Lochiel Of The 45 The Jacobite Chief And The Prince John Sibbald Gibson by John Sibbald Gibson 9781474468459, 9780748605071, 1474468454, 074860507X instant download after payment.

Part of a series of monographs which John Sibbald Gibson has produced on aspects of the history of the Jacobite risings in Scotland. It is a concise reinterpretation of the actions and relationships of a specific figure, Donald Cameron of Lochiel the Younger, to re-evaluate conventional views of the run-up to, execution of, and aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 (to restore the Stuart monarchy in Scotland and perhaps all of the British Isles).

Some source materials have not been fully exploited before, including complex memoirs of John Murray of Broughton, the secretary to Prince Charles who turned king's evidence when captured after Culloden; and a manuscript in the archive of the French foreign ministry (to persuade the government of Louis XV to re-do the '45 in 1747, exclusively as a Scottish independence war, not a war for the three British kingdoms), and which Gibson argues convincingly from internal evidence was written by the exiled Lochiel.

Gibson's Lochiel emerges as a man of total integrity, but no strategist. He was an early exponent of a "Fortress Highlands" strategic option which as first Charles and later Lord George saw would just not work without the ability to receive French aid through the eastern ports. After Culloden, Lochiel's sense of honour drove him to wage a summer campaign, and that plan was not only unrealistic but had catastrophic consequences: It was Lochiel's intransigence that drove Cumberland to the worst excesses of devastation in Lochaber.

Gibson also shows evidence that Whig general John Campbell of Mamore actively colluded in Charles Stuart's escape.

"[Gibson] makes much ... that was not quite coherent suddenly fall into place." – Bruce P. Lenman.
"This book enables us to see one of the key figures of the Forty-Five in the round." – Rosalind Mitchison.
"A splendid book … Carefully researched and elegantly written." – Trevor Royle.

This account of "the hero of the ‘45" deserves to become a key text.