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AT Kelso, Brigadier M'Intosh was superseded by
Lord Kenmure as Commander-in-Chief, of the expeditionary force, now
recruited by the junction of the Border and Northumberland Jacobites.
The Highlanders took the change of commanders, and the comparative
insignificance into which they themselves had fallen in the presence
of the southern horse, and the proud and high-bred cavaliers of
England, whose haughty overbearing conduct was on the occasion but
ill-supported by the number of followers they brought to support the
common cause, in high dudgeon ; and it needed but a spark of
contention among the leaders to light up a general conflagration.
That was soon supplied. Being informed that General Carpenter, at
the head of a royal force, was on the march to surprise them at
Kelso, Kenmure called a council of war to consider and determine as
to the course proper to be pursued. The Earl of Winton and Brigadier
M'Intosh, supported by Menzies of Culdares, Stewart of Kynachin— in
fact, by all the Perthshire chieftains—proposed, as there were no
hopes of a rising in England, and as, in the absence of such hopes
it would be madness, with a handful of men, to cross the borders, to
march back by the western coasts, attacking Dumfries and Glasgow on
the way, and, joining the Jacobites in these parts, cross the Forth
above Stirling,*or*else send the Earl of Mar word that they would
fall upon the Duke of Argyle's rear while he fell on
the front. It was lucky for the establishment of peace in Scotland
that the plan was thwarted. The battle of Dunblane could scarcely
have been what it was with M'Intosh's Highlanders pressing on
Argyle's rear; and the Duke's army defeated, the Stuart cause might
gain an ascendancy in Scotland dangerous to the existence of Great
Britain as a united kingdom. The spirit of the border mosstrooper
survived in the southern horse ; they shouted for a march or raid
into England. The English rebels strenuously supported the same
counsel, and showed, that, by crossing the Tweed, Carpenter and his
forces could be easily surprised, and the English Jacobites would
flock to them in thousands. The council finally determined upon
marching into England; but the opposition of the Highland gentlemen
was only overborne for a time, to break out anew under a more
dangerous aspect. On the 29th October, they marched to Hawick ; and
the Highlanders, understanding from their leaders that they were
being led into England against their will and advice, broke out into
open mutiny. They separated themselves from the rest, took up a
station on Hawick Moor, piled their arms, and declared they would
fight the enemy in their own country, but would not leave their
wives and children defenceless to go for other people's purposes
into England. Upon this dispute, the horse surrounded the foot in
order to force them to march south, whereupon the Highlanders cocked
their firelocks and said, "If they were to be made a sacrifice, they
would choose to have it done in their own country." "'Tis agreed
(says the historian Rae) that while in this humour they would allow
none to come to speak to them but the Earl of Winton who had tutored
them in this project, assuring them, as indeed it has proven in
part, that if they went to England they would be all cut in
pieces or taken and sold for slaves." It was at last agreed they
would keep together as long as they stayed in Scotland; but upon any
motion of going for England they (the Highlanders) would return
back. Upon this understanding they continued their march to Hawick.
At Hawick, means were found to persuade more than
one half of the Highlanders to march into England, but the rest
would neither bend to persuasion nor force, and returned home to
their mountain fastnesses, in disgust at the incapacity of titled
leaders, and the supineness of the fat English. Many of them
were taken prisoners by the way; but those who escaped spread such
unfavourable accounts of matters in the south, as greatly weakened
the hands of the Pretender's friends, and accelerated the
abandonment of their designs.
The rebels crossed the borders upon the 1st
November, and arrived the same day at Brampton, where Mr. Forster
opened his commission, by which he was appointed to act as their
general in England. On the 2nd they marched to Penrith. Here they
met (or rather they did not meet, for they dispersed in
consternation before the dreaded Highlanders came in sight) the
posse-comitalus of Cumberland. The wonderful magic of a name was
never better illustrated : 12,000 stalwart English yeomen would not
face as many hundreds of the gaunt, grim warriors of the north. The
route was pursued without much molestation, by easy marches, to
Preston, whence Stanhope's regiment of dragoons and another of
militia retired without striking a blow. This was the limit of
success. Regular forces, preposterously out of proportion with the
handful against which they were marching, gradually enclosed the
rebels in a network of steel. General Willis, with six regiments of
foot, attacked the town in two places on the 12th November, and was
repulsed by the rebels with consider- -able loss. General Carpenter
arrived next morning with three other regiments of horse. The town,
not very tenable by a larger force, was completely invested. The
Highlanders had no artillery; and abhorring to be as they said,
worried like foxes in a "garraidk" they resolutely proposed
to cut their way through the royal host, or perish in the attempt.
Forster, however, offered to surrender at discretion; and the
Highlanders, deserted by their English allies, were, after much
difficulty, over-ruled, and the whole gave up their arms and were
imprisoned—the common men at Chester and Liverpool, and the leaders
and chiefs sent to London, and conveyed through the streets to the
Tower and Newgate, with their arms pinioned as malefactors.
The Highlanders went to England at the pressing
solicitations of English Jacobites. They had been promised at Hawick,
that, as soon as they crossed the border, 20,000 men would flock to
their banner. How was the promise fulfilled? They traversed the
counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland without obtaining a single
recruit. A few common people joined them in Lancashire, but not a
man of family and influence. The Earl of Derwentwater was not
imitated by his compeers. Look at the Stuart papers; how much was
expected from England? how little from Scotland? It is plain the
rebellion of 1715 had been planned in England, and its infancy
fostered by an ultra English Cabinet. The raising of the Braemar
standard, and simultaneous gathering of a mighty host, were
Scotland's response to the bold plots of Bolingbroke and the timid
wiles of Harley. True, when the Highlanders crossed the border,
Oxford was in disgrace and Bolingbroke in exile» but where were the
southern Jacobites—the strong faction that had ruled England for the
previous four years? Where the phalanx of Lords and Commons, who,
from the 8th-August, 1710, when Godolphin and the Whigs were
dismissed, to the 1st August, 1714, when Argyle burst upon the
dismayed and irresolute Council of incipient traitors to crush
treason in the bud, had been paving, as it were, in their shirt
sleeves, the road of restoration for the Stuarts? Where the learned
doctors who taught passive obedience and non-resistance, and proved
the hereditary indefeasible right of the Chevalier de St. George as
easily and satisfactorily as the first problem in Euclid?
It is an ascertained fact that England of modern
days shows, on entering upon momentous affairs, more of the spirit
of Athelstane the Unready than of the fiery race of Normandy. The
aristocracy were generally high-prerogative and high-church at
heart; but their heavy pledges to fortune prevented them from
joining in a rebellion, the success of which was not beyond the
caprice of chance. They could not, in a civil war, bring the same
material support, at a moment's warning, to the side they espoused,
as the poorest peer in Scotland—the beggarly Lovat, for
instance—because in England there was a sharp distinction of
classes, and the clannish spirit which bound high and low in common
sympathies had never been known. The sensible middle classes in
England, in this very quarrel, supported with uniform heartiness the
cause of civil liberty and of the Protestant succession; while the
lowest classes cared not a straw who gained or lost, provided they
saved their "own bacon."
Lord Bolingbroke's plans were astutely laid, but
seemingly the extent of his wisdom led him astray. For the ultimate
safety of British liberty, kind Providence ordained he should have
been a diligent and discriminating student of history. He knew the
nature of his countrymen too well to expect a restoration, except
through the bloodless and constitutional way of parliamentary
sanction. He was taught by the history of the preceding century,
that the continuity of the absolute monarchy to be founded on such a
restoration could be guaranteed only on the condition of melting
down and recasting the national character. He prepared with singular
audacity to bring both results about; the first, by constituting the
high-prerogative party the ruling mind of the country, through a
strict Tory Parliament, which had been suddenly changed from a
triennial to a septennial lease of existence; the second, by
shutting the door of public office and employment, through the
revival of the Sacramental Test, upon the friends of liberty and
true representatives of Covenanters and Puritans, and by a series of
measures, either passed or proposed to be passed, by which the
governing body should exclusively belong to the Church of England,
and by which that Church should henceforward and for ever become the
slave of a Popish monarch, or his sceptic satrap. Scotland, too,
entered into his comprehensive schemes of universal subjugation. The
Scottish nobles, with a few exceptions, hated the blue banner of the
Covenant like the "gates of hell." But when Presbyterianism
triumphed in spite of them, they found it expedient to court the
object of hatred and recent persecutions; the sons and grandsons of
persecutors sat in the Assembly of 1710; but soon titled names
diminished and gradually disappeared, till in a very short period
only a few empty ones (empty names, for the owners seldom attended),
as at present, remained .to grace the roll of membership. Why was
this? Well, that last very patriotic ministry of Queen Anne, by two
cleverly devised measures, released the gentry from unpleasant
Presbyterian parity, and gave them the power, as of yore, to "lord
it over God's heritage." The Act of Toleration, passed in 1711,
extended valuable privileges, and afforded a legal footing to the
semi-popish Episcopal Church, which, as a more exclusive and
aristocratic religious community, and as the champion of those ideas
palatable to feudal pride and Jacobitical leaning, gathered at once
into its folds the Toryism of Scotland. It was not in any way an act
of homage to the rights of conscience—(conscience and Scottish
Episcopacy could scarcely be spoken of in the same breath; as it was
a pariah of the State from the beginning)— the infidel secretary had
no such word in his vocabulary, but a home-thrust at the political
influence of the Church of Scotland. This blow was immediately
followed by another still more fatal. "The next step taken by this
Tory Parliament, against the Established Church of Scotland, was, to
restore Patronage, thus depriving the people of their just power of
choosing and calling their own ministers, and lodging that power in
the hands of the Patrons of the several parishes, with a view to
fill up the vacancies with such as might afterwards serve their
designs in case of a new revolution; to give them an opportunity to
keep the livings in their own hands; or to employ them for the
support of Jacobite Conventicles; which 'tis known they actually did
in many parts of the nation; and to irritate the people against the
Church for yielding to that which they cou'd not help, and wou'd
fain had stopped."
Such were the cool, far-seeing projects by which
the rehabilitation of hereditary right was to be made conditional
upon casting the future mind of Britain in a Helot mould, and upon
drugging the springs of religion with the specifics of state policy,
to make it subserve the minister or monarch of the day. Everything
was in train for a legislative restoration; but lo ! Anne dies, and
the splendid conspiracy bursts like a soap bubble ; and the daring
plotter sees the projects rife with plagues for his country fail to
bring about his primary object, quarrels with the prince on whose
behoof he sold himself to evil, returns again to live under the
safeguard of the constitution he half-subverted, and, after a life
of vicissitudes, unfortunate for himself, and detrimental to his
country, dies well deserving, by his infidel works, published by
Mallet after his death, the un-forgotten censure of Johnston—"He was
a villain and a coward, sir; a villain, for charging a blunderbuss
against morality and religion; and a coward, for not daring to fire
it off, but leaving a shilling to a beggarly Scotchman to do it
after his death."
But let us turn to the encaged dupes of the
English conspirators. The word was, "Behead and quarter; hang and
slay." Menzies of Culdares, against whom a billa vera had
been found, after a pretty long imprisonment, was pardoned on
account of his youth, being under 21. The other officers and chiefs
were not so fortunate, several of them being put to death. The
common men got seven years' penal servitude in the colonies. The
Glenlyon men were mostly sent to Maryland, from which few ever
returned. There is an authentic story told of one of them which is
worth recounting.
John M'Intyre, Moar, Glenlyon, was betrothed to a
young woman before he joined the rebels. Being taken at Preston, he
was sentenced to seven years' transportation with his companions.
When made aware of his fate, he managed to send word to his
betrothed, that he would return, if alive, when his term expired ;
but that if he did not come home at the end of the eighth year, she
might conclude he was dead. The Maryland planter whose bondsman he
became was a hard taskmaster; he stated afterwards, that he received
more kindness from a negro slave who was his fellow-workman than
from any person of his own country and colour in America. When his
time was nearly out, while he and this negro were working in the
wood, one of the planter's horses was killed by the falling of a
tree. M'Intyre was adjudged to an additional year's servitude.
Meantime his betrothed counted the days, and awaited their expiry
with some apprehension, as, after much solicitation, she had been
obliged to promise her friends, who did not approve of her fidelity,
to accept of another suitor for her hand if M'Intyre appeared not at
the time he had set himself. The eighth year passed over her, and no
word of the exile. She still delayed, and put off, till the family
council would bear it no longer; and so, well on in the ninth year
after the rebellion she yielded obedience, and the night of "ceanghall"
with the new suitor was appointed. No one more strongly advised
her to obey her friends than M'Intyre's widowed mother, who
considered her son dead by this time, or despaired, if alive, of
ever seeing him again. The widow, however, did not appear at the
"betrothal," as she promised; and the reluctant bride, glad of the
opportunity of escaping for a while, insisted upon going to see what
hindered her. The old woman told her a beggar had asked for
hospitality, and she was obliged to keep at home to entertain him.
It was immediately proposed by the bride to invite the beggar and
his entertainer both to the "ceanghall" feast. With this purpose,
going into the hut to address him, she discovered to her great
delight her old betrothed in the stranger, who had struggled home to
claim his bride; but finding her on the point of marrying another,
hesitated to reveal who he was, till thus accidentally unmasked by
the eye of affection. It was not yet too late. The new suitor was
discarded, and the old one installed in his place; and long and
happily lived together the faithful couple that made "love the lord
of all." |
