cost them a battle.'"-(Klose, i., p. 280-1.)

543

deeply soever based in the principles of eternal jus- and I believe, is for the first comer; and if you can tice, could sanction the instigation of such calami- tell whether the 6000 Dutch, and the ten battalions ties, without a surer ground than a mere hope of of English, or 5000 French or Spaniards will be triumph; and it is this which must be looked to by here first, you know our fate.' Writing to the every leader of revolutions, who does not desire same gentleman a fortnight later, he says: "The the execrations of his victims, or the condemnation French are not come, God be thanked! but had of posterity sitting in judgment upon his tomb. If at any time there was the probability of suc-I verily believe the entire conquest would not have 5000 landed in any part of this island a week ago, cess, it was at the period when the chevalier arrived. Two causes of this we shall have occasion shortly to advert to, in relation to the parties of the same time, it is an important testimony to the imThis may be the exaggeration of fear; at the days of the two first Georges. At this period minency of the danger of the Brunswick princes. George the Second reigned with a character as un- Nothing could be worse than the means of defence popular as his father's. His personal licentious-adopted, except the mode of revenge when the reness, as it was little known, created only a small part bellion was at an end. The Marquis of Tweedof that sum of indignation which had no measure in dale, the Scottish secretary of state, could provide its expression, and threatened, when put in action, nothing. There was no order, no soldiers, no mato effect another revolution. The monarch's pre-teriel of war-nothing but the indomitable patience dilections for his German principality involved the and the cool sagacity of Duncan Forbes, to oppose country in the great continental war. became disgusted with their monarch, and his minThe people to the rebellion now rolling to the south. isters were involved in the same torrent of obloquy with their master. name of Hanover became odious to a proverb, and Throughout the empire the various pamphlets appeared as to the legality of changing kings.

dent soever, became mad; all doubtful people be"All Jacobites," says the president, "how pruand talked of nothing but hereditary rights and viccame Jacobites, and all bankrupts became heroes, tory. Under these circumstances, I found myself The tories, too, in the gloomy region of oppo- out money or credit; provided with no means to almost alone, without troops, without arms, withsition to which the long domination of Walpole prevent extreme folly, except pen, ink, and a had consigned them, began to see a morning rising tongue, and some reputation; and if you will exon their despair. They began to treat the unhap-cept Macleod, whom I sent for from the Isle of py Jacobites with kindness. They had fought with Skye, supported by nobody of common sense or hopeless endeavor for thirty-two years, the battle courage."-(Culloden Papers.) of faction in the legislature, and were uniformly beaten by the organized phalanx of the whig min-ization of the rebels, were guilty of the fatal misThe government after being aware of the organisters. At this time, the fame of the accomplish- take of despising them. ments of Charles Edward was carried over Europe, scription of them in the government paper-the and the tories dreamt once more in him of a Stuart Edinburgh Courant of 10th September, 1745:The following is the deking. A forgotten incident in parliamentary history illustrates this. When the expedition under they are such a pitiful ignorant crew, that such as "Not one half of them have tolerable arms, and Marshal Saxe, in 1743-destined for the invasion have spread themselves to seek for arms are fit for of England-was about to sail, an opportunity was nothing. afforded by a royal message, for an ebullition in parliament of tory feeling. Sir Francis Dashwood broke out into a rapture on revolutions, and hinted that the subverter of a monarchy might not be a usurper. The inference was cheered by many of the party; and, contrary to all precedent on such a subject, the address in answer to the royal message was bitterly opposed. The arrest of Jacobite members in correspondence with the Stuarts was pronounced illegal, and the suspension of the habeas corpus act was only carried by the whigs, after the keenest struggle in the parliamentary history of the times.

strength, of their designs, or even of themselves, They can give no account of their but talk of Sneeshin, (snuff,) King Shamesh, (James,) Reshent, (Regent,) Plunter, now brogues, &c., and diminish daily."

ments of the rebel army from Glenfinlas to CulloWe have no intention of following the moveden. The story is too well known, and its merits and defects have been too often canvassed. When we see errors, or imagine them, in the generalship of the chevalier, we must remember the nature of his army and the circumstances of his expedition. We can never separate a thing from the epoch in The ministry were culpably remiss in procuring tion, it may not be so of palliation. We confess, which it happened, and if unsusceptible of justificainformation as to the expedition of Charles Ed- however, that after a renewed study of the camward. He had been three weeks in the country paign, we can see no great blunder except the batbefore they knew he had landed; and had it not tle of Culloden. There, the field was deliberately been for Duncan Forbes, the president of the court chosen, to meet the views of the Duke of Cumberof session, the rebel leader might have been at Ed-land-none more suited to enable his artillery to inburgh without a man to oppose him. With mow down the unprotected foe. Lord Mahon, reference to the question as to whether the rising Klose, and Jesse have, however, condemned the was justified by a probability of success, we may cite a passage from the work of Mr. Klose, which is evidently colored by the passions of the mo

ment.

"The population could not be said to show any open favor to the cause of the Stuarts; but there seemed to be a cold indifference as to the issue of the struggle. Henry Fox, a member of the ministry, and a man by no means of a desponding character, in a letter to Sir C. H. Williams, dated the 5th of September, says: England, Wade says,

retreat from Derby, for which the chevalier is not responsible, as he opposed it to the last. This condemnation appears without grounds, when we look almost surrounded by three armies, the Duke of at the position of the rebel force. At Derby it was Cumberland having, within a few miles, a force nearly double. Another of 6000 men, under Marshal Wade, was skirting along the western side of Yorkshire; while, for the defence of the capital, an army was concentrating on Finchley Common. To oppose, without artillery, his breechless moun

taineers to a collision with these forces in a foreign | another lashed to the limit of physical endurance land, would have been justifiable only as an act of others" hashed" with the broad-sword to death. despair at last, since a defeat would have resulted Add to this, that when the work of deliberate butchin the utter extermination of an army which had ery had ceased, no regard was had to the cries of the no native mountains of refuge to hide them from wounded and the groans of the dying-no surgeon the pursuing cavalry. was allowed to apply proper remedies for their recovery, and when any of these were in the same unhappy circumstances, their instruments were

All depended on the coöperation of France, and no prospect of this arriving, retreat was indeed the only alternative. On this subject Mr. Jesse, how-taken from them, that they might give no relief.† ever, repeats what others have formerly asserted, but which cannot be adopted without better evidence. He states, that at the moment of retreat, 10,000 French troops were on the point of embarking for England-the Duke of Norfolk and other peers were on the eve of declaring in favor of the chevalier, and Welsh gentlemen and their follow-fire and sword. The castles of Lovat, Glengarry, ers were on the road. All these schemes, however, failed when the retreat began. The French were countermanded, and the rising insurgents of England returned to their homes. "I believe," says Lord Mahon, " that had Charles marched onward from Derby, he would have gained the Brit

ish throne."

These accumulated wrongs were not confined to the vicinity of Culloden. The Duke of Cumberland advanced into the Highlands as far as Fort Augustus, from which he detached numerous squadrons to hunt down the wrecks of the army of the chevalier. The country was laid waste with and Lochiel were burnt. Huts and hovels were destroyed; without distinction of age, or sex, or rank, without proof of guilt or the existence of suspicion, the miserable inhabitants were shot like wild beasts upon their mountains, or driven with their cattle to be butchered with them in the south, while naked women were compelled to ride on There is scarce any civil war we have ever read horses, and were thereafter violated. The unhapof where cowardice so great, and ferocity so brutal, py privates were involved in the same treason was exhibited, as by the troops of government in with their chiefs. No distinction was made in the this. Falkirk and Preston are illustrations of the fate of the ignorant mountaineers, who, without former. The whole progress of the war presents knowledge of the past or foresight of the future, numerous examples of cold-blooded and deliberate only obeyed the command of their master, without butchery, unprovoked by similar excesses, and-be finding in their code of legislation any precedent to it said to the eternal honor of the rebels-una-question its object or dispute its power. Of the venged by similar atrocities. These were not tri- immediate consequences of the disastrous defeat of umphs to be consecrated at altars. They were," Drummossie Muir," the historian sums up all in however, the subject of contemporary rejoicing. It telling us of silence and desolation over fifty miles; was not against the victims merely that the out-of the widows' and orphans' tears, shed amid the rages were committed, but against humanity in all times against the cause of freedom, which depended on the issue.

desolation of ruined villages; of the groans of the expiring victims who perished beneath the withering blast of that unrelenting vengeance which hunted them from their humble home, and from the quiet glens in which, after the storm had passed, they might have lived to display all the tender charities which have shed a lustre on the Highland name.

The scenes which followed the victory of Culloden constitute one of the darkest pictures in the history of modern Europe. Seldom has the melancholy truth been more sadly realized, that a good cause is often stained with infamy by the infamy of its agents. The accounts which have come In describing this portion of the career of Cumdown to us present an almost incredible detail of berland, our three historians very strangely waste barbarities, and yet they are vouched by testimony their space in vague generalities and eloquent dewhich it is impossible to reject. When all resist- clamation. Had they merely repeated from the ance had ceased, the wounded and the dying were memoirs gathered by the Jacobite devotion of Bishput to death by deliberate command.* Prisoners op Forbes, a few particular instances of the atrociwere taken out in files, under the assurance of hon-ties indulged in by the victors, they would have orable safety, and coolly shot; † others were en-created an impression which they have failed to do, closed in huts, which were set on fire, the yells and done justice to the murdered Jacobites whom of despairing agony from amidst them being not they wish to commiserate. louder than the shouts of exultation from the craven troops of Falkirk, who, with their bayonets, tossed back into the flames the miserable wretches who attempted an escape. The wounded were dogged to the hiding-places which their strength enabled them to reach, and which compassion was ever ready to afford them. Here their zealous victors entered, not to assuage the tortures under which they groaned, or to afford the relief which would not have been a virtue-because to give it is an instinct-but, with hands reeking with the blood they had already shed, they cut the throats of sick | and mutilated rebels. Eye-witnesses describe murders perpetrated by the direct command of the Duke of Cumberland-wounded on the field ordered to be shot-one man hanged by his orders, without even the ceremony of investigation or of trial

Cumberland, unfortunately, was not alone in the command. He had a lieutenant of the name of Hawley, who has exceeded anything we know of in the history of civilized warfare. "He is," says Horace Walpole, "called lord chief justice, (as if another Jeffries;) frequent and sudden executions are his passion."

"Hawley was a ruffian of a low order, though placed by fortune in a high place. He was an admirable foil to his royal patron, for, compared with Hawley, Cumberland was humane and generous. Hawley found an occasion to outrage decency even in his will, into which he introduced this expression: The priest, I conclude, will have his fee; let the puppy have it.' It was a common saying among his soldiers, that he conferred more fre ||quently with his hangmen than with any other of his aides-de-camp."-(Klose, i., p. 371.)

We will not follow this man's footsteps. It huckster's shops in the villages to which he came, would lead us into a detail neither calculated to for three half-pence worth of tobacco. The mode please nor suggestive of instruction. Yet his mili- in which he enjoyed himself after receiving it, is tary executions were scarcely equal to the linger- thus described.ing torments of deliberate justice. In the storm of troubled times, amid the eagerness of pursuit, and the rage of conflicting passions, men are apt to forget, in the blindness of their fury, that the being whom they torture and mutilate, is made in the image of God.

Here is the mode in which the rebels were executed :

"Charles, we are told by one of his companions in adversity, used to smoke a great deal of tobacco, and would sometimes sing them a song to keep up their hearts."-(Jesse, ii., p. 17.)

"After supper, he produced a pipe, the only one. which he ever made use of, which is described as having been as black as ink, and worn or broken to the stump! He had suffered much, he said, from the toothache, and tobacco usually alleviated the pain."-(Jesse, ii., p. 51.)

His escape to France, his expulsion from the French territory, and final settlement in Italy, have long formed portions of familiar history. After his return to Italy he kept up little or no correspondence with the expatriated Jacobites. He seemed to think that they had only done their duty, and that any attention to them was unlooked for and unnecessary. Perhaps there was also another cause which left to him the unbroken solitude of a recluse. In his wanderings in the Highlands he

"Every preparation having been made, the executioner drew the cap of each from their pockets, and having drawn it over their eyes, the rope was adjusted round their necks, and they were almost immediately turned off. After having hung about three minutes, Colonel Townley, who still exhibited signs of life, was the first who was cut down, and having been stripped of his clothes, was laid on the block, and his head severed from his body. The executioner then extracted his heart and entrails, which he threw into the fire; and in this manner, one by one, proceeded to the disgusting task of beheading and disembowelling the bodies of the re-contracted the degrading habit of intoxication, to maining eight."-(Jesse, ii., p. 254.)

These unworthy indignities offered to the last wrecks of mortality-these persecutions beyond the scaffold-cruel insults added to misfortune-have something in them abject and degrading, and cannot be justified by any necessity of punishment. Human laws only disgust the living by attempting to carry their infamy beyond the grave; and the outrages on the mangled corpses of their victims are worthy of beasts of prey, who mutilate the carcass which repletion has rendered them unable to gorge. When we recall the judicial murders of that time-the condemnation without trial, or after a mockery of trial-we cannot forget the sublime judgment of Lord Digby on the death of Stafford, "He that commits murder with the sword of justice, heightens that crime to the uttermost. The eye, if it be prætincted with any color, is vitiated in its discerning. Let us take heed of a bloodshotten eye in judgment."

which he resorted in later life to drown the remembrance of his sorrows. It estranged him thoroughly from all the friends who had any regard for their respectability or his. Cameron of Lochiel could never see him more, and his gentle brother was a stranger to his house. His fine figure became bent with premature decay, and the energy of his mind was gone. Disreputable associates crowded round him; his wife quarrelled with him, became unfaithful, and then deserted with Alfieri. Twenty-five years after Culloden, the continental kings induced him to contract a marriage, at fifty, with a girl of seventeen, in order to prolong the race as a lasting uneasiness to England. The consequence of the inequality soon became apparent in aversion and indifference; and the chevalier found relief from domestic misery in the insensibility of intoxication.

It is difficult, in judging the character of Charles, to measure him by the ordinary proportions. Right and wrong in any case, are never divided with so clean a cut that we can with justice hold that our admiration has not exalted, or our hatred depressed, the objects of our thoughts. The last scion of a line of kings, by a common exaggeration, (the offspring of education or prejudice, rather than the conclusion of reason,) is elevated to virtues he never exercised, and to which vulgar humanity can never aspire.

The wanderings of Charles after the battle of Culloden, give us some of the most romantic sketches in history. His patience, fortitude, manly courage, and at times his childish terror-the fidelity of the clansmen, who spurned the splendid bribe that would have made them wealthier than the greatest of their chiefs-the heroic courage of Flora M'Donald-the succession of lucky accidents that announced a danger, or prevented the evils of one past-the shifts and misery to which the scion That Charles was fitted for the enterprise he unof a royal race was obliged to stoop-the uncom-dertook, may be deduced from the success attained. plaining serenity with which he bore it all-consti- In an enemy's country he raised an army, with tute a succession of pictures so interesting, that the which he marched within 150 miles of the capital baldest history of it could not deaden emotions of of England. Fresh from the sunny land of Italy, sympathy. Nor will the most cynical heart find he learned, as if by intuition, to guide the "wild scope for a sneer at that fervent devotion which Highlandman," so impracticable and unbending, generous minds, measuring their love by their en- often sacrificing, as at Culloden, to the folly of thusiasm, ever felt to the object of their affec-clanship, not merely conquest but safety. To mantions. age and reconcile the jarring interests and conflictThe following is an illustration of the prince's ing claims of every petty chief-to soothe the sufferings:fierce barbarians into cheerfulness and temper, by

"At this period of his wanderings, Charles ap-an appeal to honor when that to their feelings failpeared to his guide to have reached the last stage of misery, for, owing to the filthy holes in which, during the last two months, he had often been obliged to take shelter, he was now covered with vermin."-(Klose, ii., p. 75.)

He often ran great risks in going into the small

ed, or to their interest when both were unavailing -to adjust, amid the perpetual anxieties of a rebel leader, the quarrels of the clansmen, with whose language and manners he had only for a few weeks been familiar, were duties which he effected with the open eye, the quick ear, the lively perception,

which enabled him to probe so quickly the secret an eminent physician fined for saying that Bath of little Rose Bradwardine's love. His winning water was preferable to holy water; the pope's tact was nature's gift which circumstances improv- nuncio received with great acclamations; and two ed. He knew everything he ought to know as to watermen and a porter burnt for heresy, &c., &c. the management of his followers, without learning And thus in two months ends the restored monit. He was never weary when he should be watch-archy. ful. No degrading vice cursed him during the Such a career would have only reduced to prac brief season of his active manhood-there was no tice the application of the principles of the old insensibility to his duty or his fame. Yet his su- chevalier. On the subject of religion he would periority had no overpowering greatness. It did immediately have come into collision with the peonot awe by arrogant domination, or profound sagac-ple. He only demanded, he said, toleration for ity. It was the power of pleasing by rendering himself. Whether he would have stopped at this, power gentle, and making obedience have the flat-we can only judge by the past history of his family, tering aspect of voluntary submission.

His intellectual capacity is a matter of controversy. Lord Mahon denies that he had education sufficient to enable him to write grammatically. The evidence for the charge is somewhat slender. Although a man, in the off-hand carelessness of private correspondence, does not adhere to the rules of logic in his argument, or the rules of grammar in his mode of stating it, it is too rapid a conclusion to fix down the charge of incapacity or of ignorance. Open the Ellis correspondence, and the letters of Marlborough will display rare specimens of barbarous outrages on good taste and grammar. Cobbett's grammar gives illustrations of the same description from the Wellington Dispatches; and on an average we will undertake to point out two Scotticisms in every page of the history of David Hume.

keeping in view his own characteristic haughtiness, and the equally characteristic obstinacy of his son. As to the religion of the latter, we find in these volumes evidence contradictory. He implores the pope's blessing on his enterprise, (Jesse, i., p. 166,) and, at the same time, Helvetius tells David Ilume that he knew from the chevalier himself that he was an infidel, (Klose, ii., p. 206.) At a later period, long after the '45, a Monsieur Massac had an interview with the prince, and the Frenchman was of opinion, that "he was rather a weak man, bigoted to his religion," (Jesse, ii., p. 120.) But, on the other hand, he writes, in 1762, to one of his friends in England, that "I shall live and die in the religion of the Church of England, which I have embraced," (Jesse, ii., p. 124.) The truth appears to be what is stated by Dr. King, that the chevalier was everything to all men-a Catholic among the Catholics, and ready, like his grand-uncle, to be a presbyterian if it suited his convenience.

Sobieskis, or the Henrys of Navarre, could have reversed the stern rejection made by all the British factions of him and of his race.

Had Charles triumphed, he professed, when a hunted wanderer in the Western Isles, that he would have used victory with moderation. He The misfortune of prince Charles was, that his perhaps at the time gave an honest meaning to his father lived before him, and that the mill cannot words: and there can be no question that a general grind with the water that is past. He was ready amnesty and oblivion of feuds would have been to conform to the religion of the British people, only consistent with the humanity of his character. when conformity was useless; when he had no But his father lived-a narrow bigot, tyrannical in aunt on the throne to recommend a restoration, and his politics, and full of all the towering notions, no Bolingbroke, backed by a great party, to secure from the top of which the Stuarts were thrown it. He lived a generation too late; and no merit headlong. Where was the guarantee in the history-not the united virtues of all the Stuarts, the of the Stuarts, or in the equivocal declarations of the old chevalier, which would have rendered improbable another scene like that enacted by the parliament of drunkards, who, under the dictation of a ruthless soldier, repealed in a single night the whole statutes passed in the parliament of Scotland during the protectorate of Cromwell? Where was the grounds for disbelieving, that, following this famed precedent, the legislation for half a century from the time of the revolution would have been affected, titles of nobility extinguished, attainders reversed, and many of rank and influence compelled in turn to seek safety in exile? Add to this the purging of the seats of justice, the dismissal of the officers of the army, the administration of new oaths, with all the guilt of past or future perjury.

Fielding has given us a journal of the reign of the old chevalier, on the supposition that he had been successful. He commences with the 12th of January, and carries it on to March 17th, with which he closes the duration of misgovernment by intimating another insurrection and deposition. In the course of these two months, the twelve judges were removed; Father M'Dagger, the royal confessor, was sworn of the Privy Council; three anabaptists hanged for pulling down the crucifix set up in St. Paul's churchyard; an act passed to reëstablish the writ de heretico comburendo, and another to restore the abbey lands; Father M'Dagger made president of Magdalen College, Oxford;

It was lucky for the house of Hanover, and for all posterity, but unfortunate for the chevalier himself, that the Highlanders were too faithful. Had they given him up to the royal troops, he would have had a similarity to Mary and Charles I. in the manner of his death. We can imagine no other fate for the prime instigator of the commotion, when the petty instruments were so fiercely massacred. When, in those dreary months of privation among the Western Isles, he, in the forced leisure of his hiding places, sometimes contemplated the worst side of the uncertainty in which he rested, he could not bring himself to the belief that government would bring him to the scaffold. He dreaded poison, assassination, or a lifelong imprisonment; but a public trial, with a public death, were things which he did not think the government had courage to resort to, (Jesse, ii., p. 623.) In this, many will think that he was mistaken, and that George the Second had sufficiently high notions of his rights, to induce him to defend them in the accustomed fashion. source of opprobrium has been removed from the throne of the reigning sovereigns, but how unfortunate for the chevalier himself it was, that, after dazzling the world with his heroic gallantry, he did not end his career by a death that would have ex

How just a

rited all the sympathies of mankind for his fate, | bered in its ranks, the bold spirits who had risked and saved them from emotions of pity and con- the penalties of treason, by inviting the prince of tempt in looking upon his sad decline.

orange to rescue their country from oppression. But they advocated, at that early period of their history, a nobler revolution than the change of one dynasty for another. They anticipated the civilization of a century, by insisting on the repeal of those persecuting enactments which barred the universal toleration of all opinions civil or religious the extinction of those hatreds generated by class legislation, which furnish food to the declamations of sedition and the calculations of statesmen, but which, to the people, were productive only of calamities without end-the encouragement of the arts, which increase the sphere of industry, and cast a polish over life-the more enlightened exercise of power, by beneficent legislation, adapted to the progressive movement of society-and a keener sense of the honor and independence of a country, which has ever stood in the van in the cause of freedom.

A great mistake is committed by many writers in tracing the two rebellions to the same origin. Many of the unhappy Jacobites who perished on the scaffolds of '15, were actuated unquestionably by the same motives that impelled the Highlanders to follow the Pretender in the '45. Attachment to the ancient line of kings, who claimed their allegiance on the sacred ground of divine right, coincidence of religion, and hatred of a prince with whom they had no community of feeling, of language, and of country, were the causes for which many rushed into an enterprise, which their most sanguine hopes could never color with the probability of success. There were many, too, who in the general calamity, hoped to reap their individual advantage. Many, tempted with empty titles, extravagant promises, or hurried along by the excitement of the moment, threw for coronets or coffins. In regard to such men, we have little admiration of The high church or tory party again, while they their selfish heroism, little sympathy for their suf- wanted the energy and the intelligence of the ferings or their death. They made it a matter of whigs, supplied their deficiency by the overwhelmprudent speculation, in which they necessarily ing influence of numbers, and by the ceaseless intrusted to chance, and found the chances against fluence of property. This party included all the them. But, for the credit of the Jacobites, it squirearchy and all the clergy of England, and all was not so with all. Derwentwater, Lochiel, the mass of the population engaged in agricultural Balmerino, Perth, and many others, in extraction pursuits. Many, too, of the old nobility, in fornoble or respectable, having some stake at issue, or saking popery, slid down only to the party which deriving, in certain cases, a stronger claim to our had the chief resemblance to that which they had regard, even from their poverty itself, were not left. They renounced the religion of their fathers, men actuated by the spirit of mercenary adventur- but asserted in all their wide extent, the doctrines ers. Yet even the most disinterested of the rebels of prerogative, which had raised the storms of the of the '15 could lay claim to none of the spirit of civil war. The doctrine of the indefeasible heredipersonal enthusiasm with which the presence of tary right of kings, was only less influential with the young chevalier inspired the men who followed them in that age, than the well established yell of him. The rebels of the '15 rushed into rebellion," the church in danger," which, with persevering not from affection to the Stuarts, but from hatred to the Brunswick race; and had it not been for the impolitic party spirit of the first sovereign of that dynasty, many of the pseudo patriots of the first rebellion would have felt towards him all the pride of submission and all the dignity of obedience. This involves a reference to the state of parties, of which the works before us present no account.

When, upon the accession of George the First, the Earl of Mar proclaimed the restoration of the Stuarts, a great party who had no special attachment to the race, and who abhorred their religion, were ready, had there been an energetic command er, to have" stood the hazard of the die." The tory or high church party, which numbered then as it does now the larger portion of agricultural England, had been driven, on the death of Anne, with every contumely from the power which they had imagined forever their own. The Hanoverian elector, with the sagacious policy of William before him, made himself the head of a party and not the impartial monarch of a great empire. He reaped his reward in two insurrections, which threatened the stability of his throne, and which were only crushed by the ruin of many gallant men, whose untimely and cruel deaths might have otherwise been changed into lives of patriotic usefulness.

At the revolution the country was divided into three parties, with principles incapable of amalgamation, but susceptible of being modified to the exigencies of the time. The great party of the whigs -the offspring of the misgovernment consequent on the restoration-the advocates of limited monarchy, but the uncompromising opponents of the doctrine of the absolute prerogative of kings, num

energy, they have resounded to all tunes for two hundred years. This great party could not be neglected by a sovereign whose throne was supported by none of the prestige of hereditary right; and if the successors of William had taken care to prevent latent dislike breaking out into active opposition, the party of the Jacobites would have died away. For with that section the tory party had no community of feeling, except on the doctrine of prerogative. On the cardinal question of religion they were irreconcilably opposed. The tories of the times of William and Anne, were as much averse to the restoration of the Stuarts, did they retain their religion, as they were to any toleration of Catholic or Protestant dissent. Had the fanaticism of the infatuated exile permitted him to deliver his son into the hands of William, to be educated in the Protestant religion, the restoration of the Stuart line would have been effected by the tories. Fortunately for our country, the same obstinacy which worked his ruin prevented his restoration, and the party who would have supported him became reconciled to the change.

These were the parties in the nation on whom its destiny depended. There existed, however, another, which has now absolutely disappeared; but which in that age, and till the insurrection of '45, received the jealous watchfulness of government. The Jacobites, if not so numerous and influential, compensated for this by their restless energy and their enthusiasm. They had some men of ancient family and extensive possessions, whose seclusion in the country had freed them from the immediate presence of the tyranny of the government of James, and whose hereditary prejudices the tale of his distant