History Scotland Magazine: Unlucky or Incompetent? History's Verdict on General Sir John Cope

General Wade

Unlucky or Incompetent? History's Verdict on General Sir John Cope

Martin B Margulies

Part. 1 - The Road to Prestonpans

Hey Johnnie Cope are ye wauking yet,
Or are ye sleeping, I would wit?
O haste ye get up for the drums do beat.
O fye Cope rise in the morning!

Many Scots, and every lover of Scottish history, knows the saga of the hapless British general Sir John ('Johnnie') Cope. Through complacency and incompetence, Cope was literally caught napping at the battle of Prestonpans, the first major engagement of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Routed in less than fifteen minutes by an early morning Highland charge, he fled so precipitately that he personally carried the news of his own defeat to the loyalist garrison at Berwick, nearly fifty miles away. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography condemns his efforts as 'ludicrous,' and the derisive popular ballad, quoted above, has proclaimed his ignominy to succeeding generations. But it didn't happen that way at all.

The battle, if that is a suitable term for so one-sided and encounter, took place on 21 September 1745. The following summer, when the rebellion was over, a board of inquiry convened to scrutinize the behaviour of Cope and two of his subordinates: Colonel Peregrine Lascelles and Brigadier-General Thomas Fowkes. Proceedings of this kind, in the 18th century, were rarely perfunctory whitewashes; in 1757, for instance, a court-martial consigned Admiral Sir John Byng to a firing squad for failure to 'do his utmost' to relieve British-held Minorca from French attack. Yet Cope's board, headed by the distinguished seventy-three-year-old field marshall, George Wade (better known for his road-building programme in the Scottish Highlands in the 1720s), himself a prominent but scarcely distinguished player in the '45, exonerated Cope and the other two officers of all wrongdoing.

The Report of the board's proceeding was published in 1749. Anyone who scrutinizes it closely can only conclude that the board was correct. What emerges from the pages is not, perhaps, the portrait of a military genius, but one of an able, energetic and conscientious officer, who weighed his options carefully, and who anticipated - with almost obsessive attention to detail - every eventuality except the one which he could not have provided for in any case: that his men would panic and flee.

Cope was a career soldier. He was born in the late 1600s (the precise year is uncertain) and entered the cavalry as a cornet in 1707. From there he rose steadily to become a colonel in 1730, a brigadier-general in 1735, major-general in 1739, and lieutenant-general in 1743. He seems to have owed his rise to political influence, but no more so than was usual in the British army of the period. He served in Parliament from 1722 until 1734, and again from 1738 to 1741. Somewhere along the way, he became a Knight of the Bath. In 1745, when the Jacobite Rising began, he was commander-in-chief of the King's forces in Scotland. From this point, the Report tells the story.

Gathering Clouds

Cope's woes commenced on 2 July 1745, when he received a letter from Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session. In that letter, Forbes - who would exploit his close contacts with various Highland chiefs to the great advantage of the Hanoverian government during the months to come - warned Cope of an unconfirmed report that Prince Charles Edward Stuart would land in the Highlands sometime during the summer, in order to foment an insurrection.

Cope wasted no time. He wrote the same day to the Marquess of Tweeddale, Secretary of State for Scotland. The letter reminded Tweeddale that, as a result of 'disarming' legislation enacted after the first major Jacobite rebellion thirty years earlier, the clans were largely denuded of weapons. If the rumoured landing occurred, cautioned Cope, the Prince would undoubtedly bring with him ample arms to supply the clans who joined him. This would create an imbalance between them and the clans loyal to the government. Would Tweeddale arrange to quietly arm the latter? But Tweeddale, safe in distant London, saw no urgency, and his reply, dated 9 July, was non-committal.

Even before he received this response, Cope pressed his superior in a second letter, asking Tweeddale to obtain an order recalling all officers from home leave. Cope asked that the order be published, not merely in the official Gazette, but in all evening newspapers, so that no officer could deny having seen it. Meanwhile, Cope continued, he had ordered his dragoons to be ready to bring their horses back from pasture, and had taken other measures to prepare his troops to move at short notice.

Again, Tweeddale's answer was discouraging. Leaves should not be cancelled, he wrote (though no new ones should be granted), nor should the horses be brought back from pasture. Either measure, he said, would have 'alarm'd the Country too much.'

The Rebellion Begins - July 1745

Lord President Forbes' informant proved uncannily prescient. Charles Stuart landed on the Hebridean island of Eriskay on 23 July. Two days later, he made landfall in Arisaig on the mainland. Cope's first news of the landing came in a letter from Tweeddale, dated 30 July, which he received on 3 August. Cope reacted with characteristic promptness. The same day that Tweeddale's letter arrived, he ordered the horses back from pasture, dispatched orders to the commanders of the various Highland forts to gather intelligence reports on the Prince's progress, and replied to Tweeddale seeking letters of credit (for his cash was in short supply) and trained gunners for, although he had some small field pieces, there were no artillerymen in all Scotland. In addition, in consultation with Forbes, he devised a plan for nipping the rising in the bud.

The plan was simple and well-conceived, and, like the successful government response to the 1719 Jacobite rising, depended on speed to contain the rebellion in the Highlands. Cope would assemble about half of his troops at Stirling, leaving the rest to defend the Lowlands. Then, he would march north to Fort Augustus, the centrepiece of the chain of forts running from Fort William to Inverness that controlled the Great Glen. By doing this, Cope hoped to achieve several important objectives. He would secure the forts, the Glen, and the Highlands both east and west of it. By making a show of strength, he would discourage the uncommitted clans from joining the rebels. All along his line of progress, he would collect reinforcements from clans loyal to the government. And, if this route brought him anywhere close to the Jacobite forces, he would seek them out and destroy them.

The third of these objectives - attracting reinforcements from the loyal clans - may have been the strongest motivating factor for Cope. As he well knew, his own army was pathetically inadequate, numbering at most a fraction over 3,000 men. Even more ominously, it lacked, not just trained gunners, but seasoned troops of any kind. Only Guise's 6th Foot - perhaps a fifth of the total - contained significant numbers of veterans. The rest, dragoon and infantry alike, were raw levies; Britain's more experienced soldiers were currently employed in a European war. The dearth of combat trained effectives would later haunt Cope.

The general submitted his plan to Tweeddale by letter on 10 August. This time, he received Tweeddale's enthusiastic approval. There was, however, one significant difference between what Cope proposed and what the Secretary of State, after consulting his own advisers, actually authorised. Cope had envisioned marching northwards to the forts 'unless I hear any Thing to make me alter my present Design.' But Tweeddale's responses, as Cope understood them, left him no such latitude; the march, wrote Tweeddale, 'was of the greatest importance to his Majectys Serviceand not to be neglected from any Consideration' This too would haunt Cope later.

He marched them to the top of the hill...

Without even awaiting Tweeddale's permission, Cope had set the necessary machinery in motion. His soldiers would need bread, and none was to be had in the barren and possibly hostile country that they would be entering. Accordingly, he put the ovens at Leith, Stirling and Perth to work 'Day and Night, Sunday not excepted,' to provide 21 days' supply. Then, having obtained his letters of credit from Tweeddale, he converted them immediately into cash at Edinburgh banking houses, so that he would be able to meet his payroll along the way.

On 20 August, with Tweeddale's orders at last in hand, Cope marched out from Stirling at the head of approximately 1400 men. These included two Black Watch companies (about 200 men), whom he posted on his flanks to scan the surrounding hills and warn him of surprise attacks. Approaching him were what intelligence reports had told him was upwards of 3,000 rebels.

From the beginning, things did not go well. Though the ovens had worked overtime, some of the bread did not reach Stirling until after the army had left, and Cope lost a full day at Crieff waiting for it to catch up with him. By the time it did, it had been depleted by pilferage and spoilage. Baggage horses, too, were slow in arriving, and, despite Cope's efforts to guard them, many of them were stolen, or simply wandered away, in the unfenced mountainous countryside. Low on baggage horses, Cope was forced to cover shorter distances each day and had to discard some of his precious bread along the route. Most of the Black Watch deserted.

More ominously, the 'loyal' Highland chiefs who had promised to join him found various excuses for breaking their promises. Indeed, some of them, most notably Lord George Murray, brother of the Duke of Atholl, ended up fighting for the Jacobites. At Crieff, where the army halted on 21 August to await the tardy bread, no fewer than five clan leaders, Atholl and Murray included, called upon Cope personally to tell him they could not help him. Cope, despairing, wanted to discontinue the march there and then, but his orders from Tweeddale left him with no other option than to proceed.

As he neared Fort Augustus on 26 August, he received more bad news. To get to the fort, he had to cross the Corrieyairack Pass: a treacherous mountain road, built by Wade in 1731, which rose to a height of 2500 feet and contained no fewer than seventeen hairpin turns. At Dalwhinnie, some 14 miles east of the Pass, he learned that the rebels, taking advantage of the unavoidable delays that had plagued him throughout his march, had pre-empted him and now controlled it.

...and he marched them down again.

Cope now had four choices. None of them were palatable. He could try to force the Pass and continue to Fort Augustus. He could stay where he was and hope that the rebels would descend from their position to give battle. He could return to Stirling. Or, he could circle around the Pass to the north and, instead of making for Fort Augustus, press on to Fort George at Inverness.

He did, at that point, what 18th-century generals commonly did when faced with a quandary: he summoned his officers to a council. All of them, with one exception (and he quickly changed his mind), agreed with Cope. They could not force the Pass, which was ideally situated for an ambush in which Cope and his little army risked annihilation. They could not stay where they were. For one thing, there was no guarantee that the Jacobites would come down to fight them. The rebels might simply wait them out in the mountains, or by-pass them and sweep down into the sparsely defended Lowlands. Besides, there was too little bread, only three days' supply remaining. Retreat to Stirling, five or six days distant, was out of the question, as it would have given the appearance of flight before the rebels. This would have demoralised the well-disposed clans and comforted the disloyal. A retreat would not, in any event, prevent the rebels from reaching the Lowlands ahead of them, for the Highlanders could utilise hill routes that were all but inaccessible to regular troops carrying heavy equipment. Then there was the matter of the bread. There was the matter, too, of Tweeddale's orders, which as Cope understood them absolutely committed him to march to one fort or another.

All things considered, therefore, the safest expedient was to by-pass the Corrieyairack and march to Inverness, just three days distant. It was always possible that the rebel army, instead of continuing southwards, would turn and pursue them, thereby bringing on the set-piece battle that Cope and his officers wanted. Even if that did not happen, Edinburgh, at least, should have been able to hold out until Cope returned to relieve it - and when he did, his army would have been swollen by those more steadfastly loyal clan chiefs from Lord President Forbes' area of influence around Inverness. In the event, Edinburgh did not hold out, and the chiefs in the Inverness region proved, for the most part, as recalcitrant and inventive with excuses as their southern counterparts. But Cope had no way of foretelling that.

So, Inverness it was. Cope and his men arrived there on 29 August, just as the last of the bread supply was exhausted. He immediately set the Inverness bakers to work. The next few days, however, brought little but further frustration. Optimistically, he sent messages to the ostensibly loyal clan chiefs who lived in the vicinity, urging them to support him. But one by one they told him, in person or through proxies, that they could not help him, or could not help him just then. For instance, the wily old prevaricator Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, dispatched his son to Inverness to offer Cope 400 men as soon as they could be assembled, which would take some time. Ultimately, they were indeed assembled, but under the Pretender's banner, not King George's. Only the Munros came forward with 200 men, and they agreed to serve for merely two weeks. Dogged by bad luck from the beginning, the march to the forts had been a failure.

The Race South With Cope at Inverness, the rebels emerged from the Corrieyairack and began to march on Edinburgh. Cope was eager to intercept and engage them. He concluded, with Forbes's agreement, that the fastest and safest way of doing so was to march to Aberdeen, on the northeast coast, and then sail south to Leith, Edinburgh's port. Accordingly, he called on General Guest, the eighty-five-year-old commander of Edinburgh Castle, to send transports to meet him at Aberdeen; he also issued orders to detain, and hold in readiness, whatever vessels were already available both at Aberdeen and at Montrose, thirty-eight miles south down the coast, in case Guest's transports miscarried. Keeping his options open, Cope orders boats to be collected at Dundee as well, to ferry him and his men across the Firth of Tay if he decided, on reaching Aberdeen, to change his design and march overland to the capital. The army left Inverness on Wednesday 4 September. In a series of forced marches, it arrived at Aberdeen seven days later. Once there, Cope, keeping to his original design, loaded his men and provisions onto the waiting ships as rapidly as possible (so rapidly, in fact, as to surprise the sailors, who had advised him to proceed more slowly), and set sail for Leith on 15 September. Again, fate intervened, for contrary winds prevented his ships from entering the Firth of Forth. Instead, on 17 September, he was forced to land at Dunbar, over twenty miles east of Edinburgh. Here, a new disappointment awaited him: Edinburgh, except for its Castle, held by General Guest, had fallen to the rebels just a few hours earlier. The stage was now set for the Prestonpans debacle.

Martin B Margulies, is a law professor at Quinnipiac College School of Law, Hamden, Connecticut.