Men of the Cumberland type are to be found in all ages and in history of
all nations. Men in whom the beast is barely under the formal restraint
of ordered society, men in whom a savage sensuality is accompanied by a
savage cruelty, men who take a hideous physical delight in bloodshed,
darken the pages of all chronicles. It would be unjust to the memory of
Cumberland to say that in his own peculiar line he had many, if any,
superiors; that many men are more worthy of the fame which he won. To be
remembered with a just loathing as a man by whom brutalities of all
kinds were displayed, almost to the point of madness, is not the kind of
memory most men desire; it is probably not the kind of memory that even
Cumberland himself desired to leave behind him. But if he had cherished
the ambition of handing down his name to other times, "linked with one
virtue and a thousand crimes"; if he had deliberately proposed to force
himself upon the attention of posterity as a mere abominable monster, he
could hardly have acted with more persistent determination toward such a
purpose. In Scotland, for long years after he was dead and dust, the
mention of his name was like a curse; and even in England, where the
debt due to his courage counted for much, no one has been found to
palliate his conduct or to whitewash his infamy. As "Butcher" Cumberland
he was known while he lived; as Butcher Cumberland he will be remembered
so long as men remember the "Forty-five" and the horrors after Culloden
fight. Some of those horrors no doubt were due to the wild fury of
revenge that always follows a wild fear. The invasion of the young
Stuart had struck terror; the revenge for that terror was bloodily
taken.
Everything contributed to make Culloden fatal to the fortunes of the
Pretender. The discouragement of some of the clans, the disaffection of
others, the wholesale desertions which had thinned the ranks of the
rebel army, the Prince's sullen distrust of his advisers, the position
of the battle-field, the bitter wintry weather, which drove a blinding
hail and snow into the eyes of the Highlanders--all these were so many
elements of danger that would have seriously handicapped a better
conditioned army than that which Charles Stuart was able to oppose to
Cumberland. But the Prince's army was not well conditioned: it was
demoralized by retreat, hungry, ragged, dizzy with lack of sleep. Even
the terrors of the desperate Highland attack were no longer so terrible
to the English troops. Cumberland had taught his men, in order to
counteract the defence which the target offered to the bodies of the
Highlanders, to thrust with their bayonets in a slanting direction--not
against the man immediately opposite to its point, but at the unguarded
right side of the man attacking their comrade on the right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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