“How can I be a traitor when England is foreign to me?”

—William Wallace

Exactly 278 years ago today the last battle fought on the British mainland saw Jacobite forces under Charles Edward Stuart suffer defeat at the hands of a British army under the command of Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. It took place on Drumossie Moor, east of Inverness. What led up to 16 April 1746 was tragic, but what followed even more so.

Ever since the two kingdoms each coalesced over a thousand years ago, the relationship between Scotland and England had been fraught. After subduing Wales, Edward I almost succeeded in subjugating Scotland tooo. But, after reasserting independence at Bannockburn in 1314, the border rolled back and forth in a succession of raids and warfare for three centuries.

Peace came (in theory) with the 1603 Union of the Crowns. But the the Reformation in the previous century had divided Scots more than the English. Their austere brand of Calvinism in the English-speaking Lowlands underscored a cultural divide with Gaelic-speaking Highlanders.

These differences were subsumed by dissatisfaction with an autocratic Stuart dynasty that culminated in the English Civil War. The collapse of the Commonwealth soon after Cromwell’s death briefly restored control to mor incorrigible Stuarts until the “Glorious Revolution” set the staunchly Protestant William of Orange on the throne. This set the scene for a series of Jacobite rebellions, the most famous of which, was “The’45”, which came closest to succeeding.

Under “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, an army of mostly Catholic Jacobite highlanders reached Derby, causing government panic, a burning of papers and possible evacuation. But Jacobite nerve broke, and the retreat North led to Culloden. Most accounts end with the battle, with the 2,000 Jacobite, and 300 government casualties. However, the real tragedy was the aftermath; the demise of a culture that had evolved from Ulster to Dalriada to the Lords of the Isles.

The morning after the battle, Cumberland issued a declaration to his troops claiming the rebels had been instructed to give no quarter. This was untrue. Over the next two days, the moor was searched and wounded rebels were put to death. Prisoners were taken south to England to stand trial for high treason, many being crammed into hulks on the Thames to await trial. High-ranking “rebel lords” were executed on Tower Hill.

To address the religious disparity the British government enacted laws to further integrate the Highlands, with the Protestant, English-speaking bulk of Britain. Episcopalian ministers were drafted North to extract oaths of allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty, rather than any “King over the Water”. Those Lords who had remained loyal to the government were compensated for any loss.

But no matter how repressed and abused the Highlanders may have been in retribution, the most longstanding action that doomed the Highland culture was depriving them of their livelihood. Their wealth was measured in beasts, primarily the shaggy, long-horned highland cattle that survived the poor pasture and harsh winters. In the months that followed, over 20,000 head of livestock, sheep, and goats were driven South and sold at auction. None of the proceeds came back to their original owners. A 1746 Act even banned the wearing of tartan, although most highlanders had little else to wear.

This impoverished not just the clans, but the clan chiefs themselves. Those clan chiefs who had been “out” supporting the Jacobite rebellion were stripped of their estates. These were then sold and the profits used to further trade and agricultural improvements, mostly elsewhere.

But the harshest regime on these forfeit estates came not from the new owners, but from factors (professional managers) sent to manage them. Many were lowlanders with neither sympathy, nor understanding for the people put in their charge. Through diligent cultivation and hard work, clans could eke a living from their unpromising glens. But the factors wanted more. In increasing numbers, they evicted tenants and replaced them with more profitable “four-footed clansmen”: sheep.

Men enlisted in the much-feared highland regiments that fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Families gathered at the coast, making what living they could from fishing and gathering kelp. Most gave up this hardscrabble existence and took their chances in the colonies, large groups settling in Nova Scotia, Patagonia, Georgia, Australia, where some Gaelic remains spoken to this day.

There is little doubt that the feudal system of Highland clans would have had to adapt to modern life at some point. But the brutality of the Highland Clearances that followed on from Culloden meant that little survives that is authentic. Sir Walter Scott bears much of the blame. When George IV was the first British monarch to visit Scotland in two centuries, he made a pageant using the trappings of the now-harmless highlanders. Tailors have had a field day ever since inventing tartans no genuine teuchter would recognise. The Great Pipes were dragooned into military marching bands and the great pibroch laments forgotten.

Worst of all, the largely English regiments sent along General Wade’s new military roads that linked Forts William, Augustus and George with the civilised South found impoverished people speaking incoherently put the officers in mind of any other colony where the Raj was busy: making the world England”.

It is the origin of the disparaging way some people speak of the mean-minded tightness of the Scots and the London-centric superiority of the English upper classes—so much so that, within 50 years of Culloden the remaining Scots nobility—including Highland chiefs—were all speaking cut-glass Oxford English and indistinguishable from their southern peers.

However, the attempt to roll Scotland into a homogenous state by calling emerging companies “North British” and the streets of Edinburgh after prominent Englishmen rather foundered on the reluctance of the English to consider themselves “South British” or name anything in the imperial capital after anyone from the colonies. Althugh the 1707 Union was billed as a merger of equals. But the fact that only 59 of the 650 seats in the Commons come from Scotland means its voice is drowned out. The impotence of having 76%of those 59 being held by parties seeking independence makes a travesty of a union of equals and is an affront to democracy.

All of which goes a long way to explain the current independence movement, pushing towards 50% of those living in Scotland and why unionism languishes in a minority.

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