Culloden

In this thrilling history, the legendary battle is seen through the eyes and experiences of its participants. It is a history of the people rather than the Prince.

[Culloden] is romantic and tragic, and helped me, as a London boy, to develop a love of Scotland that lasted my whole life.

Prebble and Scotland down the years have become as inseparable as oatcakes and whisky. He has...succeeded in giving the Scots a fresh awareness of their past.

One of Prebble's great strengths is his ability to empathise with his subject matter.

Marked by formidable research and passionate commitment to the cause of the poorest.

One of our leading historians, whose works...are as scholarly as they are readable

John Prebble was born in the UK in 1915 but spent his boyhood in Canada. He became a journalist in 1934 and went on to become an historian, novelist, film-writer and the author of several highly praised plays and dramatised documentaries for BBC TV and Radio. He became interested in Culloden when he was a boy in a predominantly Scottish township in Canada. He died in January 2001.

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

John Prebble

Prebble describes this almost forgotten episode as a raw cross-section of human aspirations for freedom, noble in its inception, foolish, petty and shocking in its end... Prebble's canvas is immense, his characterisations excellently drawn

This is a welcome and long-overdue reissue of the late John Prebble's 1968 classic about Scotland's disastrous venture into creation of a trading colony... His writing is as compelling as are the salutary incidents he relates

The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred years ago the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. 
 
The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Paterson, the erratically brilliant Scot who had helped to found the Bank of England. He called it 'the door of the seas, and the key of the universe', and believed that it would become a bridge between East and West, an entrepot through which would pass the richest trade in the world. 
 
The first attempt to make the Company a joint Scots and English venture was crushed by the English Parliament. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the 'noble undertaking', crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms by Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence. 
 
John Prebble's book is the first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Paterson's dream into reality.

John Prebble

Praise for Darien Disaster

Prebble describes this almost forgotten episode as a raw cross-section of human aspirations for freedom, noble in its inception, foolish, petty and shocking in its end... Prebble's canvas is immense, his characteris ...

This is a welcome and long-overdue reissue of the late John Prebble's 1968 classic about Scotland's disastrous venture into creation of a trading colony... His writing is as compelling as are the salutary incidents ...

Books by John Prebble

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