Address by Hugh Cheape, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, UHI to the Culloden Memorial Service 15.04.16
Blàr Chùil Lodair, 16 an Giblean 2016.
Tha na faireachdainnean agam an-diugh a’ sìneadh eadar irioslachd agus pròis, irioslachd a thaobh an urraim a thug sibh dhomh cuimhne a ghleidheadh air na Gàidheil cliùiteach a thuit ann an Cogadh nan Seumasach, agus pròis a thaobh an dleastanais a bhuilich sibh orm a bhith a’ riochdachadh Comunn Gàidhlig Inbhir-Nis aig Seirbhis Cuimhneachaidh Blàr Chùil Lodair. Le carragh-cuimhne air ar beulaibh agus raon uaigneach tiamhaidh fo ar comhair, tha sinn uile mothachail air an tuiteamas seo a tha a’ sìoladh sìos thugainn thar nan linntean bhon dearbh latha sa’ Ghiblean 1746. Gu deimhinnte ’s e droch latha a bh’ ann, airson Gàidheal air gach taobh dhen t-strì agus mar sin, tha cothrom againn a-rithist an-diugh cuimhne ùrachadh air na daoine foghainteach a chaill am beatha aig Cùil Lodair agus an comharrachadh as ùr.
We are commemorating the event 270 years ago today, the last battle of the ’45, which was by any measure a cataclysmic and catastrophic turning-point in Scottish and Highland history. The Battle was an awful closure to the long-running episode of the Jacobite Wars in which the Gaels were sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant participants. Every generation, it is said, should re-write it’s nation’s history, and the Battle of Culloden gives huge scope for re-visiting the subject - the reasons for the battle, long and short term causes and effects, and the lesson of history about instigating a ‘civil war’ and about its victims, and how this can be resolved . Almost as we speak another book on the ’45 is being published. This isJacqueline Riding’s Jacobites. a New History of the ’45 Rebellion from Bloomsbury Publishing. Many of us may have a personal reason for exploring these matters and visiting the battlefield; my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s brother, David Hunter, was here with the Jacobite army 270 years ago. He survived and escaped abroad.
We read about the hopelessness of the pitched battle on this open moorland, the chronicle of events leading up to it and the campaign that preceded it - the raising of the Standard at Glenfinnan and the strategy and tactics of the autumn campaign and the march south to Derby. Such events invite speculation over the ‘ifs’ of history - if the Jacobites had carried on the 125 miles to London? Now this curious exercise could be applied more realistically to exploring the ‘ifs’ of history in 1715 and the earlier attempt to place James Francis Edward Stewart on the throne of the United Kingdoms.
The motives of Gaels in 1745 were complex but the so-called ‘Stewart Cause’ is a historical complex, and our understanding may be distracted by the notion and attractions of a ‘Cause’. To begin to try to explain the events of April 1746 – whether to yourself or to others – we have a steepish hill to climb. Popular views have been formed under the influence of authors and playwrights and the literary wizards of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the afterglow of the Romantic movement, there was an obsession with the ’45 as ‘glorious episode’ or ‘heroic adventure’, and Bonnie Prince Charlie as the ‘rash adventurer’. Tourist literature brimmed with formulae such as, typically, ‘Prince Charlie’s Country’ applied to Lochaber, an area as it happened blighted by the events of ‘Charlie’s Year’. By contrast, the late Calum MacLean in his resounding work, The Highlands, published, by oral tradition very unwillingly, by Batsford in 1959, wrote: ‘One would expect that in this area there would still be stories and traditions about the Forty-Five and Prince Charlie. Strange to say, there is not so very much’. Since the last Jacobite War unleashed such devastation on the district, it is not surprising that local tradition is muted. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdairdespaired for the ‘nochd is bochd ud Mhùideart’, and his cousin, Iain Frangach, commented laconically on the Prince’s final departure from Arasaig on 20 September 1746: ‘He left us all in a worse state than he found us’. Humour may thrive in adversity and one joke is still with us. As Calum MacLean wrote: ‘There are hundreds of Prince Charlie’s Caves that the royal fugitive never saw’. When the mapmakers of the Ordnance Survey Royal Engineers toured Inverness-shire in the 1870s, they dutifully marked up ‘Prince Charlie’s Caves’ in response to evidently fulsome information on the ubiquitous footfall of Prince Charles Edward Stewart.
In the nature of such an event as Culloden, we as a nation are too used to foreshortened and even flawed versions of the battle, its preludes and aftermath. For visitors to the site, huge strides have now been made for the better explanation and interpretation of the battle. The Culloden Visitor Centre opened officially eight years ago today; it is the brainchild of the National Trust for Scotland and included the ‘restoration’ of the battlefield to what we see now. The core narrative is first-rate and effective advantage is taken of today’s interpretive techniques. Above all, and taking the standpoint of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, Scottish Gaelic is introduced competently and confidently in the displays, and used extensively to make it clear that this was a national language and more-or-less the lingua franca of the Jacobite army. This also makes clear that the language and literature of Gaelic Scotland furnishes history with real substance and it would be an interesting and challenging exercise to lay the ‘grand narrative’ of Scottish and British history to one side and compile a new history of the ’45 on the basis of Gaelic and Gaelic-derived sources. Given the course and consequences of the ’45, this would introduce a fresh emphasis in the narrative and give to the people of the Highlands and Islands a history which speaks for them rather than one composed at a distance and imposed on them.
Gaelic was spoken on both sides of the conflict. Incidents in the campaign hinged on mutual intelligibility, as in the so-called ‘Rout of Moy’ on the night of 16 February 1746. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alexander MacDonald of Dalilea, Moidart, the most prolific of the poets, gave vivid voice to the ideals and high hopes of Gaels in the ’45, as did John Roy Stewart. Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir is perhaps the best example of a poet in the Hanoverian army who yet took a more traditional Jacobite line. His was one of the voices which cursed the Hanoverians for their indiscriminate penalising by the Disclothing Act of loyal and rebel clans alike.
The first move in an adjustment of Highland history towards an understanding of the Gaelic voice came in 1933 with the late Dr John Lorne Campbell’s Highland Songs of the Forty-Five. This work revealed a political awareness and acumen far in advance of local and clan-bound traditional allegiances. Powerful concepts were brought into play such as messianic hopes for the restoration of the Stewarts and of a pan-Gaelic kingdom. Though this was in effect the last battle, Jacobitism had also been the vehicle for a prophecy of a different ‘last battle’ as ultimate victory for the Gaels. This is the repeated element of Thomas the Rhymer traditions in Scottish Gaelic and formerly an important part of the cultural life of the Gael. Thomas the Rhymer lies sleeping in in Tom na h-Iùbhraich, with his men-at-arms and his white horses, awaiting the apocalyptic summons. He would become mortal again and lead the Gaels to victory and all the early poets such as Iain Lom refer to the prophecy as established tradition.
This sense of hope – even of redemption – should fire our curiosity to reconsider the history of the Highlands and Islands. If we were standing here on the threshold of the 18th, as opposed to the 21st century, we would be in the midst of a culture that had taken its place among the nations of Europe, a culture at its most confident, successful and assertive, to become, arguably, the most decisive factor in 17th and 18th century British history. If it was not this, a vengeful government might not have taken such steps to destroy it. The conventional approach of writers and historians to 17th century Scotland, for example, has for too long led with the sorry story of civil and religious wars, interruptions to trade and commerce , economic stagnation and famines and epidemics. In the same context, intellectual or artistic endeavours (including, say, music) are ignored before the ‘sunburst’ of the Enlightenment. Gaelic culture and society has tended to be omitted from the discourse, apart from the briefest of aperςu when the Highlander rudely invades the stage of British politics , and are too often viewed retrospectively through the defining lenses of economic determinism, ‘Clearance’ and Romanticism.
By remembering what has been on this battlefield, we can honour our forebears, but 270 years after the event we can build on this remembrance by looking forward with hope and optimism. Is ann le meas a tha sinn a’ cur clach eile air a’ chàrn ac’, a’ faicinn tionndadh eile ri Cuibhle an Fhortain agus ag èisteachd le cinnte air na tha ar sinnsirean a’ labhairt troimh na linntean.