Bonnie Prince Charlie: The Bluff at Derby and the Ruin at Culloden

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Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome on December 31, 1720, in a household living on the Pope's charity and certain that God meant it to rule Britain. His grandfather, James II, had been deposed in 1688, and his father was the claimant known as the Old Pretender. Raised as a king in waiting, Charles found at 17 that most European courts would not even receive him as a prince. When a French invasion planned for 1744 was wrecked by a storm, he borrowed 180,000 livres, pawned his late mother's Sobieski jewels, and sailed for Scotland in July 1745 on his own.

This episode strips the folk songs away from the Jacobite rising. Charles lost his warship and heavy weapons before he arrived, landed at Eriskay with seven companions, and still talked the clans into war. He took Edinburgh and won at Prestonpans in minutes, then marched as far as Derby before the campaign came apart. What followed was the slaughter at Culloden on April 16, 1746, five months as a fugitive in the Hebrides, and four decades of drink, exile, and irrelevance that ended with his death in Rome in 1788 at age 67.

• He won over Donald Cameron of Lochiel by personally guaranteeing the full value of his estate if the rising failed, with money he did not have. The standard was raised at Glenfinnan on August 19, 1745.
• At Derby he confessed to his council that he had not received a single message of support from English Jacobites since leaving France, which broke his commanders' trust for good.
• Against the advice of Lord George Murray he fought on the flat, marshy ground of Culloden Moor, where government grapeshot tore into his men for almost half an hour before the order to charge.
• Flora MacDonald smuggled him from Benbecula to Skye dressed as an Irish spinning maid named Betty Burke, a disguise locals found tall and unladylike.
• In 1748 the French had him arrested on his way into the Paris Opera and expelled, and when his father died in 1766 the Pope refused to recognize him as king.