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.
[Sidenote: 1745-1889--The Stuart charm]
But it is the curious characteristic of the ill-fated House of Stuart
that, through all their misfortunes, through all their degradations,
they have contrived to captivate the imagination and bewitch the hearts
of many generations. The Stuart influence upon literature has been
astonishing. No cause in the world has rallied to its side so many
poets, named or nameless, has so profoundly attracted the writers and
the readers of romance, has bitten more deeply {235} into popular
fancy. Even in our own day, an English poet, Mr. Swinburne, who has
not tuned much to thrones fallen or standing, has been inspired by the
old Stuart frenzy to write one of the most valuable of all the wealth
of ballads that have grown up around the Stuart name. In his "A
Jacobite's Exile, 1746," Mr. Swinburne has summed up in lines of the
most poignant and passionate pathos all the feeling of a gentleman of
the North Country dwelling in exile for his king's sake. The emotion
which finds such living voice in the contemporary poetry, in the
ballads that men wrote and men sang, while the House of Stuart was
still a reality, while there were still picturesque or semi-picturesque
personages living in foreign courts and claiming the crown of England,
finds no less living voice in the words written by a poet of to-day,
though nearly a century has elapsed, since the hopes of the House of
Stuart went out forever.
"We'll see nae mair the sea-banks fair,
And the sweet, gray, gleaming sky,
And the lordly strand of Northumberland,
And the goodly towers thereby:
And none shall know, but the winds that blow,
The graves wherein we lie."
What was there, what is there, we may well ask, in that same House of
Stuart, in that same Jacobite cause, which still quickens in this
latter day a living passion and pathos, which can still inspire a poet
of to-day with some of the finest verses he has ever written? It may
be some consolation to the lingering adherents of the name, to those
who wear oak-apple on May 29th, and who sigh because there is no "king
over the water" who can come to "enjoy his own again"--it may be some
consolation to them to think that if their cause can no longer stir the
swords in men's hands, it can still guide their pens to as poetic
purpose as it did in the years that followed the fatal Forty-five. It
may console them too, perhaps, with a more ironical consolation, to
know that the greatest enthusiast about {236} all things connected with
the House of Stuart, the most eager collector of all Stuart relics, is
the very sovereign who is the direct descendant of the Hanoverian
electors against whom the clans were hurled at Sheriffmuir and at
Culloden, the lady and queen whom it affords a harmless gratification
to certain eccentric contemporary Jacobites to allude to as "the
Princess Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha."
[Sidenote: 1745--Swift and Stella]
In the wild October of the wild year of the Forty-five a great spirit
passed away under the most tragic conditions. While Scotland and
England were raging for and against rebellion, the greatest mind of the
age went grimly out in Ireland. On October 19, 1745, Jonathan Swift
died. For years he had been but in a living death. Racked with pain,
almost wholly bereft of reason, sometimes raging in fits of madness, he
was a fearful sight to those who watched over him. When the end came
it came quietly. He sank into sleep and did not wake any more. He was
in his seventy-eighth year when he died. A dim stone upon the darkened
wall of St. Patrick's Church in Dublin sums up, in words at once
cruelly bitter and profoundly melancholy, the story of his life. That
mouldering inscription, niched in high obscurity, which sometimes stray
pilgrims from across the seas strain their sight to decipher in the
gloom, is the self-uttered epitaph of Jonathan Swift. We may translate
it thus into English: "Here resteth the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of
this Cathedral Church, where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart
no longer. Go, traveller, imitate if thou canst a champion, strenuous
to his uttermost, of liberty."
A little way apart, shadowed by his name in death no less than in life,
lies Stella, the pale, dark-haired child whose wide eyes filled with
love as they followed the poor and lonely scholar through stately Shene
or the prim rococo epicureanism of Moor Park. She sleeps as she lived,
at her master's feet. She dedicated all the days of her life to Swift
with a devotion which is wellnigh without a parallel in the history of
woman's love for man. Those {237} who stand awe-struck and reverential
in the quiet presence of the dead may well feel troubled by a haunting
influence in the twilight air of the place. It is the haunting
influence of the secret of those two tortured lives, the secret that
lies buried between their graves. One forgets for the moment Swift,
the fierce fighting statesman, and thinks only of the lonely man who
lived to lament for Stella.
There has hardly ever been in the world, or out of it, in the
illimitable kingdoms of fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these
two. Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura--repeat
what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever
adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the
names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart
and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and
could not be. When we read of Swift and Stella the mind naturally
turns to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante saw in the third
circle of hell, blown about forever on the racking wind, and finding
comfort through the lapse of eternal twilight in the companionship of
their common doom. They, too--Swift and Stella--seem driven by the
pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they are
greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sustained by their
strange, exquisite friendship, by the community of genius, by a tender
affection which was out of tune with the time and with their troubled
lives. So long as Stella lived Swift was never alone. When she died
he was alone till the end. There is nothing in literature more
profoundly melancholy than Swift's own eloquent tribute to the memory
of his dead wife, written in a room to which he has removed so that he
may not see the light burning in the church windows, where her last
rites are being prepared. There is no greater and no sadder life in
all the history of the last century. The man himself was described in
the very hours when he was most famous, most courted, most flattered,
as the most unhappy man on earth. Indeed he seems to have been most
wretched; he certainly {238} darkened the lives of the two or three
women who were so unfortunate as to love him. But we may forget the
sadness of the personal life in the greatness of the public career.
Swift was the ardent champion of every cause that touched him; the good
friend of Ireland; he was always torn with "fierce indignation" against
oppression and injustice. Thackeray, whose reading of the character of
Swift is far too generally accepted, finds fault with the phrase, and
blames somewhat bitterly the man who uses it, "as if," he says, "the
wretch who lay under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to
be angry." But it was natural that Swift, scanning life from his own
point of view, should feel a fierce indignation against wrong-doing,
injustice, dishonesty. He was an erring man, but he had the right to
be angry with crimes of which he could never be guilty. His ways were
not always our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts; but he walked his
way, such as it was, courageously, and the temper of his thoughts was
not unheroic. He was loyal to his leaders in adversity; he was true to
friends who were sometimes untrue to him; his voice was always raised
against oppression; he had the courage to speak up for Ireland and her
liberties in some of the darkest days in our common history. To
Thackeray he is only a "lonely guilty wretch," a bravo, and a bully--a
man of genius, employing that genius for selfish or vindictive purpose.
To soberer and more sympathetic judgment Thackeray's study of Swift is
a cruel caricature. He may have been "miserrimus," but Grattan was
right when he appealed long after to the "spirit of Swift" as the
spirit of one in true sympathy with the expanding freedom of every
people--a champion, strenuous to his uttermost, of liberty.
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