The Jacobites’ “General”: Spanish John’s Evidence for the History of Military Bagpiping

Abstract

month after the battle of Culloden, the last organized elements of the Jacobite army narrowly escaped an attempt to surprise them at Achnacarry in southwest Inverness-shire. John Macdonell of Scotus was a Spanish officer and Highland gentleman who happened to be on hand as an envoy from the Jacobite planners in France. In his memoirs, Macdonell (or Eòin Spàinteach, "Spanish John") recorded the rebels' alarm and hasty withdrawal: "we were awakened at break of day . . . by all the Highland Bagpipes playing the general, Cogga na si, having been alarmed by their scouts, who reported that the Duke of Cumberland had sent a much superior force by three different routes to surround them . . . ." 1 Although Macdonell's narrative has been in print for many years, no one seems to have remarked the significance of this passage, which throws fresh light on the history of piping even as it deepens and confirms certain new aspects of our understanding of the Jacobite army in the '45.Until recently it was customary for even the most scholarly discussions of the '45 to use the terms "Highland army," "Highlanders," "clansmen," or even "Highland rabble" 2 interchangeably with "Jacobite army." Such has been the tenacity of the idea that the rebel army in 1745-46 was, leaving aside a few fringe units, essentially a Highland force -an informal clan army engaged in a kind of glorified cattle raid. This is an illusion with a long and complicated history, going back to the rebellion itself and the propaganda of both sides, to the government's derisive ethnic stereotyping as well as the Jacobites' mythologizing selfportrayal as a band of plucky freedom fighters. 3 On the Whig side, David Hume gives us a fairly measured expression of a