THE LOYAL REBEL

Even in Rome, it’s cold in January.

So the young man coming out into the pre-dawn must have wrapped his hunting attire around him at the beginning of the second week of 1744. He was leaving behind him the familiarity of the squares around him – the Trevi fountains, the church of the holy apostles where he and his family had attended mass, and most of all his home for some years now – the Palazzo Muti, now renamed the Palazzo di Re since the young man’s father, James Stuart, recognised by the pope and an as yet indeterminate number of Britons as James VIII/III, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, had taken up residence.

The young man – Charles Edward Louis Casimir Silvester Maria Stuart – Carluccio, Tearlach, Charlie as he would become known in many languages was, in Jacobite iconography, ‘Spes Britanniae’ – the Hope of Britain. It was to fulfil this hope that the prince, giving his brother the slip, now set off northward, to Paris, to Gravelines and through a near sinking by the British navy, to appear at Glenfinnan, a simple white rose he had plucked in his bonnet, and with seven companions raised his standard and proposed to take over the throne of Great Britain.

In September 1745 another young man was preparing to leave his family home.

This was James Johnstone, a representative of the young men of Alternative Scotland. Episcopalian, not calvinist. Free-drinking, theatre-going, art-loving when on the Grand Tour. For 40 years they had fought a religious civil war with the calvinists whom they saw as plunging Scotland into Stygian gloom. Their heroes were Bonnie Dundee and Tam Dalziel with his horsemen on Scots greys, who had had a short way with these ministers of misery.

But God works in mysterious ways. The victories of William of Orange, to this day vociferously celebrated in central Scotland, had indeed, to the calvinists, been a fulfilment of prophecy, with the meek, not the lairds, inheriting the earth.

But among the undismayed roistering Caledonian cavaliers, James Johstone won the coat and badge every year. Such was his dissipation, his despairing well-to-do Edinburgh family had used their considerable connections to have him enrolled in the Russian army, but he proved a wild child even in that uninhibited milieu and now here he was, at 25 years old, back in Edinburgh.

And then came the call.

Conversion from an aimless life to one of purpose is a common enough feature of the religious world. But the military world can do that too.

By 5 September, Prince Charles Edward had reached Perth. His revolutionary mountain men and their chiefs had outwitted the government army’s commander-inchief, General John Cope. The two armies had done a . The Jacobites came down what is now the A9. General Cope had left the security of