Clan Murray · 1746
Lord George Murray at Culloden morning
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.
It is a quarter to four on the morning of the sixteenth of April 1746, in a turf-walled bothy at the head of the road up to Drumossie Moor, by the lower park of Culloden House, in pitch dark with the rain coming up from the firth. He is fifty-two years old. He is Lord George Murray of Tullibardine, fifth son of the 1st Duke of Atholl, formerly an officer in the Royal Scots in the Marlborough wars, formerly a French soldier in 1715 and 1719, the field commander of the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart, on this morning in his thirty-eighth hour without sleep.
On the table in the bothy are the Duke of Atholl (his elder brother William, the attainted duke), Colonel John William O'Sullivan (the prince's Irish-French chief of staff, in whom Murray has had no military confidence since the council before Falkirk), and the prince himself, who has just come up the path from Culloden House. The candle on the table is in a tin lantern. The map on the table is a sketch of the country between Inverness and Nairn, in pencil, by Murray's brigade-major.
The night march on Cumberland's camp at Nairn has failed. The Jacobite army left Drumossie at eight in the evening, planned to be at Nairn by two, and was at the half-way point at three in the morning, with two thousand men dropped behind from exhaustion and hunger. Murray turned the column about at three. He has, just now, ridden ahead with his Atholl Brigade and is at the bothy. The army is coming back along the road in the rain.
He says, in plain terms, to the prince and O'Sullivan: the army is not capable of fighting today. The men have not slept in two nights. They have not eaten in eighteen hours. The ground at Drumossie is open boggy moor with no cover and Cumberland has artillery and dragoons. We must withdraw south-west across the Nairn into the broken country at Cawdor and Lethen and gather the men. We will fight on broken ground or we will not fight.
He thinks: O'Sullivan will say no. O'Sullivan picked Drumossie because Drumossie is between Inverness and Cumberland and Drumossie is a defensive position by the line of the Edinburgh map. O'Sullivan has not been on Drumossie in daylight.
He thinks: the prince will side with O'Sullivan because the prince has been told for two months by O'Sullivan that I have been opposing every plan. The prince does not know that O'Sullivan has been opposing every of mine, because O'Sullivan has had the prince's ear at supper for the past six weeks and I have not.
He thinks: if the army stands at Drumossie this morning we will lose three thousand men by the end of the afternoon and the cause is finished in this generation.
He thinks: if we cross the Nairn we have a fortnight in the country to gather men and to engage Cumberland on ground of our choice, and the cause is not finished today.
O'Sullivan says, by Murray's later account: the ground at Drumossie is the ground we have. The men will fight in three hours when the lines form. The prince has said the army will fight at Drumossie.
The prince says, by Murray: Lord George, I will hear no more of withdrawal. The army will form on the moor at first light.
Murray puts the cap back on the leather case that has the orders of march in it. He stands up. He says: Your Royal Highness, I will form the right wing of the line at Drumossie at the hour you specify. I will request that the order be put in writing. I will request that the dispositions be by my hand on the right and not by Colonel O'Sullivan. The prince agrees. Murray salutes. He leaves the bothy. He goes back to his Atholl Brigade and tells them, in plain Scots, that the army will form at Drumossie at first light.
The line formed on Drumossie Moor at eleven in the morning of the sixteenth of April. The Atholl Brigade, the Camerons, the Stewarts of Appin, the MacLachlans were on Murray's right. The MacDonalds, who had a long-standing claim to the right of the line and who had been moved to the left because O'Sullivan disliked their officers, were on the left in a sulk. Cumberland's army arrived from Nairn at midday and deployed in three lines at five hundred yards. The artillery duel began at one. The Highland charge on the right went forward at one-twenty under Murray himself, broke the first government line of foot, and reached Cumberland's second line where the canister of the supporting batteries took it apart in three minutes. The MacDonalds on the left did not advance until the right was already broken; they advanced too late and were taken by canister at long range without contact. The line broke at two. The pursuit by the dragoons under Hawley was, by every account, vicious; quarter was not given on the field for the next two hours.
Murray rode off the moor with about three hundred men of the Atholl Brigade and the rearguard. He gathered the remnant at Ruthven Barracks the following week. The prince had, by then, ordered the army to disperse. Murray wrote his letter of dismissal to the prince on the seventeenth of April, blaming O'Sullivan and the prince's Irish-French staff for the disaster of Drumossie. He went into exile at the Hague and then at Cleves, lived on a French pension, and died at Medemblik in the Netherlands in 1760, sixty-six years old. He is buried there. He never returned to Scotland. His memorandum on the campaign of 1745–46, written in exile, was published in 1842 and is the principal Jacobite defence of his own conduct and the principal indictment of O'Sullivan. The Drumossie ground is, since 1881, the Culloden Battlefield, in the care of the National Trust for Scotland; the line of the Atholl Brigade and the gravestone of Clan Stewart of Appin and Camerons are marked at the right of the field. The boggy ground O'Sullivan had picked is, on a wet April morning, exactly as Murray described it that night in the bothy.