s from London. Once again, by skill or by
good-fortune, he had contrived to slip past the English general sent
out to bar his way. Cumberland with his forces was at Stafford, nine
miles farther from the capital than the young prince, who was now only
six days from the city, with all his hopes and his ambitions ahead of
him, and behind him the hostile army of the general he had eluded.
Never perhaps in the history of warfare did an invader come so near the
goal of his success and throw it so wantonly away; for that is what
Charles did. With all that he had come for apparently within his
reach, he did not reach out to take it; the crown of England was in the
hollow of his hand, and he opened his hand {218} and let the prize fall
from it. It is difficult to understand now what curious madness
prompted the prince's advisers to counsel him as they did, or the
prince to act upon their counsels. He was in the heart of England; he
was hard by the capital, which he would have to reach if he was ever to
mount the throne of his fathers. He had a devoted army with him--it
would seem as if he had only to advance and to win--and yet, with a
fatuity which makes the student of history gasp, he actually resolved
to retreat, and did retreat. It is true, and must not be forgotten,
that Charles did not know, and could not know, all his advantages; that
many of the most urgent arguments for advance could not present
themselves to his mind. He could not know the panic in which
Hanoverian London was cast; he could not know that desperate thoughts
of joining the Stuart cause were crossing the craven mind of the Duke
of Newcastle; he could not know that the frightened bourgeoisie were
making a maddened rush upon the Bank of England; he could not know that
the King of England had stored all his most precious possessions on
board of yachts that waited for him at the Tower stairs, ready at a
moment's notice to carry him off again into the decent obscurity of the
Electorship of Hanover. He could not know the exultation of the
metropolitan Jacobites; he could not know the perturbation of the
Hanoverian side; he could not know the curious apathy with which a
large proportion of the people regarded the whole proceeding, people
who were as willing to accept one king as another, and who would have
witnessed with absolute unconcern George the Elector scuttling away
from the Tower stairs at one end of the town, while Charles the Prince
entered it