Killiecrankie

A cause is sometimes won and lost in the same gesture. The man who can hold a kingdom together by his presence alone is the man whose body cannot be spared, and the charge that proves him is the charge that takes him out of the saddle. The Stuart cause in Scotland was carried, in the summer of 1689, by one rider on a bay horse above a narrow pass, and what he did in fifteen seconds settled both the field below him and the long argument behind him.

THE VISCOUNT IN THE NORTH

John Graham of Claverhouse was forty-one years old in July 1689, a cavalry officer of fifteen years' standing, lately created Viscount Dundee by a king now in exile across the water. He had served in the Low Countries under William of Orange himself before he served against him; he had ridden the south-west of Scotland for Charles II and then for James VII, hunting Covenanters across the moss-hags, earning in the kirk the name Bluidy Clavers and in the country the name Bonnie Dundee. In April the Convention of Estates at Edinburgh had declared the throne forfeit and offered the crown to William and Mary. Dundee rode out of the city with fifty horse, climbed Dundee Law, set up his standard, and went north to the only ground where the old king still had soldiers. By the third week of July he had two and a half thousand Highlanders at his back, drawn in from Lochaber and Glencoe and Mull, against four thousand government foot under Major-General Hugh Mackay coming up the line of the Garry to relieve Blair Castle.

THE EVENING OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH

The sun was off the high ground at his back. It was the evening of the twenty-seventh of July, late enough that Mackay had cleared the pass below and drawn his line in two ranks on the plateau at Urrard, blocking the way north. Dundee had brought his Highlanders down from the Hill of Lude and arrayed them on the slope above, and there he held them through the long afternoon, refusing to be drawn, waiting for the sun to come round off the western shoulder so that it would be in the eyes of the government foot and not his own. He was on a bay horse, in a steel breastplate over a buff coat, a horse-pistol in each holster and a basket-hilted broadsword at his belt. On the right below him eight hundred Camerons under Lochiel; the MacDonalds of Keppoch beyond them; the MacLeans in the centre; the MacIans of Glencoe on the far left at the river. Mackay's line had muskets fitted with the new plug bayonet, the British army's standard issue, a blade that wedged into the muzzle of the discharged piece. The system worked against pike. It had not been tested against a Highland charge coming downhill.

A SECOND OF TIME ABOVE KILLIECRANKIE

Around seven the sun came off the ridge, and in the moment before he gave the word he was reckoning the arithmetic of fifteen seconds. Mackay was a Highland gentleman by birth, had fought under Turenne, knew his manual: the volley would be held until the charge was at thirty yards, because that was where ball would go through wool and bone together. Thirty yards in a downhill charge was fifteen seconds, and fifteen seconds was the time it took to seat a plug bayonet in a hot muzzle. The men would be on the line with their dirks before the bayonets were home. One volley. They had time for one volley, and if he led the right wing himself on the bay the line behind him would follow the horse, and if he sent a captain the line would hesitate and the volley would land at sixty yards where it could still kill the charge. There was a gap of two inches at the right armpit between the breastplate and the cuirass, where the leather strap took the weight; every cavalry officer of his generation rode with the same gap, and he knew it as a man knows the loose tooth in his own jaw. He had a wife at Dudhope outside Dundee and a son three weeks old whom he had seen once. He had a king in France with no other army. He raised the broadsword, nodded to the piper, and said, in a voice the regimental captains nearest him heard, Forward, gentlemen. Forward.

THE CHARGE

The pibroch opened on the right. The Cameron line moved down the slope at a walk, then at a run, and Dundee came on at the head of the right wing on the bay, his broadsword across his pommel, his right arm raised. At thirty yards Mackay's volley fired. A single ball took him under the right armpit in the gap of the breastplate, and he stayed in the saddle for fifteen seconds before he fell. The charge struck Mackay's line at the moment the bayonets were half-fixed. The line broke. Two thousand of Mackay's foot were killed in the ten minutes that followed, dirked or broadsword-cut at close range; another five hundred drowned in the Garry; the rest streamed south in a rout that did not stop until Stirling. The Highland casualties were under a thousand, but they were heavy in officers. Four of his Cameron men carried him from the field on his cloak.

BLAIR CASTLE, MIDNIGHT

They took him back to the chamber at Blair Castle that had been his command quarters in the morning. The ball had gone in clean and was lodged somewhere under the shoulder-blade and they could not get to it. He lay on the bed with the breastplate off and the buff coat opened, and he asked how the day went. They told him the field was won. By tradition he said, If it is well with him, it matters less with me, meaning the king. Whether he said it in those words or whether the words were given him afterwards by men who needed him to have said something, he died at midnight on the twenty-seventh of July, twelve hours after he had given the word forward on the slope. He was forty-one. The son at Dudhope was three weeks old and would not live to five.

DUNKELD, AND THE WAR LOST

Three weeks later the Highland army went south to Dunkeld under Colonel Cannon, an Irish officer of no Highland standing. There they met the new Cameronian Regiment, raised that summer in Lanarkshire from the Covenanting countryside, twelve hundred men who had grown up on the moors Dundee had hunted. The Cameronians held the town for four hours in the streets and the houses, firing from the cathedral and the laird's close, and at the end of the morning the Highland army, with no commander to hold it on the ground, broke and went home. The rising of 1689 ended at Dunkeld. The judgment has been consensus across two centuries: with Dundee out of the saddle the cause had no captain who understood the Highland system. He won the day at Killiecrankie and lost the war in the same minute.

THE LONG RETURN

The Stuart cause came back to the Highlands twice more, in the Fifteen and in the Forty-Five, and was beaten both times on ground a captain of his calibre might have chosen otherwise. Walter Scott, a hundred and twenty years later, set him in a song, Bonnie Dundee, and the song carried him into the parlours of a diaspora that no longer knew the Garry or the pass. The Grahams have carried him as a great captain, and he was a great captain. He is also the figure who proves the Zweig arithmetic in reverse: not the small man given the great hour and unable to seize it, but the great man given the great hour and seizing it at the cost of his own body, so that the seizing and the losing are the same motion. The gap at the armpit was the gap all the cavalry of his generation rode with, and the ball found it. At Old St Bride's Kirk at Old Blair, a flat stone in the floor of the ruined nave marks where they laid him, and the regiment that beat his army at Dunkeld kept the name Cameronian on its colours until 1968.