An Army of Contradictions

Today's essay is from Andrew Bamford, designer of Musket & Pike: War of the Austrian Succession. In it, he looks at the Jacobite forces of the 1745 Rising: an army often remembered through Highland romance, but one that also drew on modern European organisation, command structures, and battlefield practice.

The majority of the forces featured in my WDS title War of the Austrian Succession represent the regular armed forces of nation-states. As such, there is no shortage of information on how they were organised, unformed, drilled, and commanded, and how they fought their battles. Furthermore, making a certain amount of allowance for national preferences for the number of sub-units in a regiment or the number of ranks for an infantry firing line, all these different national armies are essentially representative of the norms for military Europe in the 1740s. The outlier, however, is represented by the forces of the Jacobites in the scenarios depicting the battles of the 1745 Rising. These battles and campaigns saw Prince Charles Edward Stuart – ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ – make a final attempt to regain the British Crown for the exiled house of Stuart and put his father, recognised by his followers as James III, on the throne in place of the Hanoverian George II.

In the weeks after the arrival of Prince Charles in Scotland in the summer of 1745, an army was created in an extremely short period of time which went on, before the year was out, to capture Edinburgh, defeat the British Government’s forces in Scotland at the Battle of Prestonpans, and push on south as far as the English Midlands. By early 1746, after the withdrawal from England and consolidation of most available Jacobite forces around Stirling, the main Jacobite army numbered in the region of 8,000 men and won another victory over Government forces at Falkirk Muir. Thereafter, however, things began to go wrong: failure to take Stirling Castle by siege prefigured a retreat to the Highlands, and, though there were further small successes, eventual defeat came at Culloden in April 1746.

An army that was only in existence for a period of around nine months, whose composition and organisation were in a state of constant flux, is a difficult beast to categorise. In the case of the Jacobites, however, this is made far, far worse for the historian (and the game designer) by the number of myths and misconceptions that abound around the topic. Nor are these myths simply the product of Victorian romanticism or the politics of modern nationalism, though both have shaped them and given them extended life. Even at the time, the Jacobites were keen to build on their perceived Highland warrior identity as a means of striking fear into their adversaries, while Government commanders like Henry Hawley sought to reverse that perception and portray their adversaries as ‘arrant scum’ who would break in the face of British dragoons. In that Hawley was the commander defeated at Falkirk Muir, it may be said that his was the less successful attempt at psychological warfare! By contrast, modern historians, taking their lead from the late Professor Christopher Duffy, who devoted the last portion of his career to reassessing the military nature of the ’45, have emphasised the ways in which Charles and his commanders sought to create an army on the modern European model even while dressing it – literally – in the trappings of an older culture.^[1] This is a much-needed development, although, as we shall see, there are places where it is possible that Duffy pushes his argument a little too far.

What this essay seeks to do, therefore, is to consider three key elements of the Jacobite army of 1745-1746. Firstly, its composition, organisation, and dress at the regimental level. Secondly, its higher organisation and command. Lastly, its approach to warfare, tactical performance on the battlefield and, in particular, the role of the famous Highland Charge and how this is modelled in the War of the Austrian Succession game.

One might ask, of course, why these battles are featured at all in a game titled War of the Austrian Succession – it may be safely taken for granted, one feels, that preferences for the Habsburg or the Wittelsbach candidatures for the role of Holy Roman Empire were not priority topics of conversation on Rannoch Moor or along the Great Glen. However, by 1745, what had begun as a dynastic war had swollen into a pan-European power struggle and when France provided the ships and money to get Prince Charles to Scotland to begin his Rising, this was done with the conscious intent to open up a new theatre of hostilities that would draw the forces of George II away from the main struggle on the continent. The French role in the ’45, including the story of the small contingents of French regular troops sent to participate in the final battles, is a topic in its own right and something that I have written about at length elsewhere;^[2] Christopher Duffy has told the fascinating story of the Hessian auxiliaries brought over to assist the British Government.^[3] Suffice to say for now that Charles and his followers were to some extent pawns in a wider game and part of a bigger picture, whether they liked it or not.

How to Dress an Army

The Jacobite forces of 1745-1746 were, of course, not the first Scots Jacobite army as there had been a major Rising in 1715 and a smaller one in 1719. Although Prince Charles himself was representative of the new generation – born in 1720 – many of those who assumed leadership positions in the ’45 had been ‘out’ in one or both of the previous Risings. There was, therefore, a certain amount of precedent for the translation of the historical clan organisation into a facsimile of a regular regimental structure. Accordingly, when the Jacobite standard was raised at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, it is hardly surprising that those clan chieftains who answered the call were able to do so with organised military forces, albeit at this stage of no great size. These initial clan regiments, predominantly the Camerons and MacDonalds, formed the nucleus of the army that marched on Edinburgh and fought and won at Prestonpans on 21 September, but even by the time that the Jacobites marched into Edinburgh, the composition of their force was becoming more mixed as the clan units were joined by those levied by the Dukes of Athole and Perth.^[4] The mechanics of raising these units were rather more akin to a feudal lord calling out his tenantry than to the more familial ties of the clan regiments, and there are some indications that these units were considered not quite on par with the clansmen. The Athole Brigade, for example, was generally deployed in the second line of battle along with Lowland troops, while the Duke of Perth’s Regiment spent most of the campaign in a state of organisational flux, with companies being added and others taken away to cadre other units, and only settled down as a smallish single battalion after the return from England. Later regiments organised by magnates such as the Earl of Cromartie and Lord Lovat were for the most part levied on a similar basis.

Such subtle distinctions, however, were neither here nor there so far as the redcoats of Sir John Cope’s little army were concerned, and when the Jacobites charged out of the morning mist at Prestonpans the consensus amongst the Government forces appears to have been that these were the terrifying Highlanders of all their fears. Cope’s regiments, most of which had seen no prior active service, crumbled before the Highland charge: suddenly, militant Jacobitsim was a threat to the Georgian state in a way that had not been seen for a quarter-century. Charles and his commanders were quick to capitalise on this psychological edge, even as the growth of the Jacobite forces served to further dilute the Highland nature of the army. New regiments were formed with men from outside of the Highlands – John Roy Stuart’s recruited in Edinburgh, Lord Ogilvie’s in Forfarshire, and Lord Lewis Gordon’s around Aberdeen – although not all of these troops would be in the field in time to join the march into England. However, as a matter of deliberate policy items of highland dress were adopted wherever possible. This does not necessarily mean the full belted plaid (the forerunner of today’s much more modest kilt), but, at the very least, tartan could be worn as a sash across a suit of Lowland civilian clothes, while the blue knitted Highland Bonnet – with the addition of the Jacobite white cockade – came close to being de rigueur.^[5]

This policy of ‘Highlandisation’ was even extended to the growing cavalry arm, with the elite Lifeguards – the only Jacobite units that came close to getting anything like a uniform – sporting tartan bandoleers over their blue-faced-red coats, and the single troop of Scots Hussars wearing tartan waistcoats along with French-pattern bearskin hussar caps. Even the English volunteers were not exempt; when the Manchester Regiment was formed out of English Catholics during the Jacobite occupation of that city, they also adopted tartan sashes to fit in with the army’s ‘corporate identity’. To the very end, right up to Culloden by which time the original clan regiments were very much in a minority relative to lowlanders and French regulars, the concept of the Highland Army was still being maintained – alas for the Stuart cause, by this point the Duke of Cumberland had convinced his soldiers that the Highlanders were not supermen, and that he had the tactics to defeat them.

A Modern European Army?

Yet even if it cut no ice with Cumberland, the Jacobite ‘PR machine’ did such a good job of propagating the impression of the Highland Army that it has masked the actual achievement of Charles and his commanders in creating something that – when measured in terms of how it was organised rather than how it looked – was much closer to being an effective modern army on the European model. We have already seen that there were organisational precedents at a regimental level, and these extended to the adoption of an internal structure with men organised into companies, and, in the case of some of the larger units, those companies being grouped into multiple battalions. In some regiments, the regular organisation was even aped to the point of designating a grenadier company, although there were neither grenades (then largely obsolete outside of siege warfare anyway) nor uniform distinctions to make this anything other than nominal. The only major concession to tradition was the fact that most units were markedly over-officered, in order to provide sufficient commissioned roles for those whose status as gentlemen required that dignity.

There were also precedents from the earlier Risings in terms of creating senior commissioned ranks, and, indeed, the aging John Gordon of Glenbucket had a Jacobite commission as a major general dated from the time of the ’15. In this rank Glenbucket remained an anomaly, but Charles did appoint three lieutenant generals: the Jacobite Duke of Athole, a.k.a. Lord Tullibardine; Lord George Murray; and the Duke of Perth. The appointment of Athole was largely an honorific as he was not in a fit state of health to actively campaign, but Murray (the Duke’s younger brother, and a leading light in the ’19 Rising) and Perth played key command roles; so, later on, did Perth’s younger brother Lord John Drummond but he did so at least in part by virtue of his rank in the French service.

At Prestonpans, Murray commanded the left wing and Perth the right, each leading what was effectively a brigade of three regiments apiece. By the time that the decision was taken to march into England, the army was in the region of 5,000 strong and was organised into two divisions. Murray led the Highland Division, made up of the clan regiments plus the two troops of mounted Lifeguards; Perth led the Lowland Division with his own regiment, Glenbucket’s, John Roy Stuart’s, and the first battalion of Ogilvie’s (the second was still raising), plus the three-battalion Athole Brigade and the rest of the Jacobite cavalry. This distribution of forces gave Charles a fast, mobile strike force under Murray and a slower-moving reserve under Perth. It also flattered Murray’s ego and kept this difficult character away from the rest of the Jacobite leadership, although in that sense it somewhat backfired from Charles’ point of view as it enabled Murray and the clan leadership to develop a united view that the march on London was doomed and to eventually force on Charles the decision to turn back at Derby and retreat to Scotland (players of War of the Austrian Succession can test for themselves who had the right of it in a campaign that explores what might have happened if the Jacobites had pressed southwards across the River Trent). After the return to Scotland, the formal designation of divisions was dropped, but the Highland units generally remained detached under Murray during the operations around Stirling. Thereafter, as we shall see, combat organisation at Falkirk Muir and Culloden mixed Highland and Lowland units in mutually supporting roles.

Christopher Duffy, as noted, has held up this use of divisional organisation as an indicator of just how modern the Jacobite army was.^[6] Contemporary armies, after all, organised their component brigades into wings, lines, and columns as required for the operations of the day, but the modern combat division as a semi-permanent structure with its own commander and staff does not begin to emerge even as a concept until well into the Seven Years War. However, it is questionable in truth just how much the Highland and Lowland Divisions of the Jacobite army were true combat divisions in that modern sense. True, they did have a designated commander who remained in post throughout the English campaign, but they were really manoeuvre formations rather than combat ones. During the rearguard action at Clifton during the retreat back to Scotland, which was the only significant clash on English soil, Murray’s command on the field was a mixture of units from his own and Perth’s divisions; at Falkirk, the two divisional-sized wings contained a mix of Highland and Lowland troops. Furthermore, aside from the Athole Brigade – which, name notwithstanding, was really a large regiment, and functioned as such – there was no provision for brigade-level subordinate commands within these larger command formations so in this sense they represent a retrograde step compared with wider European practice.

Yet if Duffy perhaps oversells his argument in terms of the Jacobite divisional system, he and others are entirely right to emphasise the modernity of the Jacobite staff organisation. As historian Arran Johnston has pointed out in his recent study of Charles as a military commander, the Bonnie Prince had not been trained as a soldier.^[7] He had been present as an observer at the Siege of Gaeta during the War of the Polish Succession, so was not unused to the sight of combat, but his role in a Rising had always been envisaged as a figurehead, with French troops and commanders providing the military nous. However, plans for a French invasion of Britain in 1744 collapsed, and Charles had to go it alone when he made his attempt the following year. This pitched him into a command role in which he unexpectedly excelled, providing inspirational personal leadership. However, the fact that he could spend so much time amongst his followers was in part because he had men like Murray and Perth to whom he could delegate subordinate commands, but also because his army quickly developed an effective staff.

The key figure here was John William Sullivan (or O’Sullivan), an Irish-born veteran of the French service with prior experience on the staff of the French army during its occupation of Corsica. As one of the handful of followers who landed in Scotland with Charles, he was instrumental from the outset in nailing together the higher organisation of the army in his combined roles as quartermaster general and adjutant general. The wording of the Jacobite army’s daily orders – and the fact that it was issuing daily orders says something about how professional it was – has a decidedly French terminology that almost certainly reflects Sullivan’s input.^[8] Assisting in this was the fact that French officers – mostly from the Irish Brigade – were seconded to command roles in Jacobite units to help spread an element of professionalism. This influx of expertise was particularly helpful in terms of enhancing artillery and engineering capacity, although in the latter regard Charles was saddled with one obvious dud in the shape of Mirabelle de Gordon, who helped misdirect the siege of Stirling Castle. Equally important in keeping an army together was the organisation of its logistics, which were handled with skill through most of the campaign by John Murray of Broughton, Charles’ Secretary of State.

Unfortunately, however, no amount of good organisation could make up for personality clashes. We have already seen how Lord George Murray’s command of the Highland clan regiments gave him the opportunity to build up his own power base that enabled him to force through the decision to retreat from Derby against Charles’ wishes, and he was also able to push for a withdrawal from Stirling with similar backing. What is more, Murray also developed a bitter feud with Sullivan, with each accusing the other of mismanagement in the early actions of the campaign. A split developed between the Scots nobility on the one hand and the French-trained Irish Catholic professionals – exemplified by Sullivan – on the other: poor Perth, being a Scots Catholic, was caught well and truly in the middle. These splits persisted through to Culloden, helped shape military decision-making, and continued to define understanding of the Rising as the participants sought to sell their side of the story in subsequent letters and memoirs.

A Jacobite Way of War?

If there was such a thing as a doctrine for Highland warfare, harking back to the 16th century and earlier, then it called for shock action with a fairly deep formation, relying on said shock to achieve a quick result after a brief discharge of firearms. With the relatively poorly equipped army that Charles led to Prestonpans, there was not much of an option for anything more sophisticated, and this action represents the closest that we come to the classic Highland Charge. Thereafter, however, captured weapons from Cope’s defeated army and imported muskets from France meant that the Jacobite infantry could be equipped in the same way as its European contemporaries. This required a melding of traditional and modern tactics, a process that was aided by the fact that the French army – which was where most of the Jacobite commanders who had any prior military experience had gained it – also retained a preference for deep formations and shock action. Adoption of a four-deep line in the French style allowed for the delivery of musket firepower while also retaining the depth and mass for shock action. Complex manoeuvres to form columns of companies were eschewed, with line being formed from column of march by the simple expedient of having the column wheel 90 degrees to the axis of advance, and then having everyone change facing. For all that the fate of the three main battles was decided by the success or failure of the Highland Charge, we should therefore not forget that the Jacobites could also perform effectively when required in a defensive, firepower-oriented manner – the action at Clifton, mentioned above, is probably the best example of this.

Turning to the Highland Charge itself, though, we need to be clear on what this actually represented. Much as with the bayonet charge by conventional troops – and, indeed, by the time of Culloden, most of the charging Highlanders were doing so with bayonets fixed rather than swords drawn – the point was not necessarily to come to blows but to terrify the enemy into breaking before contact. When this worked – at Prestonpans, or on the Jacobite right at Falkirk Muir – it was incredibly successful. However, when it didn’t go off as planned – the Jacobite left at Falkirk Muir, or Culloden – the results had the potential to be disastrous. Even from the outset, however, provision was made for a reserve to exploit success or try to recover from failure.

A doctrine was developed – seen in its purest form at Falkirk Muir, but also at Culloden – of deploying for battle with the clan regiments (bolstered where necessary by Highland levies) deployed in the first line, the remaining Jacobite infantry in the second, and the cavalry and French contingent as a reserve. At Falkirk Muir, Murray’s right-wing command had the four Clan MacDonald regiments in the first line and the Athole Brigade in the second, while the left wing under Drummond had the remaining Highland troops in the first line and the Lowland regiments of Ogilvie and Lewis Gordon in reserve. A similar deployment was attempted at Culloden, but the need to cover a lengthy frontage with understrength units meant that the Athole Brigade was put in the first line from the outset, and other non-Highland units were brought up to fill gaps before the army made its advance. Even if the circumstances at Culloden prevented its use as intended, the concept of a powerful striking force backed with a reserve to exploit success was a sound one, and indicated military thinking considerably in advance of what we might imagine, based on the romantic version of things, as a policy of “cry ‘Claymore!’ and hope for the best”! 

Modelling all this in game terms therefore presents something of a challenge, and three major battles all having different outcomes (Falkirk Muir, though a victory, was by no means as clear-cut as Prestonpans) means that there is limited and contradictory precedent to draw on. In the end, the approach was taken of making the Jacobite infantry powerful, but brittle. A strong melee bonus – designed as much to represent the other side breaking before contact as opposed to the infliction of physical casualties – but poor-to-average unit quality ratings so that if the enemy doesn’t break, there is a real vulnerability to the sort of counterattack that swept the field at Culloden.

Conclusions

From the analysis above, one key point emerges about the Jacobite forces that captures the unique and contradictory nature of this army. Organisationally, in its staff, command, logistics, and planning, it was a modern army; yet, conversely, it portrayed itself as the opposite, and its dress and tactics sought to draw on this perception to win the psychological battle even before troops had come into contact. Even with French support, it had the problem inherent to so many insurgent armies in that it lacked much by way of heavy equipment – its artillery arm was weak throughout, for example – and with Scotland divided between the two claims and active English Jacobites numbering in the low hundreds, it was ultimately doomed by the numbers game. In the WDS' War of the Austrian Succession title, playtesting has shown that the one-off battles are all certainly winnable by either side, but for the Jacobites to succeed in the campaign scenarios, with three separate Government armies in the field, will require a great deal of luck, and this, put bluntly, is as it should be. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson may well have called the ’45 ‘a noble attempt’, but it was also a desperate one.

Bibliography

Geoff B. Bailey, Falkirk or Paradise: The Battle of Falkirk Muir 17 January 1746 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996).

Andrew Bamford, The Lillies and the Thistle: French Troops in the Jacobite ’45 (Warwick: Helion, 2018).

Christopher Duffy, Fight for a Throne: The Jacobite ’45 Reconsidered (Solihull: Helion, 2015).

Christopher Duffy, The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold story of the Jacobite Rising (London: Cassel 2003).

Christopher Duffy, The Best of Enemies: Germans Against Jacobites, 1746 (London: Bitter Books, 2013)

Arran Johnston, On Gladsmuir Shall the Battle Be! The Battle of Prestonpans 1745 (Solihull: Helion, 2017)

Arran Johnston, The Battles of Bonnie Prince Charlie: The Young Chevalier at War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2023).

Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998).

Stuart Reid, 1745: A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996).

Stuart Reid, Like Hungry Wolves: Culloden Moor 16 April 1746 (London: Windrow and Green, 1994).

Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745-46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006).

Tony Pollard (ed.), Culloden: The History and Archaeology of the Last Clan Battle (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2009).

Brevet-Colonel Sir Bruce Seton (ed.), The Orderly Book of Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment in the Army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart 10 October, 1745, to 21 April, 1746 (Heaton Mersey: The Cloister Press on behalf of the Society for Army Historical Research, 1923).

Footnotes

---

1. See Christopher Duffy, The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold story of the Jacobite Rising (London: Cassel 2003), revised as Fight for a Throne: The Jacobite ’45 Reconsidered (Solihull: Helion, 2015).↩︎

2. Andrew Bamford, The Lillies and the Thistle: French Troops in the Jacobite ’45 (Warwick: Helion, 2018).↩︎

3. Christopher Duffy, The Best of Enemies: Germans Against Jacobites, 1746 (London: Bitter Books, 2013).↩︎

4. The archaic spelling Athole is used here to reflect usage at the time; today we would say Athol. There were at this time two Dukes of Athol(e), brothers who had backed different sides and each recognised as the rightful Duke by their respective monarch – the Jacobite Duke was also known as the Marquis of Tullibardine, a title to which both sides agreed that he was entitled.↩︎

5. For the regimental organisation of the Jacobite army, and notes on its dress, see Stuart Reid, The Scottish Jacobite Army 1745-46 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006).↩︎

6. Duffy, Fight for a Throne, pp.320-321.↩︎

7. Arran Johnston, The Battles of Bonnie Prince Charlie: The Young Chevalier at War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2023).↩︎

8. See, for example, orders contained in Brevet-Colonel Sir Bruce Seton (ed.), The Orderly Book of Lord Ogilvy’s Regiment in the Army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart 10 October, 1745, to 21 April, 1746 (Heaton Mersey: The Cloister Press on behalf of the Society for Army Historical Research, 1923).↩︎