along with many of his Victorian contemporaries, had chosen to remember the battle. Through a celtic romanticist prism, the battle may have appeared as a final showdown between English/British modernity and Scottish traditionalism.
By Shadowgate, via Wikimedia Commons.
In fact, the conflict had even less nationalistic undertones than I had been led to believe. After seizing Edinburgh, Prince Charles was urged by several nobles to reconvene the Scottish Parliament, abolished in 1707, and to consolidate Jacobite control over Scotland. Charles, however, had no interest in such an action and instead pushed southward into England. While there were undoubtedly elements of conflict between Scottish and English identity, it seemed to me that the most useful means of framing the uprising is a dynastic power-struggle precipitated by political disagreement over the role of the monarchy, with the British government favouring a Whiggish, constitutional view, and the Jacobites arguing in favour of the divine right of kings. It’s fascinating how many different historical angles can be applied to the conflict. The role of the clans and their relationships with the state must also be considered: did the uprising constitute the final assertion of the dominance of the British state and the end of clan sovereignty?
I would highly recommend a visit to the Culloden battlefield to anyone that finds themselves in the Inverness area. It would be of interest to both avid historians and the less knowledgeable alike, bringing to life this crucially important episode of Scottish history.