"This," says Mr. Maxwell,[257] referring to the morning of the engagement, "was the first time the Prince, ever thought his affairs desperate. He saw his little army much reduced, and half-dead with hunger and fatigue, and found himself under a necessity of fighting in that miserable condition, for he would not think of a retreat; which he had never yielded to but with the greatest reluctance, and which, on this occasion, he imagined would disperse the few men he had, and put an inglorious end to his expedition. He resolved to wait for the enemy, be the event what it would; and he did not wait long, for he had been but a few hours at Culloden, when his scouts brought him word that the enemy was within two miles, advancing towards the moor, where the Prince had drawn up his army the day before. The men were scattered among the woods of Culloden, the greatest part fast asleep. As soon as the alarm was given, the officers ran about on all sides to rouse them, if I may use the expression, among the bushes; and some went to Inverness, to bring back such of the men as hunger had driven there. Notwithstanding the pains taken by the officers to assemble the men, there were several hundreds absent from the battle, though within a mile of it: some were quite exhausted, and not able to crawl; and others asleep in coverts that had not been beat up. However, in less time than one could have imagined, the best part of the army was assembled, and formed on the moor, where it had been drawn up the day before. Every corps knew its post, and went straight without waiting for fresh orders; the order of battle was as follows: the army was drawn up in two lines; the first was composed of the Atholl brigade, which had the right; the Camerons, Stuarts of Appin, Frazers, Macintoshes, Farquharsons, Chisholms, Perths, Roy Stuart's regiment, and the Macdonalds, who had the left."
The Highlanders, though faint with fatigue and want of sleep, forgot all their hardships at the approach of an enemy; and, as a shout was sent up from the Duke of Cumberland's army, they returned it with the spirit of a valiant and undaunted people.
The order of battle was as follows: the right wing was commanded by Lord George Murray, and the left by the Duke of Perth; the centre of the first line by Lord John Drummond, and the centre of the second by Brigadier Stapleton. There were five cannon on the right, and four on the left of the army.[258]
The Duke of Perth had therefore, from his important command, the privilege of spending the short period of existence, which, as the event proved, Providence allotted to him, in the service of a Prince whom he loved; whilst he had the good fortune to escape that responsibility which fell to the lot of his rival, Lord George Murray. The influence which that nobleman had acquired over the council of war had enabled him far to eclipse the Duke of Perth in importance; but it was the fate of Lord George Murray to pay a heavy penalty for that distinction.
But not only did the amiable and high-minded Duke of Perth calmly surrender to one, who was esteemed a better leader than himself, the post of honour; but he endeavoured to reconcile to the indignity put upon them the fierce spirit of the Macdonalds, who were obliged to cede their accustomed place on the right to the Atholl men. "If," said the Duke, "you fight with your usual bravery, you will make the left wing a right wing; in which case I shall ever afterwards assume the honourable surname of Macdonald."[259] The Duke's standard was borne, on this occasion, by the Laird of Comrie, whose descendant still shows the claymore which his ancestors brandished; whilst the Duke exclaimed aloud, "Claymore!"[260] Happy would it have been for Charles, had a similar spirit purified the motives of all those on whom he was fated to depend!
The battle was soon ended! Half-an-hour of slaughter and despair terminated the final struggle of the Stuarts for the throne of Britain! During that fearful though brief[261] space, one thousand of the Jacobites were killed; no quarter being given on either side. Exhausted by fatigue and want of food, the brave Highlanders fell thick as autumn leaves upon the blood-stained moor, near Culloden House. About two hundred only on the King's side perished in the encounter. During the whole battle, taking into account the previous cannonading, the Jacobites lost, as the prisoners afterwards stated, four thousand men. But it was not until after the fury of the fight ceased, that the true horrors of war really began. These may be said to consist, not in the ardour of a strife in which the passions, madly engaged, have no check, nor stay; but in the cold, vindictive, brutal, and remorseless after-deeds, which stamp for ever the miseries of a conflict upon the broken hearts of the survivors.
"Exceeding few," says Mr. Maxwell, "were made prisoners in the field of battle, which was such a scene of horror and inhumanity as is rarely to be met with among civilized nations. Every circumstance concurs to heighten the enormity of the cruelties exercised on this occasion; the shortness of the action, the cheapness of the victory, and, above all, the moderation the Prince had shown during his prosperity,—the leniency, and even tenderness, with which he had always treated his enemies. But that which was done on the field of Culloden was but a prelude to a long series of massacres committed in cold blood, which I shall have occasion to mention afterwards."[262]
The Chevalier, leaving that part of the field upon which bodies in layers of three or four deep were lying, rode along the moor in the direction of Fort Augustus, where he passed the river of Nairn. He halted, and held a conference with Sir Thomas Sheridan, Sullivan, and Hay; and, having taken his resolution, he sent young Sullivan to the gentlemen who had followed him, and who were now pretty numerous. Sheridan at first pretended to conduct them to the place where the Prince was to re-assemble his army; but, having ridden half a mile towards Ruthven, he there stopped, and dismissed them all in the Prince's name, telling them it was the Prince's "pleasure that they should shift for themselves."
This abrupt and impolitic, not to say ungracious and unsoldier-like proceeding, has been justified by the necessity of the moment. There were no magazines in the Highlands, in which an unusual scarcity prevailed. The Lowlanders, more especially, must have starved in a country that had not the means of supporting its own inhabitants, and of which they knew neither the roads nor the language. It is, however, but too probable, that various suspicions, which were afterwards dispelled, of the fidelity of the Scots, induced Charles to throw himself into the hands of his Irish attendants at this critical juncture.[263]
The Duke of Perth, with his brother Lord John Drummond, and Lord George Murray, with the Atholl men, and almost all the Low-country men who had been in the Jacobite army, retired to Ruthven, where they remained a short time with two or three thousand men, but without a day's subsistence. The leaders of this band finding it impossible to keep the men together, and receiving no orders from the Prince, came to a resolution of separating. They took a melancholy farewell of each other, brothers and companions in arms, and many of them united by ties of relationship. The chieftains dispersed to seek places of shelter, to escape the pursuit of Cumberland's "bloodhounds:" the men went to their homes.