Bonnie Prince Charlie and Toad - What could they have in common?

Bonnie Prince Charlie Leaves Scotland
John Blake MacDonald

It is a surprising thing to say but Bonnie Prince Charlie and Kenneth Graham’s character Toad, (Wind in the Willows, 1908) have much in common. Both were good-natured, kind-hearted and not without intelligence but they were also spoiled, reckless and obsessive.

Toad fooling a policeman
in a TV adaptation of Wind in the Willows

Although one is a character of fiction and the other of history and legend they both escaped the forces of law enforcement dressed as a woman, a washerwoman in Toad’s case, whereas the Bonnie Prince took the disguise of an Irish seamstress, Betty Burke when he climbed aboard the Bonnie boat to Skye with Flora MacDonald on his way to France in 1746 leaving a trail of destruction behind him.

The retribution that followed the defeat of the Jacobite Army at Culloden in 1746 has passed into legend for its brutality and savagery and has formed the backdrop to many classic stories including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and more recently Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of novels.

Today, we are so accustomed to picture of the suppression of the Highlands by the British Army painted in these novels that we are hardly surprised by it. However, when I looked at the records in the Scottish National Archive for this article I found the pastiche of brutality in the  films and TV shows suddenly and shaply transformed from fiction to fact and the true horror of what took place became fresh and alive once more.

I have chosen some examples from the records of the Fraser Clan to illustrate what happened as there is currently so much interest in it due to the success of the Starz Outlander TV series.