Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) by Frank McLynn Page B

than the much trumpeted ‘revolutions’ of the 1640s and 1688. 2
    The mind that conceived and carried out the 1745 rising was more than a mere adventurer’s. It was that of a man with real strategic flair. The problem was that the prince’s qualities did not fit easily into the eighteenth-century context. It is not just in his disdain for organised religion and his contempt for conventional forms of authority that the prince impresses as a ‘modern’ figure. The impatience and dislike for people who tried to ‘give him laws’ extended into the military sphere. Lord George Murray and his followers were ‘by the book’ conventional commanders. Murray was a very fine specimen of that genus to be sure, but he never transcended the limitations of blinkered eighteenth-century thinking: the slow, ponderous build-up; the slogging, murderous set-piece battles of Malplaquet, Laffeld and Minden.
    The prince was not hidebound in this way. He understood that the great exploits of human history were all ‘impossible’ until someone actually did them. He had the intuitive military flair of a Montrose (but without his tactical ability); he possessed the panache of a great cavalry commander like Murat. It was no accident that the prince was a great hunter. He thought of making war in terms of the chase: rapidity of movement, lightning thrusts, economy, sudden death. 3
    That such qualities can coexist with tactical myopia and ineptitude in the world of day-to-day politics has, I hope, been made sufficiently clear. We should not, however, be seduced into overstating the case. Charles Edward Stuart did not conquer Scotland simply on the basis of an ineffable magnetism that led important leaders of Scottish clan and feudal society into lemming-like suicide against their own interests. There was a pre-existing dynamic of social conflict at work in Scotland that Charles Edward was able to energise. Unless we admit this, we shall be nudged dangerously close to the more extreme version of the ‘great man’ theory of history. If the Scottish clan system was, as some historians claim, a peacefully evolving organism with decades of life left in it, which was convulsed by the thunderbolt arrival of the prince as if from outer space, then Charles Edward must indeed be one of the great figures of world history. 4
    Such a view, even if arrived at by implication, is a gross exaggeration. But we must never forget Charles Edward’s real achievement in the ’45 and how close he came to success. Paradoxically the danger of forgetting this is especially acute for the prince’s biographer. In the forest of detail, including much that is detrimental to the prince’s reputation, through which he must hack, there is a risk that by being too close to him the biographer will omit the aerial view. But for historians and general readers alike, Charles Edward’s claim to fame must always stand or fall on his achievements in 1745–6. The biographer is at fault if he does not give this fact due weight.
    The transition from historical figure to creature of legend can be charted only if the decline in the real Charles Edward is first traced. At his peak, the prince was handsome, intelligent, deeply compassionate, with great charm and affability, and possessed of a powerful personal magnetism. He enjoyed superb natural health and had tuned himself to concert pitch as a warrior. He was a crack shot and a fine horseman. His energy and charisma in the first four months of the ’45 laid deep foundations for the later legend of the Bonnie Prince. He seemed to lack none of the qualities of the ‘parfait, gentil knight’.
    At the nadir of his career the prince was depressive, paranoid, alcoholic, reclusive, prickly and aggressive. His health had deteriorated to an alarming point. He was chronically asthmatic and dropsical. Less than thirty years separates the crest from the trough. Such a steep decline suggests a profoundly unbalanced personality, lacking any