The Jacobite forces of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) met again with the British Army under the Duke of Cumberland. (Butcher Cumberland)This reenactment of the battle of Culloden is being filmed for a new visitor attraction centre near Inverness. It could not be filmed at the actual battlefield due to the modern buildings and roads around it so they went to lauder moor..
In the reenactment as in the actual battle of 1746 the English beat the snot out of the Scots causing the chicken shit Prince to bravely run away and to become a part of romanticised history and for years of oppression against all things Scottish by the English, a quick reminder to the my English readers, you're all cunts.
I'm no fan of the Prince and the highland cause as their tastes are a little bit too catholic for me and the Prince was a dirty Eyetie anyway but the English went after everyone Scottish, even the lowland Scots that fought for England. Yet again the English thought they could overcome a simple people with might , a lesson the Yanks so far have not learned from .
The battle happened 16th April 1746 and ended any hopes for the exiled Stuart dynasty to get back on the throne of Britain, for more about it go here to a post I did a while back.
The Battle
Towards 1pm, 251 years ago, the Jacobite guns on Drummossie Moor opened fire which prompted an immediate response from their Hanoverian opponents. The government fire power was to prove superior and around an hour later 1,000 Jacobites lay dead, rising to 1,500 in the aftermath of the bloody battle.
The Gaelic poet and Jacobite soldier John Roy Stuart summed up the Jacobite defeat -'Woe is me for the plaided troops scattered and routed everywhere at the hands of these utter foxes of England who observed no fairness at all in the conflict; though they won the battle, it was not from the courage or the skill of them but the westward wind and the rain coming down on us from the lands of the lowlanders.
'It was not of course a Scots versus English affair, it was much more complicated than that but the outcome was vastly different for the two royal cousins who opposed one another on that fateful day. Prince Charles Edward Stewart was forced to take to the heather before escaping to France, all hope of restoring his father to the thrones once occupied by the Stewarts gone for ever, but for his cousin, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the adulation for having safeguarding his father's Hanoverian throne lay ahead.
The German had defeated the Italian!
The Battle of Culloden fought on 16 April 1746 only lasted as long as it would take you to walk round the battlefield but it put in motion the death of the Clan system and the death-knell of Gaeldom. Loyal and Jacobite clans were to suffer over the following months - indeed right down through the past 2 ½ centuries.
Culloden is one of the most important battles to be fought on Scottish soil and a battle which still divides Scots and emotionally rugs at the heart. Standing on the field at Drummossie, hearing the pipes play is a great heart-rending experience, for regardless of one's opinion of the Italian Prince, no one can.
