A campaign to change the name of a street that honours the Duke of Cumberland, the so-called butcher of Culloden, is supported by evidence of his atrocities, a historian has said.
More than 1,000 people have signed a petition that calls for Cumberland Close in Kirriemuir to be renamed.
Cumberland was the youngest son of George II. There was no doubt that he carried out war crimes, said Murray Pittock, pro-vice principal at the University of Glasgow.
“The atrocities he authorised after the battle on April 16, 1746 — and indeed planned before it — almost immediately shocked his contemporaries,” he said. “These included death squads to murder the wounded, burning alive and summary firing squads.
“Only two weeks after the battle questions were asked at a ball in London as to whether ‘the duke had ordered his men to give no quarter to the rebels’. By the end of that month it was being said ‘that when the duke came back to the capital he was to be made a freeman of the Butchers’ Company’.”
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Cumberland’s men ransacked and set alight the homes of those suspected of supporting Charles Edward Stuart, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was part of a violent “pacification” of the Highlands.
Pittock, the author of Culloden, a re-evaluation of the last battle fought on British soil, said a statue of the disgraced duke had been removed from Cavendish Square, London, as early as 1868.
In the same year, the word “Culloden” was removed from Cumberland’s memorial obelisk in Windsor Great Park, apparently on the orders of Queen Victoria, who once declared she was a “Jacobite at heart”.
“It isn’t odd or strange to want to rename a street,” Pittock said. “It is up to other people whether they think that is worth doing but it has plenty of precedents.”
Cumberland is said to have lodged in the the original Gairie Inn in the Angus town while returning south after the battle, which ended hope of restoring the Stuarts to the throne.
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Scott MacFarlane, a resident who is leading the call for change, said: “At present we have a close in Kirriemuir named after a mass murderer. It is a scar on the face of our town.”
He has said the road should be named Visocchi Close as a tribute to the Italian-Scottish family that has run an ice-cream parlour there for almost 80 years.
Angus council, which is led by a minority SNP administration, is due to discuss the change on Thursday.
“The petition calling for the renaming of Cumberland Close has attracted considerable local support and I know councillors will give it appropriate consideration,” Graeme Dey, the SNP MSP for Angus South, said.
“It strikes me as far more apt that the close carries the name of the Visocchi family, whose café and ice cream parlour has been at the heart of the Kirriemuir community for generations.”
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In 2019 plans by Barratt Homes to name a street close to the Inverness battlefield after Cumberland were vetoed by Highland councillors.
Cumberland, whose campaign popularised the anthem God Save the King, died aged 44, morbidly obese and suffering from heart disease, in London in 1765.
After five months on the run Bonnie Prince Charlie left Scotland for France on a French naval ship in September 1746, never to return. He died an alcoholic without an heir in Rome in 1788, a century after his grandfather James VII lost the throne to William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution.
