e Prince advanced on Edinburgh. The city opened its gates.
He was acknowledged, and held his court in the old Palace of Holyrood,
where generation after generation of Stuarts had maintained their state.
The castle alone, closely beleaguered, held out like our own Sumter in
the centre of rebellion. A battle was fought almost beneath the walls of
the Scotch capital, and the first great army upon which the English hope
depended was ignominiously routed. A portion of the soldiery fled in
disgraceful panic; those who stood were cut to pieces by the charges
of a fiery valor against which discipline seemed powerless. The border
fortress of Carlisle was soon after taken. Liverpool, not the great
commercial port it now is, but of rising importance, and Manchester,
were menaced. Even London was in dismay. Men like Horace Walpole wrote
to their friends of a retreat to the garrets of Hanover. The funds fell.
The leading minister had been a man of eminently pacific policy, whose
chief state-maxim was _Quieta non movere_, and was taken by surprise.
There are many historians and students of history who now admit,
in looking back upon those times, that the fate of the established
government hung upon a thread, and that the daring advance of the
Pretender followed by another victory might have converted him into a
Possessor and Defender. Had any one then asked as to the possibilities
of a reconstruction of the severed Union, the answer would probably
have been not much unlike the predictions of the croakers of to-day who
clamor for acceptance of the Davisian olive-branch and an acknowledgment
of the fact of Secession. Yet the strength of numbers, of means, and of
public sentiment was altogether on the English side. Though paralyzed
somewhat by the sense of private treachery, with the feeling that all
branches of the public service were harboring men of doubtful loyalty,
and the knowledge that a great body of "submissionists" were ready
to acquiesce in the course of events, whatever that might be, the
Government prepared for an unconditional resistance. _From the outset
they treated it as a rebellion, and the adherents of the Stuarts as
rebels_. Time, the ablest of generals and wisest of statesmen, happened
to be on their side. The Pretender turned northward from Derby, and on
the field of Culloden the last hope of the exiled house was forever
broken. Yet it would even then seem as if reconstruction had been
rendered impossible. The Cheval