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After midnight, 19 June 1815... On the battlefield more than 50,000
men and 7,000 horses lie dead and wounded; the wreckage of a once
proud French Grande Armee struggles in abject disorder to the
Belgian frontier pursued by murderous Prussian lancers; and
Napoleon Bonaparte, exhausted and stunned at the scale of his
defeat, rode through the darkness towards Paris, abdication and
captivity. In the days, weeks and months that followed, news of the
battle shaped the consciousness of an age. Drawing on a
multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints, Paul O'Keeffe
brings into focus as never before the sights, sounds and smells of
the battlefield, of conquest and defeat, of celebration and riot.
'Excellent... It is a tremendous tale - one of the most dramatic in
our island's history - and O'Keeffe tells it beautifully' The Times
Charles Edward Stuart's campaign to seize the British throne ended
with one of the quickest defeats in history: on 16 April 1746, at
Culloden, his Jacobite army was overpowered in under forty minutes.
Its brutal repercussions, however, endured for years, its legacy
for centuries. Paul O'Keeffe follows the Jacobite army from initial
victories to calamitous defeat. Exploring the battle's aftermath,
he chronicles the Jacobite prisoners paying for their treason on
block and gibbet while those granted 'the King's mercy' suffered
the fate of forced labour on plantations in the colonies. While
Stuart's cause eventually acquired an aura of romanticism, the
Jacobite Rising remains one of the most bloody and divisive
conflicts in British domestic history, which resonates to this day.
'Detailed, vivid - and not for the faint-hearted' Financial Times
'Fascinating, meticulously researched... tremendous' Daily Mail
'Intensely readable... and vividly written' Neal Ascherson, London
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