detained him, and thus prevented the rash outbreak which afterwards
ensued. Such is the opinion of one who knew all the parties concerned in
the insurrection well. Such is the statement of Mr. Robert Patten,
himself a Jacobite, and chaplain to Mr. Forster. He afterwards turned
King's evidence, and received for that treachery, or, as he is pleased
to call it, penitence, a suitable remuneration.[187]

Lord Derwentwater unfortunately adopted a course which could but have
one termination. He concealed himself from those who were employed to
apprehend him. Clear from any direct imputation, had he then given
himself up, he would have been released; and he might have been deterred
from a participation in the disastrous scenes which ensued. He had now
two children, a son and a daughter. He had many valuable considerations
to forfeit for the one abstract principle of indefeasible right to the
throne. Few men had more to venture. Many of the Jacobites went into the
field with tarnished characters, and with ruined fortunes: they might
gain,--they could not lose by the perilous undertaking. Amid the bands
of high-born and highly principled men who co-operated in both the
Rebellions, adventurers would appear, whose previous lives shed
dishonour upon any cause; but the irreproachable, the prosperous, the
beloved, could desire little more for themselves than what they already
possessed: they ventured their rich and glorious barks upon the
current; and let those who sully every motive with suspicion, say that
there was no virtue, no patriotism, in the Jacobite party.

By his own descendant, Lord Derwentwater is believed to have hesitated
upon the verge of his fate, but to have been urged into it by his
brother Charles. Young and ardent, courageous even to rashness, the
first to offer himself where an enterprise was the most hazardous,
seeming to set no value upon his life where glory was to be obtained,
the darling of his party, and, to sum up the whole, only twenty-two
years of age, Mr. Radcliffe rashly drew his brother into a confederacy,
so agreeable to his own ambitious and fearless spirit. But there was
another individual on whom the responsibility of that luckless movement
in the North must chiefly rest. This was Mr. Thomas Forster the younger,
of Etherston in the county of Northumberland, and member for the county.
During the first thirty years of his life, this gentleman had scarcely
been known beyond the precincts of his pate