Charles Edward Stuart has been admired mainly as a symbol, with little regard to historical fact.  He was supported only by a minority of Scots at the time.  John Prebble's words from The Lion in the North seem a fairly good summation:

Accompanied by a handful of ageing companions, this handsome, self-centred and tragically reckless young man landed on the white sand of Arisaig in July 1745.  He was strong and healthy, ill-educated and charming, and he had come against the wishes of his father, the disapproval of Louis XV, and the advice of his sympathisers in Scotland.  He brought little but the innocent appeal of his personality, and the wiser chiefs were those who refused to meet him lest his charm induce them into their own destruction.  In later years of drunkenness and self-pity he would remember the Highlanders with maudlin affection, but at the time he seemed to share the usual civilised opinion of them.  When he himself first dressed in Highland clothes he said that he needed only the itch to be taken for the real thing.

Malcolm