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LONDON - They are dismissed as primitive hairy savages who charged into battle screaming and waving their claymore swords, only to be cut down by musket fire from well-drilled British Army redcoats.
The 1746 defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie's forces at Culloden, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, is widely considered a triumph of modernity over the romance of a bygone age.
But research has established this is yet another of the many myths about the rebellion based largely on Government propaganda of the day. Gaelic poets share some blame for the misconception because of their obsession with the sword as a heroic weapon.
In reality, the battles between the Jacobites and Hanoverian forces were more contests between equals with the rebels using up-to-date military tactics and relying on the musket and bayonet - not the claymore.
Professor Murray Pittock, who carried out research for his book The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, said: "It helps to create a story that they were primitive and barbaric to present them as very badly armed."
Highland self-representation played along with propaganda and interpretations by later historians which presented this caricature of the so-called "Highland charge".
The Jacobites were defeated at Culloden, Pittock says, because they were outnumbered, did not have their heavy cannons and tried to cross boggy ground.
- INDEPENDENT
