CHAPTER VIII.
(1716.)
he Prince, after hearing the sentences pronounced, went home much touched by compassion. The Princess was more active in her pity. She had a great mind to save Lord Carnwath. ‘She has desired me,’ writes Lady Cowper, ‘to get Sir David Hamilton to go and speak to him, to lay some foundation with the king, to save him; but he will persist in saying that he knows nothing. ’Tis a thousand pities. He is a man of good understanding, and not above thirty. He has had his education at Oxford,’—the Whig lady adds, by way of fling at the Tory university—‘as one might judge from his actions.’
Lord Carnwath, however, wrote a letter which Hamilton carried to court, and which Lady Cowper delivered to the Princess of Wales. She took the letter, and was much moved in reading it, and wept, and said, ‘He must say more to save himself. Bid Sir David Hamilton go to him again, and beg of him, for God’s sake, to save himself by confessing. There is no other way,’ said Caroline Dorothea, ‘and I will give him my honour to save him, if he will confess; but he must not think to impose on people by professing to know nothing, when his mother goes about talking as violently for Jacobitism as ever, and says that her son falls in a glorious cause.’
The simple comment of Lady Cowper when the persons arrested endeavoured to shift their responsibility—fathers on sons, and sons on fathers—has at least the merit of common sense. Alluding particularly to those who pleaded that they were drawn into treason unconsciously, she says in her Diary: ‘They all pretend to know nothing, and would have people believe this affair was never concerted; and nobody knows how he came into the Rebellion. God help them! ’tis a wrong way to mercy to come with a lie in their mouth.’
CARNWATH’S CONFESSION.
Lord Carnwath’s confession, if it may be called so, related how he went to Lorraine where he had an interview with the Chevalier. He had persuaded the Prince, he said, to make sure of friends in England and to appear in person in Scotland. The Chevalier waited for an expression, which he might take for one of encouragement, from the Parliament in London. Some of his followers afterwards told Carnwath, that, if the Parliament here expressed no desire for a Restoration, the Jacobite scheme would be to engage the King of Sweden to go to Scotland and establish James on the Scottish throne.