Charles Edward Stuart
Charles Edward Stuart, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Young Pretender, was the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland. As the grandson of the deposed King James II, he embodied the Stuart cause and spent much of his youth in Rome at the court-in-exile of his father, James Francis Edward Stuart. In 1745 he landed in Scotland with a small force and rallied the Highland clans, launching the last major Jacobite uprising. His army swept south as far as Derby before retreating in the face of superior Hanoverian forces. The campaign ended in catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746, the last pitched battle fought on British soil, after which he famously escaped through the Highlands with the help of Flora MacDonald. After the rising, Charles lived as a fugitive and then in continental exile, his later years marked by alcoholism and political irrelevance. The brutal pacification of the Highlands that followed Culloden ended the clan system and the Jacobite cause with it. Despite the failure, Bonnie Prince Charlie became one of the most romanticised figures in Scottish history.
- Lived: 1720 CE – 1788 CE
- Nationality: scottish
- Roles: military_leader, leader
