Battle of Culloden

On a moor a few miles east of Inverness, on 16 April 1746, a British government army under the Duke of Cumberland shattered the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart in less than an hour. The defeat ended the Jacobite rising of 1745 and, with it, any realistic hope of restoring the Stuarts to the throne. It is often described as the last pitched battle fought on British soil.

The Jacobites had returned from their march on Derby with their army intact, and recruits and French supplies raised their strength to more than 8,000. Yet the winter went badly. They beat a government force at Falkirk Muir in January but could not take Stirling Castle, and in February withdrew to Inverness. A Royal Navy blockade cut off most help from France, leaving them short of money and food. When Cumberland advanced from Aberdeen in April, crossing the River Spey on 12 April, the Jacobite leaders decided that giving up Inverness and its stores would dissolve the army, and that they had to risk a battle.

The Jacobite commanders disagreed about where to fight. Lord George Murray thought the open ground chosen by the adjutant-general, John O'Sullivan, suited the government's artillery and cavalry, but his alternative was rejected. On the night of 15 April, Cumberland's twenty-fifth birthday, the Jacobites tried a surprise attack on the government camp near Nairn. The march in darkness fell into confusion, dawn approached before the columns were in position, and Murray called it off. The troops trudged back exhausted and hungry, and many scattered in search of food or fell asleep, so several hundred men may have missed the battle.

The armies faced each other on Drummossie Moor around midday, in wet weather, with the Highland regiments in the Jacobite front line. Estimates put the government force at about 6,900 to 7,200 and the Jacobites at about 5,000 to 6,000. After a short artillery exchange, in which the government guns were far stronger, Charles ordered an advance. Government gunners switched to canister shot, and the Jacobite centre veered right, crowding into the regiments beside it. Though raked by fire, the Jacobite right reached the government line and hit two regiments, Barrell's and Dejean's, in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Government reserves quickly counter-attacked and surrounded them on three sides.

On the Jacobite left, the MacDonald regiments, slowed by boggy ground, stalled and fired at long range. The Jacobite front collapsed. French regulars and Irish troops in French service covered the retreat while Charles was led from the field. Government dragoons pursued the fleeing men towards Inverness and gave little quarter.

Cumberland reported 50 killed and 259 wounded. Jacobite losses are usually estimated at roughly 1,500 to 2,000 killed or wounded, many of them cut down in the pursuit. More than 3,400 prisoners were eventually taken during and after the campaign; around 1,200 were transported to the colonies and 120 were executed, about a third of them deserters from the British Army.

About 1,500 survivors gathered at Ruthven Barracks, but Charles ordered them to disperse until he could return with French help. A last attempt to regroup in May came to nothing, and government troops carried out punitive expeditions through the Highlands that summer. Charles spent five months hiding in the Hebrides and the western Highlands, famously aided by Flora MacDonald, before French ships carried him away in September. He never came back.

Interest in remembering the battle grew in the nineteenth century, and a memorial cairn and clan grave markers were put up on the moor in 1881. A visitor centre opened in 2007, and archaeology on the site has confirmed the intense close-range fighting on the government left.

Our 1715 and 1783 maps show Great Britain before and after the rising; the battle took place near Inverness, in the Highlands of what had been the Kingdom of Scotland until the Union of 1707.