Issue 196 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published April 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review

Culloden ended with the slaughter of the wounded and those left on the field with only the small pockets of French regular troops being allowed to surrender. In the years since, the leader of the defeated 'Scottish' army, Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), has been cast as the romantic, handsome prince whose loyal Highland followers eventually secured his escape to France. He is now remembered in countless songs and on innumerable shortbread tins.

Yet the reality of what happened on that day on 16 April 1746 on Culloden Moor, a few miles east of Inverness, was rather different.

On one side stood a Jacobite army, committed to the restoration of the Stuart dynasty ousted from the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This army had a string of brilliant victories behind it. On the other side stood a British army defending the ruling Hanoverian king, George ll--an army which had failed to stand and fight the rebels in open battle.

This was no simple conflict between England and Scotland. The appeal of Prince Charles was to those forces who wished to maintain their feudal position. These were especially concentrated in the most backward region of Britain, the Highlands of Scotland. Them the clan system was based on peasant farmers who paid rent to and were required to do military service for their feudal lords, the clan chiefs.

Against Prince Charles stood an army defending the new Hanoverian kings who ruled Britain. Prince Charles had been born in France and raised in Italy and scarcely spoke English. The opposing army at Culloden was led by the Duke of Cumberland, son of king George II, who spoke German and little English.

This Hanoverian army was a British army because it represented the encroachment of capitalist social relations throughout Scotland spearheaded not just by the English but also by the Lowland Scots.

The roots of the crisis which broke with the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745 lay in the incomplete nature of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In England the overthrow then of James Stuart met with approval from the majority of the ruling class as it dismantled the last barrier to full capitalist development. In Scotland a smaller majority went along with the change of regime. These included the embryo of the Scottish capitalist class. But the majority of the nobility backed it for reasons opposite to their southern counterparts. The new regime was prepared to maintain their feudal powers and privileges.

Yet the two countries were united by the crown and little else. Both had seperate parliaments. For England this always raised the spectre that Scotland could become another Ireland--a doorway through which their French enemies could intervene. That is why the English ruling class was prepared to secure parliamentary union in 1707 on generous terms.

The Scottish nobility for their part could not refuse this offer. Scottish goods were subject to severe tariffs in England and its colonies, while trade with the continent was restricted. Meanwhile famine stalked Scotland between 1695 and 1700.

The English were prepared to offer a number of inducements to get the Union. From the point of view of the Scottish ruling class, the most important of these was not the preservation of their educational, legal and religious institutions, nor the safeguarding of thew main export industries, but the fact that the English ruling class maintained feudal social relations in Scotland as part of a bribe to sell the Union.

Although the intention of the English regime in pushing for Union was to prevent the opening up of a second front for France on its northern border, the consequence of successfully doing so was precisely to increase the chances of that happening, for the unfinished business of the Scottish revolution was transferred intact into the new state. This meant that in Scotland feudal enclaves continued to function within the overall territory of a state otherwise dedicated to capital accumulation. The exiled descendants of James II, the Stuart pretenders to the throne, found their support among sections of the Scottish nobility. But why, since they had been offered so many concessions, did a section of the nobility continue to support the Stuarts in turn?

The Scottish nobility had escaped fall exposure to the revolutionary upheavals which swept the British Isles after 1638 through a combination of geographical inaccessibility and political expediency.

After the Union the lords had three alternatives to increase revenues. The first was to transform themselves into capitalist landlords. Only the most powerful were sufficiently cushioned to consciously opt for capitalist farming as a solution, and for these already great lords, the trappings of feudal power were increasingly decorative.

For lesser breeds, the second alternative was to seek increased funds through rackrenting their tenants. But this could only be a holding operation. The third alternative was to support a movement which promised to maintain, if not improve, their position. It was this realisation that drove sections of the Scottish nobility into the arms of the exiled Stuart dynasty.

The arrival of Charles Edward Stuart at Arisaig, in the Western Highlands, on 22 July 1745 was the catalyst which pushed the most vulnerable of this class towards open civil war. Charles, grandson to James II (James VII of Scotland) had never set foot in Scotland in his life, and the enthusiastic reception he received from at least some of the local lords resulted less from his supposed charisma than from the economic crisis with which thew supporters were faced.

The Jacobite rank and file also had little choice in the matter. More than half the Jacobite army was raised under the clan system or from those liable for feudal military service.

Once the rebellion had begun, the great Enlightenment jurist Lord Kames outlined what was at stake with admirable clarity: '...are we to follow the Rules of England or France? Are we to be guided by the Law as at present established, or as it was three centuries ago?' But if the issues were so clear, how then did Charles find himself ensconced in Edinburgh, Scotland at his feet, without seriously engaging the enemy?

The reasons lay partly in the overconfidence of the British state, partly because the very archaic militarism of the Jacobites gave them an advantage in a society geared towards making money rather than war--at least at home. 'He [Charles Stuart] was marching with a feudal army into a bourgeois society', as the labour historians GDH Cole and Raymond Postgate put it.

But victory in Scotland was not enough. The rebels had no choice but to invade England. Every day they remained in England saw their funds diminish, the threat of desertions increase and the threat of Hanoverian counter-attack more likely. And to tax the population would have resulted in open hostility.

But there was also a deeper logic at work. They had to strike at the heart of the regime, because only such a move would persuade the French that the rising was worth supporting. Despite Charles's claims to his supporters there was little likelihood of the English Jacobites rising in his cause. Their Jacobitisin was pure decoration.

Now the real balance of forces was revealed. Conflicts within the French court over the prospects for the rising delayed the launch of a supportive invasion until December, at which point it was postponed because of bad weather. The French never regained the initiative, and thereafter British military superiority ensured that neither military nor financial support crossed the Channel.

The Jacobites reached as far as Derby, before the high command overruled Charles and voted for a retreat. Pursued back into Scotland by the army of the Duke of Cumberland, the Jacobites achieved one more victory at Falkirk before being pushed towards the Highlands for the final encounter.

The Jacobites were exhausted, hungry and below their full strength when Charles chose to confront the Hanoverians at Culloden, who outnumbered them and were armed with the most modern military technology. In fact, the majority of the government troops were not even needed, for to compound the imbalance further the site was flat terrain which deprived the Highland contingent of the element of surprise--which had been their chief tactical advantage in the past--but gave their opponents unprotected targets for their artillery. Under these conditions it is no surprise that the subsequent battle took less than half an hour for the government side to emerge victorious. The respective casualty lists tell the story: 50 Hanoverian dead; over 2,000 Jacobite.

The brutal behaviour of brutalised men--schooled in the lash and the rigours of continental service--was deliberately fostered from above by black propaganda concerning supposed Jacobite atrocities. This was for two reasons. The first was to avenge, and also to justify the previous defeats by portraying the Highland Jacobites in particular as superhuman savages against whom any action was permissible. The second was the grim logic which said that the only way to stop the enemy regrouping, or to prevent any future rising, was to destroy the society from which they were thought to have sprung.

At the forefront of this bloody work were the Scottish Lowland officers and this, as they say, was no accident. The rising had produced a ferocious hostility towards the 'Rebellious Scots' whom the uncensored national anthem--written during the crisis-- enjoins George II to crush. It was of paramount importance, therefore, that those areas which had remained loyal turned the distinctions between themselves and the rebels from matters of degree into those of absolute difference. The Highlanders had to be turned into aliens, and the opposition between feudal and capitalist elements within Scotland as a whole turned into cultural differences between areas.

Despite the anti-Highland rhetoric, the roots of the '45 rebellion were now dealt with on an all Scottish basis. After the initial repression had died down it occurred to some members of the British ruling class that merely driving off the peasants' herds might bring them close to starvation but it would not necessarily break the power of the lords. A barrage of legislation was therefore unleashed.

The most significant piece of legislation was the Heritable jurisdiction Act of 1747 which finally abolished the legal power of the lords at local level. The way these had been used to mobilise support for the rising meant that their usefulness to the British state was at an end.

What of the victims of this process--the peasants who had been dragged into a war from which they could gain nothing and who now had to pay the price for their masters' gamble?

The Highland Clearances were the result. The Clearances could not have happened without Culloden, but that did not mean that they had to happen. The tragedy of the Highlanders is that they were forced off their land at a time (1815-1860) when the working class movement was beginning to develop in Scotland, through the general strike of 1820 (the first in history), the Chartists and the origins of industrial trade unionism. Yet that movement did not attempt to defend the Highlanders. It was only after they rose up on their own behalf, in the Crofters' War of the 1880s, that they forced the labour movement to take their interests seriously.

As for the British state, the defeat of Jacobitism was the last action it undertook which could be described as part of its bourgeois revolution. Culloden stands as the bridge between two eras.