Muskets v. the Highland charge

What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without a fight in 1688, and the battlefield of the Boyne in 1690 earning him the unaffectionate nickname Séamus an Chaca, ‘James the Shit’. During the Jacobite rising of 1715 on the death of Anne and the accession of George I, his son Prince James Edward, coming late to the fight from France, fled Scone palace, telling his hapless supporters to ‘shift for themselves’ after the defeat at Sheriffmuir. In turn his son, Charles Edward, the Bonnie Prince, brought up in Rome, hurried from the field at Culloden in 1746, the culminating battle of the second major rising, the ‘Forty-five’, having mismanaged the whole affair. ‘There goes that Italian coward,’ spat Lord Elcho, one of his ADCs.

Only in the Scottish Highlands at that time, ‘one of the last feudal societies in 18th-century Europe’, could such a bloodline be thought worthy of the throne, let alone dying for.