Given at Bunchrew House, 14 April 2007
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Circle Of Gentlemen I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for coming today, as without your support all our efforts would be in vain. I do believe that Cumberland will be turning in his grave this day.
Following Culloden, “The Butcher” as we now know him, tried with every means at his disposal to completely obliterate the whole of the Celtic culture in Scotland at the time. Well Mr Cumberland you may indeed have hushed it but looking around today you could never have crushed it .
There are many different people here today, travelling from near and far - from all different parts of the country, resplendent in your tartan. Looking around at you all makes me feel proud. We are The Circle Of Gentlemen and our sentiments have taken a long journey through 3 centuries of turmoil to get here. The bond has always been the unbroken loyalty to the House of Stuart, meeting in secret, with every glass of claret sipped in toast to their rightful king they risked paying the ultimate awful price for treason.
Please be upstanding for an old Jacobite toast:-
“Were our glasses turned into swords
Or our actions half as great as our words
Were our enemies tuned into quarts
How nobly we should play our parts
The least that we should do
Each man should kill his two
Without the help from France or Spain,
The Whigs should run a tilt and their dearest blood be spilt
And the King should enjoy his ain again”As little as 80 years ago reciting that little toast in public was treasonous would have been enough to get you arrested and thrown in jail. So if I go today you all go with me!
Today the house of Windsor guard the Stuart papers to such a degree that you would think that they still fear the Stuart Dynasty: perhaps they should? For the Auld Sang may yet produce one more verse.
Politics and differences have always been, and will always be the curse of the Scots, but for today they must be put aside, for today is about respect and remembrance. Men and women sacrificed all they had and sadly, when their lives were all they had to give, they gave them willingly. Such was the great loyalty the house of Stuart could command. To understand these loyalties almost 300 years later is no easy task. To be Highland and Jacobite was a matter of honour and duty. It could not be bought, it was a bond that was dignified and just.
Culloden was a tragedy, there is no doubt, but this was no simple Scotland v England: this was civil war; father against son; brother against brother. A clash of cultures and religion. There were Scots on both sides but ultimately it was Scotland who lost.
I think that we should remember some of the individual acts of bravery shown on that blackest of days in our history.
Culloden cherishes yet the memory of the yellow haired warrior MacGillivary of Dunmaglass, who after breaking the second line of Redcoats was stricken down with English bayonets. He crawled over the blood-stained heather to the little spring of water now known as “The Well Of The Dead” which even yet bubbles up among the moss and forget-me-nots. He died whilst stretching out his nerveless hands to the spring.Nor shall Culloden forget Major Gillies MacBean, who, when the Campbells pulled down the dyke that protected his men, rushed into the gap and hacked down fourteen of his assailants with his good claymore before he fell covered with wounds.
Gillies Macbean was immortalised in this fine poem:“With thy back to the wall and thy breast to the targe,
Fair flashed thy claymore in the face of their charge:
The blood of their boldest that barren turf stain ,
but, alas yours is reddest there Gillies MacBean.”
There are so many victims and so many that will be forever unknown. We cannot change history but we can give their passing the respect that they were denied so long ago. So let the ghosts of the past speak on through us.Thank you
Matthew John Donnachie