That he allowed no sort of attention to be given to the wounded Scots, but, returning to the field two days after from the pursuit, and finding still some poor wounded wretches lying where they had fallen, he fiendishly ordered them to be put to death, some by the bullet, some by the bayonet, some by the clubbed musket.
It is said that he ordered General Wolfe, then a young officer, to kill a wounded man, but that Wolfe told him, to his credit, that he would sooner resign his commission.
And this was the man for whom King George and his Queen, Caroline, wished to put aside their first-born son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, whose greatest fault in their eyes perhaps was his gentleness of nature; his kindness to the poor and needy!
For this great bloated Butcher, Frederick was exiled from his family, insulted in public and in private, and his character assailed in such a way that his name has been handed down in history as one to be scoffed at; though this latter injustice is mainly the work of one man, Lord Hervey, perhaps after all his bitterest enemy; certainly the meanest and most contemptible.
But the details of Cumberland’s inhuman cruelty did not come out for years after, and meanwhile on his return to London, he was fêted, received the thanks of Parliament, and was given a pension of twenty-five thousand pounds per annum for himself and his heirs, but fortunately he had none. Truly the wicked flourish in this world like the bay tree!
But truth will out, magna est veritas et prevalebit; little by little came to England the evidence of eye witnesses, to the savage cruelty of this royal Prince of five-and-twenty to the poor, half-starved, maimed Scots; bit by bit the reputation of the “Butcher” was built up, and it will stand while the memory of Culloden lasts.
As for Prince Charlie, he was forced from the field, whilst trying to charge with the remnant of his men, by an Irish officer in the French service, named O’Sullivan; he fled to Gortuleg, where that ancient sinner, Lord Lovat, was residing at the time, and who gave him but a cold welcome so that they parted in anger, the Prince not even receiving a meal.
On to Glengarry’s Castle of Invergarry, rode Charles through the night with the last few of his followers, arriving before dawn, only after a brief rest, to go on and on, with the shadow of the axe ever hanging over him, till, five months after, he was taken off by a French ship at Lochnenuagh, the very same spot where he had landed over a year before.
But it would not be possible to conclude even this imperfect sketch of the Prince’s campaign without paying a tribute to Flora Macdonald, “a name,” says Dr. Johnson, “which will ever live in history.” The “little woman of genteel appearance, and uncommonly well bred.”[71]
When Charles was being run down on Long Island with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, did not this noble young lady, at the risk of her life, obtain a pass from her stepfather, a captain in King George’s militia, for herself, a manservant and a maid, and did she not smuggle away the Prince under the very eyes of his pursuers in the character of the latter, dressed in petticoats? An achievement on Charles’s part which called forth from old Macdonald of Kingsburgh the following dry remark when he saw him crossing a brook and in difficulties with his petticoats: