Clan Robertson · 1745
Struan joins the prince at Glenfinnan
On the afternoon of the nineteenth of August 1745, on the grass shelf above the head of Loch Shiel where the Glenfinnan monument now stands, Charles Edward Stuart raised the standard of his father James VIII and the Jacobite cause for the second time in thirty years. About one thousand two hundred Highland clansmen were on the hillside by sunset, principally Camerons of Lochiel and MacDonalds of Clanranald and Glenaladale and Glencoe. Among the older men in the assembly was the chief of Clan Donnachaidh, Alasdair Ruadh Robertson of Struan, then aged seventy-five, the same Robertson who had brought his clan out for the Old Pretender in 1715, who had been wounded at Sheriffmuir, who had been pardoned and returned to his estates in 1731. He had walked from his house at Struan, fifteen miles east of the head of Loch Shiel, to the gathering at Glenfinnan, in the company of about four hundred of his men. He was, by every contemporary report, the oldest man on the field. He went home to Struan with a captured English officer's coach after the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans six weeks later. The coach is, by tradition, what the prince gave him to ride home in because he could no longer walk the distance.
It is a quarter past three on the afternoon of the nineteenth of August 1745, on the bracken slope above the head of Loch Shiel, in the long late-summer light off the loch. He is seventy-five years old. He is Alexander Robertson, fourth of Struan, chief of Clan Donnachaidh, also known by the Gaelic patronymic Alasdair Ruadh, the red-haired Alexander, although his hair has long since gone white. He is in plaid over a shirt of fine linen, a targe slung at his back, his broadsword in his hand because he has been told by Cameron of Lochiel an hour ago that the prince will arrive in the next half hour and there will be the formal raising of the standard, and a chief is meant to be ready.
He has walked the fifteen miles from Struan to the head of the loch in the past two days, along the south side of Loch Eil and through the hill paths above Acharacle, with his clansmen of Donnachaidh in column behind him, four hundred men of the lower glens. He has, by his own private letter to his factor at Struan written this morning, an attack of gout in the right knee that has been with him for the past week and that is, this afternoon, unbearable. He has not told the men.
He thinks: I was on this same hill thirty years ago, in spirit if not in body, when Mar raised the standard at Braemar, and I came out for the father.
He thinks: I was forty-five then. I am seventy-five now. The country was not ready in 1715. The country may be ready in 1745.
He thinks: the prince is twenty-four years old. The prince has come from Eriskay with seven men. The prince has, in the past three weeks, gathered Cameron and Glengarry and Glenaladale on the strength of a name. That is more than I expected when I started walking from Struan.
He thinks: I have not told the men of the gout. The men cannot see me down. I will be on this hill at five o'clock when the standard goes up, and I will go to the prince's hand.
He thinks: I am the oldest man on the hillside. I am the man who carries the memory of 1715 in this assembly. The prince will know who I am.
The prince came up the slope at twenty past four, in tartan trews and a coat of plain blue, with the Marquess of Tullibardine (the Duke of Atholl who had been attainted in 1715 and lived in exile thirty years) walking beside him to raise the standard, because Tullibardine was the Jacobite peer in the field that afternoon. Tullibardine, by then sixty-six and arthritic himself, was helped up the bracken by two of his Atholl men. The standard was a square of blue silk on a long shaft, with the white roundel and the red cross of St George. Tullibardine raised it at four-thirty.
The prince made a brief speech, in English, in which he committed himself to the cause of his father and his country and called upon the gentlemen of Scotland to stand with him. He then walked along the line of the chiefs and lairds in turn. Robertson of Struan, leaning hard on his broadsword as a stick, was the third or fourth man the prince came to. The prince, by his own account preserved in the Stuart Papers, took both of Struan's hands in his and said: Mr Robertson, you fought for my father at Sheriffmuir. I am not going to let you walk back to Struan. Struan said, by Lochiel's witness: Your Royal Highness, I will go where the standard goes. The prince laughed.
Six weeks later, on the twenty-first of September 1745, the Jacobite army crushed Sir John Cope's government force at Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh, in five minutes of close-range Highland charge. Among the captured equipment was Cope's personal coach, a four-wheeled berlin with leather upholstery. The prince, by the tradition of Atholl and Strathearn, gave the coach to Robertson of Struan with the words to take you home, Mr Robertson, since you walked from Struan to find us. Struan rode home in the coach to Atholl after Prestonpans. He could not, by then, take the field with the army on the march south to England, and was nursed at Struan by his clan through the winter. He was on the field at Falkirk in January 1746 in a chair that was wheeled to the lee of a stone wall, and was taken back to Struan after the engagement; his men fought on without him. He was not at Culloden in April. He died at Carie of Rannoch on the twenty-eighth of April 1749, three years and three days after Culloden, seventy-nine years old. He is buried in the Robertson burying-ground at Dunalastair on Loch Rannoch, ten miles from his birth-house at Struan. The coach the prince gave him was kept by the Robertson chiefs of Struan for several generations and was eventually sold off in 1810 by a financially distressed heir; its later history is unrecorded. The Glenfinnan monument went up in 1815, by the bequest of Alexander MacDonald of Glenaladale, in white granite, on the spot where the standard was raised. The four hundred names of the men who came out of the lower glens with Struan are not on it, but the name on the inscription is Charles Edward Stuart, 1745, and the standard, which had been lost on the field at Culloden three years later, is in the National Museum of Scotland, blue silk, faded, with the staple-holes of the staff still cut into the linen edge.