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'FIRST BLOOD.'

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Highland hearts; his determination to be a Scotchman among Scotchmen, a determination which set him the desperate task of trying to master the Gaelic speech, ensured his hold upon the affections of the rude chivalry whom his presence and his name had already charmed. But some of the greatest clans absolutely refused to come in. Macdonald of Sleat, and Macleod of Macleod, would have none of the 'pretended Prince of Wales' and his 'madmen.'

Though these chieftains were appealed to again and again, they were resolute in their refusal to embark in the Stuart cause. They pledged themselves to the House of Hanover, they accepted commissions in the royal army; the cause of Charles Stuart must sink or swim without them. With them or without them, however, Charles was going on. The number of clans that had come in was quite sufficient to fill him with hope; the little brush at Spean's Bridge between two companies of the Scots Royal under Captain Scott and the clansmen of Keppoch and Lochiel had given the victory to the rebels. The Stuarts had drawn first blood successfully, and the superstitious saw in the circumstance yet another augury of success. The time was now ripe for action. All over the north of Scotland the Proclamation of Prince Charles was scattered. This proclamation called upon all persons to recognise their rightful sovereign in the young Prince's person as regent for his father, invited all soldiers of King George, by offers of increased rank or increased pay, to desert to the Stuart colours, promised a free

VOL. II.

T

pardon and full religious liberty to all who should renounce their allegiance to the usurper, and threatened all who after due warning remained obdurate with grave pains and penalties. Everywhere through the west this document had been seen and studied, had inflamed men's minds and set men's pulses dancing to old Jacobite tunes. In Edinburgh, in Berwick, in Carlisle, copies had been seen by astonished adherents of the House of Stuart, who were delighted or dismayed, according to their temperaments. Scotland was pretty well aware of the presence of the young Prince by the time that it was resolved to unfurl the flag.

The royal standard of crimson and white was raised by Tullibardine on August 19 in the vale of Glenfinnan, in the presence of Keppoch and Lochiel, Macdonald of Glencoe, Stuart of Appin, and Stuart of Ardshiel, and their clansmen. No such inauspicious omen occurred as that which shook the nerves of the superstitious when James Stuart gave his banner to the winds of Braemar a generation earlier. Indeed, an invading prince could hardly wish for happier conditions under which to begin his enterprise. Not only was he surrounded by faithful clansmen prepared to do or die for the heir to the House of Stuart, but the stately ceremony of setting up the Royal Standard was witnessed by English prisoners, the servants and the soldiers of King George, the first-fruits of the hoped-for triumph over the House of Hanover. 'Go, sir,' Charles is reported to have said to one of his prisoners, Captain

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AN AUSPICIOUS OPENING.

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Swetenham, 'go and tell your general that Charles Stuart is coming to give him battle.' That element of the theatrical which has always hung about the Stuart cause, and which has in so large a degree given it its abiding charm, was here amply present. For a royal adventurer setting out on a crusade for a kingdom the opening chapter of the enterprise was undoubtedly auspicious reading.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE MARCH SOUTH.

THE Condition of Scotland at the time of the Prince's landing was such as in a great degree to favour a hostile invasion. Even educated Englishmen then knew much less about Scotland, or at least the Highlands of Scotland, than their descendants do to-day of Central Africa. People-the few daringly adventurous people-who ventured to travel in the Highlands were looked upon by their admiring friends as the rivals of Bruce or Mandeville, and they wrote books about their travels as they would have done if they had travelled in Thibet, and very curious reading these books are now after the lapse of something over a century. The whole of the Highlands were wild, unfrequented, and desolate, under the rude jurisdiction of the heads of the great. Highland houses, whose clansmen, as savage and as desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees, offered their lords an almost idolatrous devotion. Nominally the clans were under the authority of the English Crown and the Scottish law; actually they recognised no rule but the rule of their chiefs, who wielded a power as despotic as that of any feudal

1715-16.

THE CHANCES IN HIS FAVOUR.

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seigneur in the days of the Old Régime. The heroes of the Ossianic poems-the Finns and Dermats whom colonisation had transplanted from Irish to Scottish legend-were not more unfettered or more antiquely chivalrous than the clansmen who boasted of their descent from them. Scotland was more unlike England in the middle of the last century than Russia is unlike Sicily to-day.

There were several things in Charles's favour. To begin with, the disarmament of the clans, which had been insisted upon after the Fifteen,' had been carried out in such a fashion as was now to prove most serviceable to the young Pretender; for the only clans that had been really disarmed were the Mackays, Campbells, and Sutherlands, who were loyal enough to the House of Hanover, and gave up their weapons very readily to prove their loyalty. But the other clans-the clans that ever cherished the lingering hope of a Stuart Restoration-were not in reality disarmed at all. They made a great show of surrendering to General Wade weapons that were utterly worthless as weapons of war, honeycombed, crippled old guns and swords and axes. But the good guns and swords and axes, the serviceable weapons, these were all carefully stowed away in fitting places of concealment, ready for the hour when they might be wanted again. That hour had now come. So that, thanks to the Disarming Act of 1716, the Government found its chief allies in the north of Scotland practically defenceless and unarmed, while the clans that kept pouring in to rally