e place.

{203}

[Sidenote: 1734-1737--The omen accepted]

When Charles Stuart, as a general of fourteen, was helping to besiege
Gaeta, he had been hailed by Don Carlos as Prince of Wales, and as
Prince of Wales he was invariably addressed by those outside the little
circle of the sham court who wished to please the exiled princes or
show their sympathy with their cause. The young Charles soon began to
weary of being Prince of Wales only in name. It seems certain that
from a very early age his thoughts were turned to England and the
English succession. There is a legend that at Naples once the young
prince's hat blew into the sea, and when some of his companions wished
to put forth in a boat and fetch it back he dissuaded them, saying that
it was not worth while, as he would have to go shortly to England to
fetch his hat. The legend is in all likelihood true in so far as it
represents the bent of the young man's mind. He was sufficiently
intelligent to perceive that masquerading through Italian cities and
the reception of pseudo-royal honors from petty princes were but a poor
counterfeit of the honors that were his, as he deemed, by right divine.
So it was only natural that with waxing manhood his eyes and his
thoughts turned more often to that England which he had never seen, but
which, as he had been so often and often assured, was only waiting for
a fit opportunity to cast off the Hanoverian yoke and welcome any
lineal descendant of the Charleses and the Jameses of beloved memory.

More than one expedition had been planned, and one expedition had
decisively failed, when in the summer of 1745 Prince Charles sailed
from Belleisle on board the _Boutelle_, with the _Elizabeth_ as a
companion vessel. He started on this expedition on his own
responsibility and at his own risk. Murray of Broughton, and other
influential Scottish friends, had told him, again and again, that it
would be absolutely useless to come to Scotland without a substantial
and well-armed following of at least six thousand troops, and a
substantial sum of money in his pocket. To ask so much was to ask the
impossible. {204} At one time the young prince had believed that Louis
the Fifteenth would find him the men and lend him the money, but in
1745 any such hope had entirely left him. He knew now that Louis the
Fifteenth would do nothing for him; he knew that if he was ever to
regain his birthright he must win it with his own wits. It is
i