The new Parliament met on December 1, 1741, and re-elected Mr. Onslow as Speaker. The speech from the throne was almost entirely taken up with somewhat cheerless references to the war with Spain, and the debate on {187} the address was naturally made the occasion for new attacks on the policy of the Government. "Certainly, my Lords," said Chesterfield, "it is not to be hoped that we should regain what we have lost but by measures different from those which have reduced us to our present state, and by the assistance of other counsellors than those who have sunk us into the contempt and exposed us to the ravages of every nation throughout the world." This was the string that had been harped upon in all the pamphlets and letters of the Patriots during the progress of the war. Walpole had done it all; Walpole had delayed the war to gratify France; he had prevented the war from being carried on vigorously in order to assist France; he had obtained a majority in Parliament by the most outrageous and systematic corruption; he was an enemy of his country, and so forth. All these charges and allegations were merely founded on Walpole's public policy. They simply came to this, that a certain course of action taken by Walpole, with the approval of Parliament, was declared by Walpole to have been taken from patriotic motives and for the good of England, and was declared by his enemies to have been taken from unpatriotic motives and in the interest of France. It was of no avail for Walpole to point out that everything he had done thus far had been done with the approval of the House of Commons. The answer was ready: "Exactly; and there is another of your crimes: you bribed and corrupted every former House of Commons."

[Sidenote: 1742—Pulteney's attempt to refer]

On January 21, 1742, Pulteney brought forward a motion to refer all the papers concerning the war, which had just been laid on the table, to a select committee of the House, in order that the committee should examine the papers, and report to the House concerning them. This was simply a motion for a committee of inquiry into the manner in which ministers were carrying on the war. The House was the fullest that had been known for many years. Pulteney had 250 votes with him; Walpole had only 253—a majority of three. Some of the efforts made {188} on both sides to bring up the numbers on this occasion remind one of Hogarth's picture of the "Polling Day," where the paralytic, the maimed, the deaf, and the dying are carried up to record their vote. Men so feeble from sickness that they could not stand were brought down to the House wrapped up like mummies, and lifted through the division. Walpole seems to have surpassed himself in the speech which he made in his own defence. At least such is the impression we get from the declaration of some of those who heard it, Pulteney himself among the rest. Pulteney always sat near to Walpole on the Treasury bench; Pulteney, of course, not admitting that he had in any way changed his political principles since Walpole and he were friends and colleagues. Pulteney offered to Walpole his warm congratulations on his speech, and added, "Well, nobody can do what you can." Pulteney might afford to be gracious. The victory of three was a substantial defeat. It was the prologue to a defeat which was to be formal as well as substantial. The Patriots were elated. The fruit of their long labors was about to come at last.

All this was telling hard upon Walpole's health. We get melancholy accounts of the cruel work which his troubles were making with that frame which once might have seemed to be of iron. The robust animal spirits which could hardly be kept down in former days had now changed into a mournful and even a moping temperament. His son, Horace Walpole, gives a very touching picture of him in these decaying years. "He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow—for I have frequently known him snore ere they had drawn his curtains—now never sleeps above an hour without waking; and he who at dinner always forgot he was minister, and was more gay and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without speaking, and with his eyes fixed for an hour together." Many of his friends implored him to give up the hopeless and thankless task. Walpole still clung to office; still tried new stratagems; planned new combinations; racked {189} his brain for new devices. He actually succeeded in inducing the King to have an offer made to the Prince of Wales of an addition of fifty thousand pounds a year to his income, provided that Frederick would desist from opposition to the measures of the Government. The answer was what every one—every one, surely, but Walpole, must have expected. The prince professed any amount of duty to his father, but as regards Walpole he was implacable. He would listen to no terms of compromise while the great enemy of himself and of his party remained in office.

[Sidenote: 1742—"The thanes fly from me!"]

The Duke of Newcastle had notoriously turned traitor to Walpole. Lord Wilmington, whose "evaporation" as Sir Spencer Compton marked Walpole's first great success under George the Second, was approached by some of Walpole's enemies, and besought to employ his influence with the King to get Walpole dismissed. It is said that even Lord Hervey now began to hold aloof from him. It was only a mere question of time and the hour. Walpole's enemies were already going about proclaiming their determination not to be satisfied with merely turning him out of office; he must be impeached and brought to condign punishment. Walpole's friends—those of them who were left—made this another reason for imploring him to resign. They pleaded that by a timely resignation he might at least save himself from the peril of an impeachment. Walpole showed a determination which had much that was pitiable and something that was heroic about it. He would not fly—bear-like, he would fight the course.

The final course soon came. The battle was on a petition from the defeated candidates for Chippenham, who claimed the seats on the ground of an undue election and return. Election petitions were then heard and decided by the House of Commons itself, and not by a committee of the House, as in more recent days. The decision of the House was always simply a question of party; and no one had ever insisted more strongly than Walpole himself that it must be a question of party. The Government desired the Chippenham petition to succeed. On some disputed {190} point the Opposition prevailed over the Government by a majority of one. It is always said that Walpole then at once made up his mind to resign; and that the knowledge of his intention put such heart into those who were falling away from him as to bring about the marked increase which was presently to take place in the majority against him. We are inclined to think that he even still hesitated, and that his hesitation caused the increase in the hostile majority. He must go—he has to go—people said; and the sooner we make this clear to him the better. Anyhow, the end was near. The Chippenham election was carried against him by a majority of sixteen—241 votes against 225. A note at the bottom of the page of the Parliamentary Debates for that day says: "The Chippenham election being thus carried in favor of the sitting members, it was reported that Sir Robert Walpole publicly declared he would never enter the House of Commons more." This was on February 2, 1742. Next day the Lord Chancellor signified the pleasure of the King that both Houses of Parliament should adjourn until the eighteenth of the month. Everybody knew what had happened. The long administration of twenty years was over; the great minister had fallen, never to lift his head again. The Parliamentary record thus tells us what had happened: "The same evening the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole resigned his place of First Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, which he had held ever since April 4, 1721, in the former of which he succeeded the Earl of Sunderland, and in the latter Mr. Aislabie."

That, however, was not the deepest depth of the fall. The same record announces that "three days afterwards his Majesty was pleased to create him Earl of Orford, Viscount Walpole, and Baron of Houghton." "Posterity," says Macaulay, "has obstinately refused to degrade Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." Posterity has in like manner obstinately refused to degrade Robert Walpole into the Earl of Orford. He will be known {191} as Robert Walpole so long as English history itself is known.

[Sidenote: 1742—The new Administration]

Walpole, then, was on the ground—down in the dust—never to rise again. Surely it would seem the close of his career as a Prime-minister must be the opening of that of his rival and conqueror. Any one now—supposing there could be some one entirely ignorant of what did really happen—would assume, as a matter of course, that Pulteney would at once become Prime-minister and proceed to form an administration. This was naturally in Pulteney's power. But Pulteney suddenly remembered having said long ago that he would accept no office, and he declared that he would positively hold to his word. At a moment of excitement, it would seem, and stung by some imputation of self-seeking, Pulteney had adopted the high Roman fashion, and announced that he would prove his political disinterestedness by refusing to accept any office in any administration. The King consulted Walpole during all these arrangements, and Walpole strongly recommended him to offer the position of Prime-minister to Lord Wilmington. Time had come round indeed—this was the Sir Spencer Compton for whom King George at his accession had endeavored to thrust away Walpole, but whom Walpole had quietly thrust away. He was an utterly incapable man. Walpole probably thought that it would ruin the new administration in the end if it were to have such a man as Compton, now Lord Wilmington, at its head. Lord Wilmington accepted the position. Lord Carteret had desired the post for himself, but Pulteney would not hear of it. The office of Secretary of State—of the Secretary of State who had to do with foreign affairs—was the proper place, he insisted, for a man like Carteret. The secretaries then divided their functions into a Northern department and a Southern department. The Northern department was concerned with the charge of Russia, Prussia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Poland, and Saxony; the Southern department looked after France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, {192} and the States along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. So Carteret became one secretary, and the grotesque Duke of Newcastle remained the other. The duke's brother, Henry Pelham, remained in his place as Paymaster, Lord Hardwicke retained his office as Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Samuel Sandys, who had moved the resolution calling for Walpole's dismissal, took Walpole's place as Chancellor of the Exchequer. There seems some humor in the appointment of such a man as successor to Robert Walpole.

[Sidenote: 1742—The combined four]

Then Pulteney's career as a great Prime-minister is not beginning? No—not beginning—never to begin. By one of the strangest strokes of fate the events which closed the career of Walpole closed the career of Pulteney too. Yet but a few months, and Pulteney ceases as completely as Walpole has done to move the world of politics. The battle is over and the rival leaders have both fallen. One monument might suffice for both, like that for Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec. Pulteney was offered a peerage, an offer which he had contemptuously rejected twice before. He accepted it now. It will probably never be fully and certainly known why he committed this act of political suicide. Walpole appears to have been under the impression that it was by his cleverness the King had been prevailed upon to drive Pulteney into the House of Lords. Walpole, indeed, very probably made the suggestion to the King, and no doubt had as his sole motive in making it the desire to consign Pulteney to obscurity; but it does not seem as if his was the influence which accomplished the object. Lord Carteret and the Duke of Newcastle both hated Pulteney, who as cordially hated them. Newcastle was jealous of Pulteney because of his immense influence in the House of Commons, which he fancied must be in some sort of way an injury to himself and his brother; and, stupid as he was, he felt certain that if Pulteney consented to enter the House of Lords the popularity and the influence would vanish. Carteret's was a more reasonable if not a more noble jealousy. He was determined to come {193} to the head of affairs himself—to be Prime-minister in fact if not in name; and he feared that he never could be this so long as Pulteney remained, what some one had called him, the Tribune of the Commons. Once get him into the House of Lords and there was an end to the tribune and the tribune's career. As for himself, Carteret, he would then be able to domineer over both Houses by his commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney—had never forgiven him his championship of the Prince of Wales—and would be delighted to see him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret, and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that removal to the House of Lords would mean political extinction for Pulteney, how is it that no thought of the kind seems to have entered into the mind of Pulteney himself? Even as a question of the purest patriotism, such a man as Pulteney, believing his own policy to be for the public good, ought to have sternly refused to allow himself to be forced into any position in which his public influence must be diminished or destroyed. As regarded his personal interests and his fame, Pulteney must have had every motive to induce him to remain in the House where his eloquence and his debating power had won him such a place. It is impossible to believe that he could have been allured just then, at the height of his position and his renown, by the bauble of a coronet which he had twice before refused—contemptuously refused. Probably the real explanation may be found in the fact that Pulteney, for all his fighting capacity, was not a strong but a weak man. Probably he was, like Goethe's Egmont, brilliant in battle but weak in council. All unknown to himself, four men, each man possessed of an overmastering power of will, were combined against him for a single purpose—to drive him into the House of Lords—that is, to drive him out of the {194} House of Commons. His enemies prevailed against him. As Lord Chesterfield put it, he "shrank into insignificance and an earldom." We are far from saying that a man might not be a good minister and a statesman of influence after having accepted a seat in the House of Lords. But it was beginning to be found, even in Pulteney's time, that the place of a great Prime-minister is in the House of Commons; and certainly the place of a tribune of the people can hardly be the House of Lords. Pulteney was born for the House of Commons: transplantation meant death to a genius like his. When the news of his "promotion" became public, a wild outcry of anger and despair broke from his population of admirers. He was denounced as having committed an act of perfidy and of treason. He had accepted a peerage, it was said, as a bribe to induce him to consent to let Robert Walpole go unimpeached and unpunished. The outcry was quite unjust, but was certainly not unnatural. People wanted some sort of explanation of an act which no ordinary reasoning could possibly explain. Pulteney's conduct bitterly disappointed the Tory section of the Opposition as well as the populace of his former adorers out-of-doors. Bolingbroke, who had hurried back to England, found that all his dreams of a genuine Coalition Ministry, representing fairly both wings of the forces of Opposition, had vanished with the morning light. Except for the removal of Walpole, hardly any change was made in the composition of recent English administration. The Tories and Jacobites, who had helped so signally in the fight, were left out of the spoils of victory. Bolingbroke found that he was no nearer to power than he would have been if Walpole still were at the head of affairs. Nothing was changed for him; only a stupid man had taken the place of a statesman. Pulteney appears to have acted very generously towards his immediate political colleagues, and to have remained in the House of Commons, where he now had all the power, until he had got for them the places they desired. Then he was gazetted as Earl of Bath; and we {195} have all heard the famous anecdote of the first meeting in the House of Lords between the man who had been Robert Walpole and the man who had been William Pulteney, and the greeting given by the new Lord Orford to the new Lord Bath; "Here we are, my lord, the two most insignificant fellows in England." With these words the first great leader of Opposition in the House of Commons, the man who may almost be said to have created the parliamentary part of leader of Opposition, may be allowed to pass out of the political history of his time.

Many attempts were made to impeach Walpole, as we still must call him. Secret committees of inquiry were moved for. Horace Walpole, the Horace Walpole, Sir Robert's youngest son, made his first speech in the House of Commons, in defence of his father, against such a motion. A secret committee was at last obtained, but it did not succeed, although composed almost altogether of Walpole's enemies, in bringing out anything very startling against him. Public money had been spent, no doubt, here and there very freely for purely partisan work. There could be no question that some of it had gone in political corruption. But everybody had already felt sure that this had been done by all ministries and parties. The report of the committee, when it came at last, was received with cold indifference or unconcealed contempt.

[Sidenote: 1742-1745—Death of Walpole]

Walpole still kept a good deal in touch with the King. George consulted him privately, and indeed with much mystery about the consultations. The King sometimes sent a trusty messenger, who met Walpole at midnight at the house of a friend. It was indeed a summons from George which hastened the great statesman's death. The King wished to consult Walpole, and Walpole hurried up from Houghton for the purpose. The journey greatly increased a malady from which he suffered, and he was compelled by pain to have recourse to heavy doses of opium, which kept him insensible for the greater part of every day during more than six weeks. When the stupefying effect of the opium was not on him—that is, for {196} some two or three hours each day—he talked with all that former vivacity which of late years seemed to have deserted him. He knew that the end was coming, and he bore the knowledge with characteristic courage. On March 18, 1745, he died at his London house in Arlington Street. Life could have had of late but little charm for him. He had always lived for public affairs and for power. He had none of the gifts of seclusion. Except for his love of pictures, he had no in-door intellectual resources. He could not bury himself in literature as Carteret could do; or, at a later day, Charles James Fox; or, at a later day still, Mr. Gladstone. Walpole's life really came to an end the day he left the House of Commons; the rest was silence. He was only in his sixty-ninth year when he died. It was fitting that he should lose his life in striving to assist and counsel the sovereign whose family he more than any other man or set of men had seated firmly on the throne of England. His faults were many; his personal virtues perhaps but few. One great and consummate public virtue he certainly had: he was devoted to the interests of his country. In the building of Nelson's ships it was said that the oak of Houghton Woods excelled all other timber. Oak from the same woods was used to make musket-stocks for Wellington's soldiers in the long war against Napoleon. Walpole's own fibre was something like that of the oaks which grew on his domain. His policy on two of the most eventful occasions of his life has been amply justified by history. He was right in the principles of his Excise Bill; he was right in opposing the war policy of the Patriots. The very men who had leagued against him in both these instances acknowledged afterwards that he was right and that they were wrong. It was in an evil moment for himself that he yielded to the policy of the Patriots, and tried to carry on a war in which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a great statesman; almost, but not quite, a great man.

[Sidenote: 1744—Death of Pope]

Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but {197} the first magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander Pope died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where "Thames' translucent wave shines a broad mirror," to use his own famous words. He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong friendships, fierce and passionate enmities; and the friendships themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic as Rousseau or Byron; but he had none of Byron's manly public spirit, and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One English critic believed he had settled the question forever when he described Pope as "a musical rocking-horse." Again and again the world has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are certainly not for those who can read the great originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles' wrath, and Helen's pathetic beauty, and Hector's fall, and Priam's agony home to the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life. We have no intention of writing a critical dissertation on the poetry of Pope. One fact may, however, be remarked and recorded concerning it. After Shakespeare, and possibly Milton, no English poet is so much quoted from as Pope. Lines and phrases of his have passed into the common vernacular of our daily life. We talk Pope, many of us, as the too-often cited bourgeois gentilhomme of Moliere talked prose, without knowing it. There is hardly a line of "The Rape of the Lock" or "The Dunciad" that has not thus passed into the habitual conversation of our lives. This of itself would not prove that Pope was a great poet, but it is a striking testimony to his extraordinary popularity, and his style is not that which of itself would seem calculated to insure popularity. The very smoothness and perfection of his verse make it seem to many ears nothing better than a melodious monotony. Pope had not imagination enough to be a great poet of the highest order—the order of creative power. He had marvellous fancy, which sometimes, as in "The Rape of the Lock" and in passages of the fierce "Dunciad," rose to something like imagination. Every good Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very good Christian could hardly help admitting that it must have been all for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should never have had "The Dunciad."



{199}

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"THE FORTY-FIVE."

[Sidenote: 1720—Birth of "Prince Charlie"]

Thirty years had come and gone since England had been alarmed, irritated, or encouraged, according to the temper of its political inhabitants, by a Jacobite rising. The personality of James Stuart, the Old Pretender, was little more than a memory among those clansmen who had rallied round the royal standard at Braemar. In those thirty years James Stuart had lived his melancholy, lonely, evil life of exile, the hanger-on of foreign courts, the half grotesque, half pitiable, sham monarch of a sham court, that was always ready to be moved from place to place, with all its cheaply regal accessaries, like the company and the properties of some band of strolling players. Now there was a new Stuart in the field, a new sham prince, a "Young Pretender." After the disasters of the Fifteen, James Stuart had become the hero of as romantic a love-story as ever wandering prince experienced. He had fallen in love, in the hot, unreasoning Stuart way, with the beautiful Clementine Sobieski, and the beautiful Clementine had returned the passion of the picturesquely unfortunate prince, and they had carried on their love affairs under conditions of greater difficulty than Romeo and Juliet, and had overcome the difficulties and got married, and in 1720 Clementine had borne to the House of Stuart a son and heir. Every precaution was taken to insure the most public recognition of the existence of the newly born prince. It was determined that none of the perplexity, the uncertainty, the suspicion, which attended upon the birth of James, should be permitted to arise now. There must be no haro about warming-pans, no accusations of {200} juggling, no possible doubts as to the right of the new-born babe to be regarded as the son of James Stuart and of Clementine Sobieski. The birth took place in Rome, and cardinals accredited from all the great Powers of Europe were present on the occasion to bear witness to it. The city was alive with such excitement as it had seldom witnessed since the days when pagan Rome became papal Rome. The streets in the vicinity of the house where Clementine Sobieski lay in her pain were choked with the gilt carriages of the proudest Italian nobility; princes of the Church and princes of royal blood thronged the antechambers. Gallant gentlemen who bore some of the stateliest names of England and of Scotland waited on the stair-ways for the tidings that a new prince was given unto their loyalty. Adventurous soldiers of fortune kicked their heels in the court-yard, and thought with moistened eyes of the toasts they would drink to their future king. From the Castle of St. Angelo, where long ago the besieged had hurled upon the besiegers the statues that had proved the taste of a Roman emperor, where Rienzi lay yesterday, and where Cagliostro shall lie to-morrow, thunders of artillery saluted the advent of the new rose of the House of Stuart.

In the years that followed, while the young Prince Charles was growing up to his tragic inheritance, it can hardly be maintained, even by the most devoted adherent of the Stuart line, that James showed himself in the slightest degree worthy of the crown towards which he reached. Indeed, his conduct showed a reckless indifference to the means most likely to attain that crown which it is difficult to account for. When everything depended for the success of his schemes upon the friends he made abroad and the favor he retained at home, he wantonly acted as if his dearest purpose was to alienate the one and to wholly lose the other. His conduct towards his wife, and his persistent and stupid favoritism of the Mar man and woman—especially the woman—drove the injured and indignant Clementine into a convent, and made the great European {201} princes of Spain, Germany, and Rome his adversaries. Spain refused him entrance to the kingdom unaccompanied by his wife; the Pope struck him a heavier blow in diminishing by one-half the income that had hitherto been allowed him from the Papal treasury. But worse than the loss of foreign friends, worse even than the loss of the Sistine subsidy, was the effect which his treatment of his wife produced in the countries which he aspired to rule. His wisest followers wrote to him that he had done more to injure his cause by his conduct to Clementine than by anything else in his ill-advised career. At last even James took alarm; his stubborn nature was forced to yield; the obnoxious favorites were dismissed, and a reconciliation of a kind was effected between the Stuart king and queen. But fidelity was a quality difficult enough for James to practise, and when the Queen died in 1735 it is said that she found death not unwelcome.

[Sidenote: 1734-1735—Charles in his first campaign]

In the mean time the young Prince Charles grew up to early manhood. Princes naturally begin the world at an earlier age than most men, and Charles may be said to have begun the world in 1734, when, as we have seen, at the age of fourteen, he took part in the siege of Gaeta as a general of artillery, and bore himself, according to overwhelming testimony, as became a soldier. Up to this time his education had been pursued with something like regularity; and if at all times he preferred rowing, riding, hunting, and shooting to graver and more secluded pleasures, he was not in this respect peculiar among young men, princes or otherwise. If, too, he never succeeded in overcoming the difficulties which the spelling of the English language presented, and if his handwriting always remained slovenly and illegible, it must be remembered that in that age spelling was not prized as a pre-eminent accomplishment by exalted persons, and that Charles Stuart could spell quite as well as Marlborough. He knew how to sign his name; and it may be remarked that though he has passed into the pages of history and the pages of romance as Charles Edward, he himself never signed his {202} name so, but always simply Charles. He was baptized Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir, and, like his ancestors before him, he chose his first name as his passport through the world. If he had marched to Finchley, if Culloden had gone otherwise than it did go, if any of the many things that might have happened in his favor had come to pass, he would have been Charles the Third of England.

His education was, from a religious point of view, curiously mixed. He was intrusted to the especial care of Murray, Mrs. Hay's brother, and a Protestant, much to the grief and anger of his mother. But he professed the tenets of the Catholic Church, and satisfied Pope Clement, in an interview when the young prince was only thirteen, that his Catholic education was sound and complete. For the rest, he was a graceful musician, spoke French, Spanish, and Italian as readily as English, and was skilled in the use of arms. As far as the cultivation of mind or body vent, he might fairly be considered to hold his own with any of the preceding sovereigns and princes of the House of Stuart. When in 1737 he set out on a kind of triumphal tour of the great Italian towns, he was received everywhere with enthusiasm, and everywhere made the most favorable impression. So successful was this performance, so popular did the prince make himself, and so warmly was he received, that the Hanoverian Government took upon itself to be seriously offended, ordered the Venetian ambassador Businiello to leave London, and conveyed to the Republic of Genoa its grave disapproval of the Republic's conduct. The zealous energy of Mr. Fane, our envoy at Florence, saved that duchy from a like rebuke. Mr. Fane insisted so strongly that no kind of State reception was to be accorded to the travelling prince that the Grand Duke gave way. Yet the Grand Duke's curiosity to meet Charles Stuart was so great that he had prevailed upon Fane to allow him to meet the stranger on the footing of a private individual; but sudden death carried off the poor Grand Duke before the interview could take place.

{203}

[Sidenote: 1734-1737—The omen accepted]

When Charles Stuart, as a general of fourteen, was helping to besiege Gaeta, he had been hailed by Don Carlos as Prince of Wales, and as Prince of Wales he was invariably addressed by those outside the little circle of the sham court who wished to please the exiled princes or show their sympathy with their cause. The young Charles soon began to weary of being Prince of Wales only in name. It seems certain that from a very early age his thoughts were turned to England and the English succession. There is a legend that at Naples once the young prince's hat blew into the sea, and when some of his companions wished to put forth in a boat and fetch it back he dissuaded them, saying that it was not worth while, as he would have to go shortly to England to fetch his hat. The legend is in all likelihood true in so far as it represents the bent of the young man's mind. He was sufficiently intelligent to perceive that masquerading through Italian cities and the reception of pseudo-royal honors from petty princes were but a poor counterfeit of the honors that were his, as he deemed, by right divine. So it was only natural that with waxing manhood his eyes and his thoughts turned more often to that England which he had never seen, but which, as he had been so often and often assured, was only waiting for a fit opportunity to cast off the Hanoverian yoke and welcome any lineal descendant of the Charleses and the Jameses of beloved memory.

More than one expedition had been planned, and one expedition had decisively failed, when in the summer of 1745 Prince Charles sailed from Belleisle on board the Boutelle, with the Elizabeth as a companion vessel. He started on this expedition on his own responsibility and at his own risk. Murray of Broughton, and other influential Scottish friends, had told him, again and again, that it would be absolutely useless to come to Scotland without a substantial and well-armed following of at least six thousand troops, and a substantial sum of money in his pocket. To ask so much was to ask the impossible. {204} At one time the young prince had believed that Louis the Fifteenth would find him the men and lend him the money, but in 1745 any such hope had entirely left him. He knew now that Louis the Fifteenth would do nothing for him; he knew that if he was ever to regain his birthright he must win it with his own wits. It is impossible not to admire the desperate courage of the young aspirant setting out thus lightly to conquer a kingdom with only a handful of men at his back and hardly a handful of money in his pocket. Judging, too, by the course of events and the near approach which the prince made to success, it is impossible not to accord him considerable praise for that instinct which makes the great soldier and the great statesman, the instinct which counsels when to dare. The very ships in which he was sailing he had got hold of, not only without the connivance, but without the knowledge, of the French Government. They were obtained through two English residents at Nantes. On August 2d the Boutelle anchored off the Hebrides alone. The Elizabeth had fallen in with an English vessel, the Lion, and had been so severely handled that she was obliged to return to Brest to refit, carrying with her all the arms and ammunition on which Prince Charles had relied for the furtherance of his expedition. So here was the claimant to the crown, friendless and alone, trying his best to derive encouragement from the augury which Tullibardine grandiloquently discerned in the flight of a royal eagle around the vessel. Eagle or no eagle, augury or no augury, the opening of the campaign was gloomy in the extreme. The first clansmen whose aid the prince solicited were indifferent, reluctant, and obstinate in their indifference and reluctance. Macdonald of Boisdale first, and Clanranald of that ilk afterwards, assured the prince, with little ceremony, that without aid, and substantial aid, from a foreign Power, in the shape of arms and fighting-men, no clansman would bare claymore in his behalf. But the eloquence and the determination of the young prince won over Clanranald and the Macdonalds of {205} Kinloch-Moidart; Charles disembarked and took up his headquarters at Borrodaile farm in Inverness-shire. A kind of legendary fame attaches to the little handful of men who formed his immediate following. [Sidenote: 1745—The Seven Men of Moidart] The Seven Men of Moidart are as familiar in Scottish Jacobite legend as the Seven Champions of Christendom are to childhood. Tullibardine; Sir Thomas Sheridan, the prince's tutor; Francis Strickland, an English gentleman; Sir John Macdonald, an officer in the service of Spain; Kelly, a non-juring clergyman; Buchanan, the messenger, and Aeneas Macdonald, the banker, made up the mystic tale. Among these Seven Men of Moidart, Aeneas Macdonald plays the traitor's part that Ganelon plays in the legends of Charlemagne. He seems to have been actuated, from the moment that the prince landed on the Scottish shore, by the one desire to bring his own head safely out of the scrape, and to attain that end he seems to have been ready to do pretty well anything. When he was finally taken prisoner he saved himself by the readiness and completeness with which he gave his evidence. No more of him. There were, happily for the honor of the adherents of the House of Stuart, few such followers in the Forty-five.

The position of the young prince was peculiar. His engaging manners had won over many of the chiefs; his presence had set on fire that old Stuart madness which a touch can often kindle in wild Highland hearts; his determination to be a Scotchman among Scotchmen, a determination which set him the desperate task of trying to master the Gaelic speech, insured his hold upon the affections of the rude chivalry whom his presence and his name had already charmed. But some of the greatest clans absolutely refused to come in. Macdonald of Sleat, and Macleod of Macleod, would have none of the "pretended Prince of Wales" and his "madmen."

Though these chieftains were appealed to again and again, they were resolute in their refusal to embark in the Stuart cause. They pledged themselves to the House of Hanover, they accepted commissions in the royal army; {206} the cause of Charles Stuart must sink or swim without them. With them or without them, however, Charles was going on. The number of clans that had come in was quite sufficient to fill him with hope; the little brush at Spean's Bridge between two companies of the Scots Royal, under Captain Scott, and the clansmen of Keppoch and Lochiel, had given the victory to the rebels. The Stuarts had drawn first blood successfully, and the superstitions saw in the circumstance yet another augury of success. The time was now ripe for action. All over the north of Scotland the Proclamation of Prince Charles was scattered. This proclamation called upon all persons to recognize their rightful sovereign in the young prince's person as regent for his father, invited all soldiers of King George, by offers of increased rank or increased pay, to desert to the Stuart colors, promised a free pardon and full religious liberty to all who should renounce their allegiance to the usurper, and threatened all who, after due warning, remained obdurate with grave pains and penalties. Everywhere through the west this document had been seen and studied, had inflamed men's minds, and set men's pulses dancing to old Jacobite tunes. In Edinburgh, in Berwick, in Carlisle, copies had been seen by astonished adherents of the House of Stuart, who were delighted or dismayed, according to their temperaments. Scotland was pretty well aware of the presence of the young prince by the time that it was resolved to unfurl the flag.

[Sidenote: 1745—An auspicious opening]

The royal standard of crimson and white was raised by Tullibardine on August 19th in the vale of Glenfinnan, in the presence of Keppoch and Lochiel, Macdonald of Glencoe, Stuart of Appin, and Stuart of Ardshiel, and their clansmen. No such inauspicious omen occurred as that which shook the nerves of the superstitious when James Stuart gave his banner to the winds of Braemar a generation earlier. Indeed, an invading prince could hardly wish for happier conditions under which to begin his enterprise. Not only was he surrounded by faithful clansmen, prepared to do or die for the heir to the House of Stuart, but the {207} stately ceremony of setting up the royal standard was witnessed by English prisoners, the servants and the soldiers of King George, the first-fruits of the hoped-for triumph over the House of Hanover. "Go, sir," Charles is reported to have said to one of his prisoners, Captain Swetenham, "go and tell your general that Charles Stuart is coming to give him battle." That clement of the theatrical which has always hung about the Stuart cause, and which has in so large a degree given it its abiding charm, was here amply present. For a royal adventurer setting out on a crusade for a kingdom the opening chapter of the enterprise was undoubtedly auspicious reading.



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CHAPTER XXXV.

THE MARCH SOUTH.

[Sidenote: 1715-1716—The chances in his favor]

The condition of Scotland at the time of the prince's landing was such as in a great degree to favor a hostile invasion. Even educated Englishmen then knew much less about Scotland, or at least the Highlands of Scotland, than their descendants do to-day of Central Africa. People—the few daringly adventurous people—who ventured to travel in the Highlands were looked upon by their admiring friends as the rivals of Bruce or Mandoville, and they wrote books about their travels as they would have done if they had travelled in Thibet; and very curious reading those books are now after the lapse of something over a century. The whole of the Highlands were wild, unfrequented, and desolate, under the rude jurisdiction of the heads of the great Highland houses, whose clansmen, as savage and as desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees, offered their lords an almost idolatrous devotion. Nominally the clans were under the authority of the English Crown and the Scottish law; actually they recognized no rule but the rule of their chiefs, who wielded a power as despotic as that of any feudal seigneur in the days of the old regime. The heroes of the Ossianic poems—the Finns and Dermats whom colonization had transplanted from Irish to Scottish legend—were not more unfettered or more antiquely chivalrous than the clansmen who boasted of their descent from them. Scotland was more unlike England in the middle of the last century than Russia is unlike Sicily to day.

There were several things in Charles's favor. To begin with, the disarmament of the clans, which had been insisted {209} upon after "the Fifteen," had been carried out in such a fashion as was now to prove most serviceable to the Young Pretender; for the only clans that had been really disarmed were the Mackays, Campbells, and Sutherlands, who were loyal enough to the House of Hanover, and gave up their weapons very readily to prove their loyalty. But the other clans—the clans that ever cherished the lingering hope of a Stuart restoration—were not in reality disarmed at all. They made a great show of surrendering to General Wade weapons that were utterly worthless as weapons of war, honey-combed, crippled old guns and swords and axes; but the good guns and swords and axes, the serviceable weapons, these were all carefully stowed away in fitting places of concealment, ready for the hour when they might be wanted again. That hour had now come. So that, thanks to the Disarming Act of 1716, the Government found its chief allies in the north of Scotland practically defenceless and unarmed, while the clans that kept pouring in to rally around the standard of the young invader were as well armed as any of those who had fought so stoutly at Sheriffmuir. Yet another advantage on the adventurer's side was due to the tardiness with which news travelled in those times. Charles had been for many days in the Highlands, preparing the way for the rising, before rumors of anything like an accredited kind came to the Court of St. James. The Highlands and islands of Scotland were then so far removed from the great world of government that it had taken something like half a year on one occasion before the dwellers in the stormy Shetlands had learned that their sovereign, King William the Third, was dead and buried; and in the years that had elapsed since William of Orange passed away the means of communication between London and the far north were little if at all better. Charles had actually raised his standard and rallied clan after clan around him before the Government in London could seriously believe that a Stuart in arms was in the island. There were other and minor elements of success, too, to be noted in the great game that the Stuart prince {210} was playing. The Ministry was unpopular: the head of that Ministry was the imbecile Duke of Newcastle, perhaps the most contemptible statesman who has ever made high office ridiculous. The King was away in Hanover. England was in the toils of a foreign war, and her prestige had lately suffered heavily from the sudden defeat at Fontenoy. There were very few troops in England to employ against an invasion, and the Scottish commander-in-chief, Sir John Cope, whose name lives in unenviable fame in the burden of many a Jacobite ballad, was as incapable a well-meaning general as ever was called upon to face a great unexpected emergency. It must be admitted that all these were excellent points in the prince's favor, and that they counted for much in the conduct of the campaign.

From the first, young Charles Stuart might well have come to regard himself as the favorite of fortune. The history of the Forty-five divides itself into two distinct parts: the first a triumphant record of brilliant victories, and the picture of a young prince marching through conquest after conquest to a crown; the second part prefaced by a disastrous resolution, leading to overwhelming defeat, and ending in ignominious flight and the extinction of the last Stuart hope. From the moment when the Stuart standard fluttered its folds of white and crimson on the Highland wind it seemed as if the Stuart luck had turned. Charles might well conceive himself happy. Upon his sword sat laurel victory. Smooth success was strewn before his feet. The blundering and bewildered Cope actually allowed Charles and his army to get past him. Cope was neither a coward nor a traitor, but he was a terrible blunderer, and while the English general was marching upon Inverness Charles was triumphantly entering Perth. From Perth the young prince, with hopeless, helpless Cope still in his rear, marched on Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: 1745—The advance of the clans]

The condition of Edinburgh was peculiar: although a large proportion of its inhabitants, especially those who were well-to-do, were stanch supporters of the House of Hanover, there were plenty of Jacobites in the place, and {211} it only needed the favor of a few victories to bring into open day a great deal of latent Jacobitism that was for the moment prudently kept under by its possessors. The Lord Provost himself was more than suspected of being a Jacobite at heart. The city was miserably defended. Such walls as it possessed were more ornamental than useful, and in any case were sadly in want of repair. All the military force it could muster to meet the advance of the clans was the small but fairly efficient body of men who formed the Town Guard; the Train Bands, some thousand strong, who knew no more than so many spinsters of the division of a battle; the small and undisciplined Edinburgh regiment; and a scratch collection of volunteers hurriedly raked together from among the humbler citizens of the town, and about as useful as so many puppets to oppose to the daring and the ferocity of the clans. Edinburgh opinion had changed very rapidly with regard to that same daring and ferocity. When the first rumors of the prince's advance were bruited abroad, the adherents of the House of Hanover in Edinburgh made very merry over the gang of ragged rascals, hen-roost robbers, and drunken rogues upon whom the Pretender relied in his effort to "enjoy his ain again." But as the clans came nearer and nearer, as the air grew thicker with flying rumors of the successes that attended upon the prince's progress, as the capacity of the town seemed weaker for holding out, and as the prospect of reinforcements seemed to grow fainter and fainter, the opinion of Hanoverian Edinburgh concerning the clans changed mightily. Had the Highlanders been a race of giants, endowed with more than mortal prowess, and invulnerable as Achilles, they could hardly have struck more terror into the hearts of loyal and respectable Edinburgh citizens.

Still there were some stout hearts in Edinburgh who did their best to keep up the courage of the rest and to keep out the enemy. Andrew Fletcher and Duncan Forbes were of the number. M'Laurin, the mathematician, turned his genius to the bettering of the fortifications. Old {212} Dr. Stevenson, bedridden but heroic, kept guard in his armchair for many days at the Netherbow Gate. The great question was would Cope come in time? Cope was at Aberdeen. Cope had put his army upon transports. Cope might be here to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, to-day, who knows? But in the mean time the King's Dragoons, whom Cope had left behind him when he first started out to meet the Pretender, had steadily and persistently retreated before the Highland advance. They had now halted—they can hardly be said to have made a stand—at Corstorphine, some three miles from Edinburgh, and here it was resolved to do something to stay the tide of invasion. Hamilton's Dragoons were at Leith. These were ordered to join the King's Dragoons at Corstorphine, and to collect as many Edinburgh volunteers as they could on their way. Inside the walls of Edinburgh it was easy enough to collect volunteers, and quite a little army of them marched out with drums beating and colors flying at the heels of Hamilton's Dragoons. But on the way to the town gates the temper of the volunteers changed, and by the time that the town gates were reached and passed the volunteers had dwindled to so pitiable a handful that they were dismissed, and Hamilton's Dragoons proceeded alone to join Cope's King's Dragoons at Corstorphine.

But the united force of dragoons did not stay long at Corstorphine. The fame of the fierce Highlanders had unhinged their valor, and it only needed a few of the prince's supporters to ride within pistol-shot and discharge their pieces at the Royal troops to set them into as disgraceful a panic as ever animated frightened men. The dragoons, ludicrously unmanned, turned tail and rode for their lives, rode without drawing bridle and without staying spur till they came to Leith, paused there for a little, and then, on some vague hint that the Highlanders were on their track, they were in the saddle again and riding for their lives once more. Dismayed Edinburgh citizens saw them sweep along what now is Prince's Street, a pitiable sight; saw them, bloody with spurring, fiery hot with {213} haste, ride on—on into the darkness. On and on the desperate cowards scampered, sheep-like in their shameful fear, till they reached Dunbar and behind its gates allowed themselves to breathe more freely, and to congratulate themselves upon the dangers they had escaped. Such is the story of the famous, or infamous, "Cantor of Coltbrigg," one of the most disgraceful records of the abject collapse of regular troops before the terror of an almost unseen foe that are to found in history. Well might loyal Edinburgh despair if such were its best defenders. The town was all tumult, the Loyalists were in utter gloom, the secretly exulting Jacobites were urging the impossibility of resistance, and the necessity for yielding while yielding was still an open question.

[Sidenote: 1745—Edinburgh parleys]

On the top of all this came a summons from the prince demanding the immediate surrender of the city. A deputation was at once despatched to Gray's Mill, where the prince had halted, to confer with him. Scarcely had the deputation gone when rumor spread abroad in the town that Cope, Cope the long expected, the almost given up, was actually close at hand, and the weathercock emotions of the town veered to a new quarter. Perhaps they might be able to hold out after all. The great thing was to gain time. The deputation came back to say that Prince Charles must have a distinct answer to his summons before two o'clock in the morning, and it was now ten at night. Still spurred by the hope of gaining time, and allowing Cope to arrive, if, indeed, he were arriving, the deputation was sent back again. But the prince refused to see them, and the deputation returned to the city, and all unconsciously decided the fate of Edinburgh. Lochiel and Murray, with some five hundred Camerons, had crept close to the walls under the cover of the darkness of the night, in the hope of finding some means of surprising the city. Hidden close by the Netherbow Port, they saw the coach which had carried the deputation home drive up and demand admittance. The admittance, which was readily granted to the coach, could not well be refused to the {214}

Highlanders, who leaped up the moment the doors were opened, overpowered the guard, and entered the town. Edinburgh awoke in the morning to find its doubts at an end. It was in the hands of the Highlanders.

Jacobite Edinburgh went wild with delight over its hero prince. He entered Holyrood with the white rose in his bonnet and the star of Saint Andrew on his breast, through enthusiastic crowds that fought eagerly for a nearer sight of his face or the privilege of touching his hand. The young prince looked his best; the hereditary melancholy which cast its shadow over the faces of all the Stuarts was for the moment dissipated. Flushed with easy triumph, popular applause, and growing hope, the young prince entered the palace of his ancestors like a king returning to his own. James Hepburn of Keith, with drawn sword, led the way; beautiful women distributed white cockades to enraptured Jacobites; the stateliest chivalry of Scotland made obeisance to its rightful prince. The intoxicating day ended with a great ball at the palace, at which the youthful grace of Charles Stuart confirmed the charm that already belonged to the adventurous and victorious Prince of Wales. September 17, 1745, was one of the brightest days in the Stuart calendar.

The conquest of Edinburgh was but the prelude to greater glories. Cope was rallying his forces at Dunbar—was marching to the relief of Edinburgh. Charles, acting on the advice of his generals, marched out to meet him. Cope's capacity for blundering was by no means exhausted. He affected a contemptuous disregard for his foes, delayed attack in defiance of the advice of his wisest generals, was taken unawares in the gray morning of the 21st at Prestonpans, and routed completely and ignominiously in five minutes.

[Sidenote: 1745—Bore the news of his own defeat]

Seldom has it been the misfortune of an English general to experience so thorough, so humiliating a defeat. The wild charges of the Highland men broke up the ordered ranks of the English troops in hopeless confusion; almost all the infantry was cut to pieces, and the cavalry {215} escaped only by desperate flight. Cope's dragoons were accustomed to flight by this time; the clatter of their horses' hoofs as they cantered from Coltbrigg was still in their cars, and as they once again tore in shameless flight up the Edinburgh High Street they might well have reflected upon the rapidity with which such experiences repeated themselves. General Preston of the Castle refused to admit the cowards within his gate, so there was nothing for them but to turn their horses' heads again and spur off into the west country. As for Cope, he managed to collect some ragged remnant of his ruined army about him, and to make off with all speed to Berwick, where he was received by Lord Mark Ker with the scornful assurance that he was the first commander-in-chief in Europe who had brought with him the news of his own defeat.

The victorious army were unable, if they had wished, to follow up the flight, owing to their lack of cavalry. They remained on the field to ascertain their own losses and to count their spoil. The losses were trifling, the gain was great. Only thirty Highlanders were killed, only seventy wounded, in that astonishing battle. As for the gain, not merely were the honorable trophies of victory, the colors and the standards, left in the Highland hands, but the artillery and the supplies, with some two thousand pounds in money, offered the prince's troops a solid reward for their daring. It is to the credit of Charles that after the fury of attack was over he insisted upon the wounded enemy and the prisoners being treated with all humanity. An incident is told of him which brings into relief the better qualities of his race. One of his officers, pointing to the ghastly field, all strewn with dead bodies, with severed limbs and mutilated trunks, said to the prince, "Sir, behold your enemies at your feet." The prince sighed. "They are my father's subjects," he said, sadly, as he turned away.

The battle of Prestonpans is enshrined in Jacobite memories as the battle of Gladsmuir, for a reason very characteristic of the Stuarts and their followers. Some {216} queer old book of prophecies had foretold, more than a century earlier, that there should be a battle at Gladsmuir. The battle of Prestonpans was not fought really on Gladsmuir at all: Gladsmuir lies a good mile away from the scene of Charles's easy triumph and Cope's inglorious rout; but for enthusiastic Jacobite purposes it was near enough to seem an absolute fulfilment of the venerable prediction. A battle was to be fought at Gladsmuir; go to, then—a battle was fought at Gladsmuir, or near Gladsmuir, which is very much the same thing: anyhow, not very far away from Gladsmuir. And so the Jacobites were contented, and more than ever convinced of the advantages of prophecy in the affairs of practical politics.

Some busy days were passed in Edinburgh in which councils of war alternated with semi-regal entertainments, and in which the prince employed his ready command of language in paying graceful compliments to the pretty women who wore the white cockade, and in issuing proclamations in which the Union was dissolved and religious liberty promised. One thing the young prince could not be induced to do: none of the arguments of his councillors could prevail upon him to threaten severe measures against the prisoners fallen into his hands. It was urged that unless the Government treated their prisoners as prisoners of war and not as rebels, the prince would be well advised to retaliate by equal harshness to the captives in his power. But on this point the prince was obdurate. He would not take in cold blood the lives that he had saved in the heat of action. Then and all through this meteoric campaign the conduct of Charles was characterized by a sincere humanity, which stands out in startling contrast with the cruelties practised later by his enemy, the "butcher Cumberland." It prevented the prince from gaining an important military advantage by the reduction of Edinburgh Castle. He attempted the reduction of the castle by cutting off its supplies, but when the general in command threatened to open fire upon the town in consequence, Charles immediately rescinded the order, although {217} his officers urged that the destruction of a few houses, and even the loss of a few lives, was in a military sense of scant importance in comparison with the capture of so valuable a stronghold as Edinburgh Castle. The prince held firmly to his resolve, and Edinburgh Castle remained to the end in the hands of the Royal troops. Charles displayed a great objection, too, to any plundering or lawless behavior on the part of his wild Highland army. We learn from the Bland Burges papers that when the house of Lord Somerville, who was opposed to the prince, was molested by a party of Highlanders, the prince, on hearing of it, sent an apology to Lord Somerville, and an officer's guard to protect him from further annoyance.

[Sidenote: 1745—In the heart of England]

But time was running on, and it was necessary to take action again. England was waking up to a sense of its peril. Armies were gathering. The King had come back from Hanover, the troops were almost all recalled from Flanders. It was time to make a fresh stroke. Charles resolved upon the bold course of striking south at once for England, and early in November he marched. He set off on the famous march south. In this undertaking, as before, the same extraordinary good-fortune attended upon the Stuart arms. His little army of less than six thousand men reached Carlisle, reached Manchester, without opposition. On December 4th he was at Derby, only one hundred and twenty-seven miles from London. Once again, by skill or by good-fortune, he had contrived to slip past the English general sent out to bar his way. Cumberland with his forces was at Stafford, nine miles farther from the capital than the young prince, who was now only six days from the city, with all his hopes and his ambitions ahead of him, and behind him the hostile army of the general he had eluded. Never perhaps in the history of warfare did an invader come so near the goal of his success and throw it so wantonly away; for that is what Charles did. With all that he had come for apparently within his reach, he did not reach out to take it; the crown of England was in the hollow of his hand, and he opened his hand {218} and let the prize fall from it. It is difficult to understand now what curious madness prompted the prince's advisers to counsel him as they did, or the prince to act upon their counsels. He was in the heart of England; he was hard by the capital, which he would have to reach if he was ever to mount the throne of his fathers. He had a devoted army with him—it would seem as if he had only to advance and to win—and yet, with a fatuity which makes the student of history gasp, he actually resolved to retreat, and did retreat. It is true, and must not be forgotten, that Charles did not know, and could not know, all his advantages; that many of the most urgent arguments for advance could not present themselves to his mind. He could not know the panic in which Hanoverian London was cast; he could not know that desperate thoughts of joining the Stuart cause were crossing the craven mind of the Duke of Newcastle; he could not know that the frightened bourgeoisie were making a maddened rush upon the Bank of England; he could not know that the King of England had stored all his most precious possessions on board of yachts that waited for him at the Tower stairs, ready at a moment's notice to carry him off again into the decent obscurity of the Electorship of Hanover. He could not know the exultation of the metropolitan Jacobites; he could not know the perturbation of the Hanoverian side; he could not know the curious apathy with which a large proportion of the people regarded the whole proceeding, people who were as willing to accept one king as another, and who would have witnessed with absolute unconcern George the Elector scuttling away from the Tower stairs at one end of the town, while Charles the Prince entered it from another. These factors in his favor he did not know, could not know, could hardly be expected even to guess.

[Sidenote: 1745—How London felt]

That the news of the rising produced very varied emotions in London we may learn from the letters of Horace Walpole. In one of September 6th to Sir Horace Mann, mixed with much important information concerning "My Lady O" and the Walpole promise of marriage "to young {219} Churchill," comes news of the Pretender's march past General Cope, and very gloomy forebodings for the result. Another letter, which talks of the Pretender as "the Boy," and of King George "as the person most concerned," presents the Hanoverian Elector as making very little of the invasion, answering all the alarms of his ministers by "Pho, don't talk to me of that stuff." Walpole's spirits has risen within the week, for he is much amused by the story that "every now and then a Scotchman comes and pulls the Boy by the sleeve, 'Preence, here is another mon taken,' then, with all the dignity in the world, the Boy hopes nobody was killed in the action."

London at large vacillated very much as Horace Walpole vacillated. While on the one side Jacobites began to come out of the corners in which they had long lain concealed, and to air their opinions in the free sunlight, rejoicing over the coming downfall of the House of Hanover, authority, on the other hand, busied itself in ordering all known Papists to leave the capital, in calling out the Train Bands, in frequently and foolishly shutting the gates of Temple Bar, and, which was better and wiser, in making use of Mr. Henry Fielding to write stinging satires upon the Pretender and his party, and hint at the sufferings which were likely to fall upon London when the Highlanders imported their national complaint into the capital. A statesman is reported to have said that this disagreeable jest about the itch was worth two regiments of horse to the cause of the Government.

Yet, if London was excited, there was a tranquil London as well. Mr. George Augustus Sala, in that brilliant novel of his, "The Adventures of Captain Dangerous," draws a vivid picture of this London with the true artist touch. "Although from day to day we people in London knew not whether before the sunset the dreaded pibrochs of the Highland clans might not be heard at Charing Cross—although, for aught men knew, another month, nay, another week, might see King George the Second toppled from his throne—yet to those who lived quiet {220} lives and kept civil tongues in their heads all things went on pretty much as usual. . . . That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King meditating flight, and the royal family in tears and swooning, did not save the little school-boy a whipping if he knew not his lesson after morning call. . . . So, while all the public were talking about the rebellion, all the world went nevertheless to the playhouses, where they played loyal pieces, and sang 'God save great George, our King' every night; as also to balls, ridottos, clubs, masquerades, drums, routs, concerts, and Pharaoh parties. They read novels and flirted their fans, and powdered and patched themselves, and distended their petticoats with hoops, just as though there were no such persons in the world as the Duke of Cumberland and Charles Edward Stuart." Fiction, that most faithful and excellent handmaiden of history, here shows us no doubt very vividly what London as a whole thought and did in face of the rebellion. It is an old story. Were not the Romans in the theatre when the Goths came over the hills? Did not the theatres flourish, never better, during the Reign of Terror?

Nor was London the only place which displayed a well-nigh stoical indifference to the progress of the rebellion. If Oxford had a good deal of Jacobitism hidden decorously away in its ancient colleges, if there were a good many disloyal toasts drunk in the seclusion of scholastic rooms, there was apparently only a feeling of curious indifference at the rival university, for Gray has put it on record that at Cambridge "they had no more sense of danger than if it were the battle of Cannae," and we learn that some grave Dons actually were thinking of driving to Camford to see the Scotch troops march past, "as though they were volunteers out for a sham-fight, or a circus procession."



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CHAPTER XXXVI.

CULLODEN—AND AFTER.

[Sidenote: 1745—Had he but known]

The prince did not know, and could not know, the exact condition of things in the capital; did not know, and could not know, how many elements of that condition told in his favor, and how many against. But what he could know, what he did know, was this: He was at the head of a devoted army, which if it was small had hitherto found its career marked by triumph after triumph. He was in the heart of England, and had already found that the Stuart war-cry was powerful enough to rally many an English gentleman to his standard. Sir Walter Williams Wynn, whom men called the King of Wales, was on his way to join the Prince of Wales. So was Lord Barrymore, the member of Parliament; so was many another gallant gentleman of name, of position, of wealth. Manchester had given him the heroic, the ill-fated James Dawson, and a regiment three hundred strong. Lord James Drummond had landed at Montrose with men, money, and supplies. The young chevalier's troops were eager to advance; they were flushed with victories; their hearts were high; they believed, in the wild Gaelic way, in the sanctity of their cause; they believed that the Lord of Hosts was on their side, and such a belief strengthened their hands. For a prince seeking his principality it would seem that there was one course, and one only, to pursue. He might go on and take it, and win the great game he played for; or, failing that, he might die as became a royal gentleman, sword in hand and fighting for his rights. The might-have-beens are indeed for the most part a vanity, but we can fairly venture to assert now that {222} if Charles had pushed on he would, for the time at least, have restored the throne of England to the House of Stuart. We may doubt, and doubt with reason, whether any fortuitous succession of events could have confirmed the Stuart hold upon the English crown; but we can scarcely doubt that the hold would have been for the time established, that the Old Pretender would have been King James the Third, and that George the Elector would have been posting, bag and baggage, to the rococo shades of Herrenhausen. But, as we have said, failing that, if Charles had fallen in battle at the head of his defeated army, how much better that end would have been than the miserable career which was yet to lend no tragic dignity to the prolonged, pitiful, pitiable life of the Young Pretender!

However, for good or evil, the insane decision was made. Charles's council of war were persistent in their arguments for retreat. There were thirty thousand men in the field against them. If they were defeated they would be cut to pieces, and the prince, if he escaped slaughter, would escape it only to die as a rebel on Tower Hill, whereas, if they were once back in Scotland, they would find new friends, new adherents, and even if they failed to win the English crown, might at least count, with reasonable security, upon converting Scotland, as of old, into a separate kingdom, with a Stuart king on its throne. By arguments such as these the prince's officers caused him to throw away the one chance he had of gaining all that he had crossed the seas to gain.

It is only fair to remember that the young prince himself was from first to last in favor of the braver course of boldly advancing upon London. When his too prudent counsellors told him that if he advanced he would be in Newgate in a fortnight, he still persisted in pressing his own advice. Perhaps he thought that where the stake was so great, and the chance of success not too forbidding, failure might as well end in Newgate as in the purlieus of petty foreign courts. But, with the exception of his {223} Irish officers, he had nobody on his side. The Duke of Perth and Sir John Gordon had a little plan of their own. They thought that a march into Wales would be a good middle course to adopt, but their suggestion found no backers. All Charles's other counsellors were to a man in favor of retreat, and Charles, after at first threatening to regard as traitors all who urged such a course, at last gave way. Sullenly he issued the disastrous order to retreat, sullenly he rode in the rear of that retreat, assuming the bearing of a man who is no longer responsible for failure. The cheery good-humor, the bright heroism, which had so far characterized him, he had now completely lost, and he rode, a dejected, a despairing, almost a doomed man, among his disheartened followers. It is dreary reading the record of that retreat; yet it is starred by some bright episodes. At Clifton there was an engagement where the retreating Highlanders held their own, and inflicted a distinct defeat upon Cumberland's army. Again, when they were once more upon Scottish soil, they struck a damaging blow at Hawley's army at Falkirk. But the end came at last on the day when the dwindling, discouraged, retreating army tried its strength with Cumberland at Culloden.

[Sidenote: 1746—The Duke of Cumberland]

Men of the Cumberland type are to be found in all ages, and in the history of all nations. Men in whom the beast is barely under the formal restraint of ordered society, men in whom a savage sensuality is accompanied by a savage cruelty, men who take a hideous physical delight in bloodshed, darken the pages of all chronicles. It would be unjust to the memory of Cumberland to say that in his own peculiar line he had many, if any, superiors; that many men are more worthy of the fame which he won. To be remembered with a just loathing as a man by whom brutalities of all kinds were displayed, almost to the point of madness, is not the kind of memory most men desire; it is probably not the kind of memory that even Cumberland himself desired to leave behind him. But, if he had cherished the ambition of handing down his name to other times, "linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes," if {224} he had deliberately proposed to force himself upon the attention of posterity as a mere abominable monster, he could hardly have acted with more persistent determination towards such a purpose. In Scotland, for long years after he was dead and dust, the mention of his name was like a curse; and even in England, where the debt due to his courage counted for much, no one has been found to palliate his conduct or to whitewash his infamy. As Butcher Cumberland he was known while he lived; as Butcher Cumberland he will be remembered so long as men remember the "Forty-five" and the horrors after Culloden fight. Some of those horrors no doubt were due to the wild fury of revenge that always follows a wild fear. The invasion of the young Stuart had struck terror; the revenge for that terror was bloodily taken.

[Sidenote: 1746—Culloden]

Everything contributed to make Culloden fatal to the fortunes of the Pretender. The discouragement of some of the clans, the disaffection of others, the wholesale desertions which had thinned the ranks of the rebel army, the prince's sullen distrust of his advisers, the position of the battle-field, the bitter wintry weather, which drove a blinding hail and snow into the eyes of the Highlanders, all these were so many elements of danger that would have seriously handicapped a better-conditioned army than that which Charles Stuart was able to oppose to Cumberland. But the prince's army was not well-conditioned; it was demoralized by retreat, hungry, ragged, dizzy with lack of sleep. Even the terrors of the desperate Highland attack were no longer so terrible to the English troops. Cumberland had taught his men, in order to counteract the defence which the target offered to the bodies of the Highlanders, to thrust with their bayonets in a slanting direction—not against the man immediately opposite to its point, but at the unguarded right side of the man attacking their comrade on the right.

After enduring for some time the terrible cannonade of the English, the battle began when the Macintoshes charged with all their old desperate valor upon the English. {225} But the English were better prepared than before, and met the onslaught with such a volley as shattered the Highland attack and literally matted the ground with Highland bodies. Then the Royal troops advanced, and drove the rebels in helpless rout before them. The fortunes of the fight might have gone very differently if all the Highlanders had been as true to their cause as those who formed this attacking right wing. "English gold and Scotch traitors," says an old ballad of another fight, "won . . . , but no Englishman." To no English gold can the defeat of Culloden be attributed, but unhappily Scotch treason played its part in the disaster. The Macdonalds had been placed at the left wing of the battle instead of at the right, which they considered to be their proper place. Furious at what they believed to be an insult, they took no part whatever in the fight after they had discharged a single volley, but stood and looked on in sullen apathy while the left wing and centre of the prince's army were being whirled into space by the Royalist advance. The Duke of Perth appealed desperately and in vain to their hearts, reminded them of their old-time valor, and offered, if they would only follow his cry of Claymore, to change his name and be henceforward called Macdonald. In vain Keppoch rushed forward almost alone, and met his death, moaning that the children of his tribe had deserted him. There are few things in history more tragic than the picture of that inert mass of moody Highlanders, frozen into traitors through an insane pride and savage jealousy, witnessing the ruin of their cause and the slaughter of their comrades unmoved, and listening impassively to the entreaties of the gallant Perth and the death-groans of the heroic Keppoch. In a few minutes the battle was over, the rout was complete; the rebel army was in full retreat, with a third of its number lying on the field of battle; the Duke of Cumberland was master of the field, of all the Highland baggage and artillery, of fourteen stands, and more than two thousand muskets. Culloden was fought and won.

{226}

It is not necessary to believe the stories that have been told of Charles Stuart, attributing to him personal cowardice on the fatal day of Culloden. The evidence in favor of such stories is of the slightest; there is nothing in the prince's earlier conduct to justify the accusation, and there is sufficient evidence in favor of the much more likely version that Charles was with difficulty prevented from casting away his life in one desperate charge when the fortune of the day was decided. It is part of a prince's business to be brave, and if Charles Stuart had been lacking in that essential quality of sovereignty he could scarcely have concealed the want until the day of Culloden, or have inspired the clans with the personal enthusiasm which they so readily evinced for him. Nor is it necessary for us to follow out in full the details of the unhappy young man's miserable flight and final escape. Through all those stormy and terrible days, over which poetry and romance have so often and so fondly lingered, the fugitive found that he had still in the season of his misfortune friends as devoted as he had known in the hours of his triumph. His adventures in woman's dress, his escape from the English ship, the touching devotion of Flora Macdonald, the loyalty of Lochiel, the fidelity of Cluny Macpherson—all these things have been immortalized in a thousand tales and ballads, and will be remembered in the North Country so long as tales and ballads continue to charm. At last, at Lochnanuagh, the prince embarked upon a French ship that had been sent for him, and early in the October of 1746 he landed in Brittany.

[Sidenote: 1746—Cumberland's vengeance]

The horrors that followed Culloden suggest more the blood feuds of some savage tribes than the results of civilized warfare. Cumberland, flushed by a victory that was as unexpected as it was easy, was resolved to kill, and not to scotch, the snake of Jacobite insurrection. The flying rebels were hotly pursued—no quarter was given; the wounded on the field of battle were left cold in their wounds for two days, and then mercilessly butchered. There is a story, which might well be true, and {227} which tells that as Cumberland was going over the field of dead and dying he saw a wounded Highlander staring at him. Cumberland immediately turned to the officer next to him, and ordered him to shoot the wounded man. The officer, with an honorable courage and dignity, answered that he would rather resign his commission than obey. The officer of the story was the heroic Wolfe, who was afterwards to become a famous general and die gloriously before Quebec. It may be true; we may hope that it is, as it adds another ornament to the historic decoration of a brave man—but history does not, so far as we are aware, record the answer that Cumberland made to this unexpected display of audacious humanity.

The cruelties of Culloden field were only the preface to the red reign of terror that Cumberland set up in the Highlands. The savage temper of the Royal general found excellent instruments in the savage tempers of his soldiery. Murder, rape, torture, held high carnival; men were hanged or shot on the slightest suspicion or on no suspicion; women were insulted, outraged, killed; even children were not safe from the blood-lust of Cumberland's murderers.

The pacification of the Highlands was accomplished on much the same methods as were afterwards employed to bring about the pacification of Poland. Perhaps the most dramatically tragic of all the events after the defeat of Charles Stuart are connected with the fate of those of his adherents who were taken prisoners, and who were of too grave an importance to be put to the sword at once or hanged out of hand. Some, unhappily, of the followers of the young prince proved themselves to be unworthy of any cause of any monarch. Aeneas Macdonald, John Murray of Broughton, Lord Elcho, and Macdonald of Barrisdale have left behind them the infamous memory that always adheres to traitors. The revelations which John Murray made to save his own life were the means of sending many a gallant gentleman to Tower Hill.

In the end of July (of 1746) Westminster Hall was {228} brilliant with scarlet hangings, and crowded with an illustrious company, to witness the trial of the three most important of the captured rebels, Lord Kilmarnock, Lord Cromarty, and Lord Balmerino. Walpole, who went to that ceremony with the same amused interest that he took in the first performance of a new play, has left a very living account of the scene: Lord Kilmarnock, tall, slender, refined, faultlessly dressed, looking less than his years, which were a little over forty, and inspiring a most astonishing passion in the inflammable heart of Lady Townshend; Lord Cromarty, of much the same age, but of less gallant bearing, dejected, sullen, and even tearful; Balmerino, the very type and model of a gallant, careless old soldier.

There was no question of the prisoners' guilt; they were tried, were found guilty, were sentenced to death. Two of the prisoners had, however, many powerful friends—Kilmarnock and Cromarty; and the charm of Kilmarnock's presence had raised up for him many more friends, whose influence was exerted with the King. For Balmerino nobody seems to have taken the trouble to plead, and even King George, whose clemency was not conspicuously displayed in his treatment of his prisoners, appears to have expressed some surprise at this, though he did not allow his regret to carry him so far as to extend his pardon to the stout old soldier. The exertions of Lord Cromarty's friends, and especially of Lady Cromarty, saved that prisoner's life. It is said that when the child which Lady Cromarty bore in her body during the terrible period in which she was pleading for her husband's life came into the world, it carried a mark like the stroke of the executioner's axe upon its neck. Kilmarnock and Balmerino died on Tower Hill on August 18, 1746. Both died, as they had lived, like gentlemen and brave soldiers. It is, perhaps, to be regretted that Kilmarnock should on the scaffold have expressed any regret for the part he had played in supporting the Young Pretender against the House of Hanover. He {229} had gone gallantly into the game of insurrection, and he might as well have played it out to the end. At least he was the only one of all the seven-and-seventy rebels who were executed, from James Dawson to Simon Lovat, who made upon the scaffold any retractation of the acts that he had done. It is impossible not to contrast Balmerino's dying words, and to like them better than the apologies of Kilmarnock. Balmerino was no subject of King George; he was his prince's man. "If I had a thousand lives I would give them all for him" were his dying words, and braver dying words were never spoken. It was the old heroic spirit of absolute loyalty to the annointed king which was of necessity dying out; which was to be repeated again half a century later in the hills and the forests of La Vendee. The Stuarts were as bad, as worthless, as kings could well be, but they did possess the royal prerogative of inspiring men with an extraordinary devotion. There was something to be said for the cause which could send a man like Balmerino so gallantly to his death with such a brave piece of soldierly bluster upon his dying lips.

[Sidenote: 1746—Lord Lovat]

A very different man died for the same cause upon the same scaffold a little later. History hardly recalls a baser figure than that of Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat). He is remembered chiefly as the desperate shuffler and paltry traitor who tried to blow hot and cold, to fawn on Hanover with one hand and to beckon the Stuarts with the other. But his whole career was of a piece with its paltry ending. His youth and manhood were characterized by a kind of savage lawlessness, like that of a Calabrian chieftain brigand or the brave of a Sioux band. He was cruel, he was cunning; he was, in his wild Highland way, a voluptuary and a debauchee; he was treacherous and hideously selfish. In his earlier days he had cast his eyes upon a lady, whom, for motives of worldly advantage as well as for her beauty, he had regarded as suitable to make his wife. Neither the young lady nor the young lady's family would listen to the suit of Captain Fraser, as he then {230} was; whereupon Captain Fraser gathered together a select company of scoundrels, carried the young lady off by force, very much as Rob Roy's wild son did with the girl of whom he was enamoured, married her against her will by force, with the aid of a suborned priest, actually, so the story goes, cutting the clothes off her body with his dirk, while his pipers, in obedience to his orders, drowned the poor creature's cries with their music. Now, in the eightieth year of his age, he had come to his grim end. He had broken most of the laws of earth and of heaven; he had ever tried to be in with both sides and to cheat both; he was always ready to betray and lie and cozen; seldom, perhaps, did a more horrible old man meet a more deserved doom; yet he died with a bravery and a composure which were not to be expected. Nothing in his life became him like to the leaving it. Thanks to the genius of William Hogarth, we all know exactly how Simon Fraser, the bad Lord Lovat, looked in those last days of his life when he lay in prison, his old body weak with many infirmities, and his old spirit still scheming and hoping for the reprieve that did not come. On April 9th he was executed on Tower Hill. His latest words were grotesquely inappropriate to his evil life. With his lying lips he repeated the famous line from Horace, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," and with that lie on his lips he knelt before the block and had his head cut off at one stroke. His body was laid in the company of better men, by the side of Balmerino and Kilmarnock, in the Church of St. Peter on the Green.

[Sidenote: 1745—William Hogarth]

The genius of William Hogarth is inseparably associated with the Forty-five by reason of this famous portrait of Simon Lovat, and for yet another reason. In this year (1745) William Hogarth was already exceedingly popular, although he had as yet failed to bask much in the sunshine of royal favor. Those old, early days of poverty and struggle were far behind. The industrious apprentice had married his master's daughter, fifteen years ago by this time, and Sir James Thornhill had forgotten his {231} wrath and forgiven the young painter who was so immeasurably his superior. "The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's Progress," "Industry and Idleness," and many another plate in the astonishing panorama of mid last century life, had earned for Hogarth a high position in the favor of the day; and when he posted down to St. Albans, where wicked Simon Lovat lay sick, to receive the old traitor's lathered embrace and to make the famous engraving, William Hogarth was a very distinguished person indeed. The portrait of Simon Fraser had a great success. Never did portrait bear more distinctly the impress of fidelity. The unwieldy trunk, the swollen legs, the horrible, cunning, satyr-like face with its queerly lifted eyebrows, its flattened sensual nose, and its enormous mouth, the odd dogmatic gesture with which the index finger of the left hand touches the thumb of the right: all these things William Hogarth immortalized—making Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat) wellnigh as familiar a personality to us as he was to any of the men be betrayed or the women he wronged in the course of his base life. The plate had a prodigious success. The presses were hard at work for many days, and could not print proofs fast enough. "For several weeks," says Mr. Sala, "Hogarth received money at the rate of twelve pounds a day for prints of his etching." It was reduced in size and printed as a watch-paper—watch-papers were vastly fashionable in those days—and in that Liliputian form it sold also in large quantities. The infamy of the subject and the genius of the artist lent a double attraction to the portrait.

But the portrait of Simon Fraser is not the only, is not perhaps even the chief, connection of Hogarth with the Forty-five. Whether Hogarth did or did not do the sketch for the mezzotint engraving called "Lovat's Ghost on Pilgrimage" matters little. He certainly did do the famous picture and famous plate which is known as the "March to Finchley." Every one knows that marvellous and no doubt vividly accurate picture of the progress of the foot guards to Finchley Common on their way to {232} Scotland; the riot, the debauchery, the confusion, the drunkenness of the scene. Those tipsy heroes, staggering along to the tunes of tipsy drummer and tiny fifer, while Doll Tearsheet and Moll Flanders harass them with enforced embraces, played their part no doubt in the horrible cruelties which succeeded Culloden. But, at the same time, these were among the soldiers who did succeed in preventing England from being given over to the Jacobites, or who at least prevented the Stuart Prince from holding Scotland, and setting up the Stuart throne there. It may, therefore, be perhaps pardoned to his majesty King George the Second if he did not quite appreciate the "burlesque," even though that lack of appreciation made Hogarth in a rage dedicate the plate to his majesty of Prussia.

[Sidenote: 1788—"Bonnie Prince Charlie"]

Misfortune followed most of the followers of Prince Charles. Tullibardine died in the Tower a few days before his trial. Charles Ratcliffe, Lord Derwentwater's brother, was executed. Sheridan died of apoplexy in the November of 1746. The Duke of Perth died on shipboard, on his way to France, soon after Culloden. The less conspicuous rebels suffered as severely as the leaders. The executions that took place at York and Carlisle, at Penrith and Brampton, and on Kennington Common, bloodily avenged the blow that had been struck at the House of Hanover. A great number of prisoners who were not executed were shipped off as slaves to the plantations, a fate scarcely less terrible than death; some were pardoned on consideration of their entering the service of the King as sailors; some were pardoned later on; a few, it is said, escaped. The sternest measures were taken to prevent any possibility of a further rising in Scotland. The disarmament of the clans, which had been carried out so imperfectly after the Fifteen, was now rigorously and effectually enforced. The hereditary jurisdiction of the chiefs of clans, which made those chiefs the petty kings of their districts, was abolished, and in their places the ordinary process of law was established, with its sheriffs {233} and sheriffs' substitutes, and its circuits of judges. The national costume, the kilt, was proscribed under the severest penalties, though in the course of time this proscription was gradually relaxed. Every master of every private school north of the Tweed was called upon to swear allegiance to the House of Hanover, and to register his oath. The turbulent spirit and fine fighting qualities of the clans were turned to good account by the Government, who raised several Highland regiments, and thus succeeded in diverting to their own service all the restless and warlike energy which had hitherto been so troublesome to law and order. It must be admitted that the modern prosperity of Scotland dates in a great degree from the Forty-five. The old conditions of life in the Highlands were conditions under which it was impossible for a country to thrive; and though it is necessary to condemn the manner in which the Government, at all events in the earlier stages, attempted to effect the pacification of Scotland, it is also necessary to admit that Scotland is probably more fortunate to-day than she would have been if victory had been given to the Stuart at Culloden.

Of that Stuart we may as well take leave now. His subsequent career is a most dispiriting study. He hoped against hope for a while that this foreign power or that foreign power would lend him a helping hand to his throne. Expelled from France, he drifted to Italy, and into that pitiable career of dissipation and drunkenness which ended so ingloriously a once bright career. To the unlucky women whom he loved he was astonishingly brutal; he forced Miss Walkenshaw—the lady of whom he became enamoured in Scotland—to leave him by his cruelty; he forced his unhappy wife, the Countess of Albany, to leave him for the same reason. Her love affair with the poet Alfieri is one of the famous love-stories of the world. It seems pretty certain that Charles Stuart actually visited England once, if not more than once, after the Forty-five, and that George the Third was well aware of his presence in London, and, with a contemptuous good {234} nature, took no steps whatever to lay hands upon the rival who was dangerous no longer. At last, on January 31, 1788, or, as some have it, on January 30, the actual anniversary of the execution of Charles the First, Charles Stuart died in Rome, and with him died the last hope of the Stuart restoration in England. Had Charles lived a little longer, he would have seen in the very following year the beginning of that great storm which was to sweep out of existence a monarchical system as absolute as that of the Stuarts had been, and to behead a monarch far less blamable than Charles the First of England. There is something appropriate in this uncompromising devotee and victim of the principle of divine right dying in exile on the very eve of that revolution which was practically to abolish the principle of the divine right of kings forever. Oddly enough, there are still devotees of the House of Stuart, gentlemen and ladies who work up picturesque enthusiasms about the Rebel Rose and the Red Carnation, and who affect to regard a certain foreign princess as the real sovereign of England. But the English people at large need hardly take this graceful Jacobitism very seriously. Jacobitism came to its end with Cardinal Henry dying as the pensioner of George the Third, and with Prince Charles drowning in Cyprus wine the once gallant spirit which, even at the end, could sometimes shake off its degradation, and blaze into a moment's despairing brilliancy, at the thought of the Clans and the Claymores, and the brave days of Forty-five. And so, in the words of the old Saga men, here he drops out of the tale.