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 régime. 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."
{221}