Athol Gathering, The

DESCRIPTION: "Wha will ride wi' gallant Murray, wha will ride for Geordie's sel'? He's the flower of Glenisla and the darling o' Dunkeld." "Every faithful Murray follows, first of heroes, best of men." Many other men join him to follow Prince Charlie
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1821 (Hogg)
KEYWORDS: jacobite soldier travel | Lord George Murray sword
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Oct 4, 1694 - Oct 11, 1760 - Life of George Murray
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hogg-JacobiteRelicsOfScotlandVol2 59, "The Athol Gathering" (1 text, 1 tune)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Gallant Murray
NOTES [2681 words]: I know of no evidence that this is actually traditional. Many things in Hogg are not. But Andy M. Stewart recorded a stirring version of this (as "The Gallant Murray") on the album "Donegal Rain." Apparently the Battlefield Band recorded it also. So it probably needs to be documented that, first, we have no proof it is traditional, and second, that the song is, at best, overly optimistic.
The song is about Lord George Murray, a younger son of the 1st Duke of Athol. His family history was complicated. Murray was a firm Jacobite in his early career, having taken part in the 1715 and 1719 rebellions. His oldest brother William was an even more committed Jacobite. But the Duke of Athol himself had stayed loyal, and when he died in 1724, by a special dispensation, his son James (who, unlike his older brother William, was loyal) had been given the Dukedom (Magnusson, p. 588). The younger Athol was able to gain a pardon for George in 1725. By 1739, George had given his oath of allegiance to George II.
Then came the Forty-Five. William Murray, the oldest of the brothers, was one of the "Seven Men of Moidart" who first landed in Scotland with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and became Charlie's Marquis of Tullibardine (and was generally regarded as the rightful Duke of Athol). Eventually George Murray too turned out for Prince Charles and the Jacobites.
Emphasis on "eventually." Early on, Murray was disinclined to join Charlie's under-manned, under-equipped forces (Reid, p. 17); the plan had been for the Jacobites to bring at least a brigade of troops from France, but the French never supplied them. Charlie ended up with two ships, the equivalent of a company of soldiers, and enough weapons for a brigade or two -- but all the troops and most of the weapons were on the ship Elizabeth, which got into a fight with a Hanoverian ship and was so damaged she had to turn back (Magnusson, pp. 586-587). Charlie landed with only a handful of men and enough weapons for a couple of regiments only. It was such a weak force that almost every chieftain, no matter how Jacobite, urged him to turn back, at least until Charlie talked them around. Even after Charlie managed to start bringing men in, Murray held back for some time (Reid, p. 23).
It sounds as if this song was written early in the rebellion, when Murray was trying to recruit men for what came to be called the "Athol Brigade." This did not go particularly well; McLynn, p. 18, says that the Murray brothers experienced the "utmost difficulty" in raising troops, and had to resort to pressure. Even so, although labelled a "brigade," the Athol Brigade was closer in strength to a regiment than a brigade. But at least it turned out for Charlie. One of Charlie's other high officers wrote that his "his presence... was thought necessary, to determine the Athol men to joyn" (Reid, p. 23) -- which is odd, since one brother, Tullibardine, was already with Charlie, and another, Athol, was firmly on the side of George II; did they think Murray was a tiebreaker or something?
Charlie's forces were short of experienced officers (the Jacobites commissioned a vast array of gentlemen, but most of them had too few ordinary soldiers to match their ranks -- Reid, p. 202 -- and most had no training or competence), so Murray was appointed Lieutenant General -- the highest rank possible (since Charlie was the General). It was a post that entitled Murray (and the other two Lieutenant Generals, Tullibardine and the Duke of Perth; Reid, p. 23) to command a division. And Charlie's forces never amounted to much more than a division. Murray also did a lot of work training the rebels (Magnusson, p. 591), and he performed some of the functions of a Chief of Staff. And, to his credit, he seems to have tried quite hard to care for his men and see them properly equipped (McLynn, p. 29) -- a responsibility many officers of the time ignored.
Assessments of Lord George's ability vary tremendously. Wilkinson, for instance, calls him a "strategical genius" (p. 85), though the description that follows shows that Wilkinson is referring more to his ability to manage an army in motion than his ability to plan a battle. This is also what McLynn seems to mean when he calls Murray a "tactical genius of a high order." But Reid, p. 30, remarks that "As events throughout the campaign were to demonstrate there was indeed much about soldiering which Murray did not understand."
What is noteworthy is that, although Murray was regarded as the best soldier in the army, prior to 1745 seems never to have commanded anything larger than an understrength regiment in the 1715 rebellion (Young/Adair, p. 256), and his 1712-1715 service in the regular army had been as an ensign, the lowest of all officer ranks (Reid, p. 203) so that his position in the Jacobite army, both as a wing commander and also a sort of de facto chief of staff was about two grades above his previous best rank and his experience. And he had no experience of high command, and no more strategic experience than anyone else in the army; contrary to what everyone seemed to think, there was absolutely no reason to expect him to be competent at any grade above that of major!
And he had become stubborn; Reid, p. 23, quotes one of his own aides as saying "Lord George was vigilant, active, and diligent; his plans were always judiciously formed, and he carried them promptly and vigorously into execution. However, with an infinity of good qualities, he was not without his defects: proud, haughty, blunt and imperious, he wished to have executive disposal of everything and, feeling his superiority, would listen to no advice." He was so cranky that, at Carlisle, he resigned his commission. McLynn, p. 45, says it was a power play to try to get a vote of confidence and improve his position. It worked, too: Charlie, who was taking a justified dislike to his prickly subordinate, was eventually induced by his officers to take Murray back, and even make him the army's senior officer (Magnusson, p. 601; Reid, pp. 64-65). This proved a horrid mistake; if Murray had been off the army council for, say, the next two weeks, the March to Derby would not have stopped at Derby but would have made its desperate but necessary attempt to capture London; it was Murray who argued most strenuously against continuing the march on London (Reid, p. 70).
I think the truth about his ability lies somewhere between the two assessments. Murray still thought in many ways like a mid-level officer -- though a very good mid-level officer. Wilkinson and McLynn are right that was creative in maneuvering an army -- it is noteworthy that, during the entire time Charlie's army marched outside the Highlands, no Hanoverian force managed to out-maneuver and trap the Highlanders -- but that is a skill that field officers, with no need to plan an entire campaign, would develop. For high command in a rebel army, his vision was too small. He was an obsessive perfectionist; if the execution of a plan wasn't perfect, he would pull back and give up. And he was an utter pessimist. He totally failed to realize that a rebel army had to take risks in order to win. For instance, he was one of those who didn't want to try to invade England; he thought that the Jacobites, having chased most English forces from Scotland, should be content to declare the Act of Union void and settle down to rule an independent Scotland (Magnusson, p. 600). It was a plan almost certain to fail; much of Scotland was pro-Hannover, and England would eventually scrape up the forces to beat the Jacobites. They couldn't win independence by not losing, the way Robert Bruce had four centuries before; they had to win outright -- by beating the English.
Even worse, at the two greatest moments of the Forty-Five, Murray got cold feet and backed out: When the army was marching on London (the "March to Derby"), he wanted to turn around and return to Scotland. And at the Battle of Culloden, when the Highland army wasn't perfectly prepared for its surprise charge, he called the whole thing off (Young/Adair, pp. 258-259).
In both cases, he was nominally right: the plans probably wouldn't work. But what Lord George didn't realize is that, in both cases, the alternative was worse: The march on London was the only chance the Jacobites had for a quick win. If they didn't take the chance, they would end up trapped in Scotland until the Hanoverians brought up enough forces to trap them. Which is just what happened at Culloden. And at Culloden, the surprise charge probably wouldn't have worked. But by calling it off, Lord George left his disorganized, starving, ill-armed troops in a disordered position, not suited for defense, where the could not use their one big tactic of the Highland Charge. The Hanoverian army slaughtered them.
Little wonder that, after both Prince Charlie and Lord George escaped to the continent, Charlie refused to meet with him. The Forty-Five would likely have failed no matter what; the forces it could muster were too small. But one man turned that likelihood of a failure into a certainty. And that one man was the hero of this song, Lord George Murray.
McLynn, who had called him a tactical genius, quotes with approval Eveline Cruickshanks's assessment of the former decision: "By forcing the retreat [from Derby] Lord George Murray and the others threw away the best chance there had been of a restoration of the Stuarts, threw away all that the bravery of the Highlanders and their own military skill had achieved. The '45 was a gamble from the beginning, but they threw in their hand..." (McLynn, p. 198).
Like the Prince whom he so disliked and served so ill, Murray left his army on the field of Culloden and fledd the country. He died in what is now Germany in 1760 (Young/Adair, p. 270).
There is at least one biography of Murray: Katherine Tomasson, The Jacobite General, William Blackwood & Sons, 1958. I have not seen it; whatever one's opinion of Murray as a general, he was so toxic as a person that I think a biography would be hard to stomach.
Of course, the song mentions other heroes. "Menzies he's our friend and brother" is presumably Menzies of Shian, who brought in 300 men (Reid, p. 53) who became one of the units of the Athol Brigade. Another of these battles was Lord George Murray's own, so they were clearly to be associated.
"Gask and Strowan": Gask is without doubt Laurence Oliphant of Gask, who was made a lieutenant colonel and commanded a small unit of cavalry at Prestonpans (Reid, p. 37). Strowan admits of two interpretations. One is that it is a mistake for Strathallan, i.e. William Drummond, fourth Viscount Strathallan, who was also a cavalry leader at Prestonpans, and Oliphant's superior officer (though neither man actually did anything in the battle). As the Jacobite army prepared to leave Edinburgh to try to attack England, Drummond and Oliphant were sent to Perth, to guard an important city but also, perhaps, to get the ineffectual Drummond out of the way (Reid, p. 52; on p. 81 he declares Drummond "ineffectual"). Drummond still had a small cavalry command at Culloden (Reid, p. 165), where he died. The other possibility is that "Strowan" refers to Alexander Robertson of Struan/Strowan, chief of Clan Robertson (died 1749 at about the age of eighty), who (according to Wikipedia) was said to have participated in all three Jacobite risings. Both are suitable candidates; Strowan has the more correct name, but Strathallan has the correct job....
A footnote for the genealogists out there: Yes, Laurence Oliphant of Gask was the father of Carolina Oliphant (One of her poems was "The Garden at Gask). And Carolina Oliphant married William Murray Nairne, lord Nairne. Oh, and remember the Athol Brigade, with battalions named for Menzies and Lord George Murray? The third battalion of the brigade was commanded by... Lord Nairne, the ancestor of Carolina Oliphant's husband. And, according to the Scottish Women Poets site, the home that they moved to was paid for by the Chief of Strowan.
"Perth" is presumably the Duke of Perth, who, as mentioned above, was another of the Jacobite Lieutenant Generals, although, by all accounts, not a particularly good one.
The precise identity of "Mackintosh, the gallant soldier... spite of all their chiefs could say" is not clear to me, but the context is: the chief of Clan Mackintosh "personally had sides with the Government, and [was] with Loudon [the leading government agent] at Inverness; but [his wife] thought otherwise. Lady Mackintosh raised the clan in her husband's absence and sent it to join Drummond at Perth" (Wilkinson, p. 160).
Young/Adair, p. 261, claims that Clan Chattan -- i.e. the Mackintoshes -- comprised the unit at the center of the Jacobite front line at Culloden; Reid, p. 155, also places the MacIntoshes there. Reid, p. 99, tells us that the unit she raised was known as Lady MacIntosh's regiment.
According to Young/Adair, p. 272 note 2, the unit "had been raised by Lord George Murray's cousin, Lady Macintosh, whose husband was a captain in King George's army. She was a very pretty young woman of 20, and rode in at the head of her men to join the Prince, wearing a tartan riding-habit and a man's blue bonnet. The English credited 'that bloody rebel Lady Mackintosh' with leading her clain into action at Culloden, and it seems a pity to disbelieve such a fine piece of mythology. She was imprisoned after the battle" and there were calls to hang her -- though I suspect her loyal husband would have been able to save her.
The mention of the Gordons in connection with Macintosh is also curious, since the Gordons were one of several clans that went for the Jacobites in 1715 but stood aloof in 1745 (McLynn, p. 21, who lists the others who stood aside as the Seaforths, McLeod of Skye, and MacDonald of Sleat), There were some individual Gordons with Charlie, to be sure -- Lord Lewis Gordon, a younger son of the Duke of Gordon, led a regiment and was involved in recruiting several units although he was "Active and peremptory to the point of being highly strung" (Reid, p. 86); in addition to this Colonel Gordon, there was Lt. Colonel John Gordon. But Lewis Gordon was not a major player at the time Murray joined; his regiment was raised in Scotland while the rest of the Jacobite army was in England (McLynn, p. 28). There was also the Glenbucket Regiment, lead by John Gordon of Glenbucket (Reid, p. 107), who was enough of a Jacobite that he had tried to get the Old Pretender to authorize a rebellion in 1737 (Reid, p. 6).
"We may gar the Campbells claw" presumably refers to the fact that the Campbells, without exception, adhered to the government (many of their arch-rivals the MacDonalds, after all, were Jacobites); Reid, p. 81, mentions eight companies of government infantry being raised among the Campbells, as well as several Campbell officers.
"Every true and trusty Stewart" refers not to the Scottish royal house but, I believe, the Stewarts of Appin, led by Charles Stewart of Ardshiel, who joined the army as it was heading for Perth (Reid, p. 22; according to McLynn, p. 20, Ardshiel was not the clan chief but was related to the actual chief, Dugald Stewart). They were formed into one of six clan regiments in the Jacobite army, the others being the Camerons (under the famous Lochiel), the MacPhersons, Clanranald (a MacDonald branch), Keppoch (another Macdonald branch), and Glengarry (McLynn, p. 18), although only the Camerons and Glengarry managed to bring in as many as 500 men. There was another regiment commanded by Colonel John Roy Stuart, but it wasn't a clan regiment -- in fact, it was raised mostly from the Edinburgh slums (McLynn, p. 19); all that its men had in common was being urban lowlanders.
The mention of the "Grahams" seems to have been a vain home; the Grahams did not support the Jacobites. Reid, pp. 213-219, has a list of those taken prisoner after Culloden; there is only one Graham on the list (Charles Graham, said to be from Glengarry; p. 215) -- and he was a private. - RBW
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