The Highland Charge — Defence Series Card #28

The tactical mechanics of the Highland Charge explained

The mature Highland Charge was a carefully sequenced tactic, not an undisciplined stampede. Contemporary and scholarly accounts agree on a consistent pattern. The clansmen preferred to form on high ground and on firm, dry footing, so that speed and downhill momentum could be maximised; they frequently shed their plaids and lower-body clothing to run faster. They advanced in clusters of roughly a dozen men — often blood relatives — which coalesced into larger wedge-shaped bodies typically four or more ranks deep, with the best-armed clan gentry ("the Fine") in the front rank and more lightly armed men behind.

As they came within effective musket range (accounts give figures from around 20–30 paces up to about 60 yards), those with firearms fired a single volley. This served two functions: it inflicted casualties on the densely packed enemy line, and its dense powder-smoke masked the Highlanders' final approach. Crucially, the clansmen did not attempt to reload — a well-drilled musketeer needed roughly 20–30 seconds to reload, an eternity once the charge was underway. Instead they dropped their firelocks, drew broadsword and dirk, took cover behind the targe (a small round shield), and rushed the last stretch with Gaelic war-cries, frequently accompanied by the pipes. Many accounts (including the Master of Sinclair's description of Sheriffmuir) describe the men throwing themselves flat when the enemy fired, then rising to complete the rush through the smoke.

At contact, the technique was specific. The Chevalier de Johnstone described how a Highlander would take the enemy's bayonet-thrust on his targe, bending the left knee to cover the body, then raise the sword-arm to strike. The basket-hilted broadsword protected the hand and could be used for both cutting and thrusting; the dirk, held in the targe hand, finished the work at grappling distance. The physical results were appalling: a contemporary account of Killiecrankie, quoted by ScottishHistory.org, records government dead "so hashed and mangled" that "many had their heads divided into two halves by one blow; others had their sculls cut off above the ears by a back-stroke, like a night-cap."

Why it worked against linear infantry

The charge was effective because it attacked the precise weaknesses of the linear "pike-and-shot" and early flintlock systems of the period. First, the reload interval: muzzle-loading muskets could manage only two or three shots a minute at best. A charge that crossed the killing ground fast enough could absorb one volley and reach the line before a second could be delivered. Second, the plug bayonet: before the ring and socket bayonets, the bayonet was rammed into the muzzle, meaning a musket with a fixed bayonet could not be fired, and one that had just fired could not instantly become a spear. This left a fatal transition gap that the charge was designed to exploit — vividly demonstrated at Killiecrankie, where, as Historic UK records, Mackay's troops, "surprised by the rapid change in tactics… did not have time to fix bayonets and so were ill equipped for the close quarter hand to hand fighting that would follow. The battle quickly turned into a rout." Third, psychology: the noise, speed and apparent fearlessness of the charge, and the concentration of a linear formation's frontage into a battering wedge, panicked inexperienced or shaken troops into premature firing and flight. As the National Trust for Scotland's Culloden interpretation stresses, the charge "was used with great effect against the Government armies and was a deadly combination of physical and psychological warfare, when used correctly."

Historians emphasise that the decisive effect was usually the rout, not the melee: the aim was to make part of the enemy line break, opening gaps that could be exploited to "roll up" the rest. Where troops held their ground and kept firing, the charge was far more costly to the attackers — a point that would matter greatly at Culloden.

Key engagements demonstrating effectiveness

At Killiecrankie (27 July 1689), Viscount Dundee ("Bonnie Dundee") held his charge until the setting sun was out of his men's eyes, then loosed it downhill against Major-General Hugh Mackay's government army in the pass. Mackay's men — including professional veterans of the Dutch Scots Brigade — got off only a shot or two before being overwhelmed; the government army was routed in minutes, though Dundee was killed at the moment of victory and the rising soon collapsed at Dunkeld. According to ScottishHistory.org, "Mackay left behind perhaps as many as 1,800 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The Jacobites had lost between 700–800 men."

At Prestonpans (21 September 1745), the Jacobites used local knowledge to cross a marsh and fall on the flank of Sir John Cope's inexperienced army at dawn. When Cope's artillery opened fire it triggered an immediate charge; the gunners fled, the dragoons broke, and the infantry disintegrated. The fighting was famously brief — the History of Parliament records that "one anonymous eyewitness to the rout declared it was even worse than that and that the troops had given up within just four and a half minutes of making contact with the enemy."

At Falkirk Muir (17 January 1746), Lord George Murray seized the high ground in a winter storm, with wind and rain at the Jacobites' backs and in the government army's faces. The Highland right broke General Hawley's regiments and routed his dragoons; the Jacobites won the field. It was, as Falkirk Local History Society rightly records, "the last time the famous Highland charge swept the clansmen to victory." Even so, on the government left several regiments under Cholmondeley held and drove off the charge with disciplined platoon fire — a foretaste of Culloden.

The "savage / undisciplined warriors" mythbusting

The popular image — reinforced by centuries of romanticism and by modern screen depictions — is of a wild, instinctive rush by "savage" tribesmen. Modern scholarship rejects this on the evidence. Executing the charge required considerable discipline and coordination: holding formation under fire, absorbing a volley, throwing oneself flat and rising on cue, delivering a controlled single volley at close range, and then transitioning en masse to edged weapons and reforming into wedges. This was underpinned by the clan structure, in which men fought in kin-based groups under their own gentry and chiefs — a command system that produced ties, in the National Trust for Scotland's phrase, "often stronger than those of a basic regiment." Historians such as Stuart Reid, whose Highland Clansman 1689–1746 is a standard modern study, explicitly dismantle the "Victorian-fabricated" image of an undifferentiated mass of broadsword-wielding kilted men, showing instead a socially layered force with recognisable organisation, equipment and tactics.

At the same time, the corrective must not overshoot into the opposite error — the claim that the charge was "only a myth" or never really effective. It plainly was effective, repeatedly, against regular troops, and its physical and psychological brutality is documented beyond serious doubt. The accurate picture is of a specialised, disciplined shock tactic with real limitations, not of either noble savages or a romantic fiction.

Culloden and the documented breakdown

At Culloden (16 April 1746) the pattern failed for the first time, and every documented factor worked against the charge. The Jacobite army was exhausted and hungry after an abortive night march on Cumberland's camp at Nairn; it was outnumbered (roughly 5,000 against 9,000) and heavily outgunned. Against the urging of Lord George Murray, Charles Edward Stuart chose to stand on Drummossie Moor — flat, open and boggy ground with no cover, offering a clear field of fire to Cumberland's artillery and none of the broken terrain the charge needed. As the National Army Museum bluntly puts it, "the battlefield was ill-chosen, as it afforded a clear field of fire to Cumberland's artillery."

Cumberland's guns bombarded the stationary Jacobite line with round shot and then grapeshot/canister for around half an hour before the charge was finally, and belatedly, unleashed — in places spontaneously, without clear orders. Recent National Trust for Scotland archaeology (finds made in late 2023 and announced ahead of the battle's 278th anniversary) has recovered dense concentrations of musket balls and grapeshot within "a small 60 sq m area close to the Government frontline," physically confirming the intensity of the fire. NTS Head of Archaeology Derek Alexander noted one lead grapeshot ball "around 2–3cm in diameter and, at 102g… about four times a standard musket ball," found beside a broken copper-alloy shoe buckle possibly belonging to Donald Cameron of Lochiel, who "led the 400-strong Camerons regiment into the battle" and was wounded in both ankles at its head. The boggy ground and a subtle slope caused the charge to drift rightwards and bunch against the government left, where Barrell's 4th and Munro's 37th Foot received the main impact. Some clansmen broke into the front line in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting; but disciplined regulars who "maintained discipline when charged," supported by mortar fire and enfilading musketry from a deeply echeloned line, halted the breakthrough and drove the survivors back into a rout. The whole action lasted under an hour. Per the National Army Museum, "between 1,000 and 1,500 of Prince Charles Edward's men were killed," while "the casualties on Cumberland's side were significantly lower: 50 dead and 259 wounded."

Government countermeasures and evolving doctrine

The government army's answer to the charge evolved over nearly sixty years. The first technological fix followed directly from Killiecrankie: Hugh Mackay is credited with promoting the ring bayonet (and, soon after, the socket bayonet), which allowed a musket to be fired and reloaded with the bayonet fixed, closing the fatal plug-bayonet gap. (Ring/socket designs were being experimented with in France in the same period, so this was a convergence rather than a purely Scottish invention.)

The best-documented tactical countermeasure is the "new bayonet drill" associated with Cumberland's army before Culloden. According to a soldier's letter published in The Scots Magazine in 1746, instead of thrusting at the swordsman directly in front — whose targe would deflect the point — each infantryman was to thrust obliquely to his right into the exposed flank of the Highlander attacking his neighbour, trusting the man on his own left to protect him in turn. As Encyclopædia Britannica summarises it, "each British soldier, instead of attacking the Highlander directly in front of him, bayoneted the exposed side of the man to his right." This is genuinely disputed: The Scots Magazine itself printed a retraction in November 1746, and the attribution of a similar technique to the Duke of Argyll at Sheriffmuir (1715) is unconfirmed. However, several other primary documents attest to some alteration, and Cumberland certainly drilled his men intensively — including modified platoon-firing practice at Aberdeen in April 1746 — and hardened their morale after Falkirk. What is clear is that the combination of disciplined, steady troops, effective artillery, favourable open ground and improved bayonet handling — not any single "trick" — defeated the charge. As Private Isaac Midgely of Barrell's recalled (National Army Museum), "After the battle there was not a bayonet in this regiment that was neither bloody or bent."

More broadly, the charge belonged to an era of transition. As firearms improved (faster, more reliable flintlocks; the socket bayonet turning every musketeer into a pikeman) and disciplined volley fire matured, the window the charge relied upon narrowed until it closed. Interestingly, elements of the shock ethos survived in British service: the "volley and bayonet charge" used by Highland regiments across the empire echoed the old sequence of a close volley followed by a rapid close assault.

Legacy and connection to later Highland regimental tradition

Within a decade of Culloden, and especially after war with France resumed in 1756, the government began recruiting Highlanders into the British Army in large numbers — William Pitt the Elder championing the policy of turning a feared enemy into a "storehouse" of aggressive, loyal troops. The martial reputation forged at Prestonpans and Falkirk unquestionably fed the mystique of the new Highland regiments, and the last two Highland Charges in history were in fact delivered for the Crown: the 78th Fraser Highlanders' broadsword charge at the Plains of Abraham in 1759 (the last successful one) and the Loyalist attempt at Moore's Creek Bridge in 1776 (a catastrophe, the patriots having stripped planking from the bridge and greased the rails).

This connection, however, must be stated carefully. Recent scholarship (for example, "Continuity, Coercion and Myth: The Recruitment of Highland Regiments in the Later Eighteenth Century," and work on the construction of Scottish military identity) stresses that the later "warrior race" image was substantially a constructed myth, promoted by landed elites and the state for political and economic reasons, and that recruitment relied heavily on economic coercion and impressment as well as genuine martial tradition. The clan system was already in decline well before Culloden. So while the Highland Charge is a real thread in the ancestry of the kilted regiments' reputation, it is not a simple, unbroken causal line from clan warrior to redcoat — and this card treats the link as real but qualified. (See Cards #3–4 Black Watch and #10–13 for the regiments themselves.)

• The tactic was originally known as the "Irish charge," reflecting the Irish Confederate troops who came to Scotland with Alasdair Mac Colla in 1644.
• The word claymore comes from the Scottish Gaelic claidheamh mòr, "great sword" — though by the Jacobite era the weapon of the charge was usually the one-handed basket-hilted broadsword, not the older two-handed blade.
• At Killiecrankie, a government soldier named Donald McBane — later a celebrated swordsman — reputedly escaped the pursuing Highlanders by leaping about 18 feet (5.5m) across the River Garry at a spot still called the Soldier's Leap.
• The Highlanders often used their own musket smoke as a screen, firing a single volley and then vanishing into the cloud before emerging with drawn swords — a deliberate tactic, not an accident.
• Bagpipes were associated with the charge and with martial culture to the extent that they later featured in the suppression of Highland military tradition; the National Trust for Scotland notes this is "perhaps one of the reasons the bagpipes would later become classed as 'weapons of war'."
• General Hugh Mackay, humiliated at Killiecrankie, is credited with helping to develop the ring bayonet — the loser of the battle helping to design the technology that would eventually neutralise the tactic that beat him.
• The battle of Prestonpans was reportedly decided in as little as four and a half minutes of contact, according to one anonymous eyewitness.
• The last successful Highland Charge in history was made not against the British but for them — by the 78th Fraser Highlanders outside Quebec in 1759, the regiment that also took the heaviest casualties of any British unit in that battle.

• "Savage / undisciplined warriors" (myth corrected): The charge required organisation, timing and discipline, delivered through clan command structures; the "wild savage" image is a later romantic and political construction. Equally, the tactic's real ferocity and effectiveness should not be dismissed — both extremes are wrong.
• Origins (disputed): Whether Alasdair Mac Colla "invented" the charge (Stevenson) or merely gave modern form to an ancient Gaelic tradition (Hill) remains an open scholarly question; the two positions are best read as complementary.
• Cumberland's "new bayonet drill" (disputed): Attested by a 1746 letter but retracted by the same magazine; supported by other sources but probably exaggerated in popular accounts. The victory at Culloden owed as much to ground, artillery and discipline as to any single technique.
• Casualty figures (variable): Killiecrankie government losses are given as roughly 1,800–2,000, Jacobite losses ~700–800; Culloden Jacobite dead are usually put at 1,000–1,500 against ~50 government dead and 259 wounded. Figures vary by source.
• Regimental legacy (qualified): The link between the charge's reputation and later Highland regiments is real but must not be overstated; recruitment relied heavily on economic coercion, and the "warrior race" image was partly manufactured.
• The ring bayonet (contested attribution): Often credited to Hugh Mackay after Killiecrankie, but similar designs were being trialled in France in the same period; it was a convergence, not a sole invention.