PSEUDO-PORTRAIT OF CHARLES EDWARD.
Jacobite sympathies were attracted and puzzled by a portrait of ‘The young Chevalier,’ which was to be seen, for sale, in every printshop. Alexander Carlyle gives an amusing account of it in his ‘Autobiography.’ ‘As I had seen,’ he says, ‘the Chevalier Prince Charles frequently in Scotland, I was appealed to, if a print that was selling in all the shops was not like him? My answer was, that it had not the least resemblance. Having been taken one night, however, to a meeting of the Royal Society, by Microscope Baker, there was introduced a Hanoverian Baron, whose likeness was so strong to the print which passed for the young Pretender, that I had no doubt that, he being a stranger, the printsellers had got him sketched out, that they might make something of it before the vera effigies could be had. The latter, when it could at last be procured, was advertised in cautious terms, as ‘A curious Head, painted from the Life, by the celebrated M. Torcque, and engraved in France, by J. G. Will, with proper decorations in a new taste.’ Beneath the portrait, the following verses were inscribed:—
‘Few know my face, though all men do my fame,
Look strictly and you’ll quickly guess my name.
Through deserts, snows, and rain I made my way,
My life was daily risk’d to gain the day.
Glorious in thought, but now my hopes are gone,
Each friend grows shy, and I’m at last undone.’
Fear of him, and of his followers, was far from having died out. A letter in the ‘Malmesbury Correspondence,’ dated May, might almost have been written by the advocate of Extermination, in the ‘Advertiser;’—the rev. writer says: ‘A Bill is now preparing and will soon be brought into the House of Lords, for putting the Highlands of Scotland under quite a new regulation, and you may be assured, until some bill is passed effectually to subdue that herd of savages, we shall never be free from alarms of invasion in the North of England.’
Lord Stair, then in London, was more hopeful, and expressed a belief that the king would now have weight in the affairs of Europe. ‘Fifty battalions and fifty squadrons well employed, can cast the balance which way his Majesty pleases.’ Derby captains now looked to shake themselves out of mere tavern-life; while spirited young fellows thought of commissions, and the figure they would cut in new uniforms.