Clan Murray

On the morning of the sixteenth of April 1746, on the ridge above the Moray Firth at Drumossie Moor, Lord George Murray, Lieutenant-General of the Jacobite army, in his fifty-second year, the most experienced soldier in the prince's command, met his cousin the Duke of Atholl and the Irish-French chief of staff John William O'Sullivan in council an hour before first light. The Jacobite army had marched twelve miles overnight in an attempted surprise attack on the Duke of Cumberland's camp at Nairn, had failed of the surprise because the column had not made the distance, and had returned to Drumossie at three in the morning, exhausted and unfed. Murray had advised before the night march, and now advised again before the dawn, that the army was not in a fit state to fight, that the boggy ground at Drumossie was not the ground for a Highland charge against artillery, and that the army should withdraw south-west into the broken country across the Nairn River where Cumberland's cavalry could not deploy. Charles Edward Stuart and O'Sullivan overruled him. The line formed at Drumossie at half past ten. Cumberland's army arrived at midday. The Highland charge went forward at one and was broken in twenty minutes by canister and musketry. Lord George Murray escaped with his life and a rearguard of Atholl Brigade men, fought a Jacobite remnant action at Ruthven a week later, and went into permanent exile at Cleves in the Low Countries, where he died in 1760.

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