In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, on a moor near Inverness. The battle lasted about an hour and engaged only 15,000 troops, but Murray Pittock persuasively argues that Culloden was one of the decisive battles of the world. The last pitched battle fought on British soil, Culloden was decisive, Pittock argues, because the British Army’s victory over forces commanded by Prince Charles Edward Stuart (now popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie) helped propel Great Britain into becoming the dominant world power for 150 years. Culloden has been written about extensively, but Pittock argues that no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely. Historians often describe Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army, which was outnumbered two to one, as a horde of sword-wielding Highlanders that recklessly took on a modern army. Pittock disagrees: Prince Charles’s army was a much more modern fighting unit than it is given credit for. Secondly, though one contemporary English historian has called Charles’s army a Highland rabble, at least half the Scots serving in it were not Highlanders. Pittock calls the forces under Prince Charles the Jacobite Army. Jacobites—not to be confused with Jacobins—were Britons who did not accept the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Stuart King James II, a Roman Catholic, was replaced by the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange and his wife Mary.

Source: The Spirit of ’45 | The Weekly Standard