{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—Cumberland's vengeance]
The horrors that followed Culloden suggest more the blood feuds of some savage tribes than the results of civilized warfare. Cumberland, 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 Cumberland was going over the field of dead and dying he saw a wounded Highlander staring at him. Cumberland 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 Cumberland made to this unexpected display of audacious humanity.
The cruelties of Culloden field were only the preface to the red reign of terror that Cumberland 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-lust of Cumberland'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 illustrious 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 passion 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 nobody 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 bluster 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.