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123 15 R Culloden It was now the middle of April, and it felt like mid-spring in the Highlands. The sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky, and by early afternoon the temperature was hovering near seventy. If anyone in the Highlands actually owned a swim suit, I’m sure they would have had it on, soaking up some rays. I was sweltering when I got to the Culloden battlefield, scene of the most|pivotal clash in Scottish Highland history and arguably the bloodiest in a lengthy history stained by bloodshed. It has always seemed strange to me that Boswell and Johnson didn’t stop at Drummossie Moor, the site of the clash between the Jacobite army of Prince Charles and the duke of Cumberland’s troops in 1746, a mere twenty-seven years earlier. Neither man mentioned it, though it is impossible that they did not know that the site was nearby and unthinkable that they were unaware of its significance. Johnson, in fact, was receiving a pension from King George, the brother of Cumberland. So both must have ignored it on purpose, and it is worth a moment to consider why. According to Boswell, Johnson was not unsympathetic to the Jacobite cause; he certainly professed much interest on Skye when he visited with Flora Macdonald and had at least been an earlier-in-life supporter of the Jacobite cause. He had little affection for the Hanoverians currently on the throne, and some years before had actually spoken aloud of the right of the Stuarts to claim the English crown. Boswell clearly had both sympathy and sentiment for the Jacobites. Perhaps the reason neither man wanted to venture there lies in the raw passions that the Jacobite Rising still inflamed. Were Johnson to walk the moor and put his feelings into words, he surely would have provoked anger from one side or the other. Given his receipt of money 124 Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster from the king, he could hardly appear so ungrateful as to belittle his royal benefactor. Boswell also had a family and professional associates in Scotland and England and could scarcely afford to risk alienating them with bold declarations of his thoughts about the battlefield. So it seems likely that neither man pressed the other to go to Culloden; and at the least since Johnson didn’t go there or say anything about it, Boswell chose not to write anything himself. Discretion is the most likely and logical winner here. The story of what led up to the battle and the aftermath of the conflict have been told thoroughly and dramatically in several books, but because of its centrality to so much of Highland life and legend, it merits recounting here. Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in Scotland aboard a French frigate on July 25, 1745, at what is now Arsaig village on the west coast, some thirty miles west of Fort William. It took nearly a month for enough Highlanders— actually scarcely more than a thousand—to come to his support, enabling Charlie to raise his standard formally at Glenfinnian at the head of Loch Shiel (commemorated by a monument erected there in 1815) and to declare the beginning of the Stuart’s efforts to reclaim the throne of England. His ragtag army managed to secure Edinburgh, then moved south toward London where Charles expected to have the crown placed on his swelled head. Whatever inspiration Charles was in figure, in the flesh he must have been lacking a bit. “Charles no longer displayed any semblance of leadership , preferring to sulk, seemingly indifferent to the welfare of his men, with whom his stock plummeted. This is perhaps the real cause of failure: Charles ultimately lacked the quality of leadership necessary to retain the unquestioning loyalty of his men,” writes historian John Sadler. The army got as close to London as Derby (which is actually a lot closer to Birmingham than London), but close enough to start a panic in the capital, described by Chevalier de Johnstone, an aide-de-camp in the prince’s command: Our arrival at Derby was known at London on the 5 of December, and the following Monday, called by the English Black Monday, the intelligence was known throughout the whole city, which was filled with terror and consternation. Many of the inhabitants fled to the country with their most precious effects, and all of the shops were shut. People thronged to...

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