Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope

by Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke

The true cause of all the misfortunes which happened to the Scotch and to those who took arms in the North of England lies here—that they rose without any previous certainty of foreign help, in direct contradiction to the scheme which their leaders themselves had formed. The excuse which I have heard made for this is that the Act of Parliament for curbing the Highlanders was near to be put in execution; that they would have been disarmed, and entirely disabled from rising at any other time, if they had not rose at this. You can judge better than I of the validity of this excuse. It seems to me that by management they might have gained time, and that even when they had been reduced to the dilemma supposed, they ought to have got together under pretence of resisting the infractions of the Union without any mention of the Pretender, and have treated with the Government on this foot. By these means they might probably have preserved themselves in a condition of avowing their design when they should be sure of being backed from abroad. At the worst, they might have declared for the Chevalier when all other expedients failed them. In a word, I take this excuse not to be very good, and the true reason of this conduct to have been the rashness of the people and the inconsistent measures of their head.

But admitting the excuse to be valid, it remains still an undeniable truth that this is the original fountain from whence all those waters of bitterness flowed which so many unhappy people have drunk of. I have said already that the necessity of acting was precipitated before any measures to act with success had been taken, and that the necessity of doing so seemed to increase as the means of doing so were taken away. To whom is this to be ascribed? Is it to be ascribed to me, who had no share in these affairs till a few weeks before the Duke of Ormond was forced to abandon England, and the discovery of the intended invasion was published to Parliament and to the world? or is it to be ascribed to those who had from the first been at the head of this undertaking?

Unable to defend this point, the next resort of the Jacobites is to this impudent and absurd affirmation—that, notwithstanding the disadvantages under which they took arms, they should have succeeded if the indirect assistances which were asked from France had been obtained. Nay, that they should have been able to defend the Highlands if I had sent them a little powder. Is it possible that a man should be wounded with such blunt weapons? Much more than powder was asked for from the first, and I have already said that when the Chevalier came into Scotland, regular troops, artillery, etc., were demanded. Both he and the Earl of Mar judged it impossible to stand their ground without such assistance as these. How scandalous, then, must it be deemed that they suffer their dependents to spread in the world that for want of a little powder I forced them to abandon Scotland! The Earl of Mar knows that all the powder in France would not have enabled him to stay at Perth as long as he did if he had not had another security. And when that failed him, he must have quitted the party, if the Regent had given us all that he made some of us expect.

But to finish all that I intend to say on a subject which has tired me, and perhaps you; the Jacobites affirm that the indirect assistances which they desired, might have been obtained; and I confess that I am inexcusable if this fact be true. To prove it, they appeal to the little politicians of whom I have spoken so often. I affirm, on the contrary, that nothing could be obtained here to support the Scotch or to encourage the English. To prove the assertion, I appeal to the Ministers with whom I negotiated, and to the Regent himself, who, whatever language he may hold in private with other people, cannot controvert with me the truth of what I advance. He excluded me formerly, that he might the more easily avoid doing anything; and perhaps he has blamed me since, that he might excuse his doing nothing. All this may be true, and yet it will remain true that he would never have been prevailed upon to act directly against his interest in the only point of view which he has—I mean, the crown of France—and against the unanimous sense of all his Ministers. Suppose that in the time of the late Queen, when she had the peace in view, a party in France had implored her assistance, and had applied to Margery Fielding, to Israel, to my Lady Oglethorpe, to Dr. Battle, and Lieutenant-General Stewart, what success do you imagine such applications would have had? The Queen would have spoke them fair—she would speak otherwise to nobody; but do you imagine she would have made one step in their favour? Olive Trant, Magny, Mademoiselle Chaussery, a dirty Abbé Brigault, and Mr. Dillon, are characters very apposite to these. And what I suppose to have passed in England is not a whit more ridiculous than what really passed here.

I say nothing of the ships which the Jacobites pretend that they sent into Scotland three weeks or a month after the Pretender was returned. I believe they might have had my Lord Stair’s connivance then, as well as the Regent’s. I say nothing of the order which they pretend to have obtained, and which I never saw, for the stores that were seized at Havre to be delivered to Castel Blanco. I have already said enough on this head, and you cannot have failed to observe that this signal favour was never obtained by these people till the Marshal d’Huxelles had owned to me that nothing was to be expected from France, and that the only thing which I could do was to endeavour to bring the Pretender, the Earl of Mar, and the principal persons who were most exposed, off, neither he nor I imagining that any such would be left behind.

When I began to appear in the world, upon the advertisements which my friends gave me of the clamour that was raised against me, you will easily think I did not enter into so many particulars as I have done with you. I said even less than you have seen in those letters which Brinsden wrote into England in March and April was twelvemonth, and yet the clamour sank immediately. The people of consideration at this Court beat it down, and the Court of St. Germains grew so ashamed of it that the Queen thought fit to purge herself of having had any share in encouraging the discourses which were held against me, or having been so much as let into the secret of the measure which preceded them. The provocation was great, but I resolved to act without passion. I saw the advantage the Pretender and his council, who disposed of things better for me than I should have done for myself, had given me; but I saw likewise that I must improve this advantage with the utmost caution.

As I never imagined that he would treat me in the manner he did, nor that his Ministers could be weak enough to advise him to it, I had resolved, on his return from Scotland, to follow him till his residence should be fixed somewhere or other. After which, having served the Tories in this which I looked upon as their last struggle for power, and having continued to act in the Pretender’s affairs till the end of the term for which I embarked with him, I should have esteemed myself to be at liberty, and should in the civillest manner I was able have taken my leave of him. Had we parted thus, I should have remained in a very strange situation during the rest of my life; but I had examined myself thoroughly, I was determined, I was prepared.

On one side he would have thought that he had a sort of right on any future occasion to call me out of my retreat; the Tories would probably have thought the same thing: my resolution was taken to refuse them both, and I foresaw that both would condemn me. On the other side, the consideration of his keeping measures with me, joined to that of having once openly declared for him, would have created a point of honour by which I should have been tied down, not only from ever engaging against him, but also from making my peace at home. The Chevalier cut this gordian knot asunder at one blow. He broke the links of that chain which former engagements had fastened on me, and gave me a right to esteem myself as free from all obligations of keeping measures with him as I should have continued if I had never engaged in his interest. I took therefore, from that moment, the resolution of making my peace at home, and of employing all the unfortunate experience I had acquired abroad to undeceive my friends and to promote the union and the quiet of my country.

The Earl of Stair had received a full power to treat with me whilst I was engaged with the Pretender, as I have been since informed. He had done me the justice to believe me incapable to hearken, in such circumstances, to any proposals of that kind; and as much friendship as he had for me, as much as I had for him, we entertained not the least even indirect correspondence together during that whole time. Soon afterwards he employed a person to communicate to me the disposition of his Majesty to grant me my pardon, and his own desire to give me, on this occasion, all the proofs he could of his inclination in my favour. I embraced the offer, as it became me to do, with all possible sense of the King’s goodness, and of his lordship’s friendship. We met, we talked together, and he wrote to the Court on the subject. The turn which the Ministers gave to this matter was, to enter into a treaty to reverse my attainder, and to stipulate the conditions on which this act of grace should be granted me.

The notion of a treaty shocked me. I resolved never to be restored rather than go that way to work; and I opened myself without any reserve to Lord Stair. I told him that I looked on myself to be obliged in honour and in conscience to undeceive my friends in England, both as to the state of foreign affairs, as to the management of the Jacobite interest abroad, and as to the characters of persons—in every one of which points I knew them to be most grossly and most dangerously deluded; that the treatment I had received from the Pretender and his adherents would justify me to the world in doing this; that if I remained in exile all my life, he might be assured that I would never more have to do with the Jacobite cause; and that if I was restored, I should give it an effectual blow, in making that apology which the Pretender has put me under a necessity of making: that in doing this I flattered myself that I should contribute something to the establishment of the King’s Government, and to the union of his subjects; but that this was all the merit which I could promise to have; that if the Court believed these professions to be sincere, a treaty with me was unnecessary for them; and that if they did not believe them so, a treaty with them was dangerous for me; that I was determined in this whole transaction to make no one step which I would not own in the face of the world; that in other circumstances it might be sufficient to act honestly, but that in a case as extraordinary as mine it was necessary to act clearly, and to leave no room for the least doubtful construction.