TIME'S HOUSEHOLD.
Time is a lowly peasant, with whom bred
Are sons of kings, of an immortal race.
Their garb to their condition they debase,
Eat of his fare, make on his straw their bed,
Conversing, use his homely dialect,
(Giving the words some meaning of their own,)
Till, half forgetting purple, sceptre, throne,
Themselves his children mere they nigh suspect.
And when, divinely moved, one goes away,
His royal right and glory to resume,
Loss of his rags appears his life's decay,
He weeps, and his companions mourn his doom.
Yet doth a voice in every bosom say,
"So perish buds while bursting into bloom."
WHAT WE ARE COMING TO.
In the year 1745 Charles Edward Stuart landed in the wilds of Moidart and set up the standard of rebellion. The Kingdom of Scotland was then, in nearly all but political rights, an independent nation. A very large part of its population was of different blood from that of the southern portion of the British Island. The Highland clans were as distinct in manners, disposition, and race from their English neighbors as are the Indian tribes remaining in our midst from the men of Massachusetts and New York. They held to the old religion, the cardinal principle of which is to admit the right of no other form, and which never has obtained the upper hand without immediately attempting to put down all rivalry. They were devotedly attached to their chiefs. They represented a patriarchal system. They lived by means of a little agriculture and a great deal of plunder. They were bred to arms, and despised every other calling. The whole country of Scotland was possessed with an inextinguishable spirit of nationality, stronger than that of Hungary or Poland. They were traditional allies of France, the hereditary foe of England. Seven hundred years of fighting had filled the border-land with battle-fields, some of glorious and some of mournful memory, on which the Cross of Saint Andrew had been matched against that of Saint George. Some of the noblest families of the realm had won their knightly spurs and their ancient earldoms by warlike prowess against the Southron. Flodden and Bannockburn were household words, as potent as Agincourt and Cressy. Nor had the conduct of the House of Hanover been such as to conciliate the unwilling people. There was known to be a widespread disaffection even in England to the German princes. These had governed their adopted for the benefit of their native country. The sentiment of many counties was thoroughly Jacobite. A corrupt and venal administration was filled with secret adherents of the king over the water. One great university was in sympathy with the fallen dynasty. A large part of the Church was imbued with doctrines of divine right and passive obedience, of which the only logical conclusion was the return of the Stuarts.
Between the two countries there was an antagonism of customs, of manners, of character, more marked, more offensively displayed, and breeding more rancorous hatred than any which can now exist between the people of Boston and Charleston, between the Knickerbockers of New York and the Creoles of New Orleans. A Scotchman was to the South a comprehensive name for a greedy, beggarly adventurer, knavish and money-loving to the last degree, full of absurd pride of pedigree, clannish and cold-blooded, vindictive as a Corsican, and treacherous as a modern Greek. An Englishman was to the North a bullying, arrogant coward,—purse-proud, yet cringing to rank,—without loyalty and without sentiment,—given over to mere material interests, not comprehending the idea of honor, and believing, as the fortieth of his religious articles, that any injury, even to a blow, could be compensated by money.
Into an island thus divided the heir of the ancient family to whom in undoubted right of legitimacy the crown belonged, a young, gallant, and handsome prince, had thrown himself with a chivalrous confidence that touched every heart. There was every reason to suppose that the interests of England's powerful enemy across the Channel were secretly pledged to sustain his cause. Scotland was soon ablaze with sympathy and devotion. The Prince advanced on Edinburgh. The city opened its gates. He was acknowledged, and held his court in the old Palace of Holyrood, where generation after generation of Stuarts had maintained their state. The castle alone, closely beleaguered, held out like our own Sumter in the centre of rebellion. A battle was fought almost beneath the walls of the Scotch capital, and the first great army upon which the English hope depended was ignominiously routed. A portion of the soldiery fled in disgraceful panic; those who stood were cut to pieces by the charges of a fiery valor against which discipline seemed powerless. The border fortress of Carlisle was soon after taken. Liverpool, not the great commercial port it now is, but of rising importance, and Manchester, were menaced. Even London was in dismay. Men like Horace Walpole wrote to their friends of a retreat to the garrets of Hanover. The funds fell. The leading minister had been a man of eminently pacific policy, whose chief state-maxim was Quieta non movere, and was taken by surprise. There are many historians and students of history who now admit, in looking back upon those times, that the fate of the established government hung upon a thread, and that the daring advance of the Pretender followed by another victory might have converted him into a Possessor and Defender. Had any one then asked as to the possibilities of a reconstruction of the severed Union, the answer would probably have been not much unlike the predictions of the croakers of to-day who clamor for acceptance of the Davisian olive-branch and an acknowledgment of the fact of Secession. Yet the strength of numbers, of means, and of public sentiment was altogether on the English side. Though paralyzed somewhat by the sense of private treachery, with the feeling that all branches of the public service were harboring men of doubtful loyalty, and the knowledge that a great body of "submissionists" were ready to acquiesce in the course of events, whatever that might be, the Government prepared for an unconditional resistance. From the outset they treated it as a rebellion, and the adherents of the Stuarts as rebels. Time, the ablest of generals and wisest of statesmen, happened to be on their side. The Pretender turned northward from Derby, and on the field of Culloden the last hope of the exiled house was forever broken. Yet it would even then seem as if reconstruction had been rendered impossible. The Chevalier escaped to France, guarded by the fond loyalty of men and women who defied alike torture and temptation. While he lived, or the family remained, the danger continued to threaten England, and the heart of Scotland to be fevered with a secret hope. The old conflict of nationalities had been terribly envenomed by the cruelties of Cumberland and the license of the conquering troops. There was the same temptation ever lurking at the ear of France to whisper new assaults upon England. Ireland was held as a subjugated province, and was in a state of chronic discontent. To either wing of the British empire, alliance with, nay, submission to France, was considered preferable to remaining in the Union.
Thus far we have been looking at probabilities from the stand-point of their times. There is a curious parallelism in the essentials of that conflict with the present attempt to elevate King Cotton to the throne of this Republic. It is close enough to show that the same great rules have hitherto governed human action with unerring fidelity. The Government displayed at the outset the same vacillation; the people were apparently as thoroughly indifferent to the Hanoverian cause as the Northern merchants, before the fall of Sumter, to the prosperity of Lincoln's administration. The Russell of 1745, writing to the French court his views of the public sentiment of England and especially of London, probably gave an account of it not very dissimilar to that which the Russell of 1861 wrote to the London "Times" after his first encounter with the feeling of New York. There were doubtless the same assurances on the part of confident partisans that the whole framework of the British government would crumble at the first attack. There were, too, the same extravagant alarms, the same wild misrepresentations, the same volunteer enthusiasm on the part of loyal subjects a little later on in the history. There was on the part of the rebels the same confidence in the justice of their cause, the same utter blindness to results, as in the devotees of Slavery. There was then, as now, an educated and cultivated set of plotters, moved by personal ambition, swaying with almost absolute power the minds of an ignorant and passionate class. It was the combat so often begun in the world, yet so inevitably ending always in the same way, between misguided enthusiasm and the great public conviction of the value of order, security, and peace.
The enmity seemed hopeless; the insurrection was a smouldering fire, put out in one corner only to be renewed in another. If Virginia is a country in which a guerrilla resistance can be indefinitely prolonged, it is more open than the plains of Holland in comparison with the Highlands of that era. Few Lowlanders had ever penetrated them,—scarcely an Englishman. It was supposed that in those impregnable fastnesses an army of hundreds might defy the thousands of the crown. At Killiecrankie, Dundee and his Highlanders had beaten a well-appointed and superior force. Dundee had himself been repulsed by a handful of Covenanters at Loudoun Heath through the strength of their position. Montrose had carried on a partisan war against apparently hopeless odds. To overrun England might be a mad ambition, but to stand at bay in Scotland was a thing which had been again and again attempted with no inconsiderable success.
The rebellion failed, and there were several causes for the failure: Dissensions among the rebels, the want of efficient aid from France, the want of money, and the conviction of a large part of the Scots themselves of the value of the Union. The rebellion failed, and sullen submission to confiscation, military cruelty, and political proscription followed.
On Sunday, the 18th of June, 1815, not quite seventy years after, there charged side by side upon the élite of a French army, with the men of London, the Highlanders and Irish. A descendant of Cameron of Lochiel fell leading them on. The last spark of Jacobite enthusiasm and Scottish hatred of Englishmen had died out years before. Those who witnessed the entry of the Chevalier into Edinburgh lived to see the whole nation devouring with enthusiasm the novel of "Waverley,"—so entirely had the bitterness of what had happened "sixty years since" passed from their minds!