Who won the Battle of Killiecrankie?
The Jacobites won. On 27 July 1689 about 2,400 Highlanders and Irish under Viscount Dundee charged downhill at the Pass of Killiecrankie and routed Hugh Mackay's larger government army in minutes. But Dundee was shot dead in the charge, and without him the Jacobite rising in Scotland collapsed within a year.1
Killiecrankie was the opening battle of the first Jacobite rising in Scotland, and one of the bloodiest of the Jacobite wars. It pitted Scots against Scots: Highland clans fighting for the deposed King James VII against a mostly Lowland Scottish army raised for William and Mary. It was also one theater of a wider struggle, the Nine Years' War, which was being fought at the same time in Ireland and Flanders. This is the story of why both commanders wanted the battle, how a few minutes of fighting decided it, and why the victors gained so little from it.2
Why was the Battle of Killiecrankie fought?
In the winter of 1688 to 1689 William of Orange took the English throne and James VII and II fled abroad. In Scotland a Convention of the Estates declared on 4 April 1689 that James had forfeited the crown and the throne was vacant, and a week later offered it to William and Mary, who accepted it in London on 11 May. Most of the Scottish political establishment went along with the change, but not all of it. John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, rode north and raised the King's standard. He had made his name hunting Covenanters in the southwest under Charles II, which earned him the nickname “Bluidy Clavers” among his enemies; later song and legend called him “Bonnie Dundee.” His followers were called Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin for James. Our history of Scotland's wars tells the longer story.3
Through the spring and early summer Dundee and the government's commander in Scotland, Major-General Hugh Mackay, played what Historic Environment Scotland calls a game of cat and mouse across the Highlands. In July both men turned toward Blair Atholl. Its castle commanded the route between the Lowlands and the Jacobite heartland of Badenoch and Lochaber. Dundee had ordered Patrick Steuart of Ballechin to hold it for King James, while the Marquess of Atholl's son, Lord Murray, whom Mackay trusted, laid siege to his own family's house.4
Why did Dundee attack at Killiecrankie?
Dundee's position was weaker than his letters admitted. He wrote to the chiefs that French fleets and armies were coming and that James would soon land; in fact King James could send him only Colonel Alexander Cannon with about 300 Irish foot, who joined him in mid-July. Not all the clans had come out, and even Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel had only part of his men with him. On 26 July, hearing that Mackay was on the march for Blair, Dundee left Badenoch with fewer than 2,000 men and reached the castle first; Murray abandoned the siege and fell back through the pass.5
On the morning of the 27th Dundee held a council of war. The Lochiel memoir, written in the next century by Lochiel's descendant John Drummond of Balhaldy, gives the old chief's case for fighting at once: the men were eager, delay would let Mackay's horse and dragoons join him, the army could not spare men to forage, and to march up to the enemy and then hold back would tell the clans their leaders thought them the weaker side. Better, Lochiel argued, to fight at odds of one to three than to wait. Macaulay retells the same speech; Terry, more cautiously, accepts only that Dundee's insistence on battle was endorsed by the chiefs.6
The council asked one thing in return: that Dundee should not risk himself in the fight. Both the memoir and Macaulay record his refusal. The clans, he answered, needed to see that he could hazard his life as freely as the meanest of them; he asked leave to give the King one day's work and promised to be more careful afterward.7
Why did Mackay march into the pass?
Hugh Mackay of Scourie was himself a Highlander, from Sutherland, and a professional soldier who had served for years in the Scots Brigade of the Dutch army. He had meant to go west to join the Earl of Argyll, but Ballechin's seizure of Blair Castle changed his plan. Blair held for James meant Atholl for James, and Atholl linked the Jacobite north to the Lowland counties. As long as Blair held out, he told Murray, through Atholl he would go. He set out even though four troops of dragoons and two of horse had not yet joined him.8
Lieutenant-Colonel Lawder had already gone ahead in the night with 200 fusiliers to secure the defile. On the morning of 27 July Mackay marched from Dunkeld, sent 200 more men to reinforce Lawder, and brought his army through it in a long column: five battalions and a troop of horse first, then more than 1,200 baggage horses, then Hastings's English regiment and a second troop of horse as rearguard. At the north end of the pass the army halted in a cornfield by the River Garry to rest and draw ammunition.9
Then the Jacobites appeared, coming down the hills from the direction of Blair. Mackay saw that if they took the wooded slope just above him they could fire down into his halted army and drive it into the river. He turned each battalion to the right and marched it straight up the bank, a maneuver his memoirs call a quart de conversion. He gained a terrace that was, in his words, a ground fair enough to receive the enemy but not to attack them, because Dundee already held a higher shelf of the hillside within a short musket shot.10
How were the armies drawn up at Killiecrankie?
Mackay now had a problem of width. Fearing that the Highlanders would outflank him and get between him and the pass, his only road back to Perth and the reinforcements behind him, he stretched his line to match theirs. He split each battalion in two, formed them three deep instead of the usual six, and left gaps between them, with a wider gap in the center where he placed his two troops of horse. From left to right stood Lawder's fusiliers on a wooded knoll, then the regiments of Balfour, Ramsay, Kenmure and the Earl of Leven, Mackay's own regiment under his brother James, and Hastings's English regiment on the right.11
It was a mixed army. Balfour's, Ramsay's and Mackay's were Scots regiments brought home from Dutch service, Hastings's was English, and most of the rest were Lowland Scots recruits who had never been in battle. Facing them, Dundee kept each clan together as its own battalion, as Lochiel advised, and widened the intervals so that his smaller army would not be outflanked. The Macleans held the right, then Cannon's Irish, Clanranald's and Glengarry's Macdonalds, Dundee's 40 or so horse, Lochiel's Camerons and Sir Donald Macdonald of Sleat's men on the left.12
How many men were there? Historic Environment Scotland gives the Jacobites about 2,400, some 40 of them mounted, and the government army between 3,500 and 5,000 with about 100 horse and three light leather guns. A report sent to the exiled court, which Terry thought probably accurate, gave Dundee 2,500 foot and one troop of horse; a letter of 30 July 1689, apparently by one of Mackay's officers, which Terry also accepts, gave Mackay 4,000 foot and two troops. The Lochiel memoir says the Jacobites did not fully number 2,000.13
What happened in the Highland charge?
For two hours or more the armies watched each other. Mackay would not attack uphill and dared not retreat across the river in the enemy's sight. Dundee waited for the sun, which was shining straight into his men's faces, to go down. Mackay fired his three leather guns to provoke an attack, but their carriages broke at the third shot. His own regiment drove a party of Lochiel's Camerons out of some houses on the slope from which they had been sniping.14
About half an hour before sunset, at around eight in the evening, the Jacobites came down the hill. Mackay had ordered his battalions to open fire by platoons at 100 paces, and the volleys cut down many Macdonalds and Camerons as they came on. The Highlanders fired a single volley, at point-blank range in the Jacobite memoir, at a distance and to little effect in Mackay's, then threw down their muskets and went in with broadswords. Donald MacBane, a private in Mackay's army, wrote that they were in the middle of his line before his comrades could fire three shots each.15
Mackay's left broke almost at once. Balfour's regiment, by Mackay's own account, did not fire a shot, half of Ramsay's fired a little, and Lawder's picked men on the knoll did as little as the rest. Mackay sent his horse to strike the Highlanders in the flank, but the troopers turned back and carried Kenmure's battalion and half of Leven's away with them.16
On the right the fight was harder. Hastings's regiment and the rest of Leven's held their ground and poured fire into the clans; Lochiel's Camerons lost half their number, most of them from Leven's flanking fire. But within minutes the government line had dissolved, and most of the army was running down the slope toward the river and the baggage, with the Highlanders among them.17
How did Viscount Dundee die?
Dundee led his small band of horse forward in the center. According to the Lochiel memoir, whose author drew on men who rode with him, the horse checked behind him on Sir William Wallace's order, and Dundee, entering the smoke, turned his horse, rose in his stirrups and waved his hat to bring them on. A musket ball struck him in the left side below the edge of his armor, by the memoir's and Macaulay's account; Historic Environment Scotland says under the arm. It also notes that sources differ on whether he died on the field or a little later, and dismisses the story that a sniper shot him from Urrard House.18
A man named Johnston caught him as he fell. Asked how the day went, Johnston answered that it went well for the King but that he was sorry for his lordship; Dundee replied that it mattered the less for him, seeing the day went well for his master. Terry traces the exchange to evidence given before the Scottish Parliament. Dundee's body, wrapped in plaids, was carried to Blair and buried in the church there.19
How many died at Killiecrankie?
Proportionally, Killiecrankie was one of the bloodiest battles of the Jacobite wars. Historic Environment Scotland puts Jacobite casualties at 600 to 800, up to a third of their army, most of them suffered under fire before the swords met. The Lochiel memoir agrees that the victors lost very near a third of their number, and it says most of them fell within a few paces of the enemy.20
The government army lost about 2,000 killed, wounded and captured, by the general agreement of the sources that Historic Environment Scotland reviews; the Lochiel memoir counts 1,800 dead. Most of the killing came in the pursuit. Men of Atholl, who had held back from the battle, fell on the fugitives in the pass, as Mackay had warned his soldiers they would. Among the dead were Brigadier Balfour and Mackay's brother James; on the Jacobite side Dundee, Haliburton of Pitcur and Gilbert Ramsay fell.21
Did the plug bayonet lose the Battle of Killiecrankie?
Mackay's soldiers carried plug bayonets, which were pushed into the muzzle of the musket. Once fixed, the musket could not fire; fixed too early, a volley was lost. Mackay concluded that the Highlanders were on his men before they could change from shooting to stabbing, and in his memoirs he claims to have devised a way of fixing the bayonet outside the muzzle with two rings, so that a soldier could fire and then receive a charge at once. Macaulay made this the immediate cause of the defeat.22
Others weigh it differently. Historic Environment Scotland calls it a myth that Mackay invented the socket bayonet, which had been introduced in Europe a few years earlier, while crediting him with pressing the British army to adopt it. It also stresses the ground: a long slope ending in a narrow terrace, with natural steps that hid the charging clans until they were almost on the line. The 1842 editor of the Lochiel memoir went further, asking what use it was to train soldiers at all if they could not fix bayonets in time, and noting that the Highlanders credited their own way of fighting.23
Who won the Battle of Killiecrankie, and what happened next?
The Jacobites won the battle, completely. Mackay found himself nearly alone on the field, gathered what was left of Leven's and Hastings's regiments, crossed the Garry in the dusk and led them over the hills by Strath Tay and Weem, reaching Stirling on 29 July. Many of his men owed their escape to the Highlanders stopping at the baggage train, Mackay and Macaulay believed; the Lochiel memoir insists the clansmen were too exhausted to go on and found the baggage only the next morning.24
But the victory did not last. Historic Environment Scotland calls it Pyrrhic, and Macaulay judged that for the great interests of the state it did not matter at all whether it was lost or won. Mackay was back in the field within days. Under Cannon the Jacobite army attacked Dunkeld on 21 August 1689 and was beaten off by the newly raised Cameronian regiment under William Cleland. The clans dispersed, and the last Jacobite force of the rising was surprised and scattered at Cromdale on 1 May 1690.25
From the government side, then, the battle's meaning was the death of Dundee, the one leader who might have held the clans together. From the Jacobite side it was a first victory that put the Lowlands in fear and kept the cause alive. The same war ended James's hopes in Ireland at the Boyne in 1690 and at Aughrim in 1691, where Mackay led the Williamite infantry. He was killed at Steenkerque in Flanders in 1692.26
Where was the Battle of Killiecrankie fought, and how is it remembered?
The battle was fought not in the gorge itself but on the open slopes of Creag Eallaich at its northern end, above Urrard House, about a mile north of today's National Trust for Scotland visitor center. Terry, who walked the ground in 1905, already placed the fighting north of the gorge, though Historic Environment Scotland judges that he turned the two battle lines about 90 degrees from their true alignment and that its 2003 fieldwork bore out Mackay's own description of the ground. The battlefield is on Historic Environment Scotland's Inventory of Historic Battlefields.27
The best-known story of the day is the Soldier's Leap. MacBane wrote that, chased by a Highlander, he jumped a gap of about 18 feet between two rocks over the Garry, losing a shoe. The National Trust for Scotland shows visitors the spot; Historic Environment Scotland thinks the jump improbable and notes that MacBane was good at self-publicity.28
Poets kept the battle alive. Robert Burns wrote a song in the voice of a soldier who met “the devil an' Dundee” on the braes of Killiecrankie. Wordsworth, in a sonnet of October 1803, when Britain feared a French invasion, made Killiecrankie a warning about trained regulars routed by shepherds and herdsmen. For later Jacobites it remained proof that a Highland charge could break regular troops, and the charge stayed their tactic in the risings that followed, until the defeat at Culloden in 1746.29
