Dance Lady MacIntosh's Rant 3617

(or “The Duke Is Welcome to Inverness”)
(See also “Invercauld’s Reel”)

Lady Macintosh was Anne, daughter of John Farquharson, 9th of Invercauld, wife of Angus, 22nd Chief of Clan Macintosh, a young lady who at the age of twenty raised two battalions among Clan Chattan for Prince Charles Edward. It is interesting to note that while “Colonel Anne” was riding about the clan countryside in blue bonnet and tartan habit that her husband was away, an officer in the service of George II who remained loyal to his commission.

The seat of the Macintosh is Moy Hall, eleven miles from Inverness and very near to Culloden Moor. On the night of 16 February, 1746, Prince Charles Edward was staying with Lady Macintosh at Moy Hall when word was brought by young Lachlan Macintosh from the Dowager Lady Macintosh then at her town house in Inverness that 1,500 of Lord Loudon’s soldiers were marching upon Moy in the hope of capturing the prince. Lady Macintosh did not wish to awaken her sleeping royal guest so she put the situation into the capable hands of Donald Fraser, the local blacksmith. Fraser and four other men, armed with muskets, moved into the darkness past the prince’s sentries and through the hamlet of Moy until they came upon Loudon’s men creeping steadily through the shadows. The five men then spread out until they formed a line a regiment in width. They fired, killing one of Loudon’s men. With shouts and orders that would make the Hanoverians think that they had run into the prince’s army, and with the five men racing back and forth and firing their muskets, Loudon’s soldiers turned and ran, with Fraser and his companions in hot pursuit. One of the men left dead among the peat stacks after the Rout of Moy was Donald Ban MacCrimmon, that paragon of pipers, who had accompanied the Hanoverians that night. Before he left Skye, Donald Ban had had a premonition and he composed the great pipe lament, “Cha till, cha till, cha till Mac Cruimein”, “MacCrimmon will never return”.

Lady Macintosh was taken prisoner after Culloden, but she survived captivity and died at Leith in 1787, a staunch Jacobite to the end.

There is another side to the story behind this dance, the Hanoverian, the other side of the coin. From 21 February until just before the battle of Culloden, Inverness was the headquarters of the Highland army of Prince Charles Edward. Inverness had been a Jacobite city, but on the afternoon of 16 April there was a reversal in loyalty. At four o’ clock, fresh from his victory on Culloden Moor, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721–1765), rode into Inverness and was greeted with thundering peals from the city’s church towers. When the duke went to his lodging, it was to the townhouse of the Dowager Lady Macintosh, the same house that had sheltered his cousin during his stay in Inverness. When Lady Macintosh was taken prisoner, she was reputed to have said, “I’ve had two king’s bairns living under my roof in my time, and to tell you the truth I wish I may never have another”.