Lord George Murray at Culloden morning

A campaign is not always lost on the field where the bodies fall. More often it is lost the night before, in a turf-walled room by candlelight, when the one man in the army who has read the ground is overruled by the one man who has read only the map. The professional soldier knows this and dreads it: that the decisive hour will arrive not as a charge but as a conversation, and that he will be on the losing side of it before a single piece is fired.

THE FIFTH SON OF ATHOLL

Lord George Murray of Tullibardine was fifty-two years old on the morning of the sixteenth of April 1746, fifth son of the 1st Duke of Atholl, and the most experienced soldier in the prince's command. He had carried a Royal Scots commission in the Marlborough wars, had been out in the rising of 1715, had taken French pay in the Spanish descent of 1719, and had come home under indemnity to farm at Tullibardine for twenty-five years before riding into Perth in September 1745 to lay his sword at the feet of Charles Edward Stuart. Since Prestonpans he had been Lieutenant-General. He had carried the army into England as far as Derby and brought it home again without losing a gun. He had won the action at Falkirk in January. He had, through all of it, been at odds with Colonel John William O'Sullivan, the prince's Irish-French Adjutant-General, whose military judgement he distrusted and whose access to the prince's ear he could not match.

THE NIGHT MARCH

The plan had been O'Sullivan's and the prince's, and Murray had carried it under protest. The Jacobite army, eight thousand on paper and five thousand in fact, was to leave Drumossie Moor at eight in the evening of the fifteenth, cover the twelve miles to Nairn in darkness, and fall on the Duke of Cumberland's camp before first light, the duke's birthday having been kept that day with an issue of brandy to every government soldier. The men had not eaten. A single biscuit had been served at noon and nothing since. By midnight the column was strung out over four miles of broken track, with Lochiel's Camerons at the front and the stragglers from the rear vanishing into the heather by tens and hundreds to lie down and sleep. At three in the morning Murray was at Kilravock, still four miles short of Nairn, with the eastern sky already beginning to grey at the edge. He turned the column about. There would be no surprise. There was only the road back.

THE BOTHY AT A QUARTER TO FOUR

The rain came up from the firth in slow grey sheets as he rode ahead of his Atholl Brigade and dismounted at a turf-walled bothy by the lower park of Culloden House. A tin lantern stood on the table, and on the table a pencilled sketch of the country between Inverness and Nairn drawn by his brigade-major. His elder brother William, the attainted Duke of Atholl, was already there. O'Sullivan came in from the dark. The prince came up the path from Culloden House last, in his riding cloak, having slept perhaps two hours. Murray had not slept in thirty-eight. He set his case of orders on the table and spoke in plain terms, as a soldier to his commander: the army was not capable of fighting today. The men had not slept in two nights nor eaten in eighteen hours. The ground at Drumossie was open boggy moor with no cover, and Cumberland had artillery and dragoons. The army must withdraw south-west across the Nairn into the broken country at Cawdor and Lethen, gather the stragglers, and engage on ground of its own choosing. He had carried this argument to the prince twice already in the past three days. He carried it a third time now.

He looked across the table at O'Sullivan and saw the answer in the man's face before it was spoken. O'Sullivan had picked Drumossie because Drumossie sat between Inverness and Cumberland on the map, and because a defensive position drawn in pencil on the Edinburgh chart had a logic that survived only until one walked the actual ground in actual rain. O'Sullivan had not walked it. The prince, who had been told for two months that Lord George opposed every plan, did not know that every plan had been O'Sullivan's, nor that O'Sullivan had opposed every plan of Murray's in turn, because O'Sullivan had had the prince at supper for six weeks and Murray had been with the army on the road. He understood, in the slow way a man understands a wound he has already taken, that the case was already decided and that what remained was only the form of words by which it would be put on him. If the army stood at Drumossie this morning, three thousand men would lie on the moor by the end of the afternoon, and the cause would be finished in this generation. If it crossed the Nairn, there were a fortnight's marches in the broken country and an even chance against Cumberland on ground of his own choosing. He set the words down carefully, one after the other, as a man sets stones in a wall he knows will fall.

O'Sullivan answered, in Murray's own later account, that the ground at Drumossie is the ground we have, and that the men will fight in three hours when the lines form. The prince said that he would hear no more of withdrawal: the army would form on the moor at first light. Murray put the cap back on the leather case. He stood up. He requested only that the order be set in writing, and that the dispositions on the right of the line be by his hand and not by Colonel O'Sullivan. The prince agreed. He saluted, and went out into the rain.

THE LINE AT HALF PAST TEN

The line formed on Drumossie Moor at half past ten in the morning. The Atholl Brigade, the Camerons of Lochiel, the Stewarts of Appin, the MacLachlans were on Murray's right where he had set them. The MacDonalds, who held by ancient claim the right of every Stuart battle line since Bannockburn, were on the left in a sulk, O'Sullivan having moved them because he disliked their officers. Cumberland's army came up from Nairn at midday and deployed in three lines at five hundred yards, the artillery train in the intervals, the dragoons on either flank. The duke's guns opened at one. The Highland charge on the right went forward at twenty minutes past, under Murray himself with his sword drawn, broke the first government line of foot, and reached the second where the canister of the supporting batteries took it apart in three minutes. The MacDonalds on the left did not move until the right was already broken. They advanced too late, into canister at long range, and never closed. The line broke at two. Hawley's dragoons rode down the fugitives across the moor for the next two hours, and gave no quarter.

RUTHVEN, AND AFTER

Murray came off the field with about three hundred men of the Atholl Brigade and the rearguard, and gathered the remnant at Ruthven Barracks in Badenoch the following week. Two thousand stood there in arms still, asking for orders. The prince's order came back through Cluny MacPherson on the twentieth: let every man seek his safety as best he can. Murray wrote his letter of dismissal to the prince on the seventeenth, before that order came, blaming O'Sullivan and the Irish-French staff for the disaster at Drumossie and absolving himself of nothing but the want of having been listened to. He went into hiding in the hills above Tullibardine through the summer of forty-six while Cumberland's regiments harried the glens, took ship at Bergen in December, and never set foot in Scotland again.

EXILE AT CLEVES

He lived twelve years more on a French pension, at the Hague, at Emmerich, at Cleves in the Lower Rhine. He wrote his Marches of the Highland Army, the long memorandum that is the principal Jacobite defence of his own conduct and the principal indictment of O'Sullivan, in a room he rented above a Dutch bookseller. He saw the prince once in Paris, briefly, and was not received again. He saw his wife and children only at intervals, when they could cross to him. He died at Medemblik in October 1760, sixty-six years old, and was buried there in a Protestant churchyard far from the green braes of Tullibardine. The memorandum was not printed until 1842.

THE GROUND HE HAD READ

The age of the rising closed at Drumossie in the space of twenty minutes, but it had already closed in the bothy four hours before, when the man who had walked the ground was overruled by the man who had drawn it. Lord George Murray was not the kind of soldier to whom legends attach themselves in life; he was careful, professional, scrupulous, and right. The decisive hour was offered to him in the form he had been trained for, a council of war at a table with a map, and he gave the correct answer; the answer was not taken. The ground at Drumossie is, since 1881, the Culloden Battlefield in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. The line of the Atholl Brigade is marked at the right of the field, and the gravestones of the Stewarts of Appin and the Camerons stand a few paces forward of where they fell. The moor remains open and boggy, exactly as he had described it that night in the bothy, on a wet April morning when the rain comes up from the firth.