66 strathspey, mingling its wail with the rustle | fied, with claymore in hand, with wild outof the light feet, with the " snap" of the bursts of contemptuous triumphant song, characteristic melody. We are all familiar not only Johnnie Cope, but more manful with the poetic contrast between that "sound leaders. Follow me, gentlemen," said the of revelry by night" and the distant echo of Adventurer on that field of Prestonpans, in the fatal guns which broke up the brilliant the chill daybreak, "and by the blessing of crowd. But the eve of Waterloo was noth- God I will this day make you a free and ing to that eve, behind which shadowed happy people!" He had slept among his darkly not only Culloden, but the Tower Highlanders that night on the peas-straw and the block—the traitors' heads set up among the ricks. He had crossed the moss on the gates, the noble hearts plucked with them, sinking in the uncertain soil. quivering out all the nameless horrors of When the sudden shameful rout of their opthe scaffold; or that escape at the cost of ponents left them masters of the field, he reall that makes life supportable, which in mained there through the day to give orders some cases was more terrible still. for the care of the wounded and the safety of the prisoners. But his was not the genius which could combine and direct. He could animate, encourage, fight with his soldiers, share all their hardships; and a certain intuition of what was wisest, being boldest, seems to have been in him; but he himself was not born to be a great general which was well for England, perhaps, though ill for him. We cannot go over in detail all the military vicissitudes of that strange year. It is evident that almost from the first there was a conflict of authority. Lord George Murray, an able and experienced but stubborn and self-willed general, defends himself in his narrative with a vehemence which savours something of wrong on his part; but throughout the story the persistent shadow of another figure, almost as active as his In four months the handful of men which own, comes in to spite and harass the move-at the outset had been scorned as banditti .ments of the Commander-in-chief. 'Mr. and helpless savages, had won all Scotland, O'Sullivan then came up," is the signal for with the exception of two or three strongconfusion, for contravention of legitimate holds, and had overrun England in such a orders, and loss of men. O'Sullivan, one rapid raid as other Stuarts in other days had of Charles's companions from the outset attempted, without meeting with any an Irishman, doubtless bristling with points check. The Prince reached Derby on the of national opposition to the kindred yet dif- 4th of December. His rapid progress and ferent race does not send any voice out amazing successes struck the very soul of of the darkness to explain his own conduct; the English Government with terror. Horbut it is evident that he headed such an op- ace Walpole, once more discussing the sitposition as, useful enough in constitutional uation, gives up Scotland as lost; and Lonstruggles, is fatal in war, and that he thwart- don itself thrilled with terror, less perhaps ed wherever he was able, and set perma- of the new reign than of the petticoated nently on edge, the only captain of the Highlanders, who were likely to carry havoc Highland forces who had the head of a gen- into the city. And yet the invaders were eral. Lord George was interfered with, totally unequal to the defensive forces of stopped in his work, driven to the length of the country. Marshal Wade had ten thouresignations, self-defences, despair of any sand men at Newcastle when the Highland real good; while Charles, no doubt, felt army passed the border. The Duke of Cumover again more bitterly than ever, what he berland was forming another army in the had said before the beginning of his enter-midland counties- militia was being raised prise, that his friends would rather sacrifice me and my affairs than fail in any private view of their own." He had nobody great enough to take the lead by such force of genius as could not be withstood. 66 "O for one hour of Wallace wight, on all sides and the whole wealth and credit of the empire were embarked against the Adventurer. The reader stands aghast to see the little army, "barely five thousand fighting men," in the very heart of England, with all the troops of the kingdom in arms against them, and more than their own numOr well-skilled Bruce, to rule the fight!” ber of Hessians just imported to help King he might well have exclaimed; or even, if George to hold his own. How did they get not that, of Berwick or Maurice of Saxe to there? how did they get away again through be supreme and above all question. What the mazes of successive armies? A march downright valour could do the little army more marvellous, a success so wonderful, did. It stormed across Scotland, sweeping has scarcely ever been recorded in history. before it the panic-stricken troopers who had Almost every qualified critic concurs in the Lought well enough on other fields. It de-conclusion that had Charles and his soldiers had their simple will and pushed on, blind to the tremendous risks of their position, to London, they would have carried victory with them, and taken possession of the capital of England as easily as they did of Edinburgh. It is said that the trembling Premier shut himself up for a day, to consider whether he had not better declare for Charles when the news came of his arrival at Derby; and that King George had his treasures embarked and his vessels prepared at the Tower ready for escape. The armies stood impotent, gazing at the unexampled foray the nation stood passive, with a stupid amaze, gazing too, to let events settle themselves. The only active living figures in that grim pause of fate against the great silent background of expectant England, are the wild forms of the mountaineers, daring and eager the princely young Captain at their head, as eager, simple, and fearless and the anxious chiefs between. They were less than a hundred and thirty miles from London. They had driven away like chaff every antagonist that had yet ventured to look them in the face. They had glided between and around the stupid masses of soldiery, who outnumbered them twice over. What was to arrest their victorious course? Fortune for once was on the Stuarts' side: a few days longer, and all would have been won. It was at this moment, against all probability and all true wisdom, that the Highland leaders seem to have come to their senses. The laws of ordinary prudence suddenly, at the most unpropitious hour, came back to them. They opened their eyes as from a trance, and felt their position untenable. What they do not seem to have perceived was, that their position had been untenable from the first outset; that laws of every kind had been defied; and that in the utter daring and mad valour of their expedition had been and might be its success. By all military laws they had no right to be where they were. The conclusion they ought to have drawn from this was clearly the simple unscientific conclusion drawn by Charles and the common men of his army, to persevere in their wild triumphant way to the end. But the trained soldiers thought otherwise. At Derby, heaven knows why, neither sooner nor later, they awoke from their passion of fight and victory. The light of common day returned to them. A panic of reasonableness, good sense, and strategical rule came back upon them. It was such an exhibition of the foolishness of wisdom as seldom strikes the eye. Why they should have pulled up there of all spots in the world; how it was that the eloquence, the entreaties, "the soothing close applications" the tragic protest of the unhappy Prince, which had once moved them to the risking of life and fortune, should have lost all its potency now, who can tell? It was as if a forlorn hope, carrying all before it, had suddenly bethought itself that it was a regular army, and must return to the punctilios and symmetrical movements of dignified warfare. This was the strange revolution of feeling that arrested Charles on his way. It was no defection of heart, no faltering of courage. These men were all as ready to die for him as when, hopeless yet dauntless, they had pledged him their Highland faith. But all at once it had flashed upon them that they were doing their work as men had never done it before; "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." The danger was no way increased, the path was as open, every augury of success as fair before them as at the moment of starting; but at last the irregular impetus had failed, and the laws of their trade, and the long-forgotten precautions of prudence, came back too late to the minds of the generals. Prudence was madness in their then position, but, mad as it was, it carried the day. To this awakening, however, many different reasons had conduced. First of all was the old and stubborn Scottish prejudice against leaving or remaining long absent from their native soil—a prejudice, no doubt, built upon very sufficient foundation and recollections of disaster but put in force too late, when retreat was worse than advance. Then the fact that England did but stare at them and stand aloof, had no doubt an intensely depressing effect upon men who were compelled to take all the circumstances into consideration, and could not go on blindly like knights-errant. It had been promised them that England was ready to take up arms, that France was ready to send Lelp and succour. Such promises had been made to Charles himself, and he too in his silent heart had borne the shock of disappointment. But his generals could not take it silently. To this let us add, that the divisions among them were gradually growing more bitter. It is said that Charles himself was wilful, and fond of his own way; but of this there is little direct evidence, so far as the conduct of the war is concerned. He had all but forced them over the Border, it is true, vowing that he would go alone if no man would follow him; but there is little trace in the various narratives of absolute interference on his part. Lord George, though evidently feeling himself an injured man, repeatedly records the fact that the Prince relinquished his own will in defer ence to the opinions of his officers. But | ated all hearts-he whose words had with all these adverse circumstances against charmed away prudence, and made life itthem, and little more than their attachment self seem but sweet as a weapon to serve to the Prince's person to inspire their cour-him- had to see his prayers put aside, age, it is natural enough that their endurance, strained to the uttermost, should have given way. Unfortunately, a sudden fit of prudence after daring is in most cases fatal. They had gone too far to go back. When they turned they virtually gave up the conflict, renewed the courage of their adversaries, and relinquished the immense advantages of enthusiasm and confidence which had been their own. his arguments neglected, and no answer given to his appeal. The debate went on for hours, but the unhappy Prince would not yield. When the council broke up, he tried once more pathetically what his old skill in persuasion was good for. They had baffled him together; they might yield to him separately. Something of the simplicity of an untrained mind is in this last attempt. He trusted in his power of moving To Charles this blow was all the more their hearts as a girl might trust in her terrible that it was quite unexpected. "He beauty; but the influence was no longer arrived at Derby in high spirits," says Lord fresh and novel. His captains had become Mahon, "reflecting that he was now within used to the pleadings of their Prince. Pera hundred and thirty miles of the capital, haps he had tried too often that mode of and that neither Wade's nor Cumberland's government. The moment was come when forces any longer lay before that object of fact and probability had returned to reign his hopes." He had even begun in the over them, shutting their ears to all aplightness of his heart to consider the ques- peals. The men faced him, when he sent tion whether he should enter London on for them, as steadily alone as they had done foot or on horseback, in an English or High- together. His hour and power were over. land dress. It was the last night of triumph At that moment, when fortune still seemed to the Chevalier. The dawn of the winter to smile on him, and his neighbourhood morning brought with it a miserable change. struck terror into the hearts of his enemies, The chief officers of his army waited on him Charles must have passed through the very at break of day, headed by Lord George, bitterness of death. the Commander-in-Chief. The proposition they laid before him was nothing less than to abandon the attempt on England, which up to this time had been so strangely uninterrupted, and to retreat to Scotland. They laid before him their diminished numbers, the apathy of England, the silence of France, the thirty thousand men who might at any moment gather round them, and prevent the escape of a single soldier; the risk of his own person. All these arguments were suddenly poured upon Charles's indignant astonished ear. He tried again his powers of remonstrance, of entreaty, of sudden appeal all the arts that had once vanquished his fond yet half-unwilling supporters. What was his life to him in comparison with his cause? "Rather than go back I would wish to be twenty feet under ground!" he cried. With the fervour of a man arrived at the crisis of his life, and to whom the question was desperate, he confronted all those gloomy disappointed chiefs who had been so true to him, and yet so hard upon him. It might mean a scaffold to them to Charles it meant death spiritual and moral, shame, downfall, a lingering agony. Desperately he pleaded with them, imploring them to do anything but retreat. Of all the silent stubborn assembly, Perth alone, young, chivalrous, and hopeful as himself, stood by him; and he who once had fascinVOL. XI. 422 LIVING AGE. The same evening the council was again called together, and "Charles suddenly declared his consent to a retreat." Sullenly, perhaps sadly with his heart broken and his high hopes quenched, who can doubt? Disappointed of the prize that seemed so near, the last stroke which would have roused all his friends to his succour; disappointed in the very love which now seemed to fail him - in the dead silence of the country round, out of which so many promises had come- -in the sickening unresponsive quiet in which he was left, to do his best or worst, heaven and earth looking on, not aiding. It was then, and not when the stimulus of personal danger called him back to himself, that Charles Stuart bore the blow that was worse than death. There, and not on Culloden, the natural result of that decision, should be noted the real end of his extraordinary campaign. Nor was he alone. in his misery. Next morning, when the army set out in the grey twilight, "the inferior officers and common men believed that they were going to fight the Duke of Cumberland, at which they displayed the utmost joy." But when the daybreak allowed them to discern the surrounding objects, and to discover that they were retracing their steps, nothing was to be heard throughout the army but expres sions of rage and indignation. If we had 66 been beaten," said one of their officers, the grief could not have been greater." But the soldiers had to yield, silent with rage and dismay, and trudge back again the weary dangerous way, uncheered by the glorious hopes which had drawn them thither; while the Prince, ready to weep such tears as would not have misbecome his manhood-his heart broken, his countenance changed, all his princely suavity and charm gone from him- came tardily and dully in the rear. At that terrible moment his dignity forsook him along with his hopes. In the frightful revulsion of feeling, the poor young hero, still so young, shows for a moment like a petulant child. Instinctively he felt that all he had struggled for was lost. What need now to be up with the sun, to brush away the early dew, to hold out the longest and march the strongest of any of his men? He had done so, and this was the end. Now he fell back into the exhaustion of lost hope. On his way south he had given up his carriage to one of his aged followers, and had traversed the long plains merrily on foot, sometimes at the head of one clan, sometimes of another, in the Highland dress, with his target slung over his shoulder. He would not even stop to eat, but snatched his dinner when he could, threw himself lightly on whatever bed might be possible the open field, if no better was to be had and slept till four o'clock in the morning, when he was astir again. But now all this was over. Every other trial he had borne bravely, but this Charles did not bear well. He could not hide the change in his face; he made no further effort; lingering in the rear, late in the march, he rode on moody with a petulant misery. The test of this disappointment was too much for him. It is the only point in the brief and wonderful story in which the hero falls below his position. And yet the reader forgives the unhappy Chevalier. If ever man had reason to be cast down, it was he. 66 "I believe," says Lord Mahon, in whose careful and close narrative the mass of existing material is condensed and set forth with equal judgment and power, and whose principles do certainly not incline him to favour the Stuarts' cause-"I believe that had Charles marched onwards from Derby he would have gained the British throne." It is evident that he felt this conviction himself to the depths of his heart. But Providence did not mean to give the race that last chance. When the Highlanders turned their back upon England, the last possibility was over for the house of Stuart. The retreat thus sadly begun was scarcely less wonderful than the march. It was accomplished with a speed and safety quite extraordinary in the circumstances; but, nevertheless, it moved like a funeral procession across the western border, men and leaders having alike lost temper and lost heart. The strict discipline of the earlier part of the campaign failed under this trial. The mountaineers, lowered in their own estimation, went back to their old instinct of plunder. The Prince, sore at heart, exacted fines from the towns he passed, where the popular enthusiasm for the successful leader had changed, with the usual treachery of the mob, into vexatious opposition. Manchester was mulcted in £5000; Dumfries in £2000. Glasgow, always adverse, was laid under "a most heavy requisition to refit the Highland army." One transient gleam of renewed success burst upon them at Falkirk, reviving the spirit at once of the soldiers and of their leader; and a decisive battle seemed imminent. The prospect roused all the old enthusiasm. It was Cumberland this time who was advancing to meet them, and the hearts of the Highlanders were all aglow. But again the chiefs stepped in with proposals for retreat. A kind of infatuation seems to have possessed these fated men. Their mountains attracted them with some unreasonable fatal fascination. They promised Charles in spring an army of 10,000 effective Highlanders," and in the mean time the reduction of the northern forts, if he would but withdraw now, and seek safety among the hills. Only the night before, Lord George, once more at the head of the malcontents, had shown to the Prince a plan for the battle with Cumberland's army, which Charles had corrected and approved. Once more the rage of disappointment overwhelmed the unfortunate Adventurer. "Good God! have I lived to see this?" he cried, dashing his head against the wall with the wild passion of his southern training. But again the chiefs, masters more absolute than any king, prevailed. The inevitable battle was postponed from the links of Forth, where their followers were gay with victory, to the dreary Culloden moor, where, starving, destitute, and desperate, the hopeless encounter had at length to be. Thus the bitter crisis was re-enacted. And hard must the heart be, and dull the imagination, which will not own at such a moment a pang of intolerable pity for the heart-broken Chevalier and his lost cause. 66 The retreat, for the first time, was made in confusion, of which poor Charles, sick at not on that other field of victory, where their gallant chief, with a prophetic shroud (it is their own superstition) high upon his breast, addressed to them only these three words, Highlanders, remember Egypt!'not in those hours of triumph and glory was displayed a more firm and resolute bravery than now in the defeat at Cullo not human bravery. For the first time since they set out from their mountains eight months before, the Highlanders fell before their enemies. The tide had turned their day was over- - and the first lost battle was the last. And Charles, into whose mind it is evident such an idea had never entered Charles, who could not believe that when the encounter came, man to man, anything on earth could stand before his mountaineers -saw this destruction from the height where he stood, watching with sudden tears of passion and anguish, with wonder, incredulity, and despair. He could not believe it. Probably it was the stupefaction of amaze and horror that prevented him from rushing down into the fatal mêlée and dying like his ancestor at Flodden, the best fate his best friend could have wished him. heart, yet ever generous, took the blame despair, broke, fell, and perished before upon himself. Drearily, with heavy thoughts the fatal force and overwhelming numbers and lessening numbers, the little host pur- of their adversaries. "Nowhere," says sued its fatal way towards the hills. As Lord Mahon, moved out of his composure the disastrous march proceeded, money to a swell of sympathetic eloquence,-“ not failed, and even food, as well as patience by their forefathers at Bannockburn — not and hope. The wild winter-bound moun- by themselves at Preston or at Falkirk tains afforded no supplies to the wanderers. not in after years, when discipline had The succours which had always_continued raised and refined the valour of their sons to drop in in minute doles from France fell into the enemy's hands- one ship in particular, with £10,000 in gold and 150 soldiers. The Highlanders had to be paid in meal, which the men, being obliged to sell out and convert into money, it went but a short way for their other needs." Even the meal failed by-and-by. On the eve of Culloden, one biscuit served to each den." But human strength has its limit, if man was the sole provision of the five thousand, who, weary, dispirited, and chilled to the heart, had to meet, on this poor fare, an army of nearly 9000 well-fed and carefully appointed soldiers. Courage alone held out, the last prop of the unfortunate. When Lord George advised a night-march to surprise Cumberland in his camp, even at this dismal conjuncture Charles rose and embraced the general who had served him so ably and thwarted him so cruelly. But Drummossie Moor and Prestonpans were different. The men were worn out. The wintry darkness and cold, intensified by want, stupefied even the mountaineers. Their progress was so slow that this project, like so many others, had to be given up. Wearily the doomed army went back to arrange itself in line on the black hopeless moor, and wait the battle. Nobody seems to have had heart enough left even to compare the dismal omens of this field with what might have been had Cumberland been met at Falkirk, or to cast the contrast in the teeth of the captains who had retreated only for this. Hungry, cold, and worn out, after a sleepless night and foodless day, the Highlanders stood up to meet their fate. The Macdonalds had not their usual place, which seems to have moved them more than fatigue or want. "We of the clan Macdonald thought it ominous that we had not the right hand in battle as formerly at Gladsmuir and Falkirk, and which our clan maintains we had enjoyed in all our battles and struggles since the battle of Bannockburn." This punctilio did what starvation could not do. My God! have the children of my clan forsaken me?" cried gallant Keppoch, in his death-pang, no doubt with a pang more sharp than death. While the Macdonalds stood sullen without striking a blow, the other clans, fighting the fight of 66 66 In the lost battle, borne down by the flying," he stood aghast in a terrible surprise. He was urged, some say, to put himself at the head of the stubborn Macdonalds and attempt another charge; others tell us that he was prevented by force from taking this desperate step, O'Sullivan seizing his horse by the bridle and forcing him from the field. All the narratives combined leave upon the reader's mind the impression that Charles was stupefied with the unexpected calamity. He had felt his cause was lost, but never that it was so lost as this. As he turned his back upon the fatal moor where his poor Highlanders lay dying, in this bewilderment of amaze and despair, a certain Ned Burke, a poor Highland caddie from Edinburgh, came up to the little knot of reluctant fugitives which surrounded the Prince. were very few along with him," the faithful fellow says, "and he had no guide." "If you be a true friend, endeavour to lead us safe off," said Charles; while the enemy's fire, according to this humble observer's "There |