The Battle of Culloden, seventeen forty-six.
Um, this defeat was inevitable.
The Highland Jacobite army, had lost already, before, the battle started.
They were hungry, ill-supplied, and ill-led.
Um, they'd lost in a deeper sense.
The previous year, this army had got as far as Derby, in England.
And the leader and pretender, Prince Charles, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had wanted to push onto London, until dissuaded by the clan chiefs, who formed his officer corps.
Thereby, they belied their rash reputation.
In fact, a push to London, um, might have succeeded.
Um, the Hanovarian Home Defense Forces, were tiny, and badly organised.
The main British Army being on the continent, fighting France and Prussia.
And even the king.
The Hanovarian King, George II, was out of the country.
He was the last English king actually, to lead his armies in battle.
If the half-Jacobite gentry of lowland Scotland, Wales, and England, did not, did not rise up for Prince Charles, as the Highlanders had done.
Equally, they were not rallying to George II of Hanover, either.
A point, often overlooked.
Much of the country was in solid neutrality, waiting to see which way the cat would jump.
So, if the Highland Army, had pressed on, from Derby to London, in seventeen forty-five, there's just a chance, that there could have been a Jacobite restoration.
But it was not to be.
The chance was missed.
Uh, by turning north, turning back at Derby, the army lost momentum, and the intervening year, between then, and Culloden, had been one long, slow, depressing retreat through England back up to Scotland.
To their heartland in the Highlands.
Until they could go no further.
Culloden is near Inverness.
Inverness is in the north-east tip of Scotland.
Note, I said the Jacobite Highland Army.
There is nothing inevitable about, this coupling of adjectives.
The Jacobites, have many alleged supporters all over Britain.
See what I have said above, or hear what I have said above.
While the Highland clans, had been historically, agin' the Government.
Any Government.
And no particular friends to the Stuarts, on the whole, in the days of Stuart prosperity.
But in forty-five, they took their opportunity to be agin' the Hanovarian Government.
And this proved a disastrous last Highland fling, if you'll excuse the pun.
So I think more significant, than the final extinction, or the destruction of Jacobitism at Culloden.
Which have been just a substitute of one royal family for another is the virtual destruction which ensued of a whole society and culture.
The Gaelic highlands.
This followed with a state terrorism and repression, instituted, by, the Hanovarians.
And later developments, like the clearances of the Highlands, where people were, kicked out.
Often by their own, uh, clan chiefs, in favour of sheep.
That came later about eighteen hundred.
Um, until then, you had the survival of something interesting and odd.
The survival of a pre-feudal, near dark-age tribal society in Britain.
Though, in a gradually contracting area.
The Gaels of Scotland, had not overall had a successful history.
They had founded the Kingdom of Scotland as the Scottish monarchy.
Um, this is the age that Shakespeare makes famous.
The age of King Duncan, and MacBeth, and Malcolm Canmore, they're all Gaelic-speaking.
And_ but Malcom Canmore who married an English wife.
And paradoxically introduced some Norman aristocrats to Scotland, and turned southern Scotland round to an Anglo-French civilisation.
But even in the sixteenth century, um, the Gaelic-speaking area was about a half of Scotland, in terms of population.
By the, um, seventeen hundreds however, it was about one seventh of the population.
And wild parts of lowland Scotland were progressing, the Gaels much less so.
And then came the disaster of Culloden.
Um, nevertheless, um, we have, an immense loss of a language and culture.
Culloden is the turning point.
Um, Wordsworth celebrates, or remarks on this, in his, um, poem about the girl reaping in the Hebrides.
Um, when he is a tourist there in the early eighteen hundreds.
She's singing it in Gaelic, and he says, he writes, 'will no one tell me what she sings.
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow, of sad, far off, forgotten things, and battles long ago.
'
That's extremely likely, because that about sums up Highland history.
Um, by, the eighteen fifties, the Highlands are fashionable again.
Queen Victoria builds Balmoral there, expands it.
She has her servants in Highland dress, she has her special friend John Brown, an outspoken Highland servant.
And the Royal Family have been wearing kilts, in spite of their predominantly German blood, and going there ever since.
People that go up the Highlands to shoot.
But the thing is, that the Highlands, like a tiger, turned into a hearth rug, have been pacified completely.
Um, an interesting, if obstreperous society, and civilisation, is, burning very low.
I think about eighty thousand or ninety thousand people speak Scottish Gaelic.
There are more people in Scotland who speak Urdu, and uh, one can, in a sense, I think, regret it.
Um, for a long time, the destruction of the Highlands wasn't regretted.
The lowland Scots didn't like the Highlanders.
And, English historians would say it's all in the, um, name of progress.
The early twentieth century historian, Trevellian, himself the great, uh, gr_ nephew of, a man of Highland descent, Jim McCauley.
Who_ and McCauley was somebody who, although of Highland descent disapproved of the Highlanders.
But Trevellian said, an Afghanistan could not be tolerated fifty miles from the modern Athens.
Meaning enlightenment Edinburgh.
Nowadays we would take perhaps a more sympathetic view of Highland civilisation.
What it has done of course, is spread the Highlanders all over the, um, world, in a sense.
So, you get, upper class Englishman of Highland descent.
Like Harold MacMillan, who became Prime Minister of England, and married Duke's daughters.
And, um, that kind of thing.
But, the Highlands itself, really is gone.
It's a vast, empty countryside