HERO OF THE HIGHLANDS
“Ye windows were full of Ladys who threw up their handkerchiefs and clap’d their hands and show’d great loyalty to ye Bonny Prince,” an onlooker wrote after watching Charles Edward Stuart ride through Edinburgh in 1745. His whole manner and appearance seemed “Cut out for enchanting his beholders and carrying People to consent to their own Slavery in spite of themselves.”
Such is the popular image of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ that has prevailed across three centuries: a charismatic young man whose adventures to reclaim the British Crown for the House of Stuart became the stuff of romantic Scottish legend; his heroic failure and flight wistfully lamented in . But how did a half-Polish prince raised in Rome
