One of the volumes is about the battle of Culloden and its aftermath, running to just over 300 pages of narrative, with just the one rather crude sketch map of the battle field. Perhaps if one pokes around there are lavishly illustrated hardback versions.
It turned out to be an interesting, if rather stodgy read, with lots of lists of men and women and their fates on the battlefield itself or in the courtroom afterwards.
Much talk of flogging and hanging of soldiers in the Royal army, with soldiers regularly getting hundreds of strokes of the cat, and surviving to get more the following day - while my memory of Hornblower stories is that hundreds of strokes of the cat were likely to be fatal, with strokes more usually be delivered in dozens rather than hundreds. Nevertheless, there seems little doubt that the Royal army was a brutal place, that soldiers were brutalised and were apt to behave badly, on and off the battlefield.
And there is no doubt at all that Culloden was a decisive victory for the Royal army, albeit on a much smaller scale that the battles of the Napoleonic wars some fifty years later, with five to ten thousand engaged on each side, with the Rebels taking around a thousand casualties, a lot of these down to artillery rather than infantry action, compared to the Royal few hundred. No doubt either that the Young Pretender was a bad general and would probably have been a very bad king. We backed the right horse on that one.
The aftermath appears to have been as brutal as the battle, with justice being very rough indeed, as it generally was in those days, and with gruesome executions being important public entertainments. Plenty of women, children and other innocents caught up in the reprisals. Not forgetting here that rebellion was a serious business in those days and sober people in England had no desire to get involved again in the sort of religious and civil wars which had engulfed much of western Europe at various times in the previous hundred years or so. Bad for trade.
But Prebble makes it clear that the clan system was pretty brutal too, with livelihood depending to a large extent on robbery with violence, and most people in both Scotland and England were glad to see the back of it, only getting romantic and dewy eyed about it after the event. I puzzle now about the difference between Scotland and Ireland. How is that one not very big battle made the peace in the Highlands, leaving the whole of Scotland firmly inside the United Kingdom, where it happily remained for a couple of hundred years, while we never managed the same trick with Ireland, a place with many similarities, including both race and language, with Scotland?
Taking a quick look at the Wikipedia entry this morning, the story is that most of the Rebel army would have been armed with muskets, while Prebble makes much of their broadswords. Perhaps Prebble's account of the battle itself is a little out of date. I also worried about the amount of detail. Did Prebble put more weight on eye witness accounts, with eye witness accounts of battles in particular being notoriously unreliable, than he should have? Prebble being a journalist and popular historian rather than a professional historian.
We shall see whether I get into any of the other three volumes: Glencoe, clearances and mutinies.
PS: I had completely forgotten, if I ever knew, that the battle of Culloden was fought just outside Inverness. In the far north.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Prebble.
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