warmly on the
boldness and the aplomb (so he was kind enough to phrase it) which had
carried me through devious dangers.

CHAPTER X

CULLODEN

I have neither space nor heart to attempt a history of our brilliant but
ill-starred campaign. Surely no more romantic attempt to win a throne was
ever made. With some few thousand ill-armed Highlanders and a handful of
lowland recruits the Prince cut his way through the heart of England,
defeated two armies and repulsed a third, each of them larger than his own
and far better supplied with the munitions of war, captured Carlisle,
Manchester, and other towns, even pushed his army beyond Derby to a point
little more than a hundred miles from London. Had the gentlemen of England
who believed in our cause been possessed of the same spirit of devotion
that animated these wild Highlanders we had unseated the Hanoverians out
of doubt, but their loyalty was not strong enough to outweigh the
prudential considerations that held them back. Their doubts held them
inactive until too late.

There are some who maintain that had we pushed on from Derby, defeated the
army of the Duke of Cumberland, of which the chance at this time was good,
and swept on to London, that George II would have been sent flying to his
beloved Hanover. We know now in what a state of wild excitement the
capital city was awaiting news of our approach, how the household
treasures of the Guelphs were all packed, how there was a run on the Bank
of England, how even the Duke of Newcastle, prime minister of Great
Britain, locked himself in his chamber all day denying admittance to all
in an agony of doubt as to whether he had better declare at once for the
Stuarts. We know too that the Wynns and other loyal Welsh gentlemen had
already set out to rally their country for the honest cause, that cautious
France was about to send an army to our assistance.

But all this was knowledge too late acquired. The great fact that
confronted us was that without a French army to assist, our English
friends would not redeem their contingent pledges. We were numerically of
no greater force than when we had set out from Scotland, and the hazard of
an advance was too great. General Wade and the Duke of Cumberland were
closing in on us from different sides, each with an army that outnumbered
ours, and a third army was waiting for us before London. 'Tis just
possible that we might have taken the desperate chance and won, as the
Pri