ONE of the great problems for Prince Charles Edward Stuart before and during the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46 was that he and his father – known to Jacobites as King James VIII and III but to history as the Old Pretender – were both Roman Catholics. I have written before about how this United Kingdom is an institutionally sectarian state as decreed by the Act of Union of 1707 with its infamous Article II: “That all Papists and persons marrying Papists shall be excluded from and for ever incapable to inherit possess or enjoy the Imperial Crown of Great Britain and the Dominions thereunto belonging or any part thereof.”
by Paul O Keeffe (Bodley Head £25, 432 pp)
On a bleak moor near the village of Culloden, just to the east of Inverness in the wild Highlands of Scotland, the final pitched battle to be fought on British soil began just after 1pm on April 16, 1746.
It was all over in 40 minutes, less time than half a football match, with mangled, stricken bodies strewn across the mud.
If you are looking for the over-romanticised Scotland of whisky and oatcakes, aristocratic mistresses, flights across the misty heather and sailing over the sea to Skye, this is not really the book for you.
Instead, as vivid as the Ten O’Clock News, it is a fascinating, meticulously researched, often brutally detailed account of a short episode in British history, the repercussions of which are still felt hundreds of years later: just look at the headlines. After all, the Scots have long had a fondness for the sweet melancholy of the lost cause.