#battle of culloden
The 270th Anniversary of the Battle of Culloden
The painting included is: An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745
Circa 1745. By David Morier.
The painting which forms part of The Royal Collection and is on display at the Palace of Holyrood House depicts fighting of the 1745 Jacobite Rising. It is unsure if the painting depicts events from the Battle of Culloden itself though it has always been used to illustrate the famed battle.
https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/401243/an-incident-in-the-rebellion-of-1745
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Surely the strangest fact associated with the battle of Culloden, fought on April 16th 1746, was that there may well have been a Native American warrior present on the side of the British forces.
One of the British brigadiers present at Culloden was also the Governor of Georgia. In 1745 he was in England recruiting for his colonial Rangers. When the Jacobite rebellion broke out these troops were quickly added to the hastily assembled Government forces. With them was what the newspapers described as an “Indian King” - one of the Governor’s Creek allies who had seemingly traveled across the Atlantic to help with recruitment.
I really want the story about the Creek warrior being present at the battle to be true–but it sounds an awful lot to me like one of those “memory creep” stories where details get added to a story bit by bit until the end result bears no relationship to the truth.
But I want it to be true
- Got to start with the most basic - it wasn’t a battle between Scotland and England, it was a continuation of a (broadly) Catholics ~ Protestant British civil war. As many Scots fought against the Jacobites as alongside them.
- The Duke of Cumberland never actually ordered the execution of Jacobites during or immediately after the battle - he merely told his men to “keep in mind” the false belief that the Jacobites themselves had been ordered to take no prisoners.
- The Government casualties from the battle officially stand at 309 compared to the 2000+ Jacobite losses, but historians believe redcoat casualties were probably much higher. The Government may have covered up figures, and due to the battlefield graves being a protected heritige site they cannot be exhumed. Certainly the fact that Barrell’s regiment was nigh-on annihilated makes the relatively low casualty figures suspect.
- The French Jacobite regiment, the Royal Ecosse are suspected of having executed Government soldiers during the battle. At one point they overran a detachment of highland Loyalists from the Argyll Militia who were defending a stone wall - bodies were found buried beside the wall side-by-side, with musket balls through their skulls. Whilst officially this is claimed to have been due to the greater accuracy of the French muskets, such a claim seems unlikely.
