Flight of the Heron read-along: Part III chapters 1-2

[regshoe]

Charlie chose the place himsel', the graveyard of Culloden...

Well, it looks like Keith's prophecies about the fate of the Jacobites, at least, weren't too inaccurate...

Next week we'll read chapters 3 and 4 of part III.

Comments

[hyarrowen]

Hey, two people on opposite sides of the '45 nevertheless passionately in love and treating each other honourably as prisoners, it can happen. :P

LOL!

It was quite common for members of the same family to be on opposing sides, or so I understand. That way the family holdings would remain in the family. It also ensured that the Highlands, or Scotland as a whole, didn't rise as one man to throw out the invader. I think I saw a scene in one of Neil Oliver's (?) programmes on Scotland which showed the Mackintoshes in that light.

[luzula]

It was quite common for members of the same family to be on opposing sides, or so I understand.

Yes, totally. Partly from genuine conflict, such as in the Murrays of Atholl, where the first son was a Jacobite, who was dispossessed by the government in favor of the second who was a Hanoverian, and then the first one returned with BPC to take back his heritage. And then there's the third son who became one of BPC:s military commanders.

But often it was absolutely an insurance strategy. It's unclear to me whether John Cameron of Fassefern stays out of the '45 because he genuinely is against it, or whether it was one of these agreed-upon strategies.

[hyarrowen]

A Cameron of Fassefern ended up getting killed at Quatre-Bras, at Waterloo - dying for a Hanoverian king. But that's what happens when Napoleon comes along.

[regshoe]

Huh! There was a Cameron of Fassefern fighting in the War of American Independence, earlier than that—and he was standing in for a Lochiel who couldn't go due to illness, so I think everyone's loyalties looked a bit different by then.

As for the original John Cameron of Fassefern, I can understand either caution or an insurance strategy for him, seeing what happened to so many of his Jacobite brothers.