The Rout of Moy

A rising is rarely saved by its prince. More often it is saved, for one further month or one further mile, by someone whose name was not written into the plan: a wife left at home, a smith in a byre, a boy on a back stair. The night decides who that person will be, and the person has the length of a breath to decide whether to answer.

THE HOUSE AT MOY

Anne Farquharson of Invercauld was married at eighteen to Aeneas Mackintosh, twenty-second chief of clan Chattan, and came north as mistress of Moy Hall on the south shore of the loch. Her husband holds a captain's commission in the Earl of Loudon's regiment and serves the government at Inverness. She does not. When the prince crossed the Forth in the autumn of 1745 she rode out in a riding habit of Mackintosh tartan with pistols at her saddle and raised four hundred men of the name for him, in her husband's absence and against his coat. The men of the regiment, half amused and wholly in earnest, call her Colonel Anne. She is twenty years old. The rising has come back over the border out of England in the new year, the prince has fallen back from Derby, and on the evening of the sixteenth of February seventeen hundred and forty-six he asks for a bed at Moy Hall on the road north from Aberdeen. She gives him one. She keeps a fire in the great chamber and does not go up to her own.

A BOY ON THE BACK STAIR

It is between ten and eleven at night when the boy comes up. He is the apprentice of a saddler in Inverness whose name is recorded as Lachlan Mackintosh, and he has run the fifteen miles in the dark and the wet, and his hose are black to the knee. His master has been drinking in the town and has heard the thing in plain words. Lord Loudon has put fifteen hundred men under arms in the streets of Inverness, with cavalry at the head, and means to march on Moy in the small hours and take the prince in his bed. The boy delivers the message in the great chamber. Anne pays him and sends him to the kitchen for bread.

She has, by her own count, the prince, his French officer O'Sullivan, eight Mackintosh gentlemen of the household, and four men of the place in the byre across the yard. Thirteen muskets, perhaps fourteen. The road from Inverness is fifteen miles of moor and wood. At a forced march in the dark, with cavalry held back to the pace of foot, that is four hours, perhaps a little less. It is now eleven. They will be at the avenue by three.

THE SECOND IN THE GREAT CHAMBER

To wake the prince and put him on a horse is to put him into open country in the dark with eight men, against fifteen hundred at the run, and his white face known to every dragoon north of Stirling. To leave him asleep is to set thirteen muskets at the door of Moy Hall against a regiment with field guns by daylight. There is a third thing, and it is the thing she has the length of a breath to find. The road from Inverness narrows three miles below the Hall, between the burn and the high heather, in a stretch of wood where a column cannot see its own length and the wind comes off the loch and carries every sound back along the line. She has walked the road a hundred times. She knows the place the way a smith knows the place on the hoof to set the nail. She does not wake the prince. The choice is not his, because to give it to him is to lose the hour in his deliberation, and the hour is what she has. She rings for Donald Fraser.

Fraser is her father's blacksmith, brought north into her household at her marriage. He is fifty. He has shod horses for thirty years and knows the road as he knows the sole of his own foot. He comes in under his cap, in his shirtsleeves, and stands inside the door. She tells him what is coming and where to go and what she wants him to do there. She wants him to take his four men down to the wooded stretch, to spread out at fifty paces in the heather on the loch side of the road, and when Loudon's column comes up to fire from five different places and call the slogans of Cameron and MacDonald and Keppoch and Mackintosh into the wind, the way the regiments of a Highland army in the dark shout across to know each other's flanks. To make Loudon, who cannot see his own van, believe that the prince's whole army is on him at the road. Fraser hears her out. He does not ask any questions. He picks up the musket from beside the byre door, takes the four men, and goes.

THE FIVE IN THE HEATHER

They are Donald Fraser the smith and four men of the place whose names the next century half remembers: a herd, a gillie, two of the household. They go down the road on foot through sleet, in plaids, with one musket apiece and a pistol or two between them. Fraser sets them at intervals of fifty paces in the bracken on the rising ground above the road, where the wood thins to heather and the wind blows from the loch back the way Loudon will come. He goes to ground himself in the dead bracken at the road's edge, and lies there listening to the water and his own heart and the sleet coming down on the heather, and waits.

Loudon's column comes up at perhaps half past three. Fifteen hundred foot in marching order, dragoons at the head, the road narrow and the men two and three abreast, no drum. Fraser hears the bits before he hears the boots. He lets the dragoons come up to within thirty paces and then fires one musket into the head of the column and roars the slogan of Lochiel into the dark, Chlanna nan con thigibh a so 's gheibh sibh feoil, sons of the dogs, come hither and get flesh, the Cameron cry that any government soldier from Fort William has heard at second hand and feared at first. The four men in the heather fire and shout from four different bearings, calling Cameron and MacDonald and Keppoch and Mackintosh into the wind. The dragoons at the head of the column, who can see neither the road behind them nor the heather above them, hear the slogans of four separate clans on three sides of them in the dark and conclude what any column in their place would conclude. The whole Jacobite army is on the road.

The column breaks. The dragoons wheel and ride back through their own foot. The foot, hearing the horses come back at them and the slogans still calling out of the heather, take it for the rout it sounds like and run. Fifteen hundred men go back down the road to Inverness in the dark at the pace of the most frightened among them, and the five in the bracken lie still and let them go.

CHA TILL MI TUILLEADH

One man was hit. Donald Ban MacCrimmon, hereditary piper to the MacLeods of Dunvegan, marching with the government at the head of Loudon's column, took a musket ball at Fraser's first shot and was dead before the column turned. He had composed his own lament on the march south from Skye, Cha till mi tuilleadh, I shall return no more, in the certainty of what was coming. The tune is still played. He is the only fatality of the night. The road back to Inverness in the small hours of the seventeenth carried fifteen hundred men in disorder and one piper across a saddle, and the affair has been called the Rout of Moy since the day after it happened.

THE MORNING IN THE GREAT CHAMBER

The prince woke at first light to a story. He was told it over breakfast in the great chamber by Colonel Anne, who had not been to bed. He thanked her privately and did not make it public, because to make it public was to publish that he had slept eight miles from Inverness with thirteen muskets at his door and been saved by a smith. Three weeks later, at Falkirk, her husband Aeneas Mackintosh was taken prisoner by the prince's army and sent home to Moy Hall under guard, where he was given into the custody of his own wife. She is said to have met him at the door of the Hall with a curtsy and the words Your servant, Captain, and he is said to have answered Your servant, Colonel, and they went in to dinner. After Culloden, two months further on, when the rising was finished on the moor above Drummossie and the country was given over to the dragoons, she was held five weeks at Inverness in the custody of Lady Loudon, the mother of the man she had routed at her door, and then released into her husband's keeping. They lived together at Moy for forty years and had no quarrel of it that any record has kept.

RETURN

The hour given to the unprepared is not given twice, and is not given for long. It is given to a wife of twenty in a tartan plaid on a wet night in February, and to a smith of fifty in his shirtsleeves with one musket and four men in the heather, and the country round about owes them the breath of a further month. The rising went on to Culloden and ended there, and the long settlement after it broke the Highlands in ways the night at Moy could not undo. But the night itself stood. Colonel Anne's portrait, in riding habit with a pistol at her hip and a bonnet of blue with a white cockade, hangs in the great chamber at Moy Hall where she sat out the dark of the sixteenth of February, and the chiefs of Mackintosh have lived in the house ever since, and the road from Inverness still narrows at the stretch of wood above the loch where five men in the heather called the names of four clans into the wind.