Meredith and I split our vacations up, each being in charge for half the time. This came about one vacation when Meredith took some helpful suggestion on my part amiss and shoved the guidebook at me with a disgruntled, “If you think it’s so easy, YOU be in charge.” And so it was. Today marked the beginning of my time, and I wanted to head up to the Inverness area, which would reset our northern-travels record set yesterday.

Inverness is the biggest city in the Highlands, with a population of about 45,000 people. It also happens to be just a few miles from the Culloden battlefield, where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite army fought against a government-backed army. Spoiler: Charlie lost.

I have a folk song on a CD about Culloden, so I wanted to see it. All I knew was that a battle had happened there, and according to the song, the Scots fought bravely but were defeated by the English. It turns out to have been much more complicated than that, involving politics, religion, succession to the throne, international plots, Scottish home rule, and more. Easy.

Here is the history as best I know it from the amazing museum at the battlefield:
James II is a Catholic king in a Protestant England. The parliament suggests that he step down and let his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William reign. James II does so and goes into exile in France and Rome. James II’s grandson, Charles, born in exile and thinking his father should be king, launches a plot with the French to invade England, since France is skirmishing with England all over the world and has won an important battle recently, leaving England in a bit of disarray. But bad weather over the winter scuttles the plans.

Charles then raises a private army and sails in two ships to Scotland. On the way, he meets an English ship, and in the ensuing battle, the English ship and one of Charles’s ships (with the most arms and men) have to sail back to their ports for repairs. Charles lands in Scotland with very little to help him other than charm and his own self-generated promise of French armed help. He still manages to raise an army of two thousand men and begins marching south, capturing Scottish cities along the way. He eventually gets an army of about ten thousand men, and they march south into England, against the advice of some of Charles’s generals. They get to about 120 miles from London, which throws London into a panic. The army then turns around and goes back to Scotland after hearing rumors of three separate armies advancing on them.

Back in Scotland, the big army breaks into multiple fighting groups as the Jacobites struggle to keep ports open to receive French aid. Charles and his army end up near Inverness. He knows the Prince of Cumberland’s army is eleven miles away, and is bigger and better equipped. So Charles orders a night march and attack, but the march is across country, in the dark and fog, and in the snow. The army gets about a mile from the government forces, and the commander of the attack (not Charles) orders them to withdraw since he thinks he has lost the element of surprise.

The army arrives back at Culloden after an all-night twenty-mile march. Some of the men go off in search of supplies. Meanwhile, the government forces march up. Charles and his leaders argue over where to fight, with some of his leaders wanting to move to better ground nearby. While they argue, the government forces line up on the best ground at Culloden. Charles makes the decision to fight there, which leaves the Scots lined up on some swampy ground. Since the best weapon the Scots have is “the Highland Charge,” in which the army runs at full speed into the other line and engages in hand-to-hand combat, the swampy ground is a major disadvantage. Also, over half his army is elsewhere, so Charles only has about 5,500 men to face 7,500 government forces. It does not go well. Charles loses, and about 1,500 Jacobites are killed to about 50 government forces. The government forces brutally kill the wounded and hunt down the Scottish Jacobites and either shoot them or deport them. The Irish and French soldiers who fought are taken prisoner and then sent back to France.

Scots fought on both sides of the battle, with somewhere between a fifth and a third of the government forces being Scots. It really was a civil war, and it was the last hand-to-hand battle fought in Britain (I’m guessing the Blitz counts as the last battle fought here).

The museum really is excellent. Down each exhibit hall are given the perspectives of the government forces on one side and the Jacobites on the other. There is a four-walled immersive film about the actual battle, demonstrations from actors, and a huge overhead bird’s-eye view of the battle showing how the lines moved. We even got to handle a period musket (they are heavy). We got a thirty-minute guided tour of the field, and then Meredith and I walked around it on our own. There are plaques explaining things, and there are lines of flags set up showing where the initial lines were. In all, it was really well laid out, and we spent almost five hours there.

We drove the short distance into Inverness, where we checked into our B and B, and then walked downtown to get supper. It turns out that restaurants are really busy here on Saturdays, even as early as 6:00 pm (Europeans usually eat later than we do). We finally found a place that would take us with only a fifteen-minute wait. It was an Italian restaurant run by actual Italians, and it was very good.

We ended the evening with a short walk down by the River Ness (which flows from Loch Ness). It was windy, but dry, with really cool light playing around downtown as the clouds shifted. I called it a fairly early evening, getting back to the room about 9:00 pm, with plans to sleep in tomorrow. Uneasy is the head that wears a crown, but at least the head can be well rested.