William Wallace & Robert The Bruce: The Legends of Medieval Scotland | Celtic Legends | Chronicle

Scotland is justifiably famous for the beauty of its landscapes, for the magnificent rivers and glens, the forests and of course there are also the fairy tale castles. It was in places like this where some of the great legendary stories of Scotland were hatched and played out. This is Needpath Castle here in the Borders and we've come here because it represents many of the things that are good about Scotland. It stands on a hill above the river Tweed and it has endured for the centuries as have many of the stories we're about to explore. Unusually we've been spared the rain today so we can have a look at Needpath Castle in all its glory. Normally when tourists come to Scotland they bypass this area and they head straight for the Highlands which for them is a great shame because they miss not only some of the best landscapes in the world, they also miss the roots of some of the real stories that colour Scotland's history. One of the most famous figures in Scottish history is now William Wallace. Thanks to Hollywood who came here and made the Braveheart film, Wallace has become one of the single most dominant figures on the medieval landscape of Scotland. But he was certainly a character who deserved to be celebrated and in those days when there was no real such thing as a nation he probably was one of the very first patriots. I think William Wallace must be regarded as one of the great icons of Scottish history, a remarkable figure by any stretch of the imagination. Historically he was the son of a knight but in legend he became the common man, the man from nowhere who appeared in the hour of need of his country. Medieval people believed in the great chain of being that everything had its correct place. If you took one piece out and inserted it somewhere else the whole chain was likely to fragment. So the English accounts stress the unnaturalness of this man and what's curious is that the Scottish nobility who should have been leading the armies at the time Wallace was leading them also distrusted him for the same reason. He was a man of low birth. We know very little about the early life of William Wallace. What we do know is that he was born in Elderslie in the parish of Paisley in 1270 but for the rest of the detail on his colourful life we have to rely on an epic poem which was written by a minstrel known as Blind Harry and Blind Harry tells the story of William Wallace and his deeds from the time when he stepped onto the national stage in 1297 AD. The first record of Wallace in the history books is the mid 1290s when we hear the sheriff of Lanark William de Hazelrig who was an Englishman and part of the English garrison there had assaulted William Wallace's wife. He subsequently murdered her. Wallace took swift and instant revenge. He murdered de Hazelrig and with some followers killed the rest of the garrison in the town. He was immediately declared an outlaw and he carried out a guerrilla campaign against what he regarded as an army of occupation. William Wallace we think was typical of Scottish opinion round about early 1297. Nobody likes to live in an occupied country. Edward I had conquered Scotland the year before as he thought and placed English garrisons in most of the Scottish castles. It would have been fairly uncomfortable I think for people living under such a regime. Now this is the inspiration of Wallace. He was not alone. He operated in the southwest of Scotland. A guy called William Douglas operated in the southeast. Andrew Murray operated in the north. It looks like they were the inspiration these men for a popular resistance and we're told of the common people coming out and supporting them. Not surprisingly the English ruler of Scotland Edward I would not be prepared to accept a challenge like that lightly. He dispatched the Earl of Surrey with all of the English forces in Scotland to deal with the rebellion as quickly as they could. They met together on the banks of the River Forth in a battle which has become famous in Scottish history. The Battle of Stirling Bridge. Murray or de Murray as he was known and Wallace came together at Stirling in the centre of Scotland. Their armies combined and there the approaching army of Edward under the generalship of Surrey approached them to cross the River Forth at the one bridge at Stirling. It was an old wooden rickety bridge and the heavy English cavalry had to cross this bridge two by two side by side. The Scots army waiting in the woods on the Abbey Hill overlooking the bridge kept their nerve and when the order was given they swooped down and massacred the English army who found it very difficult to manoeuvre in the marshy ground around the bridge. Some of the knights tried to turn and flee back across the bridge causing more chaos but they were outflanked by Wallace's force who fell upon them. The victory was complete and Scotland was for the moment free of the tyrannical English rule of Edward. The Scottish victory at Stirling Bridge was a sensational and unexpected boost for the morale of Wallace and his men and at first it looked as if they would be able to free the whole of Scotland but what Wallace hadn't reckoned with was the intervention of Edward I who was to become known as the Hammer of the Scots. The legend has it that about five miles west from here William Wallace with a band of his followers were surprised by an English force and forced to flee. The area here of course was then governed by the Fraser family. The last of the Fraser family here was taken at the Battle of Dunbar in 1296 and forced to then swear allegiance to Edward I. Shortly after this Fraser then went to France as a knight Banneret and fought for Edward I in his French wars. Fraser returned to this area and became sheriff of Traquair and Ettrick Forest. During this period certain people wrote to Edward I suggesting that Fraser's heart wasn't in the employ of the English, he was a bit of a nationalist. Fraser shortly after this proved this by changing completely to the Scottish side. Now Edward was not only a first class ruler he was also a great politician, a statesman and above all he was a soldier who knew the craft of soldiership and he knew what had to be done on the battlefield. Edward marched north with his own army and he engaged Wallace and his forces in the Battle of Falkirk. It's really quite hard to assess the methods of warfare used at this time. One of the mysteries is the Scots had been at peace with England and virtually everybody else for a hundred years so where did they acquire the military expertise which allowed them to resist the English? The chiltrum was used at Falkirk which is the battle that Wallace lost. It's more of defensive I think it's been compared to a hedgehog with a kind of semi-circle and spears sticking out, close ranks and archers between the spears. The idea was the spears would protect the defending troops against the cavalry charge, the archers would do the damage as well. At the Battle of Falkirk in 1298 the Scottish army under the generalship of Wallace alone were mainly spearmen formed into chiltrums or phalanxes. The first charge was repulsed but Edward was a wily soldier and brought up his archers and the archers rained their deadly arrows upon the chiltrums. Many of the Scots fell dead, their ranks were broken, the cavalry came into charge and finished off the job. Wallace indeed was lucky to escape with his life, he had to flee to France where he tried to enlist the help of the French king. Edward of course was back in charge but Wallace came back to Scotland, tried to regenerate a guerrilla campaign. Unfortunately he was betrayed by one of his own countrymen Sir John who gave the brave Wallace up to Edward I who in typical fashion had no mercy. He had Wallace taken to London where he was hung drawn and quartered as a lesson to all Scots that there were not under any circumstances to trifle with the will of England. I think it's quite possible that the wars of independence might never have come about had it not been for the actions of William Wallace. The problem was that many of the Scottish aristocrats including Robert Bruce, the future king, had estates in England. They did not want to jeopardise the possession of these estates by taking on the might of Edward I. If the proper rulers of the kingdom are not doing their duty the common man will come forth and usurp their authority and that remains an extremely powerful idea right down through the centuries. Shortly after the execution of William Wallace another man strode onto the stage of Scottish history and this time there would be no mistakes. This was Robert Bruce, the man who was to become the most famous king of Scotland and Bruce was able to unite the whole country behind him and win the independence of the nation. Although it's now associated as a Scottish name Bruce actually was a Norman name from Debruce and Bruce came from a Norman family but by the 1290s they were very much a part of the Scottish nobility. The area at that time was governed or ruled by a Sir Simon Fraser. The Frasers of course were Norman knights. He fought with Bruce and legend has it at the Battle of Manfon he placed Bruce back on his horse three times when he had been unhorsed. Now imagine if this had not happened the course of history would have been changed. Robert was one of the claimants to the throne but that claim along with those of 12 others was dismissed and the nobleman of Scotland decided to appoint Edward I as guardian of Scotland. The nobleman of the time being practical fellows signed what was called the Ragman's Row. Bruce then was very much involved in the politics of the time but he had for himself a long-term view which was the throne of Scotland. The switching of allegiance in the late 13th early 14th century is fairly easy to understand. You could see the nobles as a sort of international fraternity who moved back and forward over boundaries and borders quite happily and they didn't necessarily have a commitment to a concept, to an idea. It's very interesting that in 1304 when Edward is bombarding Stirling Castle and he asks them on whose authority do you hold this castle against me Edward I? They say we hold on behalf of the lion. That's the first abstraction of kingship that you get in the British Isles. They're having to formulate new ways of articulating their political aspirations. What's happening in this very interesting period is that people are working out their ideas and their identities and their commitments for the first time against a very tricky background so they're reacting to present contingencies and redefining themselves in the process. In the medieval world you were only ever going to be a king if you had the strength and the ability to protect your position, sometimes physically. Bruce and Comyn were two rivals for the throne but at the same time they were also occasional allies and the Bruce clearly decided at some stage that he had to be rid of Comyn. There are accusations of treachery on both sides, we'll never know what the truth is but what certainly did happen is that when the two men met together in a chapel near Dumfries the Bruce drew his dagger and murdered Comyn. As you would expect he was excommunicated for such a heinous sin as a murder in a chapel but with the politics of the day the Archbishop was still prepared to crown Bruce as King of Scotland which happened on Palm Sunday in 1306. The family of Comyn were out to settle the score and the people of Scotland weren't sure about this man who had murdered his opponent in a church of all places. The English sent an army to confront Bruce's small army at Medwyn near the town of Perth and Bruce was very lucky to escape with his life. After that he left Scotland's shores and the legend tells that he went to take refuge on an island off the coast of Ireland, it's known as Rathen Island and it was there that we hear the tale of Bruce and the Spider and that legend is about Bruce sitting in the cave hiding thinking well will this ever happen will I ever be king when he saw the spider spinning its web trying and trying again to make the complete circle of the web and finally the spider succeeded so Bruce thought yes well one day I might succeed and I might be King of Scotland but I must keep trying I must try again. The first reference to Bruce and the Spider comes in Sir Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather 1830. There's not a trace of it before that. There is a legend from the 17th century which associated a spider with the Black Douglas, Robert Bruce's famous sidekick but no association between Bruce and the spider. What we have here is a great example of instant legend or the invention of tradition. The spider story is a sort of metaphor inserted very much later for whatever happened when Bruce was away taking a think to himself and what he seems to have decided upon was avoid conventional warfare, avoid pitched battles, we'll never beat the English on their own terms and so he actually adopted guerrilla tactics from then on and it was very very successful. Now the story could well be apocryphal but it is an inspiring legend which has endured down through the centuries but in 1307 there did come a turning point for the Bruce. In that year Edward I died, ironically on his way with his own army to come to Scotland and teach Bruce a lesson. At the age of 68 even the hammer of the Scots was so worn out by his years in the saddle that he died at Barra on Sands on his way north to fight the Scots. This gave Bruce the reason space he needed and he began to take the war to the English. There was even better news for Bruce in that the successor to Edward I, the new king Edward II was by no means the soldier and the statesman that his father had been. People have come to the conclusion that because this king liked art and painting, had a male favourite and ostensibly neglected his wife, he must therefore have been a homosexual and that has become the accepted view of Edward II and I'm not sure that the evidence actually stands up to the kind of scrutiny. A great number of kings have had confidants and favourites right through to Charles I and beyond. In addition homosexuality could be punished by being burned alive at the stake and even the wouldn't have been able to escape that kind of retribution. With Edward absent from the stage the Bruce was able to gradually win over the whole of Scotland. One by one the castles and towns fell from English rule back into the hands of the Scots until finally in 1314 only one castle remained in the hands of the English. This was the castle of Stirling overlooking the plain of Sir Hugh de Cressingham, the governor of Stirling castle had agreed to surrender to the Bruce if he was not relieved by midsummer's day 1314. Now even a king of questionable strength and vigour such as Edward II couldn't afford to ignore a challenge like that. If he lost Stirling he lost Scotland and to try and make sure that didn't happen he assembled one of the greatest armies ever to leave England. It was led by a powerful vanguard of knights, there was a huge body of men at arms and of course there were the famous Longwomen. They were to meet on the field at Bannockburn. It came to pass in 1314 the battle to end all battles in Scottish terms was fought. The army of Edward II was very much stronger in terms of numbers but Bruce had made preparations for the coming of the English army. He had took up a very strong defensive position, he had dug pits, in these pits he had put spiked poles to trap the cavalry and he waited patiently for the English army to advance. The battle of Bannockburn was Bruce's defining moments and one of the reasons for his success in that battle was his ability to prepare not only his army but also the ground on which they would fight. He chose the river Forth to define the boundary of the battlefield and he knew the English had to come and relieve Stirling Castle. He knew the road they would be approaching and as a consequence of that he was able to spend time preparing defensive positions on the battlefield. Those defensive positions took the form of a number of pits which were dug across the projected path of any English cavalry charge and a number of fiendishly horrible devices known as coltrops which were metal spikes that were strewn across the path of any projected cavalry charge in the hope that they would stick into the hooves. By doing so Bruce was able to spend time drilling the men, getting his army to act in a cohesive fashion and preparing the terrain that was very unusual on a medieval battlefield and it paid dividends in the battle of Bannockburn. Instead of awaiting the English attack he launched his own children's and an attack against the English cavalry. This was certainly throwing a spanner in the works and certainly not the kind of thing that Edward II would have expected. By his ability to use the river to define the battlefield the Bruce was able to pen the English army into a fairly compact and fairly narrow piece of ground. They couldn't use their archers as they'd done at Falkirk because the archers were behind not only the cavalry but the billmen who were in the second rank. This meant that the Scots infantry were free from the dangers of the arrow storm and decimated them at Falkirk and also in the battle of Mervyn. So what we had here was a general who was able to decide not only his tactics but also how he was going to use the field to his own advantage. Some of the English archers did actually manage to take up a position on the flank and begin to cause casualties among the Scots infantry with their arrow fire from the flank and the Bruce had had enough wisdom to keep back the tiny reserve of cavalry he did have. Only 500 men lightly armoured on small horses but they were to prove absolutely decisive at that point because it was then that he released his small force of cavalry to disperse the English archers and keep the battle going in favour of the Scots. The English cavalry advanced but could only advance very slowly because they had a very limited section of dry land in which they could advance. That attack was repulsed easily by the Scottish spearmen and then the next day the spearmen beat off the English army. As the English army were turning to flee the reinforcements or the camp followers came into the battle and the route was complete. The English made off. The king himself was lucky to escape but his wife and daughter were taken prisoner and ransomed for a great price. Bannockburn was undoubtedly a colossal victory. There's no question about it. Probably the most spectacular victory in Scottish history as such has never been forgotten by certain sections of the Scottish community. The Scottish National Party for example still holds annual rallies at Bannockburn. I suppose it's seen as a kind of a shrine of Scottish independence or whatever but it didn't really achieve very much as a battle. The whole point of fighting a battle was a. to get rid of the English which they succeeded in doing b. to get the English to recognise the legitimacy of Bruce's title to be king of Scots. You had to raid all the way through England to hit the king at Westminster so they could run around the north of England till the cows came home. It would never affect the attitudes of the kind of home county mentality. Sadly the battlefields of Britain haven't benefited from the kind of protection that a field like Gettysburg has had for example in the States. They've been encroached by modern developments and in Bannockburn's case housing development right on to the battlefield and also the landscape has been changed by the advent of modern farming techniques. Behind me here we've got the River Tweed which can represent for us the River Forth that was going to give the English army so many problems particularly during the retreat. Opposite we've got the mature trees similar to the kind of features of the new park which hid the Scottish army so effectively on the days before the battle. Then across here we've got a flat plain which stretches from the river. It hasn't been changed by modern farming techniques, it hasn't been intensively cropped by animals and as such we can see the the tussocky nature of the ground and you can appreciate just how difficult it would be for cavalry to make progress across ground like this. There are a number of things that can trap the ankles and break legs of horses. Towering over this landscape we have the castle of Needpath. Now Needpath is obviously a much smaller castle than Stirling but you do get a feel almost of the battlefield in miniature and what the main features were. In 1320 the Scots did the nobles, barons, freeholders and the community of the realm of Scotland. They sent a letter to the Pope of the day really asking the Pope to put pressure on the English King to recognise Bruce's title. A declaration of Scottish independence and there are some very very interesting ideas in this document. They actually say if Robert Bruce should ever submit our kingdom to the King of England or the English we will remove him and set up another better able to in his place. Now they had no intentions of removing Robert Bruce but they're trying to show if Robert even hints at stepping out of line they're going to remove him. So what's that? That is the earliest statement of the contractual theory of monarchy in European history. They're saying the King is answerable to his subjects. The next section of the declaration of our Bruce goes on to say and this is quoted all over the place but it's still good it's very moving. For so long as a hundred of us remain alive we shall never surrender. It is not for riches nor for glory nor for honours that we fight but for freedom alone which no honest man will lose but with life itself. If the Battle of Bannockburn was to prove Scotland's greatest day in its military history the blackest day was to come almost 200 years later at the Battle of Flodden. On that day in a field in the north of England 10,000 Scotsmen lost their lives under the leadership of King James IV. In many respects James could have been a greater king than the Bruce. He was a cultured man and he understood the need for education in a changing world. This was the time of the renaissance and James was very much a renaissance king. He established Scotland's third university at Aberdeen for example and he was terrifically interested in the fields of literature and art and science. For him the application of science came very much in the exploration of gunpowder. He was fanatical about artillery and its employment on the battlefield. Unfortunately the artillery was to let him down on the day of his greatest triumph. James IV of Scotland came to the throne in 1488 following the untimely death of his father. Much trade was carried out between Scotland and the Low Countries and France. In terms of culture he set up the third university in Scotland in Aberdeen, the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, set up a printing press, encouraged writing and literature and so did a lot of good for the education of Scots and Scotland. His brother-in-law Henry VIII of England had formed the Holy League with the King of Spain and the Doge of Venice and their aim was to attack the power of Louis the King of France. Now there had been an ancient alliance between France and Scotland called the Old Alliance which went back to the 13th century but Louis, knowing that James was a very gallant and chivalrous gentleman, decided that it would be better if his wife, the Queen, wrote to James seeking his assistance. This she did with all pomp and circumstance and with her letter she sent a lovely turquoise ring. Unfortunately James was not the kind of man who could resist a call to chivalry like that and he brought together a great army of Scotland and invaded England. It was a big mistake on James's part and the Scots army came disastrously unstuck when they moved into England in order to support the French in September 1513. The Battle of Flodden was an unmitigated disaster for the Scots and the famous image of the sole survivor returning to Edinburgh still haunts the Scots today. James himself is alleged to have been forewarned by an apparition, the famous blue man, who appeared to him before the campaign. At Linlithgow, where the King was praying, this man came to the church knocking on the door insisting that he saw the King. The man wearing a blue cloak, it is said, had been sent by his mother with a warning, a dire warning to the King that he should not set out in this journey because it would be very, very dangerous both for him and his companions. Furthermore his mother had told him to give the King the message that the King should not take the advice of women. Whether it's true or not or whether it's been embroidered over the years, it certainly was a legend that was prevalent at the time of the battle. It was said that there wasn't a single family in the whole of Scotland that was left untouched by the disaster at Flodden. So great were the casualties that they were lamenting throughout the land. The legend of Robin Hood is an enduring tale. Scotland has its own version of that in the legend of Rob Roy. I think the thing that appeals to people about Rob Roy is much the same as that which appeals about Robin Hood. The fact that he's what's called a social bandit, an outlaw who defends his community against alien or elite influences. Rob Roy first of all came from an outlawed clan, the McGregors, who'd been outlawed as a result of the exercise of state power in the 1590s. He was associated with the Jacobite Risings and their opposition to the Union in 1715 and 1719. He was also associated with the ability to act autonomously in defiance of authority. In Scotland we have our own version of Robin Hood and his name is Rob Roy McGregor and he lived here in this area called Balwhydder. Behind me is the Kirkton Burn which flows down to Loch Boyle and passes by the ale house where Rob Roy used to drink, not 300 yards from here. He drove cattle to markets in the south, down to England and as he reached his late teens he was installed in a farm not far from here on the southern shores of Loch Boyle. Later in 1693 he was married to Mary McGregor of Cromer and it was here in this glen that he started his married life. As well as farming and droving he engaged in a little what we call lifting or that was stealing cattle and reselling them. At that time Rob's business was doing very well and he arranged to borrow some money from a wealthy landowner, the Duke of Montrose. Sadly all did not go to plan. Rob gave the money to his trusty lieutenant, the man disappeared. So did the money. Rob Roy was declared bankrupt and in his absence his wife and children were evicted from the property on the shores of Loch Lomond. Rob took revenge in Montrose by stealing his cattle, stealing his rent and in some cases stealing the rent that the tenants, the poor tenants had paid to his factor and then giving the money back to the tenants. Many dramatizations of Rob Roy were put on from the 1820s onwards. I think there were 30 or 40, if my memory serves me right, dramatizations of Rob Roy in the 19th century. He was very much a figure taken up as a result of Scott's novel and yet Scott's novel was called Rob Roy for a reason because Rob Roy already had a status on which Scott was drawing. So I think we can say that Scott was a great publicity agent for Rob Roy. Rob became implicated in the political struggles of the time, the struggle to replace the Stuart Kings on the throne of Scotland. He was given a pardon towards the end of his life and he ended his days here further up the glen at Inverloch Larrick. He had a dispute with a Rob came marching down the glen with a force of about a hundred men but when he came to the western side of the burn at the bottom near the loch there was a force of 300 waiting to meet him. Thinking upon this and being quite a sensible man in his old age he thought this is not the day for a fight because we're sadly outnumbered but he felt that all these warrior-like men having come together they should have some fighting at least so they decided to fight a duel and there was Rob being the man he was putting himself forward for the fight. The other side put forward a young champion, a young Stuart. They fought and the agreement had been first blood and eventually the young man got the better of Rob and gave him a nick on the arm but that wound was the end of him. It went septic but before he died Maclaren this neighbour with whom he had had the dispute heard he was dying and came to gloat at Rob on his deathbed. Rob heard he was coming, called for his wife to dress him in his best plaid, bring him his sword and his gun and when Maclaren came in he was aghast to see Rob looking as fierce as ever, nowhere near death he thought so he made his grovelling apologies and left hurriedly. When he did die he was buried down here at the cemetery at the churchyard. There was a huge funeral, hundreds of people came and the funeral bill came to over 400 pounds. Rob's estate was valued at 146 pounds so even in death poor Mary, that long-suffering wife, had to work with the help of her sons to pay off the debt for the funeral. The story of Rob Roy goes beyond the bounds of his locality, the west of Scotland and Parthshire, they're spread throughout Scotland, even in Aberdeenshire there are caves which are associated with Rob Roy and these are a function of storytelling not of history and it's very interesting that such a powerful folk mythos, mythology has been built up around somebody who was a historical figure and died no more than 260 odd years ago. What we do know for certain is that Rob Roy was present at some of the biggest battles of the Jacobite wars. He fought at the Battle of Sheriffmure in 1715 and he was also present on the ill-fated campaign which led to the Battle of Glenshield in 1719. By 1745 the cause that Rob Roy had gone out to support should have been dead and buried but there was one last act to be played in the tragedy and that tragedy would be led by the son of the old pretender Charles Edward Stewart. Charles Edward Stewart is better known to Scottish history as Bonnie Prince Charlie. Prince Charles Edward Stewart was born in 1720 in Rome. He was the son of the old pretender to the throne of Scotland. His father was in turn the son of the deposed king King James II of Scotland and England who had been deposed in what was called the glorious bloodless revolution in 1688. The powers that be, the British government of the time, felt that they should have a Protestant king so they invited Prince William of Orange in the Netherlands and his Queen Mary to become King and Queen of Britain. They came to the throne but there was a movement called the Jacobite movement who were keen to have the Stewart family line restored to the throne. The clans and other supporters whom General Cope and the government army counted on as coming out to support the government simply didn't do it. There was relatively little interest even from opponents of the Jacobite cause and actually standing up and fighting against them. There was a good deal of passive sympathy with the Jacobites among those who weren't prepared to support them and effectively the rest of the political nation sat on their hands. Indeed it's arguable that that was the case in England too, at least while the Jacobites were marching south. The religious landscape had also changed. Scotland was very much a Protestant country and for many the Stewarts represented a return to the old Catholic religion and as such they couldn't command the popular support in what was very much a Presbyterian country. In 1719 a great storm had destroyed the Spanish fleet which had been brought together to support an attempt by the nominal head of Scotland James III to regain the throne. In 1744 another great storm wrecked the French fleet that had been brought together in support of a claim by his son Charles Edward Stewart. There were never enough people who were prepared to support the cause and when the French help that had been promised failed to materialise, really the whole expedition should have been cancelled then and quite a few of the the wiser Highland chiefs knew that the end had really come. Nonetheless Charles was able to persuade them to continue on in the cause and the ill-fated rebellion of 1745 was the consequence. He's arrived with just seven men. They were known as the Seven Men of Moira. In August 1745 he arranged to raise the standard at Glynfinnan. That morning he was rowed up a loch to the point at the top of Loch Shield where he had put out the word for the Highlanders to gather. At first they came in dribs and drabs, there weren't many there but by the end of the day Cameron of Lochiel had come with over 500 men and so the tally at the end of the day was almost a thousand. He marched south with his army gathering men and support as he went and in no time at all he reached Edinburgh. He took Edinburgh quite easily, he defeated the army of the government under Johnny Cope at the Battle of Prestonpans and the famous tune, Hey Johnny Cope are you walking yet? Are you awake yet General Cope? became a byword for the Jacobite army. After the Jacobite army left Edinburgh it split into two columns. One column actually ended up here between Peebles and the castle and camped overnight en route to England and it's also recorded that the local populants were much put out by this. Now this column was commanded by Sir George Murray, contained most of the artillery, we're talking about a considerable number of men and horses. The officers themselves probably took billets in the town itself but the men would have been left to rough it down by the river. The river of course providing water for the horses and the men. It was then that Charles' real master plan was unfolded. Despite the fact that he had claimed the throne of Scotland and actually had his father proclaimed as James VIII of Scotland, he decided that his real mission lay in winning the throne of England and that's when things really went wrong. Lord Murray proved himself to be an excellent commander at Prestonpans and it was his ability that glued together the Jacobite army but Murray was no fool and he agreed to march on England only on the condition that they would receive French help. The prince by this stage must have known that no French help was ever going to materialise but nonetheless he allowed the army to embark on its march into England, probably in the hope that what he saw as his English subjects would raise up in arms to help him. Once again this didn't happen. Other than a motley collection of volunteers that they picked up and formed into what was optimistically known as the Manchester Regiment, the English population were at best indifferent to the Jacobites and certainly large sections were openly hostile. They advanced as far as Derby just 120 miles north of London but when they got to Derby they hesitated. They had a council of war and Charlie was advised that he should turn back but in London they were making arrangements to move the king from town and it was at that time our national anthem God Save the King was penned because there was such a fear that these wild Highlanders would come and take the town. Murray and the other chiefs were prepared to allow the charade of an invasion to progress as far as Derby but by then they knew the army had to be turned for home. Having done so they were able to forge together a victory over the forces of Hawley who were pursuing them into Scotland but ultimately they were once again forced to retreat, this time to Inverness, the Highland capital. Even at Inverness they were still pursued by William, Duke of Cumberland, second son of George II. Cumberland was on a personal mission to ensure there would never again be a Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and as such he used the government forces to ruthlessly suppress the Highland army in the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. Cumberland and his men, an army of about 9,000 strong, were camped at Nairn not far from Inverness and the prince heard of this, he also heard it was Cumberland's birthday and he reckoned that Cumberland would be entertaining his army to a night of celebration in honour of his birthday. So they planned a night raid, a night attack. On their approach the guard was alerted and the attack was aborted. The troops, hungry and tired now, made their way back to Culloden Moor. The next morning the government army marched up. The Highlanders stood in tight ranks. Against them was a highly regimented army of 9,000 troops, mostly regular troops but believe it or not there were some Scots fighting on that side as well, those Scots who took the government side. There was some confusion in the Jacobite ranks as opposed to the giving of orders. The command to charge was not passed and the English artillery wrought havoc. In the space of 45 minutes the battle was lost. The order had been given to the government troops to spare no quarter. The wounded were killed where they lay. Bonnie Prince Charlie though escaped in the battle. As part of his escape he was disguised once as an Irish maid and was assisted in this part of the escape by one Flora MacDonald. Charles and Flora are a very poignant pair. A young woman doing her duty as she sees it to protect and succour her prince from the threat of arrest and death. It is innocent and therefore very much closer to a fairy story than these things so often are. But it also has a very powerful symbolic resonance that it makes a very good counterpart to a male-oriented military campaign that when he falls on hard times it's a woman who succours and rescues him and so on. It gives a kind of domestic aura to the public political side of the earlier part of the Jacobite Rising. One of the things that's very important is that in 18th century Jacobite political rhetoric, political discourse, Scotland, indeed Ireland too, but Scotland was portrayed as a woman. A woman who would only be restored to fertility when her king came back, this to an ancient Celtic mythology, and her land is made fertile again. Therefore Flora, with a good name for that kind of symbolism, stood in very effectively for Scotland as a whole receiving Charles into her bosom. And that meant in a way that you could portray the essence of the land with its feminine essence remain true to the Stuarts. After the battle the prince rather ungraciously told his followers to or he himself tried to escape back into exile into France. The famous incidents where he had to dress as a woman and hide in the heather are all very well documented, but if we look at the evidence I'm afraid the prince's later behaviour certainly doesn't reflect well on him as a man. He doesn't appear to have shown much gratitude for the people who had lost everything in the support of the Stuart cause. Charles remains a controversial figure. He became a Scottish icon despite the fact of his mixed Scottish-English-Polish ancestry and the fact that he was born in Rome and the fact that Lord Elko, one of his supporters, said there you go you cowardly Italian as he was led off the battlefield of Culloden. Despite all these things Charles first of all cultivated a Scottish identity. All his army were uniformed in tartan including himself. He appointed a Gaelic tutor who was in fact one of the foremost Gaelic poets of his day and so it was a very shrewd move because that was more free publicity. And on the route south he marched on foot at the head of his army as if he were a great chieftain of old, more a Finn MacCool than an 18th century claimant to a throne.