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.
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 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 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 III, 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'
council of war persistently argued 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 the
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 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' 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.
Men of the Cumberland type are to be found in all ages and in 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 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 toward 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.
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. 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 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.
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. 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 misfortunes
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 as 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 October, 1746, he landed in Brittany.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Sir John Cope, commander-in-chief of King George's forces.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN EXPERIMENTS WITH ELECTRICITY
A.D. 1747
JOHN BIGELOW AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
It was not only by his demonstration that lightning is identical
with electricity that Franklin did an important work in connection
with electrical science. He is also entitled to great credit for the
stimulus imparted by his experiments and writings to further
discoveries in this field. Franklin was by far the most practical
among the natural philosophers of his time; and the development of
science in the knowledge and application of electricity has
continued to reflect upon mankind his genius for the useful.
The ancients had no scientific acquaintance with electricity. The
early Greeks, so far as known, observed but a single phenomenon in
connection with it--the electrification of amber by friction.
Aristotle and Pliny note the production of electricity by certain
fishes, especially the torpedo, a ray possessing an electrical
apparatus with which it kills or stuns its prey and defends itself
against its enemies. Not before the sixteenth century of the
Christian era was there any recorded scientific study of electrical
phenomena. The early predecessors of Franklin, such as Gilbert,
Boyle, and others, are considered to have created the science of
electricity and magnetism. The invention of the Leyden jar or vial,
in 1745, said to have been "hit upon by at least three persons
working independently," was a very important advance.
The work of Franklin, following so soon upon the then latest step of
progress in Europe, is best made known to the world through his own
writings, particularly in the letters, selected by Bigelow, which
appear in the present account of the philosopher's experiments.
While on a visit to Boston in 1746 Franklin witnessed some electrical
experiments performed by a Mr. Spence, recently arrived from Scotland.
Shortly after his return to Philadelphia the Library Company received
from Mr. Collinson, of London, and a member of the Royal Society, a
glass tube, with instructions for making experiments with it. With this
tube Franklin began a course of experiments which resulted in
discoveries which, humanly speaking, seem to be exerting a larger
material influence upon the industries of the world than any other
discovery of the human intellect. Dr. Stuber, then a resident of
Philadelphia, and author of the first continuation of Franklin's _Life_,
who seems to have enjoyed peculiar opportunities of obtaining full and
authentic information upon the subject, gives us the following account
of the observations which this letter brought for the first time to the
notice of the world through Mr. Collinson.
"His observations," says Dr. Stuber, "he communicated, in a series of
letters, to his friend Collinson, the first of which is dated March 28,
1747. In these he shows the power of points in drawing and throwing off
the electrical matter which had hitherto escaped the notice of
electricians. He also made the grand discovery of a plus and minus, or
of a positive and negative, state of electricity. We give him the honor
of this without hesitation; although the English have claimed it for
their countryman, Dr. Watson. Watson's paper is dated January 21, 1748;
Franklin's, July 11, 1747, several months prior. Shortly after Franklin,
from his principles of the plus and minus state, explained in a
satisfactory manner the phenomena of the Leyden vial, first observed by
Mr. Cuneus, or by Professor Muschenbroeck, of Leyden, which had much
perplexed philosophers. He showed clearly that when charged the bottle
contained no more electricity than before, but that as much was taken
from one side as was thrown on the other; and that to discharge it
nothing was necessary but to produce a communication between the two
sides, by which the equilibrium might be restored, and that then no sign
of electricity would remain. He afterward demonstrated by experiments
that the electricity did not reside in the coating, as had been
supposed, but in the pores of the glass itself. After a vial was charged
he removed the coating, and found that upon applying a new coating the
shock might still be received. In the year 1749 he first suggested his
idea of explaining the phenomena of thunder-gusts and of the aurora
borealis upon electrical principles. He points out many particulars in
which lightning and electricity agree, and he adduces many facts, and
reasonings from facts, in support of his positions.
"In the same year he received the astonishingly bold and grand idea of
ascertaining the truth of his doctrine by actually drawing down the
lightning, by means of sharp-pointed iron rods raised into the region
of the clouds. Even in this uncertain state his passion to be useful to
mankind displayed itself in a powerful manner. Admitting the identity of
electricity and lightning, and knowing the power of points in repelling
bodies charged with electricity, and in conducting their fires silently
and imperceptibly, he suggested the idea of securing houses, ships,
etc., from being damaged by lightning, by erecting pointed rods that
should rise some feet above the most elevated part, and descend some
feet into the ground or water. The effect of these he concluded would be
either to prevent a stroke by repelling the cloud beyond the striking
distance, or by drawing off the electrical fire which it contained; or,
if they could not effect this, they would at least conduct the electric
matter to the earth without any injury to the building.
"It was not till the summer of 1752 that he was enabled to complete his
grand and unparalleled discovery by experiment. The plan which he had
originally proposed was to erect, on some high tower or other elevated
place, a sentry-box, from which should rise a pointed iron rod,
insulated by being fixed in a cake of resin. Electrified clouds passing
over this would, he conceived, impart to it a portion of their
electricity, which would be rendered evident to the senses by sparks
being emitted when a key, the knuckle, or other conductor was presented
to it. Philadelphia at this time afforded no opportunity of trying an
experiment of this kind. While Franklin was waiting for the erection of
a spire, it occurred to him that he might have more ready access to the
region of clouds by means of a common kite. He prepared one by fastening
two cross sticks to a silken handkerchief, which would not suffer so
much from the rain as paper. To the upright stick was affixed an iron
point. The string was, as usual, of hemp, except the lower end, which
was silk. Where the hempen string terminated, a key was fastened. With
this apparatus, on the appearance of a thunder-gust approaching he went
out into the commons, accompanied by his son, to whom alone he
communicated his intentions, well knowing the ridicule which, too
generally for the interest of science, awaits unsuccessful experiments
in philosophy. He placed himself under a shed, to avoid the rain; his
kite was raised, a thunder-cloud passed over it, no sign of electricity
appeared. He almost despaired of success, when suddenly he observed the
loose fibres of his string to move toward an erect position. He now
presented his knuckle to the key and received a strong spark. How
exquisite must his sensations have been at this moment! On this
experiment depended the fate of his theory. If he succeeded, his name
would rank high among those who had improved science; if he failed, he
must inevitably be subjected to the derision of mankind, or, what is
worse, their pity, as a well-meaning man, but a weak, silly projector.
The anxiety with which he looked for the result of his experiment may be
easily conceived. Doubts and despair had begun to prevail, when the fact
was ascertained, in so clear a manner that even the most incredulous
could no longer withhold their assent. Repeated sparks were drawn from
the key, a vial was charged, a shock given, and all the experiments made
which are usually performed with electricity.
"About a month before this period some ingenious Frenchman had completed
the discovery in the manner originally proposed by Dr. Franklin. The
letters which he sent to Mr. Collinson, it is said, were refused a place
in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society of London. However this may
be, Collinson published them in a separate volume, under the title of
_New Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia,
in America_. They were read with avidity, and soon translated into
different languages. A very incorrect French translation fell into the
hands of the celebrated Buffon, who, notwithstanding the disadvantages
under which the work labored, was much pleased with it, and repeated the
experiments with success. He prevailed on his friend, M. Dalibard, to
give his countrymen a more correct translation of the works of the
American electrician. This contributed much toward spreading a knowledge
of Franklin's principles in France. The King, Louis XV, hearing of these
experiments, expressed a wish to be a spectator of them. A course of
experiments was given at the seat of the Duc d'Ayen, at St. Germain, by
M. de Lor. The applause which the King bestowed upon Franklin excited in
Buffon, Dalibard, and De Lor an earnest desire of ascertaining the truth
of his theory of thunder-gusts. Buffon erected his apparatus on the
tower of Montbar, M. Dalibard at Marly-la-Ville, and De Lor at his house
in the Estrapade at Paris, some of the highest ground in that capital.
Dalibard's machine first showed signs of electricity. On May 16, 1752, a
thunder-cloud passed over it, in the absence of M. Dalibard, and a
number of sparks were drawn from it by Coiffier, joiner, with whom
Dalibard had left directions how to proceed, and by M. Paulet, the prior
of Marly-la-Ville.
"An account of this experiment was given to the Royal Academy of
Sciences, by M. Dalibard, in a memoir dated May 13, 1752. On May 18th,
M. de Lor proved equally as successful with the apparatus erected at his
own house. These philosophers soon excited those of other parts of
Europe to repeat the experiment; among whom none signalized themselves
more than Father Beccaria, of Turin, to whose observations science is
much indebted. Even the cold regions of Russia were penetrated by the
ardor for discovery. Professor Richmann bade fair to add much to the
stock of knowledge on this subject, when an unfortunate flash from his
conductor put a period to his existence.
"By these experiments Franklin's theory was established in the most
convincing manner.
"Besides these great principles Franklin's letters on electricity
contain a number of facts and hints which have contributed greatly
toward reducing this branch of knowledge to a science. His friend, Mr.
Kinnersley, communicated to him a discovery of the different kinds of
electricity excited by rubbing glass and sulphur. This was first
observed by M. du Faye, but it was for many years neglected. The
philosophers were disposed to account for the phenomena rather from a
difference in the quantity of electricity collected, and even Du Faye
himself seems to have at last adopted this doctrine. Franklin at first
entertained the same idea, but upon repeating the experiments he
perceived that Mr. Kinnersley was right, and that the _vitreous_ and
_resinous_ electricity of Du Faye were nothing more than the _positive_
and _negative_ states, which he had before observed, and that the glass
globe charged positively, or increased, the quantity of electricity on
the prime conductor, while the globe of sulphur diminished its natural
quantity, or charged negatively. These experiments and observations
opened a new field for investigation, upon which electricians entered
with avidity; and their labors have added much to the stock of our
knowledge.
"Franklin's letters have been translated into most of the European
languages, and into Latin. In proportion as they have become known, his
principles have been adopted."