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1967., Secker and Warburg Call No: SC 941.07 P922c Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Culloden is the story of a battle and of what followed: the destruction of a way of life and the persecution of a people. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and reigmental rosters of the time as "Common Men". The romantic figure of the Young Pretender, and his now hackneyed story, has stood between us and them for too long. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias, or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, April 16th 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the "Common Men" on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chattan and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chattan to reach him, likening them to "a troop of hungry wolves". Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles's army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-solider's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle as as much as a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves, like young Ranald Macdonald, aged seven, skulking in the hills above his burning home. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.
