an hour. One part of the beaten army fled west to Inverness, pursued and mercilessly sabred by the English horse; the other part fled south to Ruthven in Badenoch. The duke wrote: ‘I think we may reckon the rebels lost two thousand men upon the field of battle and in the pursuit, as few of their wounded got off, and we have 222 French, and 326 rebel, prisoners’ (Weston Papers, p. 444). The loss of the English troops was 340.
The soldiers, elated at their victory, greeted the duke with cries of ‘Now, Billy, for Flanders!’ How warmly they felt towards their ‘young hero’ may be seen in a letter written shortly afterwards by one of Cobham's dragoons, praising his fairness and his care of them, and adding, ‘Had he been at Falkirk, those brave Englishmen that are now in their graves had not been lost, his presence doing more than five thousand men’ (Lyon in Mourning, i. 380). He for his part was equally pleased with them. Replying to Ligonier's congratulations, he said: ‘Sure never were soldiers in such a temper. Silence and obedience the whole time, and all our manœuvres were performed without the least confusion. I must own that [you] have hit my weak side when you say that the honour of our troops is restored. That pleases beyond all the honours done me. You know the readiness I always found in the troops to do all that I ordered, and in return the love I have for them, and that I make my honour and reputation depend on them’ (Stowe MS. 142, f. 113).
The army advanced to Inverness and halted there. On the 17th an order was issued: ‘a captain and fifty men to march immediately to the field of battle, and search all cottages in the neighbourhood for rebels. The officer and men will take notice that the publick orders of the rebels yesterday were to give us no quarter’ (Campbell-Maclauchlan, p. 293). A copy of these orders, signed by Lord George Murray, was said to have been found in the pocket of a prisoner (they are given in full in the Scots Magazine, 1746, p. 192, and are referred to by Wolfe in a letter written on the day after the battle; but cf. Athenæum, 11 March 1899). Lord Kilmarnock and others afterwards declared that they had never heard of any such orders, but they were not primâfacie incredible. It is stated that Murray had warned the Hessians when they arrived that, unless there was a cartel for exchange of prisoners, they would be put to the sword, and the duke refused a cartel (Johnstone, p. 119; and cf. Walpole, Letters, ii. 4). But even assuming that the orders were genuine, they referred to the heat of action. To use them next day as a means of rousing the vindictiveness of the men sent to search for wounded rebels was inexcusable, and renders the duke responsible for the atrocities which took place (Lyon in Mourning, iii. 68, &c.).
At Inverness the duke was joined by the lord president, Duncan Forbes (1685–1747) [q. v.], with whose assistance a proclamation was drawn up calling upon all magistrates to search out and seize all rebels who had not submitted, and any persons harbouring them; ‘but as one half of the magistracys have been either aiders or abettors to this rebellion, and the others dare not act through fear of offending their chiefs or of hanging their own cousins, I hope for little from them’ (Cumberland to Newcastle, 30 April, Addit. MS. 32707, f. 128). Of the lord president he wrote: ‘As yet we are vastly fond of one another, but I fear it wont last, as he is as arrant Highland mad as Ld Stair or Crawford. He wishes for lenity if it can be with safety, which he thinks, but I don't’ (ib.) He is said to have replied to Forbes's expostulations, ‘The laws of the country, my Lord! I'll make a brigade give laws, by God!’ (Lyon in Mourning, iii. 68).
He was firmly convinced, like Cromwell in Ireland, that ‘mild measures won't do.’ They had been tried and had failed. He told Newcastle, on 4 April, ‘You will find that the whole of the laws of this ancient kingdom must be new modelled.’ He made some suggestions himself, and sent Lord Findlater to London to advise on the legislation needed to break down the clan system. To support or supplement the magistrates, parties of troops were sent throughout the highlands to hunt for rebels, plunder and burn their houses, and drive off their cattle. He shifted his headquarters and the bulk of his troops on 23 May to Fort Augustus, as that was a more central point. On 23 June Lord Granby wrote from there: ‘The duke sent a detachment of a hundred of Kingston's horse, fifty on horseback and fifty on foot, into Glenmorrison's country to burn and drive in cattle, which they executed with great expedition, returning in a couple of days with a thousand head of cattle, after having burnt every house they could find. The duke has now shown the gentlemen of Scotland who gave out that the highlands were inaccessible to any but their own people, that not only the infantry can follow rebel highlanders into their mountains, but that horse upon an occasion commanded by him find nothing impracticable’ (Rutland
