Clan Forbes · 1745
Duncan Forbes holds the north
From the August of 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart raised the standard at Glenfinnan, until the disaster of Culloden in April 1746, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session and the senior judicial officer in Scotland, sat at his country house at Culloden, four miles east of Inverness, on the strip of ground that the Jacobite army would eventually march across, and wrote letters. He wrote to Lovat, who he knew was for the prince. He wrote to MacLeod of MacLeod, who he kept on the government side. He wrote to Sleat, to Sutherland, to Cromartie, to MacDonald of Slate, to MacKenzie of Coul, to MacDonell of Glengarry. He wrote to thirty-one separate Highland chiefs in fourteen weeks. About half of them came out for the prince anyway. The other half, in part because of his letters, did not. By the careful judgment of the histories, the smaller half of the Highlands held by Forbes is the half that turned the rising into a one-army campaign rather than a two. The cost of the work was forty thousand pounds of his own private money advanced to the government, never repaid in his lifetime. He died bankrupt at Culloden House in December 1747, twenty months after the battle that took his name.
It is the late evening of the third of October 1745, in the long writing-room at Culloden House, four miles east of Inverness, with the candles down to the second hour and the wind off the firth pushing against the south windows. He is sixty years old. He is Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session, third son of a Aberdeenshire laird, called to the Scottish bar in 1709, Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs, raised to the bench in 1737. He is in a long velvet coat over a shirt, with the gout in his left foot up on a stool, and a half-finished letter to MacLeod of MacLeod on the writing-slope.
On the desk to his right are the day's sealed packets: a letter to Lord President MacLeod, a letter to Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, a letter to MacKenzie of Coul, a letter to MacKintosh's tutor (because the chief himself is a boy of nineteen and the tutor will decide), a letter to Sutherland. He has, since the prince landed at Eriskay on the second of August, 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.
He thinks: Lovat will come out. Lovat has been writing to Murray of Broughton for six months. Lovat has decided. I will not waste a sheet of paper on Lovat.
He thinks: MacLeod will not come out. MacLeod is on the fence and the wife is on the right side of the fence. The wife is the deciding voice in MacLeod's house and the wife reads my letters at the breakfast table.
He thinks: Sleat is the test. Sleat could bring out fifteen hundred men of Skye if he chose to. Sleat has not, by Hugh MacDonald's letter to me of the eighteenth, decided. The letter to Sleat is the letter that matters this week.
He thinks: I have advanced eighteen thousand pounds of my own to the Royal Bank's loan. I have not been repaid in cash. I have a Treasury draft for six thousand on the basis of which I am paying Edinburgh wine merchants for the cellar I am keeping the regiments out of. I am, on paper, a wealthy judge of the highest court of this country. I am, in fact, three weeks from having to ask my brother John for the Edinburgh house rent.
He thinks: the price of doing this is that nobody on either side will know that I did it.
He thinks: 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.
By the reckoning of the historians of the rising, of the thirty-one Highland chiefs Forbes corresponded with through the autumn and winter of 1745, between fourteen and seventeen kept their men out of the Jacobite army. The most important of the holdouts were MacLeod of MacLeod (over one thousand men), Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat (one thousand men), Munro of Foulis, Sutherland of Reay, MacKay of Reay, Ross of Pitcalnie. The total of men kept off the field by Forbes's correspondence is variously estimated at between eight and twelve thousand. The Jacobite army at Culloden in April 1746 numbered about five thousand. Cumberland's army numbered about nine thousand. If the half of the Highlands that Forbes had kept out had come in for the prince, the numerical balance at Culloden would have been reversed. By the judgment of every careful historian since John Hill Burton, this is the substantial reason the rising was beaten on a single battlefield in five months and not in a long Highland campaign.
Duncan Forbes was at Culloden House on the morning of the sixteenth of April 1746. The Jacobite army marched past his gate the previous afternoon on its way to the moor. The Duke of Cumberland and his staff were in the house through the week of the battle and the weeks of the pursuit afterwards; Forbes received the duke as a guest in his own dining-room three days after the battle and gave him supper. The duke, by the tradition, asked Forbes whether he had any final petition. Forbes asked him for clemency for the captured Highland gentlemen. Cumberland, by the same tradition, said: the gentleman is fanciful, sir, like all his people.
Forbes was given a baronetcy in 1746 in recognition of his services and was advanced no further. The Treasury repayments of his private outlays did not come in his lifetime. He died at Culloden House on the tenth of December 1747, sixty-two years old, leaving an estate of some seven hundred pounds and a debt of sixteen thousand. The debt was not settled by the Crown until 1763, by his nephew, fourth in the title. He is buried in the small private burying-ground above Culloden House, half a mile from the field that took his name. His correspondence with the Highland chiefs of 1745, eighty-seven letters in his own hand, was published in 1815 by his great-grand-nephew as The Culloden Papers. The book is, by every careful biographer of Forbes since, the central documentary source for the political holding of half the Highlands during the rising of 1745.