Across here is the Culloden battlefield. This is the Fraser burial stone,
and this is the monument to the many others, who gave their lives, but this monument doesn't even
begin to count the number of lives lost in the conflict that I'm going to describe. I want to
take you on a journey, and ask you to think about Culloden in a way that you probably haven't done before.
Will you come? If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history,
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right. In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
Here they've had to lay a path along by the burial stones, and it's all because
of this one, the Fraser stone. It had wear and tear compared to the others and that shows
just how many folk come here, because of a fictional character created by an American writer,
and that makes me sad. Not because the writer's not talented or a creation compelling.
It's not that I don't want people to visit Scotland. That goes without saying.
It's just that the men buried here aren't fantasy characters in a novel, they're real people,
and what came to an end here, wasn't just flesh and bone, it was a whole culture and way of life.
So why were they here?
On the 16th of April, 1746, men of Athol, Camerons, Stewarts, Macintoshes, Farquharson's, Maclachlans,
Macdonalds and many more, stood on the ground indicated by the blue flags. You might be able
to see in the background. They were waiting for their leader Charles Edward Stewart to give the
order to charge. As they waited cannon fire from the opposing side scythed through the ranks, taking
off legs, decapitating bodies, and creating death and destruction, with no chance of getting your own
back on your tormentors as you stood and waited. Lachlan Maclachlan, the very man who was to give
that order was himself decapitated by a cannonball, as he rode to call on Highland Gaels, Lowland Scots,
Irish, French and maybe even a smattering of English to charge. Last night's field attempt
at an overnight march to Nairn, to surprise the opposition from behind, meant that the men hadn't
slept. Most of them hadn't eaten either. Eventually they couldn't take it any longer and they charged
over this ground, totally inappropriate for a Highland charge, towards their red coated opponents,
who contained Highland Gaels, Lowland Scots, English, Germans and Dutch. This was not Scots against
the English. As we'll see it was way more international than that, and it was way more domestic than that.
Charles Edward Stewart, who led the Jacobites, had been born in Italy. The opposing General,
the Duke of Cumberland, was from a German family and had just returned from Flanders,
and I suppose his reason for being in Flanders, is the point of this video,
but just before we start our journey, let me say that on the 22nd of November, Murray Pittock will
be my guest for my monthly conversations with experts. Murray is the expert on the Jacobite
period, and amongst many others he wrote the book "Culloden", it is the most complete account of this
battle, and a new illustrated edition has just come out. I'll leave a link in the description
below. Now a video of our conversation, where I ask your questions will be available on my Patreon
members page, so if you're a Whisky Patreon member, then send in your questions for me to ask and I'll
put them to Murray on the 22nd of November. If you're not already a Whisky Patreon member, then
you can become one by clicking the white tab up there. Now whenever people talk about this battle,
they talk about it as the end of a series of Jacobite counter revolutions, in support of the
Stewart monarchy, that started with William of Orange overthrowing James the Seventh of Scotland, and
the Second of England in a coup in 1688. I'm going to ask you to think about it slightly differently.
You see in 1701 when exile James died, leaving his title to the British crown to his son James the
Eighth and Third, or the Old Pretender, depending on your politics, there was another succession crisis
going on. Spain was past the height of its imperial power, but the Spanish Empire still extended
across the Americas, the Philippines, and chunks of Europe, so when Charles the Second of Spain died childless,
well you can imagine. Now he'd always been sickly, so you know the sharks had been circling for a
while. He had two sisters; one had married Louis the Fourteenth of France and the other had only married Emperor
Leopold the First, the Holy Roman Emperor, the two biggest kids in the playground.
There may be trouble ahead! Look I can't go in every detail of the various wars that are
about to happen. There are more moving parts than a swiss timepiece, and ironically they were neutral.
To simplify things at this point let me give you three facts; one, to smooth over difficulties with
this Spanish succession, Louis the Fourteenth, the husband of one of the dead guys, well the dead guy, and
also his main geopolitical rival, William of Orange, the King of Scotland, England and Ireland,
agreed a treaty to divide the Spanish Empire, weakening it to their benefit and avoiding war;
two, when exile, James the Seventh and Second died, remember him?
The French King supported his son, James's claim to the British thrones in opposition to William;
three, the Austrians of the Holy Roman Empire, didn't give a stuff about British and French
treaties or who was King of Scotland, England and Ireland, they wanted their man to be King of Spain.
Can you imagine if the grandson of the French King was also the King of Spain? That's way too powerful
a family. It was war. Now during this war, the French sponsored an invasion of the British Isles to
put their man James the Eighth, Third, the Old Pretender, whatever. By now the United Kingdom throne
was to be his. Now James fell ill, and it didn't go ahead, but this was only a tiny part of the war
that included the British, the French, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic and more. Their imperial
and trading interests throughout the globe, meant that conflicts raged in Northern Europe, Western
Europe, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Indian subcontinent, South America, North America, and the
West Indies. In the process, some Native American tribes in Florida, were all but wiped out, which
might just seem like a sideshow in the passing, but that's exactly the point we'll come back to,
trust me. By 1713 and 14, everyone was spent, like prize fighters, and they agreed a truce that
nobody was entirely happy with. The British did get Gibraltar, more control of the seas, and the French
acceptance of the Hanoverians as the new British monarchs, leaving the Stewarts out in the cold,
until the Spanish let them in later. The cost had been an estimated three-quarters of a million
casualties on all sides. They probably didn't even count the Native Americans.
The truce was so unstable, that four years later, the Spanish broke it in order to get
back some of the territories that it had lost. Now Spain was opposed by Britain,
France, Austria and the Dutch, which is why it was called the War of the Quadruple Alliance.
I'll tell you who was on the side of the Spanish, the Jacobites.
When Spain launched a seaborne invasion, it was blocked in the channel and the south, but in the
north, Spanish troops landed and joined up with Jacobite forces who based themselves at Eilean
Donan Castle before losing the Battle of Glen Shiel in 1719, but Scottish Jacobites weren't the
only pawn in the Spanish crown. They also landed in Brittany, in an effort to raise the Bretons
against the French state. The French similarly used the Basques and the Catalans against the Spanish.
Gaels, Basques, Catalans weren't really different from Native Americans in Florida.
Have you ever wondered why there were no Jacobite uprisings between the
one that ended at Glen Shiel in 1719 and here at Culloden 25 years later?
Here's a thought, the War of the Austrian succession started in 1740.
Charles the Sixth, the ruler of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire died, and there was a family tiff about who
inherited the empire and who got that fish-shaped vase that always sat on the dining room table.
Initially, the empire was to go to Charles's daughter Maria Theresa, even although lassies (females)
weren't supposed to inherit, but when Charles died, it turned out that folks that had previously
agreed to this, changed their mind. What are the chances? A family feud became a major European
war, because it turned out that ordinary folks in Manchester, Salzburg, Hanover, Amsterdam and
Moscow, had really strong opinions about who should get that vase, and ordinary folks in Paris, Madrid,
Stockholm, Naples and Berlin felt just as strongly in the other direction, and of course the conflict
crossed the Atlantic and extended to the Indian subcontinent. Who would have thought that all
these folks cared so much about the provisions of a will written in Europe? Of course I'm joking,
the ordinary folks couldn't give a stuff. They weren't the people who'd be winning and losing
they'd be the people fighting and dying. We're big players of European power placing the pawns on the
chess board, and sacrificing our populations based on self-interest. The on-off relationship between
France and Spain was back on again, and part of the French and Spanish self-interest was an invasion
up the Thames in 1744, to put the Stewarts back on the British throne. Now when the invasion
fleet didn't get out of Dunkirk, Charles Edward Stewart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, decided to go
anyway, and by the time he arrived in the west Highlands the following year, the French had won
a decisive victory over the Duke of Cumberland and allies in Flanders at the Battle of Fontenoy.
Now the fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie had raised a Highland uprising was an added bonus to the French,
because Cumberland had to leave Flanders, cross the Channel and head north until he sat astride his
horse along this line of red flags representing the British army troops, where they fly today. His
grandfather, had been George, Elector of Hanover, the first Hanoverian King of Great Britain.
His grandmother had been Elizabeth Stewart, the daughter of James the Sixth and First,
in the interminable family squabbles of European monarchies and wars of succession, two cousins
sat astride horses at two ends of this field, to decide whose daddy would stride the stage
of power politics in Europe. If the Jacobites had won, maybe a new alliance with the French.
They didn't, and when the war of the Austrian succession was finally settled and treaties agreed,
the European powers involved, still weren't happy with outcome that they'd signed up to,
and that led to the Seven Years War. Now our American cousins will call them at the French/
Indian War, in fact it was the fourth French/Indian war, because indigenous
peoples had been dragged in to fight and die in every one of these European chess games,
or was it happy families? Either way, in this field in April 1746, real people were killed
and an entire way of life died. When you think about it in the context of these geopolitical,
European struggles, it's no less haunting that the clansmen who died here were just another one
of those indigenous people used as pawns in the greater European power play, just like the Basques
Catalans Micmacs, Mohawks and others. In fact, I think it's sadder still.
There's a video about an aspect of the 1715 uprising, that people don't think about coming
up on screen now. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.