toppled from his throne--yet to those who lived quiet {220}
lives and kept civil tongues in their heads all things went on pretty
much as usual. . . . That there was consternation at St. James's, with
the King meditating flight, and the royal family in tears and swooning,
did not save the little school-boy a whipping if he knew not his lesson
after morning call. . . . So, while all the public were talking about
the rebellion, all the world went nevertheless to the playhouses, where
they played loyal pieces, and sang 'God save great George, our King'
every night; as also to balls, ridottos, clubs, masquerades, drums,
routs, concerts, and Pharaoh parties. They read novels and flirted
their fans, and powdered and patched themselves, and distended their
petticoats with hoops, just as though there were no such persons in the
world as the Duke of Cumberland and Charles Edward Stuart." Fiction,
that most faithful and excellent handmaiden of history, here shows us
no doubt very vividly what London as a whole thought and did in face of
the rebellion. It is an old story. Were not the Romans in the theatre
when the Goths came over the hills? Did not the theatres flourish,
never better, during the Reign of Terror?

Nor was London the only place which displayed a well-nigh stoical
indifference to the progress of the rebellion. If Oxford had a good
deal of Jacobitism hidden decorously away in its ancient colleges, if
there were a good many disloyal toasts drunk in the seclusion of
scholastic rooms, there was apparently only a feeling of curious
indifference at the rival university, for Gray has put it on record
that at Cambridge "they had no more sense of danger than if it were the
battle of Cannae," and we learn that some grave Dons actually were
thinking of driving to Camford to see the Scotch troops march past, "as
though they were volunteers out for a sham-fight, or a circus
procession."

{221}

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CULLODEN--AND AFTER.

[Sidenote: 1745--Had he but known]

The prince did not know, and could not know, the exact condition of
things in the capital; did not know, and could not know, how many
elements of that condition told in his favor, and how many against.
But what he could know, what he did know, was this: He was at the head
of a devoted army, which if it was small had hitherto found its career
marked by triumph after triumph. He was in the heart of England, and
had already found that the Stuart