[Sidenote: 1745—William Hogarth]
The genius of William Hogarth is inseparably associated with the Forty-five by reason of this famous portrait of Simon Lovat, and for yet another reason. In this year (1745) William Hogarth was already exceedingly popular, although he had as yet failed to bask much in the sunshine of royal favor. Those old, early days of poverty and struggle were far behind. The industrious apprentice had married his master's daughter, fifteen years ago by this time, and Sir James Thornhill had forgotten his {231} wrath and forgiven the young painter who was so immeasurably his superior. "The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's Progress," "Industry and Idleness," and many another plate in the astonishing panorama of mid last century life, had earned for Hogarth a high position in the favor of the day; and when he posted down to St. Albans, where wicked Simon Lovat lay sick, to receive the old traitor's lathered embrace and to make the famous engraving, William Hogarth was a very distinguished person indeed. The portrait of Simon Fraser had a great success. Never did portrait bear more distinctly the impress of fidelity. The unwieldy trunk, the swollen legs, the horrible, cunning, satyr-like face with its queerly lifted eyebrows, its flattened sensual nose, and its enormous mouth, the odd dogmatic gesture with which the index finger of the left hand touches the thumb of the right: all these things William Hogarth immortalized—making Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat) wellnigh as familiar a personality to us as he was to any of the men be betrayed or the women he wronged in the course of his base life. The plate had a prodigious success. The presses were hard at work for many days, and could not print proofs fast enough. "For several weeks," says Mr. Sala, "Hogarth received money at the rate of twelve pounds a day for prints of his etching." It was reduced in size and printed as a watch-paper—watch-papers were vastly fashionable in those days—and in that Liliputian form it sold also in large quantities. The infamy of the subject and the genius of the artist lent a double attraction to the portrait.
But the portrait of Simon Fraser is not the only, is not perhaps even the chief, connection of Hogarth with the Forty-five. Whether Hogarth did or did not do the sketch for the mezzotint engraving called "Lovat's Ghost on Pilgrimage" matters little. He certainly did do the famous picture and famous plate which is known as the "March to Finchley." Every one knows that marvellous and no doubt vividly accurate picture of the progress of the foot guards to Finchley Common on their way to {232} Scotland; the riot, the debauchery, the confusion, the drunkenness of the scene. Those tipsy heroes, staggering along to the tunes of tipsy drummer and tiny fifer, while Doll Tearsheet and Moll Flanders harass them with enforced embraces, played their part no doubt in the horrible cruelties which succeeded Culloden. But, at the same time, these were among the soldiers who did succeed in preventing England from being given over to the Jacobites, or who at least prevented the Stuart Prince from holding Scotland, and setting up the Stuart throne there. It may, therefore, be perhaps pardoned to his majesty King George the Second if he did not quite appreciate the "burlesque," even though that lack of appreciation made Hogarth in a rage dedicate the plate to his majesty of Prussia.
[Sidenote: 1788—"Bonnie Prince Charlie">[
Misfortune followed most of the followers of Prince Charles. Tullibardine died in the Tower a few days before his trial. Charles Ratcliffe, Lord Derwentwater's brother, was executed. Sheridan died of apoplexy in the November of 1746. The Duke of Perth died on shipboard, on his way to France, soon after Culloden. The less conspicuous rebels suffered as severely as the leaders. The executions that took place at York and Carlisle, at Penrith and Brampton, and on Kennington Common, bloodily avenged the blow that had been struck at the House of Hanover. A great number of prisoners who were not executed were shipped off as slaves to the plantations, a fate scarcely less terrible than death; some were pardoned on consideration of their entering the service of the King as sailors; some were pardoned later on; a few, it is said, escaped. The sternest measures were taken to prevent any possibility of a further rising in Scotland. The disarmament of the clans, which had been carried out so imperfectly after the Fifteen, was now rigorously and effectually enforced. The hereditary jurisdiction of the chiefs of clans, which made those chiefs the petty kings of their districts, was abolished, and in their places the ordinary process of law was established, with its sheriffs {233} and sheriffs' substitutes, and its circuits of judges. The national costume, the kilt, was proscribed under the severest penalties, though in the course of time this proscription was gradually relaxed. Every master of every private school north of the Tweed was called upon to swear allegiance to the House of Hanover, and to register his oath. The turbulent spirit and fine fighting qualities of the clans were turned to good account by the Government, who raised several Highland regiments, and thus succeeded in diverting to their own service all the restless and warlike energy which had hitherto been so troublesome to law and order. It must be admitted that the modern prosperity of Scotland dates in a great degree from the Forty-five. The old conditions of life in the Highlands were conditions under which it was impossible for a country to thrive; and though it is necessary to condemn the manner in which the Government, at all events in the earlier stages, attempted to effect the pacification of Scotland, it is also necessary to admit that Scotland is probably more fortunate to-day than she would have been if victory had been given to the Stuart at Culloden.
Of that Stuart we may as well take leave now. His subsequent career is a most dispiriting study. He hoped against hope for a while that this foreign power or that foreign power would lend him a helping hand to his throne. Expelled from France, he drifted to Italy, and into that pitiable career of dissipation and drunkenness which ended so ingloriously a once bright career. To the unlucky women whom he loved he was astonishingly brutal; he forced Miss Walkenshaw—the lady of whom he became enamoured in Scotland—to leave him by his cruelty; he forced his unhappy wife, the Countess of Albany, to leave him for the same reason. Her love affair with the poet Alfieri is one of the famous love-stories of the world. It seems pretty certain that Charles Stuart actually visited England once, if not more than once, after the Forty-five, and that George the Third was well aware of his presence in London, and, with a contemptuous good {234} nature, took no steps whatever to lay hands upon the rival who was dangerous no longer. At last, on January 31, 1788, or, as some have it, on January 30, the actual anniversary of the execution of Charles the First, Charles Stuart died in Rome, and with him died the last hope of the Stuart restoration in England. Had Charles lived a little longer, he would have seen in the very following year the beginning of that great storm which was to sweep out of existence a monarchical system as absolute as that of the Stuarts had been, and to behead a monarch far less blamable than Charles the First of England. There is something appropriate in this uncompromising devotee and victim of the principle of divine right dying in exile on the very eve of that revolution which was practically to abolish the principle of the divine right of kings forever. Oddly enough, there are still devotees of the House of Stuart, gentlemen and ladies who work up picturesque enthusiasms about the Rebel Rose and the Red Carnation, and who affect to regard a certain foreign princess as the real sovereign of England. But the English people at large need hardly take this graceful Jacobitism very seriously. Jacobitism came to its end with Cardinal Henry dying as the pensioner of George the Third, and with Prince Charles drowning in Cyprus wine the once gallant spirit which, even at the end, could sometimes shake off its degradation, and blaze into a moment's despairing brilliancy, at the thought of the Clans and the Claymores, and the brave days of Forty-five. And so, in the words of the old Saga men, here he drops out of the tale.
[Sidenote: 1745-1889—The Stuart charm]
But it is the curious characteristic of the ill-fated House of Stuart that, through all their misfortunes, through all their degradations, they have contrived to captivate the imagination and bewitch the hearts of many generations. The Stuart influence upon literature has been astonishing. No cause in the world has rallied to its side so many poets, named or nameless, has so profoundly attracted the writers and the readers of romance, has bitten more deeply {235} into popular fancy. Even in our own day, an English poet, Mr. Swinburne, who has not tuned much to thrones fallen or standing, has been inspired by the old Stuart frenzy to write one of the most valuable of all the wealth of ballads that have grown up around the Stuart name. In his "A Jacobite's Exile, 1746," Mr. Swinburne has summed up in lines of the most poignant and passionate pathos all the feeling of a gentleman of the North Country dwelling in exile for his king's sake. The emotion which finds such living voice in the contemporary poetry, in the ballads that men wrote and men sang, while the House of Stuart was still a reality, while there were still picturesque or semi-picturesque personages living in foreign courts and claiming the crown of England, finds no less living voice in the words written by a poet of to-day, though nearly a century has elapsed, since the hopes of the House of Stuart went out forever.
"We'll see nae mair the sea-banks fair,
And the sweet, gray, gleaming sky,
And the lordly strand of Northumberland,
And the goodly towers thereby:
And none shall know, but the winds that blow,
The graves wherein we lie."
What was there, what is there, we may well ask, in that same House of Stuart, in that same Jacobite cause, which still quickens in this latter day a living passion and pathos, which can still inspire a poet of to-day with some of the finest verses he has ever written? It may be some consolation to the lingering adherents of the name, to those who wear oak-apple on May 29th, and who sigh because there is no "king over the water" who can come to "enjoy his own again"—it may be some consolation to them to think that if their cause can no longer stir the swords in men's hands, it can still guide their pens to as poetic purpose as it did in the years that followed the fatal Forty-five. It may console them too, perhaps, with a more ironical consolation, to know that the greatest enthusiast about {236} all things connected with the House of Stuart, the most eager collector of all Stuart relics, is the very sovereign who is the direct descendant of the Hanoverian electors against whom the clans were hurled at Sheriffmuir and at Culloden, the lady and queen whom it affords a harmless gratification to certain eccentric contemporary Jacobites to allude to as "the Princess Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha."