The failure of the Forty-five
On November 8th, 1745, the Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart invaded England. It was the last time a foreign army did so - (the Nazi occupation of the Channel Isles in World War II wasn’t England). Charles Edward, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, had begun his rebellion by landing in Scotland in August and raising his standard at Glenfinnan, on the shores of Loch Shiel.
His Jacobites won the Battle of Prestonpans and captured Edinburgh. Prince Charles persuaded his Scots to march South giving assurances of the assistance of both English Jacobites and the support of a French army that would land in the South. They quickly took Carlisle, an important border fort, but manned by only 80 elderly veterans.
Many British troops were on the Continent, involved in the War of the Austrian Succession, but the Duke of Cumberland, commanding British troops in Flanders, was hastily recalled with 12,000 men. The lightly-armed Jacobite army, although small, was effective at charge attacks, but lacked heavy artillery or siege equipment for longer campaigns. They reached Manchester, the only town to add significant numbers of recruits to their cause, and then went on to reach Derby on December 4th. Preston, thought to be a centre of Jacobite support, yielded only 3 extra recruits.
At this point Prince Charles’ army was disillusioned. The expected masses of recruits had not appeared, and there was no sign of the French landing. Charles was by now regarded as duplicitous and overbearing, and he drank heavily. Cumberland was marching North from London, and General Wade was moving South from Newcastle. The Jacobite army, fearing their supply lines and escape route would be cut off, retreated Northwards.
The general view at the time was that the Hanoverian regime would not have collapsed, even if the Jacobites had reached London. The country was too committed to its liberal Parliamentary democracy to return to a monarch who claimed divine right. The final suppression of the rebellion took place at the Battle of Culloden the following April, where the Jacobites took heavy casualties. Charles was pursued through the Highlands and finally picked up by a French ship in September. He was not betrayed during this time, despite a price on his head of £15 million in today’s money. A charming story tells that he rewarded loyal followers by imparting the secret recipe for his family’s drink, the liqueur Drambuie.
Many historians regard the defeat of the ’45 as boosting the confidence of the Scots that they were to remain part of the modern world, and not plunged back into clan governance and divine kingship. This, in turn, is reckoned to have created the intellectual climate that nurtured the explosion of genius called the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that gave us David Hume and Adam Smith, amongst others.