Battle of Culloden

Based on Wikipedia: Battle of Culloden

The Last Charge

It took less than an hour to destroy a dynasty's dreams.

On the morning of April 16, 1746, roughly five thousand exhausted, hungry Highlanders stood in driving sleet on a bleak stretch of Scottish moorland called Culloden. They had not slept. They had barely eaten in days. Many had wandered off in search of food and would miss the battle entirely. The men who remained were about to charge directly into the massed artillery of a professional army nearly twice their size, and most of them knew exactly how this would end.

The Battle of Culloden lasted perhaps forty minutes. In that brief span, the Jacobite cause—the dream of restoring the Catholic Stuart dynasty to the British throne—died in blood and smoke and the screams of men cut down by grapeshot. It was the last pitched battle ever fought on British soil, and it remains one of the most lopsided military disasters in Scottish history.

But to understand why those Highlanders stood there at all, willing to hurl themselves against cannon fire with nothing but swords and courage, you need to understand what had brought them to that frozen moor in the first place.

The Prince Who Came From the Sea

Charles Edward Stuart—known to history as Bonnie Prince Charlie—was twenty-four years old when he stepped ashore in the Scottish Highlands in July 1745. He was handsome, charming, and almost completely delusional about his chances of success.

The Stuarts had been deposed from the British throne fifty-seven years earlier, during what the English called the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Charles's grandfather, the Catholic King James II, had fled to France rather than face the Protestant forces of William of Orange. Ever since, the exiled Stuarts had been plotting their return, launching periodic invasions that invariably ended in failure. The word "Jacobite" comes from Jacobus, the Latin form of James—supporters of the Stuart claim were supporters of King James and his descendants.

Charles arrived in Scotland with almost nothing: seven companions, some weapons, and an unshakeable belief that the Scottish clans would rise to support him. The major clan chiefs were skeptical. They had seen Jacobite risings fail before. They asked Charles what French troops he had brought.

None, he admitted.

What about money? Arms? Ships?

Almost none.

The chiefs told him to go home.

Charles refused. He declared he would raise his standard with or without them, and fight alone if necessary. This combination of reckless courage and romantic stubbornness proved surprisingly effective. One by one, the chiefs began to commit their clans. By September, Charles had an army.

The Impossible March

What happened next shocked Britain and terrified London. The Jacobite army swept through Scotland with astonishing speed. At Prestonpans, just outside Edinburgh, they routed a government force in less than fifteen minutes—the Highlanders' terrifying charge with broadswords proving devastatingly effective against troops who had never faced anything like it.

By November, Charles controlled most of Scotland and had convinced his reluctant officers to attempt the unthinkable: an invasion of England itself.

The Jacobite army marched south. They took Carlisle. They pushed through Lancashire. By December 4, they had reached Derby, just 125 miles from London. Panic gripped the capital. King George II reportedly had his bags packed and ships ready to flee to Hanover. The Bank of England paid out withdrawals in sixpences to slow the run on its reserves.

And then, at the moment of their greatest advance, Charles's officers forced him to turn back.

The promised English Jacobite rising had failed to materialize. French reinforcements had not arrived. Two government armies were converging on their position, and the Highlanders were deep in hostile territory with extended supply lines and no clear path to London. Lord George Murray, Charles's most capable general, insisted that continuing south meant certain destruction.

Charles never forgave his officers for this decision. He believed they had stolen victory from him at the very moment it was within reach. The relationship between the Prince and his commanders, already strained, grew poisonous. This dysfunction would prove fatal at Culloden.

The Long Retreat

The march back to Scotland was a masterpiece of military skill. Murray conducted a fighting withdrawal against two pursuing armies, never allowing them to catch the main Jacobite force. The Highlanders even won another battle, defeating a government army at Falkirk in January 1746.

But the strategic situation was deteriorating. The Jacobites had laid siege to Stirling Castle, the key to controlling the Scottish Highlands, but they lacked the heavy artillery to breach its walls. Meanwhile, a new government commander had arrived: William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the twenty-five-year-old son of King George II.

Cumberland was methodical where Charles was impulsive, patient where Charles was reckless. He understood that time favored him. The Royal Navy's blockade was strangling Jacobite supply lines. French ships occasionally slipped through with money and weapons, but never enough. The Highland army was slowly starving.

In February, the Jacobites abandoned the siege of Stirling and retreated to Inverness. Cumberland pursued cautiously, waiting for the weather to improve. When he finally marched out of Aberdeen in April, Charles and his advisers realized they had run out of options. They could not retreat further—their supplies were in Inverness, and without food, the army would simply melt away. They would have to stand and fight.

Choosing the Killing Ground

The place where armies fight often matters more than how many soldiers they bring. At Culloden, the Jacobites chose catastrophically.

Sir John O'Sullivan, Charles's Irish adjutant-general, selected a stretch of open moorland called Drummossie Moor. To a conventional military eye, it looked defensible: flat ground with walls on both flanks to prevent encirclement.

Lord George Murray was horrified. The Jacobites' greatest weapon was the Highland charge—a terrifying headlong rush with broadswords that had shattered government formations at Prestonpans and Falkirk. But the charge required specific conditions to succeed. The Highlanders needed broken, uneven terrain where disciplined musket volleys would be disrupted. They needed downhill momentum to build speed. They needed to close the distance to the enemy lines before artillery could tear them apart.

Drummossie Moor offered none of this. It was flat, open, and soggy—perfect ground for artillery and disciplined musketry, terrible ground for a sword charge. Murray proposed an alternative site with steep slopes that would give the Highlanders the advantage of terrain. O'Sullivan rejected it.

The decision to fight at Culloden was essentially a decision to fight the battle on Cumberland's terms. Whether this was military incompetence, arrogance, or simply the desperation of men who had run out of alternatives is still debated by historians.

The Night Attack That Never Was

On April 15, Cumberland's army celebrated the Duke's twenty-fifth birthday. Extra rations of brandy were distributed to every regiment. The Jacobite commanders saw an opportunity: a night attack on the government camp while the redcoats slept off their celebration.

It was a bold plan. Murray's troops would attack the front of the encampment while the Duke of Perth struck the rear. The Highlanders would use only swords and dirks—no firearms to alert the enemy. They would overturn tents and stab at the thrashing shapes beneath.

The plan fell apart almost immediately.

The Jacobite army set out after dark, stumbling across country to avoid government patrols. The night was pitch black. Units lost contact with each other. Men walked into ditches, tripped over rocks, became hopelessly disoriented. By the time Murray's vanguard reached a point still two miles from Cumberland's camp, dawn was approaching. There was no time to coordinate the attack.

Murray called it off. But crucially, no one told the Duke of Perth, whose force of twelve hundred men continued blindly toward the government lines. According to some accounts, Perth's troops actually made contact with enemy sentries before realizing they were alone. They barely escaped back to camp.

The exhausted Highlanders straggled back to Culloden as the sun rose. They had marched all night for nothing. Now they would have to fight a battle without rest, without food, without hope.

The Armies Face Each Other

The government army broke camp at five in the morning. Cumberland formed his roughly nine thousand men into three lines and marched toward the Jacobite position. By ten o'clock, the Highlanders could see them approaching across the moor, their red coats vivid against the grey April sky.

The Jacobite army that faced them numbered perhaps five thousand. Hundreds of men were missing—asleep in ditches, foraging for food in Inverness, or simply too exhausted to have made it back from the failed night march. Those who remained took their positions in the driving sleet, stamping their feet against the cold, watching the enemy approach.

The Highland regiments formed the front line, their positions assigned by the traditional—and politically volatile—question of who had the right to stand where. The MacDonalds, who claimed the honor of holding the right wing, were instead placed on the left. They were furious, and some historians believe their anger affected their performance in the battle.

Behind the Highlanders stood the Lowland regiments: the Royal Écossais (Scots in French service), the Irish Picquets, and various smaller units. These were trained in conventional European tactics—musket volleys and bayonet charges. They would prove crucial in covering the eventual retreat.

As both armies settled into position, something strange happened to the Jacobite line. Adjustments made to cover gaps and protect flanks caused the formation to skew. The right wing edged forward while the left lagged behind. When the order to charge finally came, the Highlanders would not hit the government line simultaneously—they would strike in a ragged sequence that allowed Cumberland's men to concentrate their fire.

Nine Minutes Under the Guns

At approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, the Jacobite artillery opened fire.

They had perhaps twelve guns, served by crews with limited training. The government army had vastly more artillery, better positioned and served by professional gunners. When Cumberland's batteries replied, the disparity became immediately clear.

The Jacobite cannons fell largely silent—outranged, outgunned, their crews killed or driven from their pieces. But the government bombardment continued. Round shot—solid iron balls—tore through the Highland ranks. At this range, the statistical reality was that casualties were relatively light: perhaps twenty or thirty men. But to the Highlanders standing in the sleet, watching their comrades torn apart while doing nothing, the bombardment felt endless.

Later Jacobite accounts claimed they stood under artillery fire for thirty minutes or more while Charles inexplicably delayed the order to charge. Government accounts suggest the actual time was much shorter—one officer timed it at nine minutes, another at barely two or three. The truth probably lies somewhere between, but in either case, those minutes represented an eternity of helpless suffering.

Why did Charles wait? No one knows for certain. Perhaps he hoped his own artillery would find the range. Perhaps he was paralyzed by indecision. Perhaps, as some have suggested, he was simply too far from the front line to understand what was happening. Whatever the reason, the delay cost lives and, more importantly, cost the Highlanders their greatest asset: the psychological momentum of the charge.

The Charge

When the order finally came, it had to be carried down the line from regiment to regiment by riders on horseback. The Highlanders did not attack as a single wave—they surged forward in sequence, the right wing leading, the center following, the left lagging behind.

As soon as they left their positions, the government gunners switched from round shot to canister. A canister round was essentially a tin can packed with musket balls—when fired from a cannon, it turned the weapon into a giant shotgun, spraying hundreds of projectiles in a spreading cone of death. Against massed infantry at close range, canister was devastatingly effective.

The Highlanders charged directly into it.

On the right, the Atholl Brigade and Clan Cameron lowered their heads and ran toward the government left. The distance they had to cover was perhaps four hundred yards—an eternity under fire. The soft, boggy ground sucked at their feet. Canister tore through their ranks. And then something happened that made their situation even worse.

The center regiments—Clan Chattan and the Frasers—began drifting rightward. Perhaps they were following slightly firmer ground along a road that crossed the moor. Perhaps they were instinctively flinching away from the artillery fire. Whatever the cause, instead of striking the government line across its entire length, five Highland regiments converged on a single point, crashing into each other as they ran.

The tangled mass of screaming Highlanders, still somehow moving forward, hit the government line at almost the same moment their commanders fell. MacGillivray of Clan Chattan went down. MacBean fell beside him. Lochiel of Clan Cameron had both ankles shattered by canister just yards from the redcoat bayonets. Modern archaeology has confirmed the intensity of the fighting at this point: excavations in 2024 recovered dense concentrations of musket balls and grapeshot in a small area believed to mark where the charge struck home.

For a few terrible minutes, it looked like the Highland charge might actually succeed.

The Breaking Point

The brunt of the Jacobite impact fell on just two government regiments: Barrell's 4th Foot and Dejean's 37th Foot. These roughly seven hundred men absorbed the full fury of the Highland charge—thousands of screaming warriors with broadswords, crashing into their lines after running through artillery fire that would have broken most armies.

Barrell's regiment lost one of its colors—the unit flags that served as rallying points and symbols of honor. They suffered 125 casualties out of 373 men, a loss rate of more than a third. For a moment, their line buckled.

But it did not break.

Part of the reason was a tactical innovation Cumberland had introduced. The traditional defense against a Highland charge was the bayonet, thrust straight forward at the attacking swordsman. But a Highlander's small round shield, called a targe, was carried on the left arm, and the broadsword was wielded with the right hand—this meant the shield protected the swordsman's front while his sword arm was free to strike. Government soldiers using a conventional bayonet thrust found their weapons deflected by the targe while they were cut down from the side.

Cumberland's solution was brutally simple: instead of stabbing at the Highlander in front of you, stab at the one to your right. That man's shield arm was extended forward, leaving his right side exposed. The tactic required discipline and trust—you had to ignore the immediate threat and defend your neighbor—but it worked. The Highlanders who reached the government line found themselves impaled on bayonets from unexpected angles.

Meanwhile, the government second line swept forward. Lord Sempill's brigade—over a thousand fresh troops from three regiments—wheeled into position, catching the Jacobite right in a crossfire from three sides. The Highlanders who had penetrated the front line were suddenly surrounded. The charge, which had seemed on the verge of breaking through, began to disintegrate.

The Left That Never Moved

While the right wing was being destroyed, the Jacobite left barely moved at all.

The three MacDonald regiments—Keppoch's, Clanranald's, and Glengarry's—faced the longest approach across the worst ground. The bog that protected the government right flank was deep enough to slow the cavalry, but the infantry still had to cross it under fire. More importantly, the MacDonalds were demoralized from the start, convinced they had been deliberately insulted by being denied their traditional position on the right.

They advanced perhaps halfway to the enemy line, then stopped. Instead of charging home, they stood in the open and fired their muskets—a futile gesture at that range, and a complete abandonment of the Highland tactics that had won previous battles. When their own officers fell—Keppoch killed, Clanranald wounded—the regiments began to waver.

Lord John Drummond, commanding the Jacobite center, walked out in front of the stalled left wing, trying to draw government fire and break their discipline. The redcoats refused to take the bait. They held their volleys, waiting for targets that would actually close to effective range. The MacDonalds never gave them the opportunity.

As the right wing collapsed and the left stood paralyzed, Cumberland ordered his cavalry forward. Two troops of dragoons rode toward the Jacobite left, but the boggy ground that had hindered the MacDonald advance now protected their retreat. The horsemen couldn't build momentum for a charge. They turned instead toward the Irish Picquets who had been brought up to stabilize the line, and the fighting devolved into a confused melee.

The Retreat

By 1:30 in the afternoon, the battle was over. The Jacobite army was streaming from the field in various states of disorder.

Some units fled in panic. Others conducted fighting retreats, professional soldiers doing their jobs even in defeat. The Royal Écossais withdrew along the enclosure walls, using the stone barriers as cover from artillery fire—until they stumbled into an ambush by Highland militia loyal to the government. The brief firefight killed the militia commander and six of his men, but it forced the Écossais out into the open moor where government dragoons were hunting survivors.

The Irish Picquets performed the most valuable service of the entire battle. These hundred-odd soldiers, fighting far from home in a cause that was not originally theirs, formed a rearguard and held off the pursuing cavalry while the shattered Highland regiments escaped. Half of their casualties in the entire battle came from this single action, buying time with their lives so others might survive.

Charles Edward Stuart watched his army disintegrate. According to some accounts, he tried to organize a final charge into the government lines—a suicidal gesture that would have accomplished nothing except adding his body to the heaps already carpeting the moor. His bodyguard captain physically dragged him from the field.

The Prince who had landed nine months earlier with nothing but confidence and charm was fleeing again, this time with the wreckage of everything he had built scattered across the heather behind him.

The Aftermath

The government had won, but Cumberland was not satisfied with victory. What followed Culloden earned him a nickname that has endured for nearly three centuries: "Butcher Cumberland."

The pursuit of fleeing Jacobites was relentless. Wounded men lying on the battlefield were bayoneted where they lay. Prisoners were shot. For weeks afterward, government troops swept through the Highlands, burning homes, driving off cattle, and killing anyone suspected of Jacobite sympathies. An entire way of life—the clan system that had defined Highland society for centuries—was systematically dismantled.

The wearing of tartan was banned. The carrying of weapons was prohibited. The legal powers of clan chiefs were stripped away. The Highlands were garrisoned by government troops and forcibly integrated into the British state. Within a generation, many of the same clans that had charged at Culloden would be fighting in British Army Highland regiments, their martial traditions redirected to serve the empire that had destroyed their world.

Charles spent five months as a fugitive in the Highlands, protected by loyal supporters who refused to claim the £30,000 bounty on his head—an enormous sum that none of them would ever see in their lifetimes. He eventually escaped to France, and spent the remaining forty-two years of his life in increasingly bitter, alcoholic exile, still insisting that one day he would reclaim his throne.

He never did. The Jacobite cause died at Culloden, and nothing would ever resurrect it.

Why It Matters

Culloden was more than a military defeat. It was the end of an alternative history—the final closing of a door that had stood open since 1688.

Had Charles won, the consequences would have been profound and unpredictable. A restored Stuart monarchy would likely have been Catholic, or at least Catholic-sympathizing, in a fiercely Protestant nation. The constitutional settlement that established parliamentary supremacy over royal power might have been reversed. Britain's emerging role as a Protestant counterweight to Catholic France and Spain would have been fundamentally altered. The entire trajectory of the British Empire—and by extension, much of world history—could have taken a radically different path.

Instead, Culloden confirmed that Britain would be Protestant, parliamentary, and united (however unwillingly) under the Hanoverian dynasty. The energies that might have gone into further civil wars were redirected outward, into imperial expansion. Within twenty years, British armies would be conquering India and North America, many of them led by officers who had learned their trade suppressing Jacobites.

The battle also transformed Scotland's relationship with England. The Highland way of life, already under pressure, was deliberately and thoroughly destroyed. What replaced it was a romanticized version—tartan and bagpipes and misty glens—carefully sanitized of any political threat. By the Victorian era, the British monarchy was enthusiastically adopting Highland aesthetics even as actual Highland communities were being cleared from their ancestral lands to make room for sheep.

This is the final irony of Culloden: the culture that lost the battle eventually conquered its conquerors, at least in the realm of imagination. Bonnie Prince Charlie became a romantic hero. The lost cause became the most Scottish of causes. The tartans that were banned in 1746 became symbols of Scottish identity—and eventually British identity—around the world.

But none of that romantic mythology could bring back the men who died in the sleet on Drummossie Moor, charging into cannon fire for a prince who had promised them everything and delivered only destruction.

The battle lasted less than an hour. Its consequences are still with us.