While a Jacobite success, The Battle of Falkirk Muir has been described as a hollow victory, since divided command and poor co-ordination deprived them of the last opportunity to decisively defeat their opponents. One factor was confusion over the result - from their position on the left, Prince Charles and his closest advisors initially thought they had been defeated. Military strategists sometimes refer to this sort of chaos and confusion onthe battlefield, as 'the fog of war'.
There were other uncertainties that made this battle an untidy victory - George Murray, the Jacobite field commander publicly blamed one of the other Jacobite leaders for arriving late and not supporting the success of the Highlanders on the south front, while accusing another of cowardice. The distrust between the lowland clan leaders and the non-Scottish advisors that Bonnie Prince Charlie surrounded himself with was very evident - the victors were bitterly divided. Even within the lowland clan heads, Murray himself was still distrusted having very recently worked for the Hanoverians. The Jacobean Army's internal strife exploded into recriminations after what should have been an emphatic victory.
As well as confusion about who was to be trusted amongst the Jacobean leaders, there were cultural divides between lowland clan leaders, highland clans, and Bonnie Prince Charlie's collection of advisors made up of military men exiled from their own countries. Murray was knowledgeable on how Highlanders fought and organised, they were not a standing army and were held together by obligations to their landowner lords/clan chiefs. Prince Charles and the exile advisors however, failed to appreciate that while the military obligations of clan society allowed the Highland clan chiefs to provide large numbers of men at short notice, the obligation assumed warfare was short-term and rarely took place in the winter. After a successful battle, the Highlanders expected to be able to go home to secure their loot and the clan chiefs could not prevent a flood of such 'desertions'. So it was after Falkirk Muir. When the Hanoverian overall Commander - the Duke of Cumberland - resumed his advance through Scotland later in January, Prince Charles asked Murray to prepare a battle plan, but was told the army was in no state to fight, most of it had gone home.
