Culloden by Murray Pittock (review)

Though it was a small, brief battle by contemporary standards, Culloden is certainly an appropriate subject for the Great Battles series from which this book stems. The essential remit of the authors in the series is that they should consider not just the military event, but the memory and subsequent uses made of the battle and its significance by posterity; in effect, the creation and evolution of collective memory and myth-history. As Murray Pittock convincingly demonstrates, Culloden definitely qualifies as one of the ‘great battles’ on this score. For that rainy, blustery day near Inverness has come to be seen as the iconic moment when civilisation and modernity triumphed in the British Isles.

Yet this belies the reality. Pittock begins by re-examining the course of military events leading up to the battle proper and closely analyses the dynamics of the clash between the two sides on Drummossie Muir. This is all based on the very latest research and archaeology and in the process problematises our whole understanding of what actually happened on 16 April 1746. Far from operating in the ‘classic’ fashion associated with Highland warfare – clan-based formations charging with sword and targe into physical contact with their opponents and overwhelming them by shock and their skill in hand-to-hand combat – by the time of Culloden the Jacobite army had transformed itself into a conventional military force. Apart from the officers, the Jacobites had virtually abandoned the targe and sword in favour of musket and bayonet, just like their British opponents. Their regiments were originally clan-based, but eight months into the rising they were matter-of-factly recruiting Lowlanders and Englishmen into their ranks. Their tactical training and doctrine were French and so were their limitations. They only fought the battle in the first place because they would have had severe problems sustaining a conventional war without a port through which they could import French and Spanish munitions, and readapting their formations and training to the exigencies of mountain warfare would have been a major problem. As is well known, the Jacobite army’s attempt to charge its British counterpart got bogged down on the moor and was driven back with heavy casualties, but it was a conventional French-style attack and what finally broke Jacobite resistance on the field was their inability to counter Cumberland’s riposte, which was to send his cavalry in on the flanks to break up their shaken regiments and rout them as they fell back. A normal, nasty day’s work in Flanders or Lombardy; it just happened to be taking place in northern Scotland.

Having challenged the received wisdom on the events of the day, Pittock goes on to explore the interpretation of the battle in subsequent generations. And while his account of the military side of Culloden is very good, it is here that he is at his absolute best. The development of a vision of the battle that airbrushed out the modernity and ‘civilised’ nature of the Jacobite army happened very quickly, one of the most influential components being David Morier’s famous painting of wild, charging Highlanders. This allowed the British state to present itself as having fought off the forces of savagery and darkness in the British Isles in the same way as it defended its colonists against terrible threat of the heathen Indians of North America. The idea that Jacobitism represented a throwback to a primitive medieval past was then taken up with enthusiasm by the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. As far as they were concerned the whole of the ‘45 was an embarrassing and regrettable episode that, like much of Scotland’s history, was best forgotten. Culloden thus became the moment when the condition of Scotland – indeed, the British Empire and the world – began to get better. Of course a few Highlanders (a people left behind by the march of history) got hurt, which was unfortunate, but so many good things were now in train that it was best just to move on rather than...