Duncan Forbes holds the north

Some risings are broken on a battlefield. Others are broken months before, in a writing-room, by a man with a sore foot and a stack of unsealed letters, who calculates that the cheapest way to spare a country is to spend his own fortune quietly and let no one know he spent it.

THE JUDGE AT CULLODEN HOUSE

Duncan Forbes of Culloden was sixty years old in the August of 1745. He was third son of an Aberdeenshire laird, called to the Scottish bar in 1709, Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs, raised to the bench in 1737, and since that year Lord President of the Court of Session, the senior judicial officer in Scotland. He kept his country house at Culloden, four miles east of Inverness, on a strip of moor he had ridden over since boyhood. He had known the Highland chiefs all his life. He had drunk with their fathers; he had pleaded the cases of their cousins; he had married into half their genealogies through the side door of Aberdeenshire kinship. When Charles Edward Stuart landed at Eriskay on the second of that August with seven men and a quantity of conviction, Forbes did not ride south to Edinburgh. He rode north to his own house, sent for paper, and sat down at the writing-slope.

THE EVENING OF THE THIRD OF OCTOBER

It is the late evening of the third of October, with the candles down to the second hour and the wind off the firth pushing against the south windows of the long writing-room. The gout is in his left foot, propped on a stool with a cushion under the heel. He is in a long velvet coat over a shirt; the fire has gone low and he has not rung for it. On the desk to his right are the day's sealed packets: a letter to MacLeod of MacLeod, a letter to Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, a letter to MacKenzie of Coul, a letter to the tutor of young MacKintosh (because the chief himself is a boy of nineteen and the tutor will decide), a letter to Sutherland. Since Eriskay he has written sixty-two such letters in his own hand, because he does not trust a clerk with the names of the persons he is corresponding with. The half-finished sheet on the slope is to MacLeod. The pen has dried twice. He has dipped it twice. He has not yet written the sentence that matters.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A WRITING-ROOM

One second in the writing-room at Culloden House decides what kind of war this rising will be. Lovat will come out, Lovat has been writing to Murray of Broughton for six months, Lovat has decided, no sheet of paper need be wasted on him. MacLeod is on the fence and the wife reads his letters at the breakfast table and the wife is on the right side; MacLeod can be held with the proper sentence in the proper hand. Sleat is the test, Sleat could bring fifteen hundred men of Skye into the field if he chose to, and by Hugh MacDonald's letter of the eighteenth Sleat has not chosen. He has eighteen thousand pounds of his own advanced to the Royal Bank's loan and a Treasury draft for six on which he is paying Edinburgh wine merchants for a cellar he is keeping the regiments out of, and he is on paper a wealthy judge of the highest court of his country and in fact three weeks from asking his brother John for the Edinburgh house rent. He has held the bench under three sovereigns; he has read every plea that crosses a Scottish desk; he knows the law cannot reach into Skye and Glengarry and Strathnaver, but a letter in his own hand can, because the chiefs will read his hand where they will not read a Hanoverian proclamation. The pen is in his fingers. The price of doing the thing is that nobody on either side will know it was done. The price is the price. He picks up the pen. He finishes the letter to MacLeod. He starts the letter to Sleat. He works through to two in the morning. The packet for the morning post will go to Inverness at six.

THE LETTERS AND THE NAMES

Through the autumn and the winter the work goes on at the rate of three or four letters a night, in his own hand, sealed with his own ring. He writes to Lovat (already gone), to MacLeod, to Sleat, to Sutherland, to Cromartie, to MacDonald of Sleat, to MacKenzie of Coul, to MacDonell of Glengarry, to Munro of Foulis, to MacKay of Reay, to Ross of Pitcalnie, to the tutor of MacKintosh, to thirty-one chiefs in fourteen weeks. He advances forty thousand pounds of his own private money against Treasury drafts that do not come. He raises and pays the Independent Highland Companies. He keeps the loyal regiments in wine and shoes and powder out of his cellar and his purse. He does not, in any letter that survives, raise his voice. He writes the way a judge writes a charge to a jury: plainly, by the facts, and with the assumption that the reader is a gentleman who will be addressed as one.

THE GENTLEMAN IS FANCIFUL

On the fifteenth of April the Jacobite army marches past his own gate on its way to the moor. On the sixteenth the battle is fought half a mile from his burying-ground. Three days after, the Duke of Cumberland is at supper in Forbes's dining-room, in Forbes's chair, eating off Forbes's plate. The duke, by the tradition, asks his host whether he has any final petition of the Crown. Forbes asks for clemency for the captured Highland gentlemen, for the men whose chiefs he has spent eight months holding off the field, and for the men whose chiefs he could not hold. Cumberland, by the same tradition, looks across the table and says that the gentleman is fanciful, sir, like all his people. Forbes does not answer. He sets down his glass. The candles are again at the second hour. The wind is again off the firth.

THE RECKONING

By the reckoning of every careful historian of the rising since John Hill Burton, of the thirty-one chiefs Forbes corresponded with, between fourteen and seventeen kept their men out of the Jacobite army. The largest holdouts were MacLeod of MacLeod with over one thousand men, Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat with one thousand, Munro of Foulis, Sutherland, MacKay of Reay, Ross of Pitcalnie. The total of men kept off the field by the correspondence is variously estimated at between eight and twelve thousand. The Jacobite army at Culloden numbered about five thousand. Cumberland's army numbered about nine thousand. Had the half of the Highlands Forbes held come in for the prince, the numerical balance on the moor would have been reversed, and the rising would have been a Highland war of years instead of a single battle of an April afternoon. Forbes was given a baronetcy in 1746 and advanced no further. The forty thousand pounds were not repaid in his lifetime. He died at Culloden House on the tenth of December 1747, sixty-two years old, with an estate of seven hundred pounds and a debt of sixteen thousand. The debt was settled by the Crown in 1763, by his nephew, fourth in the title.

THE CULLODEN PAPERS

Some risings are broken in the open and counted by the dead. Others are broken in a writing-room by a private gentleman who pays for the broken half himself and is not thanked for it inside his own century. Eighty-seven letters in Duncan Forbes's hand were published in 1815 by his great-grand-nephew under the title The Culloden Papers, and have been, by every careful biographer of him since, the central documentary source for the political holding of half the Highlands through the rising of the forty-five. The book sits in the library at Culloden House, four miles east of Inverness, on the strip of ground the Jacobite army marched across, half a mile above the small private burying-ground where he lies.