Allan Maclean, Jacobite General: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Career Soldier

Michael Power is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This is a readable and competent biography of an eighteenth-century soldier and adventurer whose fate as a career army officer was largely dictated by the military misfortunes of his race. Mary Beacock Fryer, an apologist for the United Empire Loyalists, has researched her subject thoroughly and sympathetically. She is generous and objective in her assessment of a man who might have lived and died in obscurity had it not been for his family’s reckless and romantic attachment to the House of Stuart.

Allan Maclean, Scotsman and Presbyterian, was born in 1725, son of Donald Maclean, the fifth laird of Torloisk, an estate on the northwest coast of the Isle of Mull. His family, though impoverished, kept alive clan traditions and loyalties. They valued education, and the parents taught all their children to speak English as well as Scots. They were also fervent and uncritical supporters of the Stuart claim to the throne of England and Scotland.

Allan’s own life was lived in the vortex of emotions whipped up by the almost mystical appearance of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The long-awaited Stuart restoration was about to take place. And the men of Mull, along with all the clans who had never forsaken the rightful cause of the Stuarts, would fight alongside the Prince to restore his family to its proper place in the nation’s life and to revive the honour and respect which Scotland deserved but had lost to the foreigners from London. However, the hopes of a generation were crushed at the Battle of Culloden, 16 April 1746, when the die-hard supporters of the Stuarts, armed only with muskets and broadswords, were slaughtered by the Duke of Cumberland’s cannons. Rebellious Scotland was soon to feel the full wrath of Cumberland’s army of occupation as it marched from one end of the country to the other, demolishing, in the name of the King and the Tory establishment, every cultural and spiritual link with the Stuart past. Even the tartan and clan colours were to be outlawed. Before the smoke had cleared from the battlefield, before the last of the dead and dying had been carted off, Allan Maclean had escaped the carnage and was making his way to the east coast where he hoped to take a boat to Europe.

His exile began in the Netherlands. He survived by joining the Scottish Brigade of the Dutch Army, at that time under the command of a kinsman, Francis Maclean. Through him, Allan was commissioned a lieutenant in time for the battle of Bergen-op-Zoom against the forces of Louis XV, ironically the one monarch who had been steadfast in his support of the Stuarts. A brief period as a prisoner of the French was followed by almost four years of relative idleness. He returned to Great Britain in 1750 when George II offered an amnesty to all Jacobite officers. Swallowing his pride, Allan gratefully accepted the offer and went to live with a brother, a solicitor in Edinburgh.

Arms were his livelihood; the officers’ mess his only home. Six years elapsed before Maclean entered the regular British army, despite his lingering love for the Stuarts. He finally landed a lieutenancy in the Royal American (62nd) Regiment. Thus began his colourful career in North America. He was wounded at the Battles of Ticonderoga and Fort Niagara. After the fall of New France, he was instrumental in raising a regiment for the Royal Highland Volunteers, the 114th Regiment of Foot. Exile in Paris because of bad debts, a love affair, the birth of an illegitimate son, and marriage to Janet Maclean eventually steered him back into the army. The income of a half-pay officer of a disbanded regiment was hardly enough to finance his family in London.

In April 1775 he received a commission to raise the Royal Highland Emigrants, a provincial corps of the British Army to be recruited in America for service against the rebels. He successfully orchestrated the defense of Quebec in December 1775, outfoxing the likes of Benedict Arnold and General Richard Montgomery. He was Governor of Montreal for several years, and ended his tour of duty as Commandant of Fort Niagara during the crucial period leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, 1783, which recognized the United States and forced Britain to accept a radical change in the boundary separating her colonial possessions to the north and the new nation of America to the south. From 1775 to 1783, Maclean was a member of a Loyalist mosaic which sought to re-establish the King’s loyal subjects in what is now the province of Ontario.

Maclean retired from active service in 1784. He spent the rest of his days in quiet retirement with his wife in London, where he died in March 1797.

Fryer makes much of Maclean’s spirited defense of Indian land claims and Britain’s moral and treaty obligations to her Indian allies. Although Maclean was typical of his generation when it came to serving rum to the Indians, he was one of only a handful of British officers who felt offended by Britain’s refusal to include the natives, especially those belonging to the Six Nations, in the 1783 treaty negotiations. In this respect, Allan Maclean was far more than just a product of the eighteenth century: he was an enlightened administrator far ahead of his time.

The one weakness of Fryer’s otherwise entertaining biography is her use of invented dialogue. It tends to blur the very real distinction between the historical novel, where the imagined words of the characters have a part to play in illuminating events, and a straightforward work of history, where no such invention should be allowed to intrude upon our apprehension of the facts. Neither Fryer nor any other historian can have it both ways.