No sooner was the charge of the Highlanders broken than the English regiments closed in upon them with the bayonet. Cumberland had with some skill, instructed his men not to use their bayonets on the adversaries immediately in front of them in a melée, who were protected by their small shields, but to stab sideways at the assailants of their right hand men; what was to become of the unfortunate man on the extreme left of the line apparently was not stated in the Duke’s order. Against the solid press of the well-fed English soldiers, at least two to one, the broken half-starved Highlanders could make no way, and for the first time in the whole campaign fell back before them; the Macdonalds on the left wing being the only part of the line which retreated in anything like order. So far the battle had been fairly fought, and the Scots fairly beaten; had the Duke of Cumberland treated them with the ordinary humanity of civilized war, even as civilized war was understood in those brutal days, not one word would have been said against him, and he might have handed a clean name down to posterity. As it was, he preferred to give full play to the most brutal instincts that a man was ever cursed with. The chief charge against the Duke of Cumberland, and the charge is fully substantiated by undeniable testimony--is that in cold blood he ordered the enemy’s wounded to be butchered. Nay that a barn into which twenty poor wounded Highland men had crept was deliberately set on fire, adding to the agony of their wounds the intolerable pain of death by fire. That he allowed no sort of attention to be given to the wounded Scots, but, returning to the field two days after from the pursuit, and finding still some poor wounded wretches lying where they had fallen, he fiendishly ordered them to be put to death, some by the bullet, some by the bayonet, some by the clubbed musket. It is said that he ordered General Wolfe, then a young officer, to kill a wounded man, but that Wolfe told him, to his credit, that he would sooner resign his commission. And this was the man for whom King George and his Queen, Caroline, wished to put aside their first-born son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, whose greatest fault in their eyes perhaps was his gentleness of nature; his kindness to the poor and needy! For this great bloated Butcher, Frederick was exiled from his family, insulted in public and in private, and his character assailed in such a way that his name has been handed down in history as one to be scoffed at; though this latter injustice is mainly the work of one man, Lord Hervey, perhaps after all his bitterest enemy; certainly the meanest and most contemptible.