On 21 September 1745 the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart1, Bonnie Prince Charlie, destroyed Sir John Cope's government force at Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh, in about fifteen minutes. Guided across a marsh at dawn, the Highlanders fell on the government line out of the morning mist before its raw troops could steady themselves, and the charge swept them away. It was the first great victory of the 1745 rising.2
It was over almost before it began. In the space of a quarter of an hour, on a misty September morning east of Edinburgh, a charge of Highlanders broke a government army so completely that the battle passed into song. Prestonpans was the moment the 1745 rising looked, for a while, as if it might just succeed.
The rising reaches the Lowlands
In the summer of 1745 Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in Scotland to reclaim the throne for the exiled House of Stuart. His Highland army grew as it marched, took Edinburgh, and then turned to face the only government force in the field: an army under Sir John Cope, sent to crush the rising before it could spread.
Cope's position
Cope drew up near Prestonpans with what he thought was a secure front, his flanks protected and a boggy marsh covering his line3. He expected to fight on his own terms. But the Jacobites, with Lord George Murray directing the field, found a local man, Robert Anderson, who knew a path through the marsh3, and in the darkness they moved across it to form up on open ground facing the government flank.
Fifteen minutes
At first light the Highlanders came on out of the mist at a run3, broadswords out, straight at the government line. Cope's soldiers, many of them raw and unnerved, had almost no time to react. The gunners and then the infantry broke almost at once3, and the battle collapsed into a rout in a matter of minutes3. The speed and completeness of it stunned both sides.
The high tide of the '45
Prestonpans made the rising look unstoppable. Charles held court at Holyrood, recruits came in, and the Jacobites soon marched south into England3. But the tide would turn: the advance stalled at Derby4, the army fell back into Scotland, and the rising was crushed for good at Culloden in April 17464. The rout of Sir John Cope, though, was never forgotten, mocked ever after in the song Hey, Johnnie Cope.
