hoes and
warming-pans." "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans,"
retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his
wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at
present, Mr. Jobson." There was not, of course, the slightest
foundation for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne.
Some little excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere
fact that there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be
present at the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to
make the report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one
whose opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at
the time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all. At the
time, however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large
proportion of the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the
supposed warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the
supporters of the Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the
slightest chance whatever of a Stuart restoration. This story of a
spurious heir to a throne repeats itself at various intervals of
history. The child of Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed
by many Legitimist partisans to be supposititious. In our own days
there were many intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the
unfortunate Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not
the son of the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her
sister, the Duchess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the
French {11} people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist
throne.

[Sidenote: 1714--The "Old Pretender"]

James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was
therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history
begins. Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to
escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed
discrowned. He had led an unhappy life--unhappy all the more because
of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it. He is
described as tall, meagre, and melancholy. Although not strikingly
like Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the
Stuart aspect. Horace Walpole said of him many years after that,
"without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the
strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all." The words