Bobbing John raises the standard at Braemar

Some risings are lost in the field and some are lost on the platform where the standard goes up. The man who calls a country to arms before he has counted his ground will spend the rest of his life inside the moment he chose. The hill at Braemar is a small hill, and the wind off Lochnagar is a small wind, but a flag once raised on either cannot be quietly lowered again.

THE COURTIER AT HOME

John Erskine, twenty-third Earl of Mar in the medieval line and sixth in the re-grant of 1565, was forty years old in the autumn of 1715, and had spent the working years of his life in offices that required no horse and no broadsword. He had been Secretary of State for Scotland in Anne's last ministry, a Treasury commissioner, a steady architect of the Union of 1707, a Court Tory comfortable in Whitehall corridors and Edinburgh closes. George of Hanover came over in August 1714, dismissed him in September, and refused to receive him at the levee. Mar took ship north in August 1715 with the manner of a gentleman travelling to his estate. The hunting party he gathered at Aboyne, by careful arrangement and not by accident, was the muster of the country.

THE BRAES ABOVE THE DEE

On the morning of the sixth of September, the heather above Invercauld House was just turning. The ground was open turf above the river, a cairn of cut sods built up to hold the shaft, the wind coming down off Lochnagar in long cold sweeps. Eight gentlemen of the country stood in a half-circle on the platform: Pitsligo, Drummond, Linlithgow, Huntly, the chiefs of Glenbuchat and Cluny, the Duke of Atholl and his son. Behind them three hundred armed men of the country in plaid and Lochaber-axe and broadsword. Behind those, two hundred women and children of the lairds' households who had ridden up to see the standard raised. The flag itself, brought north from London by Linlithgow's daughter sewn into the lining of her riding-cloak, lay wound about a long shaft of pine, a gilt ball of brass screwed into the head, a cord holding the silk against the wood.

A QUARTER PAST TEN

He looks at the men in the half-circle and counts them as a Treasury man counts ledger columns. Pitsligo has commanded in three previous risings; Huntly will bring two thousand if he is asked clearly; Atholl is here for his son and not for himself. The proclamation Pitsligo carried up from Edinburgh on Sunday promises that James will land at Peterhead in October with five thousand French troops, and the letter from Bolingbroke folded inside his coat says that the French troops will not come, and he has shown the letter to no one. A courtier learns to hold two papers at once. He has held them for ten days. Behind the gentlemen the country stands in plaid; in front of him the shaft leans against the cairn; in the next pocket of country south, the Duke of Argyll is taking the field for King George with three thousand men and the road to Stirling. If he does not raise the standard the gentlemen go home by Wednesday and Stair has him in irons at Edinburgh by the eighth. If he raises it he has four weeks to march the country past Argyll to Edinburgh and the central belt before the commitment in Lancashire goes off and the chiefs from the west turn for home with the cattle. He has never commanded men in the field. He has commanded clerks. Twenty past the hour by his watch, and the gentlemen are waiting. He gives the cue.

THE GILT BALL

The standard-bearer unwound the silk from the shaft. The wind caught the flag. White silk of the Old Pretender, gold thistle on the obverse, No Union embroidered in green silk on the reverse. The bearer's hands were shaking, by the testimony of Thomas Strachan the Aberdeenshire factor, who was on the hill. The shaft went up. The shaft was heavy. The cairn took it. And then the gilt ball at the head of the shaft, the brass ornament screwed into the pine, came loose, slid down the length of the wood, struck the turf, and lay among the heather at Mar's feet. By Strachan's account there was a silence on the hill of perhaps fifteen seconds. Lord Pitsligo, sixty-seven years old, bent, picked the ball out of the heather, put it in his pocket, and said, in a voice meant to carry to the back of the assembly, that the Earl would have a new ball turned for the standard tomorrow morning. God Save the King. The crowd took the cry. The ceremony went on. The Highland people present, who had a sense of these things from their grandfathers, took the omen for certain and said nothing.

THE WEEKS AT PERTH

He held the country at Perth from late September. Through October the chiefs came in from the western Highlands, from Lochiel and Glengarry, from Banff and Aberdeenshire and the central straths. By the first week of November he had between ten and twelve thousand men under arms, the largest Jacobite army either rising would ever raise. Argyll at Stirling had three thousand. The road south was open. He did not march. He held a council of war at Auchterarder for ten days. He wrote letters. He waited for the French troops he knew would not come and for the English rising he knew was already breaking up in Lancashire. The chiefs sharpened their blades and watched the weather. On the thirteenth of November he met Argyll at Sheriffmuir on the moor above Dunblane, in an engagement of about eight thousand a side. The Jacobite right under his own command broke the government left and pursued it five miles. The Jacobite left under Hamilton was broken by the government right and ran for ten. By dusk both wings of both armies had vanished off the field. He withdrew to Perth that night. In the bothies of Strathearn they made the rhyme that has carried since: there's some say that we wan, some say that they wan, some say that nane wan at a', man.

THE BALL AT SHERIFFMUIR

Pitsligo, who had carried the gilt ball south in his coat through the whole campaign, lost it on the field at Sheriffmuir. By tradition it rolled out of his coat in the press of the right-wing pursuit, somewhere on the heath above Dunblane, and was never found. The standard the ball had crowned went back to Perth in the baggage train. James Francis Edward Stuart landed at Peterhead in late December with no French troops and a fever, spent six weeks in Scotland in a black mood, was unable to galvanise the country, and took ship for France in early February with Mar at his elbow. The army at Perth dissolved into the glens through the winter, the chiefs riding home in twos and threes, the broadswords going back over the lintel.

EXILE

He was attainted by Westminster, his estates forfeit, his name struck from the peerage roll. He spent the remaining sixteen years of his life in lodgings in Paris, in Rome, in Geneva, in Aix-la-Chapelle, intriguing for the Stuart cause and against it by turns, falling out with two successive Old Pretender ministries, accepting in 1721 a small pension from the British government in exchange for keeping Bolingbroke under observation in France, and earning by these manoeuvres the nickname Bobbing John by which he has been generally remembered since. He died at Aix in 1732, fifty-six years old, and was buried there. The standard he raised at Braemar is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The hillside above Invercauld is part of the Mar Lodge Estate of the National Trust for Scotland; a marker on the path notes the day.

THE MARKER ON THE PATH

The hour that asks a man to be other than he has been will not wait for him to learn the trade. Mar had been a clerk of state and a manager of votes, a courtier of two queens and one king, a steady servant of an office; the hill above the Dee asked him to be a soldier in four weeks, and he was not. The Highland people who stood on the hill on the morning of the sixth of September took the omen and were right. Their grandchildren had it from them and passed it on. Visitors come up the path past the marker on the Mar Lodge Estate in the present day and ask the locals what happened here, and the locals will tell them, with no expression on their faces, that the gilt ball came off.