THE DUKE OF ORMOND.
Meanwhile, the Government was not meanly hostile to their dead enemies. The Duke of Ormond, the boldest and frankest of conspirators against the Hanoverian succession; the man who more than once would have invaded his country at the head of foreign troops; he who had fostered rebellion, and maintained foiled rebels, during his thirty years’ exile, had, at last, died in his eighty-third year. King and ministers made no opposition to the interment of this splendid arch-traitor in Westminster Abbey. His anonymous biographer (1747), after stating that the duke died, on November 14th, 1745, at Avignon, says: ‘On the 18th, his body was embalmed by four surgeons and three physicians, and in the following month, May, as a bale of goods, brought through France to England, and lodg’d in the Jerusalem Chamber, and soon after, decently enterr’d.’
BURIAL OF ORMOND.
There was something more than mere ‘decency.’ In the ‘General Advertiser,’ May 23rd, it is announced, but without a word of comment on the great Jacobite:—‘Last night, about Eleven o’Clock, the Corps of the late Duke of Ormond was, after lying in State, in the Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Abbey, interr’d in great Funeral Pomp and Solemnity, in the Ormond Vault in King Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, the whole Choir attending, and the Ceremony was perform’d, by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster.’
But the popular attention was directed to the other ‘Duke.’ Whatever Tories may have said at the time, or people generally, since that period as to the character of the Duke of Cumberland, he was the popular hero from the moment he arrived in London, after the victory at Culloden. The papers were full of his praises. They lauded not only his valour but his piety. After the battle, so they said, he had gone unattended over the battle-field, and he was not only seen in profound meditation, but was heard to exclaim,—his hands on his breast, and his eyes raised to heaven—‘Lord! what am I that I should be spared, when so many brave men lie dead upon the spot?’ Even Scotsmen have owned that the duke attributed his victory to God, alone, and that he was unmoved by the adulation of that large body of Englishmen who were grateful at having been relieved by him from a great danger. They compared him with the Black Prince, who won the day at Poictiers, when he was about the same age as the duke, when he triumphed at Culloden. The latter was then in his twenty-sixth year.
THE QUESTION OF INHUMANITY.
The orderly-books of the Duke of Cumberland, recently published, fail to confirm the reports of his cruelty after Culloden. The Jacobites exaggerated his severity, and they gave the provocation. That an order was given to the Highlanders to refuse quarter to the troops under the Duke of Cumberland is proved by Wolfe’s well-known letter. The only trace of retaliatory rigour is to be found in the following entry in the above book (Maclachlan’s ‘William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland,’ p. 293): ‘Inverness, April 17th.—The ‘Officers next from Duty to come from Camp, in order to divide and search the Town for Rebels, their effects, stores, and baggage. A Captain and 50 Men to march immediately to the field of Battle, and search all cottages in the neighbourhood for Rebels. The Officers and Men will take notice that the public orders of the Rebels yesterday were to give us no quarter.’ In Wolfe’s letter (he was then on the staff, and one of Hawley’s aides-de-camp), written on the day the above order was issued, that young officer says: ‘Orders were publicly given in the rebel army, the day before the action, that no quarter should be given to our troops.’ The latter, it is equally true, had said on leaving London for the North that they would neither give nor take quarter; but they had no orders to such cruel effect. It was soldierly swagger. At the very outset, what savagery there was, was fostered by the London gentlemen who lived at home at ease. Walpole suggested if Cumberland were sent against the Jacobite army, ‘it should not be with that sword of Mercy with which the present Family have governed their people. Can rigour be displaced against bandits?’ But, if the young duke should be full of compassion after victory, Walpole rejoiced to think that in General Hawley there was a military magistrate of some fierceness, who would not sow the seeds of disloyalty by too easily pardoning the rebels.
INSTIGATORS OF CRUELTY.
It was said in the London newspapers that the French did not act at the Battle of Culloden, by reason of their being made acquainted with the order of giving no quarter to our troops; and that the French Commanding Officer declared that rather ‘than comply with such a Resolution he would resign himself and Troops into the Hands of the Duke of Cumberland; for his directions were to fight and not to commit Murder.’
THE PRISONERS IN LONDON.