It was now about 5 am. Peering into the half light of the pre-dawn, Cope’s men could see what looked like bushes a few hundred yards away, along terrain that had been featureless the night before. But they were not bushes. They were the vanguard of the Jacobite army coming out of the mist.”

 

By Kim J. Harmon

Only to the most casual historical observer would the Battle of Prestonpans, 1745, seem like a minor skirmish in the second Jacobite uprising in Scotland.

Especially seeing as how this particular battle may have lasted as long as 15 minutes (some historians argue it didn’t even last that long) when the rebel forces, led by Prince Charles Stuart, thoroughly routed Lieutenant-General Sir John Cope and his force of British regulars.

As short it was (maybe as short as five minutes, according to some accounts), it was, in fact, the first major battle of the 1745 Jacobite Uprising and it led to the invasion of England and very nearly led to King George II being driven from the throne.

Stepping away from the law books and the tennis court, Martin Margulies – the head coach of the Newtown High School boys’ tennis team – takes a step back in time to revisit the Battle of Prestonpans and to re-examine the events leading up to the battle and the repercussions from the loss for Sir John Cope, long since ridiculed for his failure on the battlefield.

It’s called The Battle Of Prestonpans 1745 and it’s currently available at www.amazon.com.uk.

“I’ve always loved history,” said Mr Margulies, a law professor emeritus at Quinnipiac University, “British and French history of the 17th and 18th century and I read accounts of the rebellion battles by historian John Prebble.”

It helps that his heart is linked to Scotland as he and his family own a summer home on the small Hebridean island of South Uist. It also helps that he discovered a transcript of the trial of Sir John Cope, who was accused of incompetence following the battle – at a time when Britain was routinely executing admirals who weren’t doing their best for the crown.

“Morale (in Sir John Cope’s army) was excellent up until the battle,” said Mr Margulies, “but I can see if you have a 20-year-old English soldier, serving out of economic necessity, being faced with these ‘savages’ rushing out of the mists, panicking.”

Mr Margulies wrote an article about the Battle of Prestonpans – but since there no were tomes, as yet, on the subject he was asked if he would like to try his hand at a book. Though Mr Margulies wrote a short book about 30 years ago, a biography of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, the idea was a bit unsettling.

“I was scared – daunted,” he said. “I contemplated the magnitude of it, but I realized I just had to strap myself to the computer and do it.”

From the initial signing of the contract to the moment he delivered the manuscript to Tempus Publishing at The Mill, Brimscombe Post, Stroud in Gloucestershire, the project took some two-and-a-half years to complete. It encompassed many hours poring over old documents and other archaic materials written on the politics of the time, the battle and the subsequent trial, as well as a physical tour of the old battlefield.

“It’s one of the two hardest things I have done in my life,” Mr Margulies said. “The other was raising kids. Only difference is, I only did one of them right. Don’t ask me which.”

With a hint of that same dry wit, Mr Margulies examines, in depth, the complicated politics of the time (“… in the resulting English civil war, Charles lost both his crown and his means of wearing one; he was beheaded …”) and goes into the exacting detail of the battle and all the movements directly leading up to that fateful moment on September 21, 1745.

As short as it was, it was a bloody affair as the Highlanders, with their crude implements, slaughtered many of the British soldiers too slow to turn and run along with their comrades and while Mr Margulies brings the events to vivid life, he also allows the actual words of the battlefield participants to describe the horror.

The battle itself – allowing the Jacobites the confidence to invade England – was important enough, but so was the aftermath and the trial of Sir John Cope, who wrote in his report of the battle, “I have been unfortunate, which will certainly give a Handle to my Enemies to cast blame upon me. I cannot reproach myself. The Manner in which the Enemy came on, which was quicker than can be described (of which the Men have long been warned) possibly was the Cause of our Men taking a most destructive Pannick …”

The book is an engaging account of an important battle of which not many of us are aware, but Mr Margulies brings it to life in The Battle of Prestonpans 1745.

He will continue writing – but for now he will be as a guest columnist for the Am Paipear, a newspaper of the Southern Isles of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. His first effort, out this month, is on the perils of hill-walking and how his son fell into a bog after claiming hill-walking wasn’t at all dangerous.