Sweet William or the Butcher? The Duke of Cumberland and the '45 by Jonathan Oates

Author:Jonathan Oates [Oates, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844684717
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2008-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

The road to Inverness from Culloden is downhill–excellent for pursuing cavalry and terrible for their luckless foes. Whitefoord later wrote of the pursuit and was regrettably suitably vague: ‘You know the pursuit was bloody and are no stranger to the other circumstances that followed.’129

It was customary for cavalry to pursue a defeated foe and the result was inevitably bloody unless there was any formed resistance against them. It was also during the rout that most casualties were inflicted on the losers. Elsewhere, the picture was grim. As a contemporary letter observed, ‘The moor was covered with blood; and our men, what with killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in the blood, and splashing it about one another, looked like so many butchers.’ Others were killed far from the site of combat, as Alexander Tough, surgeon to the Scots Fusiliers noted, ‘whom we suppose in their flight to have at last languished of their wounds lamenting Charley’s fate’.130 The aftermath of any battle is not for the squeamish and Culloden was not an exception to the rule. The Jacobite victory at Prestonpans had presented a similar spectacle.

The battle was over in about half an hour, or less, from the first cannonade to the rout of the Jacobites; though Whitefoord thought it was only fifteen minutes from the Jacobite charge to their rout. As an officer of Munro’s noted, it had been ‘the bloodiest Battle with the Rebels that was ever fought in the Memory of Man’.131

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