On 10 June 1719, in the only battle of the Jacobite rising of that year, a Jacobite army of about a thousand Highlanders and a few hundred Spanish regulars, holding a fortified position in the narrow pass of Glen Shiel in the western Highlands, was attacked by government troops under Major General Joseph Wightman. Coehorn mortars and a series of infantry assaults drove the clansmen from the slopes, the Spanish surrendered, and the rising, Spain's attempt to restore the exiled Stuarts, ended. The date is in the Julian calendar then used in Britain.
Spain's Jacobite gamble
The rising grew out of the war between Spain and Britain that began in 1718. Historic Environment Scotland's inventory entry explains that Spain backed a Jacobite rising to put pressure on the British government; it was the only one of the risings supported by Spain rather than France. In March 1719 a fleet carrying about 5,000 men under the Duke of Ormonde sailed from Cádiz to invade England, but it was wrecked by a storm.1
A much smaller expedition of 240 to 300 Spanish troops under George Keith, the Earl Marischal, landed on Loch Alsh on 13 April and made Eilean Donan Castle its base. The clans were slow to rise. Tullibardine took command on land, and with his brother Lord George Murray, Rob Roy MacGregor, Cameron of Lochiel and the Earl of Seaforth the army grew to around a thousand men. In May Royal Navy frigates bombarded Eilean Donan, stormed it and captured the Jacobite powder and ammunition stored there.2
The fight in the pass
Wightman marched from Inverness on 5 June. The Jacobites blocked the narrowest part of the glen with a barricade across the road and stone breastworks on the slope north of it, later called Spanish Hill after the Spanish regulars who held it, with an advanced post on a knoll south of the river. HES gives Wightman about 850 infantry, 130 Highlanders, 120 dragoons and a battery of coehorn mortars, including Dutch and Swiss troops shipped over from Holland; it puts the Jacobites at about 1,200 Highlanders plus the Spanish, while Wightman counted 1,640.3
The attack began at about five in the afternoon. The mortars shelled the knoll south of the river, which the government left then took after several attempts, and the barricade on the road was stormed. On the north slopes, the government right climbed to meet Seaforth's men at the end of the Jacobite line; Seaforth was wounded, his men gave way, and the retreat spread along the line through Rob Roy's men and the Camerons. The Highland Council's historic environment record, drawing on the plans of the battle made by Lieutenant John Bastide, likewise describes the Jacobites being driven from their positions with little difficulty and scattered.4
An end and a beginning
Only the Spanish regulars held firm. Tullibardine led them back in good order around eight in the evening, and the whole Spanish contingent then surrendered and was treated as prisoners of war. Losses were light. The government side lost 21 killed and 121 wounded according to HES, while the Highland record counts three officers and eighteen men killed; Jacobite losses are unknown, somewhere between ten and a hundred.5
HES calls Glen Shiel the only battle in which the Jacobites waited on the defensive instead of charging, which helps explain the low casualties, and notes the first recorded use of coehorn mortars by the British Army in a field battle. Traces of the Spanish breastworks still survive on the hillside. The rising ended with the battle, but HES suggests the easy victory may have lulled the government into complacency about the Highlands before the rising of 1745. That later rising is told in our article on Prestonpans and our article on Culloden. Britain still used the Julian calendar in 1719; in the Gregorian calendar the battle fell on 21 June.6
Also on this day
- 1619: Battle of Sablat. Early in the Thirty Years' War, Bucquoy's Imperial army caught Ernst von Mansfeld's Protestant force near Záblatí in southern Bohemia as it moved to aid the siege of České Budějovice.
