A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume II Part 11

{221}

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

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 sanct.i.ty 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 a.s.sert 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 n.o.body 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, a.s.suming 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 c.u.mberland'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 c.u.mberland at Culloden.

[Sidenote: 1746--The Duke of c.u.mberland]

Men of the c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland he was known while he lived; as Butcher c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland. 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. c.u.mberland 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s 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 impa.s.sively 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 c.u.mberland 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--c.u.mberland's vengeance]

The horrors that followed Culloden suggest more the blood feuds of some savage tribes than the results of civilized warfare. c.u.mberland, 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 c.u.mberland was going over the field of dead and dying he saw a wounded Highlander staring at him. c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland made to this unexpected display of audacious humanity.

The cruelties of Culloden field were only the preface to the red reign of terror that c.u.mberland 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-l.u.s.t of c.u.mberland'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 ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.body 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 bl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.sociated 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 quant.i.ties. 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 hara.s.s 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 Derwent.w.a.ter'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' subst.i.tutes, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l, 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, n.o.ble, 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 G.o.d'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.

{239}

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

CHESTERFIELD IN DUBLIN CASTLE.

[Sidenote: 1746--Chesterfield in Dublin Castle]

The Jacobite rebellion had compelled the Government to withdraw some of their troops from the continent. France for a while was flattered and fluttered by a series of brisk successes which left almost the whole of the Austrian Netherlands in her possession at the end of the campaign of 1746. The battle of Lauffeld, near Maestricht, in Holland, in the summer of 1747, in which the allied Austrian, Dutch, and English armies were defeated, especially exhilarated the French Jacobites. The French were commanded by Marshal Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy. The English troops were under the command of c.u.mberland, and Lauffeld was therefore regarded by them as in some sort avenging Culloden. The victory was largely due at Lauffeld, as it had been at Fontenoy, to the desperate courage of the Irish Brigade, who, in the words of one of their enemies, "fought like devils," and actually came very near to capturing c.u.mberland himself. But the tide of victory soon turned for France on land and sea, and she became as anxious to make a peace as any other of the belligerent powers could be. The French were sick of the war.

Henry Pelham was writing to the Duke of c.u.mberland to tell him that no more troops were to be had by England, and that, if they were to be had, there was no more money wherewith to pay them.

Political life in England had, during all this time, been pa.s.sing through a very peculiar period of transition. When we speak of political life we are speaking merely of the life that went on in St.

James's Palace, in the House of Lords, and in the House of Commons.

The great bulk {240} of the middle cla.s.ses, and the whole of the poorer cla.s.ses all over Great Britain, may be practically counted out when we are making any estimate of the movement and forces in the political life of that time. The tendency, however, was even then towards a development of the popular principle. The House of Lords had ceased to rule; the Commons had not yet begun actually to govern. But the Commons had become by far the more important a.s.sembly of the two; and if the House of Commons did not govern yet, it was certain that the King and the Ministry could only govern in the end through the House of Commons. The sudden shuffle of the cards of fate which had withdrawn both Walpole and Pulteney at one and the same moment from their place of command at either side of the field, brought with it all the confusion of a Parliamentary transformation scene. Nothing could have been more strictly in the nature of the burlesque effects of a Christmas pantomime than Walpole and Pulteney shot up into the House of Lords, and Wilmington and Sandys set to carry on the government of the country.

[Sidenote: 1743--"The drunken Administration"]