When you say The Battle of Culloden, people
will inevitably retort that it was the place the Jacobite cause finally died ,
the Last Jacobite hurrah...
but that isn t strictly true.
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history then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
My guess is that if you re watching this
you ve heard about the Battle of Culloden,
but I thought I d give a two sentence summary just in case you clicked expecting
to see funny pictures of cats.
The Stuart monarchs of
Scotland, England and Ireland
but mainly Scotland
had been ousted and Scotland and England merged into one country.
In an attempt to unravel both those knotty balls of string
the Jacobite supporters of James Stuart had risen up against the new monarchs,
(now The Hanoverians) on several occasions.
The son of the exiled, would-be monarch
landed in the Highlands, raised an army,
took them to within spitting distance
of London, before a double agent
persuaded them to turn back and it
all climaxed on Drumossie Moor,
with the last pitched battle
in a British civil war
assuming you ignore the rammy
in our house last Christmas.
Least said soonest mended.
With defeat at the Battle of Culloden
you might think that was the end of it.
Indeed, as the title suggests,
Culloden is normally seen
as the last hurrah of the Jacobite cause.
But I recently met with renowned Jacobite historian Murray Pittock.
He is the author of the Book Culloden
If you want to understand the battle
you should definitely get his book
Anyway, Murray opened my eyes to
something I hadn t thought of
and revealed what WAS the
last hurrah of the Jacobites.
As you drive down A9, from Inverness to
Perth, just outside Kingussie you ll see the ruins of Ruthven Barracks.
The barracks had been a power base from which the British army had subdued the Highlands.
The Jacobites had attempted to take it on the way south to Derby, and had
succeeded on the way back north.
After the disaster of Culloden
Highland clansmen gathered here with the intention of continuing the fight.
When they sent a message to Bonnie Prince Charlie the response they got was
every man for himself
You might think this was Murray
s revelation, and the real end of Jacobitism, but no,
I already knew about that.
There followed gory executions then the inhumane
and barbaric suppression of the Highlands:
state sanctioned murder, arson and theft.
But six years after Culloden there was a plot by English Jacobites
let me repeat that ,
by English Jacobites to restore
the Stuarts to the thrones.
This Ellibank plot is what I had envisioned
as the last hurrah of the Jacobite cause
but Murray Pittock changed my view.
In fact Murray caused me to reassess a few things.
We talked for over an hour and, if you re a Patreon member you can see
our conversation the Patreon page.
If you re not already a Patreon member then,
when this video s finished, you can come back and click on the white tab up there to sign up.
I ll leave a link in the description as well.
but for the benefit of non-Patrons I m going to
share one of the insights that Murray gave.
Now, I previously made a video called
What They Don t Say About Culloden
I m going to leave a link
to that video at the end
In it, I explained how the 1745 Jacobite
uprising was one part of the wider European,
indeed global, struggle,
which involved the European powers fighting in the War of the Spannish
Succession. The War of the Quadruple Alliance
and the war of the Austrian Succession.
You might even have heard of the War of Jenkin s Ear
Because he hasn t
When the last of those conflicts ended in
1748, nobody was really happy with the terms.
So hoping that this time
they d get what they wanted, or at least get back what they d lost,
the warring parties realigned their allegiances, so that the Prussians took the side
of the British, and the Austrians and Russians allied with France .
And it all started over again
The British and the French started fighting
with each other in North America.
Our North American cousins will
call this the French Indian War.
Then on August 29th,
1756
the Prussians invaded Saxony starting the Seven Years War ,
They didn t call it The Seven Years War at that point. That would have been silly.
What if you got the dates wrong?
It d be like when the English and the
French went to war in the 14th century.
They called that the 100 Years war then it
ended up lasting a hundred and sixteen years.
The guy who named it must
have felt pretty stupid.
Anyway for the first three years or so the
whole thing was a bit of a stale mate.
Then a guy called William Pitt
took control on the British side.
Basically the strategy was to
blockade the French ports,
capture French ships at sea and send British
troops to fight the French in the colonies.
This worked pretty well.
Cutting off French trade damaged their economy which made it
difficult to fund their war efforts.
It also meant that loads of
French sailors had been captured
which made it damned near impossible for
the French to fill battleship crews to regain control, or break out of French ports.
I ll be honest the French were in a bit of a fix.
In December 1758 a guy called the Duc de Choiseul became French foreign minister
and came up with a cunning wheeze.
You see the British were a naval power and had
sent what land forces they had to the colonies.
On the home front they called up militia
who were to be led by a guy called Captain Mainwaring based in Warmington on Sea.
Should I explain for the internationals?
Don t tell him Pike
OK
The point is that if the French could just
land ground forces in Great Britain,
they were pretty confident
that they could win the war.
This became the main French strategy
and they set about building large transport ships to take a force of
I ve seen numbers up to 100 000 mentioned.
Just 14 years earlier when the
Jacobites fought over this place,
they had nearly taken London with what
started as a landing force of seven guys.
So, in February 1759,
Bonnie Prince Charlie was called to Paris for a secret meeting where
the French explained their strategy.
Ultimately it would be a pincer movement
of invasion from the south AND
a landing in the Clyde estuary to
raise a Jacobite force in Scotland,
and when Britain was defeated, the
Stuarts would be put back on the throne.
They tell me that Bonnie Prince
Charlie turned up late and drunk
which for a job interview is less than optimal,
but what the French wanted wasn t the figurehead, but the fighting men.
In 1745 Jacobite troops were desperately seeking French help to march on London.
Fourteen years later it was the other way round.
The French continued their preparations.
It was in June that they had decided
on the smaller landing in Scotland
where The Duc D Aiguillon would
raise the Jacobite troops
and by midsummer 1759 in ports
all along the Atlantic coast
there were hundreds of transport ships and
around 50000 troops ready to make sail.
But the British blockade
on French ports continued
and the number of French seamen
that had been captured by the British Royal Navy in the Atlantic and elsewhere
meant that the French Navy was
almost 40% under capacity.
Then in July the British struck a further blow
when a raid on the Normandy port of Le Havre
damaged or destroyed part of the
French fleet anchored there.
The French realised they were going
to have to adjust their plan,
and at a council of war in Paris they decided
that the Scottish landing would come first,
and once they d gained that Jacobite support,
then they would send a force to the south coast of England later.
Then in August the French navy lost the Battle of Lagos off Portugal .
OK, so just Scotland then
Now the obvious port from which to launch
the invasion was Brest in Brittany,
but a typhoid epidemic had
killed 4000 troops there,
so the troops were assembled down the
Brittany coast at Vannes in the sheltered Gulf of Morbihan off Quiberon Bay
If a French Squadron could break out from the British blockade at
Brest to head down the coast,
they could collect 17000 troops there
to make a landing on our shores.
In early November gale force winds
struck the Atlantic seaboard,
which sent all but the most rugged
British ships back to their ports.
On 14th November the French
squadron sailed out of Brest.
They were sighted at various points
by up to four British ships which had stayed in the area despite the weather.
But these were relatively small vessels and the French ships initially gave chase before
turning round in the gale to head down the coast
to their intended destination.
Fighting against the wind it was the 19th of November before the French
ships were slowing down off Belle Isle
with plans to reach dock at dawn.
That s when a squadron of British ships hoved into view.
Realising that this wasn t the main British fleet, the French ships gave chase again,
although as their vanguard chased the British squadron the rear-guard saw
masts approaching from the distant west.
The French stopped their pursuit and were in a bit
of disarray as it became clear that the masts
were, in fact the main British fleet.
What do they do?
Retreat to the safety of labyrinthine
coastal rocks and reefs,
or do they fight a larger force
in storm tossed open waters?
Deciding that discretion was the better
part of valour and knowing that it would be madness for the British to follow
into waters they didn t know
the French headed for the security of
a defensive position in Quiberon Bay.
It was the next morning by the time the
British arrived and did something not only unexpected, but downright dangerous.
Admiral Hawke gave the order for a chase, full sail, with the first seven ships
in a line abreast despite weather wave and murderous waters.
By mid afternoon the French Admiral was rounding the rocky Quiberon
peninsula as he heard canon fire behind him.
The British were starting to overtake the
rear of the French fleet and engulf them.
By 4pm the French ship Formidable wasn
t so formidable and it surrendered.
It had been taken by the British ship
Resolution and it wasn t even New Year.
Another French shop Th s e tried to turn,
but forgot to close the lower gun ports.
As water flowed into the lower
decks the ship capsized,
leaving most of the crew dead.
The Superbe also capsized and H ros surrendered.
As the wind changed the French ships got in each other s way
and Hawke s daring pursuit had paid off.
Several French ships were wrecked.
Some, including the flagship of Vice Admiral Conflains,
were grounded and the crew set fire to them rather than have them fall into British hands
and a few managed to limp away for other French ports ,
but by the time the sun set on 20th November 1759
the British had won the most decisive victory of the seven years war.
Thus THEY would create Canada
and large parts of the Americas
would become British
at least for a few years.
Britain would become the dominant global colonial power
France would reorganise its military, in particular it s artillery,
from which would emerge an officer called Napoleon Bonaparte.
Prussia emerged from the war strengthened and it would later lead the unification of Germany
but most importantly for us in November 1759, thirteen and a
half years after the Battle of Culloden,
the last Jacobite hurrah
had finally been roared.
The Stuarts weren t coming back.
For more information about how Culloden fitted into the wider European picture
watch my video What they Don t Say About Culloden.
It s coming up on screen now. In the meantime Tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.
