In the grey dawn the clans waded through the marsh and leaped the ditch; Charles was forced to come with the second line fifty yards behind the first.  The Macdonalds held the right, as they said they had done at Bannockburn; the Camerons and Macgregors were on the left they “cast their plaids, drew their blades,” and, after enduring an irregular fire, swept the red-coat ranks away; “they ran like rabets,” wrote Charles in a genuine letter to James.  Gardiner was cut down, his entire troop having fled, while he was directing a small force of foot which stood its ground.  Charles stated his losses at a hundred killed and wounded, all by gunshot.  Only two of the six field-pieces were discharged, by Colonel Whitefoord, who was captured.  Friends and foes agree in saying that the Prince devoted himself to the care of the wounded of both sides.  Lord George Murray states Cope’s losses, killed, wounded, and taken, at 3000, Murray, at under 1000.

The Prince would fain have marched on England, but his force was thinned by desertions, and English reinforcements would have been landed in his rear.  For a month he had to hold court in Edinburgh, adored by the ladies to whom he behaved with a coldness of which Charles II. would not have approved.  “These are my beauties,” he said, pointing to a burly-bearded Highland sentry.  He “requisitioned” public money, and such horses and fodder as he could procure; but to spare the townsfolk from the guns of the castle he was obliged to withdraw his blockade.  He sent messengers to France, asking for aid, but received little, though the Marquis Boyer d’Eguilles was granted as a kind of representative of Louis XV.  His envoys to Sleat and Macleod sped ill, and Lovat only dallied, France only hesitated, while Dutch and English regiments landed in the Thames and marched to join General Wade at Newcastle.  Charles himself received reinforcements amounting to some 1500 men, under Lord Ogilvy, old Lord Pitsligo, the Master of Strathallan (Drummond), the brave Lord Balmerino, and the Viscount Dundee.  A treaty of alliance with France, made at Fontainebleau, neutralised, under the Treaty of Tournay, 6000 Dutch who might not, by that treaty, fight against the ally of France.

The Prince entertained no illusions.  Without French forces, he told D’Eguilles, “I cannot resist English, Dutch, Hessians, and Swiss.”  On October [15/26] he wrote his last extant letter from Scotland to King James.  He puts his force at 8000 (more truly 6000), with 300 horse.  “With these, as matters stand, I shal have one decisive stroke for’t, but iff the French” (do not?) “land, perhaps none. . . .  As matters stand I must either conquer or perish in a little while.”

Defeated in the heart of England, and with a prize of 30,000 pounds offered for his head, he could not hope to escape.  A victory for him would mean a landing of French troops, and his invasion of England had for its aim to force the hand of France.  Her troops, with Prince Henry among them, dallied at Dunkirk till Christmas, and were then dispersed, while the Duke of Cumberland arrived in England from Flanders on October 19.