Bonnie Prince Charlie(1720–1788)

Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart was born at the Palazzo Muti in Rome on the thirty-first of December 1720, eldest son of James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, and Maria Clementina Sobieska of the royal house of Poland. He was raised at the exiled Stuart court in Rome, a Catholic prince of a deposed dynasty whose father held the formal courtesy of King James the Third of Great Britain in the eyes of the Catholic powers of Europe and of his own household. Charles was tutored in French, Italian, Latin, Spanish and the swordsman's trades, learned Scots Gaelic in adolescence from his Highland servants, and from the age of fourteen was being prepared for the moment of his father's restoration.

The opportunity came in 1745. The British army was concentrated in Flanders for the War of the Austrian Succession; the French court of Louis the Fifteenth, at war with Britain, was willing to sponsor a Stuart landing. Charles, twenty-four years old, set out from Saint-Nazaire with two ships on the fifth of July 1745. One was driven back by the Royal Navy; he sailed on alone in the small frigate Du Teillay with seven companions, the Seven Men of Moidart, and landed at the head of Loch nan Uamh on the west coast of Inverness-shire on the twenty-fifth of July 1745. He had no army, no money, and no guarantee of a single Highland chief.

He raised his father's royal standard on the brae above the head of Loch Shiel at Glenfinnan on the nineteenth of August 1745. The MacDonalds of Clanranald, Keppoch and Glengarry came in with eighteen hundred men; the Camerons of Lochiel brought seven hundred more; the Stewarts of Appin, the Macphersons of Cluny, the MacLachlans and the rest of the western Highland regiments rallied through the next ten days. He marched east to Perth, took it on the fourth of September, took Edinburgh on the seventeenth of September with three thousand men and entered the city on a white horse to the cheers of the Old Town, held court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and on the twenty-first of September 1745 his Highland army of two thousand five hundred broke a regular British government army under Sir John Cope at Prestonpans east of Edinburgh in a single charge that lasted less than fifteen minutes.

He held Edinburgh and the lowland Lothians through October and November as the de facto sovereign of Scotland and on the eighth of November 1745 crossed the Tweed into England with about five thousand men, the boldest single offensive in the history of the Jacobite cause. He took Carlisle on the fifteenth of November, marched south through Penrith, Lancaster, Preston, Manchester and into the Midlands, and reached Derby on the fourth of December 1745. He was a hundred and twenty-seven miles from London; the Hanoverian court at St James's had had carriages standing in the courtyard for three days and the funds of the Bank of England were being shipped down the Thames in chests. A Highland army under a Stuart prince stood closer to the throne of Great Britain than at any point since 1688.

He withdrew from Derby on the sixth of December 1745 on the council of his Highland generals, fought a successful rear-guard at Clifton Moor in Westmorland and a tactical victory at Falkirk in January 1746, and was defeated at Culloden Moor outside Inverness on the sixteenth of April 1746 by a British army under William, Duke of Cumberland. He escaped the field, was hidden through the summer of 1746 by Flora MacDonald and a long chain of Highland and Hebridean families across Moidart, Benbecula, South Uist and Skye, and on the twentieth of September 1746 sailed for France on the French ship L'Heureux from Loch nan Uamh, the same beach he had landed on fourteen months before. The Stuart cause as an active dynastic claim ended at Culloden, but Charles Edward Stuart's name carries the romance of those fourteen months down to the present: the Glenfinnan monument raised in 1815 stands on the spot the standard was unfurled, the Skye Boat Song is on every Scottish piping repertoire, and the white-cockaded image of the prince landing at Loch nan Uamh remains the central icon of the Jacobite cause in the popular memory of Scotland.