But the cattle were still in danger, and the men of the house were usually concerned to garrison the tower with the women and children, and to give fight, if the odds were not overwhelming, outside; and many a Westmoreland and Cumberland farmer has died in protecting his stock.
Clifton should be marked on maps with the conventional crossed swords indicating the site of a battle, for it was here, on the evening of December 18th, 1745, that the Battle of Clifton Moor, the last ever fought on English ground, was decided. It is true that, judged by the standard of killed and wounded, it was no great affair, but it probably gave a final turn to the fortunes of the Young Pretender. It was fought midway in the panic-stricken retreat from Derby, and was a rearguard action, covering the retirement of the main body upon Penrith and Carlisle. Some two thousand Highlanders made a stand here, in the muddy road and fields, in advance of the village, as the sun went down, and the Duke of Cumberland’s force, consisting chiefly of Kerr’s, Bland’s, Montagu’s, Kingston’s, and Cobham’s dragoons, attacked them in the growing darkness.
CLIFTON.
THE BATTLE OF CLIFTON
The rebel cavalry were off at once. According to the account of Lord George Murray, on the Scottish side, “our horsemen, on seeing the enemy, went to Penrith”: an innocent phrase, which rather obscures the prudent, if inglorious, fact that they “bunked,” as a schoolboy would say, or “did a guy,” as the slangy would remark: leaving the Highland infantry to do the best they could. It was a haphazard hurly-burly that ensued. No one could see any one. The Highlanders were quite invisible, and the English dragoons only to be seen by the gleam of their buff belts in the darkness. Mr. Thomas Savage, a Quaker, whose house was in the thick of the encounter, was anxious for himself, and for his cattle, which interposed between the combatants, but he had really little cause for alarm; for both sides fired so high and so wide that not even a cow was killed, and after all the shooting and the hacking was done, and the rebels had fled, leaving the more or less stricken field in the possession of the enemy, it was found that but twelve (or according to one account, five) Highlanders had been killed and some forty to seventy made prisoners. On the English side, eleven dragoons were killed, and twenty-nine wounded. Many a railway accident has wrought more havoc.
The registers of Clifton church bear witness to this event, in the following entries:
“The 19th of December, 1745, Ten Dragoons, to wit, six of Bland’s, three of Cobham’s, and one of Mark Kerr’s Regiment, buried, who was killed ye evening before by ye Rebels in ye skirmish between ye Duke of Cumberland’s army and them at ye end of Clifton Moor next ye town.”
“Robert Atkins, a private Dragoon of General Bland’s Regiment, buried ye 8th Day of January, 1746.”
This last was obviously one of the wounded.