ONE:The Hanoverian Tories now again joined the Whigs, and their demands compelled the Government to issue a proclamation offering a reward of five thousand pounds for the apprehension of the Pretender should he attempt to land anywhere in Great Britain. Wharton proposed that the words "Alive or Dead" should be inserted in the proclamation, but the queen rejected them with horror. The House of Lords passed a resolution increasing the reward to one hundred thousand pounds. It was made high treason, too, to enlist or be enlisted for the Pretender. Bolingbroke, however, assured Iberville, a French agent, that "it would make no difference;" and that the queen regarded the whole as a mere sop to the public was evinced by her immediately afterwards receiving the Earl of Mar, a most determined Jacobite, at Court on his marriage with Lady Francis Pierrepoint, sister of the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and soon after making this man one of her Ministers of State, who, in the very next year, headed the Jacobite rebellion.
ONE:The slowness with which the Government became aware of these proceedings is something astonishing in these days of telegraphs and railroads. Though Charles sailed on the 2nd of July, it was not till the 30th of the same month that Lord Tweeddale, the Scottish Secretary of State in London, was informed even that he had left Nantes. Sir John Cope was the commander of the forces in Scotland, and he immediately gave orders for drawing[94] together such troops as he had to Stirling. These were extraordinarily few. There were two regiments of dragoons, Gardiner's and Hamilton's, but both recent in the service; and the whole force at his disposal, exclusive of garrisons, did not amount to three thousand men. Cope was eager enough to march into the Highlands, even with such forces as he had, and crush the insurrection at once. He proposed this apparently active and judicious scheme to the Lords Justices in England, George II. himself being at Hanover, and they warmly approved of it, and issued their positive orders for its execution. It was, in truth, however, the most fatal scheme which could be conceived. The spirit of rebellion was fermenting in every glen and on every hill, and to march regular troops into these rugged fastnesses was only to have them shot down by invisible marksmen on all hands, and reduced to the extremity of the two companies already captured. The plan was to have secured all the passes into the Lowlands, to have drawn his forces to the foot of the mountains wherever a descent could be made, and blockade the rebels in their own hills till they should be reduced by gradual approaches and overwhelming numbers. Famine, indeed, would soon have tamed any large body of men in those sterile regions.
ONE:When the day came he rode out with most of the garrison to meet her. He was anxious. He recalled Anne of Cleves, and had a fellow-feeling for the King. By the time they came in sight of the marching troops, he had worked himself to such an implicit faith in the worst that he decided that the wide figure, heavily blue-veiled, and linen-dustered, on the back seat of the Dougherty was she. It is one of the strongest arguments of the pessimist in favor[Pg 17] of his philosophy, that the advantage of expecting the disagreeable lies in the fact that, if he meets with disappointment, it is necessarily a pleasant one.Take a look at this! he hailed Larry as the latter sat on Dicks porch, whittling on the tiny struts of a model airplane.
