་ are to be disappointed in their most sanguine expectations of political perfection.” * The editor of these memoirs would compare the atrocities after Culloden with "the tyrannical barbarity of the latter Stuarts," upon the principle of the one being "a good offset to the other. It appears to us that the only real advantage to be derived from such narratives, is to make us grateful that we live in times when “an improved system of government" has gradually produced such a state of public opinion, that the ordinary tyrannies of the days of James II., and the exceptional cruelties of the days of George II., could not be repeated without more danger to the throne than the revolts which they sought to crush. The national prejudices of the English at that period, and at subsequent times when these prejudices were even more intense, never led them to countenance the barbarity after Culloden. It is some satisfaction to know that William of Cumberland was "during many years one of the most unpopular men in England." The alderman of London, who, when it was proposed to present the duke with the freedom of some city company, exclaimed, "then let it be of the Butchers," anticipated the feeling of a better time, when bravery and compassion would be held as inseparable in the character of the great soldier. The people of the duke of Cumberland's day dreaded that he might be the man to subject them to a military despotism. His nephews feared him. He was compared with the Crookback Richard, who murdered his nephews in the Tower. All this was unjust enough, no doubt, but it showed the feelings of the English nation with regard to the great blot upon the character of one who was blunt, brave, and honest, but who believed too much in the power of brute force in countries under military government. He lived for many years in the retirement of Windsor Great Park. He amused himself by planting hills with Scotch firs, and in making an artificial lake and a cascade, as if to produce a miniature resemblance of the scenery in which he had earned his glory and his twenty-five thousand a year. Perhaps in some moments his favourite Virginia Water, then a wild and unenclosed tract, might have sug gested a compunctious remembrance of the solitary lakes, the woods and the wastes, amongst which he had hunted Highlanders as beasts of prey. The slaughter of the wounded rebels upon the field of Culloden, the atrocious treatment of the prisoners, and the cold-blooded murders committed on the first and second days after the battle, Introduction to this Section of "Jacobite Memoirs," by the Editor, Mr. R. Chambers. Macaulay Essay ou Chatham." BARBARITIES AFTER CULLODEN. 557 are much too circumstantially detailed by many witnesses, to allow us to believe that the odium which ultimately rested upon the duke of Cumberland, was the effect of national or party violence. In different to the disgrace he was bringing upon the English nation, he looked at the Rebellion as a crime against his house, to be dealt with in a spirit of revenge. "I tremble," he wrote from Scotland, "for fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this island and of our family." In another letter he says that "a little blood-letting has only weakened the madness and not cured it." The "little blood-letting" is the opprobrium which a century of equal justice to Scotland has scarcely yet obliterated. The accursed story may be thus briefly told. On the day of the battle, the wounded rebels that lay on the field received none of that aid which brave men usually offer to their vanquished enemies. The soldiers went up and down, knocking such on the head as had any remains of life in them. The weather was cold; the dead, and those supposed to be dead, had been stripped. But, naked and starving, some wretched creatures were still alive on the morning of the 17th of April. A resident in Inverness, who claims to be regarded as a supporter of the government, writes to bishop Forbes, that although the report of the cruelties was much aggravated, "it is certain that a resolution was taken, that it was not proper to load or crowd this little town with a multitude of wounded and incurable men of our enemy's; and, therefore, a party was ordered to the field of battle, who gathered all the wounded men from the different corners of the field, to one or two parts; and there, on a little rising hillock or ground properly planted, they were finished, with great despatch; and this, as you and everybody else must own, was, as to them, performing the greatest act of humanity, as it put an end to many miserable lives, remaining in the utmost torture, without any hopes of relief." * This "greatest act of humanity" is termed a most bloody and ruthless deed by a more modern authority, † by whom it is stated that the wounded men still alive were collected in two heaps, and a six-pounder applied to each heap. The following evidence to the fact is then adduced: "One Mac Iver, a private, though mutilated in several parts of his body, survived this massacre, a dismal memorial of Cumberland's tender mercies. The man died near Beauly, about the year 1796, where many are still living, who may have known him. But to put the bloody deed beyond the shadow of doubt, the writer of this account knew for several • "Jacobite Memoirs," p. 273. + " Statistical Account of Scotland. Parishes of Croy and Dalcross." years a John Reid, who fought that day in the second battalion of the Royal Scots, and heard from his lips that he saw the cruel deed and thanked God that he had nothing to do with the black wark. John fought at the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, and only died about the year 1807, in the 105th year of his age, and in the full enjoyment of all his mental faculties. He was a lively little man, and retained a correct and vivid recollection of what he had seen and heard." The slaughter of the miserable survivors found in the field, was not the only atrocity of that week of triumph and of shame. To a little cot-house, where goats or sheep used to shelter, about a quarter of a mile distant from the battle-ground, many of the wounded men had crawled in the night-time. They were found by the soldiers. The door of the hut was shut; fire was put to the frail building; and thirty-two persons, including some beggars who had come to the field for plunder, perished in the flames.* On the 18th, parties were sent to search the houses in the neighbourhood of the battle; to remove the wounded, and to kill them. John Fraser, called Mac Iver, an officer in Lovat's regiment, with eighteen other officers, had been carried wounded to Culloden House, the residence of the lord president Forbes. They were treated with kindness by his agent, "who performed acts of beneficence to the wounded in and about the house of Culloden, at the hazard of his life." These nineteen men were tied with ropes; thrown into a cart; carried some distance; and shot under the park-wall. Fraser, though left for dead, after some hours, dragged his mangled carcase to a little distance. Lord Boyd riding by, espied him; had him removed and concealed; and the poor fellow recovered, to remain a crippled memorial of these atrocities. To go over the afflicting details of military executions;-of men whipped to extort confession;—of boys, women, and old men murdered and maltreated ;-of prisoners left to perish upon insufficient allowance in filthy dungeons ;-would be as disgusting to our readers as the perusal of the documents has been to ourselves. The folly of these proceedings is as manifest as their wickedness. A Lon doner, who travelled in the north of Scotland in 1750, writes to his friend, "I happened to fall in with a venerable old gentleman, an honest Whig, who, looking me seriously in the face, asked if the duke of Cumberland was not a Jacobite? A Jacobite !' said I, how comes that in your head?? Sure,' replied the old gentleman, the warmest zealot in the interest of the prince could not possibly devise more proper methods for sowing the seeds of Jacobitism Jacobite Memoirs," p. 274. TRIALS AND EXECUTIONS. 559 and disaffection, than the duke of Cumberland did.' ' The same letter-writer relates two circumstances sufficiently characteristic of the temper and manners of some commanders of that day-their contempt for civilians, and for civil authority. We must indeed receive with the doubt that ought always to attach to hearsay evidence the anecdotes thus related. But if not strictly to be relied upon, they show something of the prevailing opinions of the time. The provost and aldermen of Inverness went to the levee of the duke of Cumberland. One of their number, Mr. Hossack, a friend of Duncan Forbes, presumed to say, that he hoped mercy would be mingled with judgment; upon which Hawley cried out, "D-n the puppy! does he pretend to dictate here? Carry him away." Another cried, Kick him out," and he was kicked out. Duncan Forbes himself the wisest and truest friend of the Hanoverian government, who expended large sums in opposing the Rebellion, which sums he was never repaid-in an interview with the duke of Cumberland at Inverness, ventured to make mention of the laws of the country. The duke's reply, if we can rely upon the fact, was an example of the insolence that might have plunged England and Scotland into another civil war, had the power of princes to do evil not been sufficiently abridged in the tenure upon which the family of the unwise young man was called to the highest estate amongst a free people. This was the reputed answer to the lord president of Scotland: "The laws of the country! My lord, I'll make a brigade give laws, by G—d.” * Amongst the papers of Duncan Forbes were found some thoughts upon the extent and degree of punishment that ought to be awarded to those concerned in the Rebellion. He was for severity towards the leaders. He thought that severity towards the crowd of common people would do more harm than good, by raising pity, "the rather, that it is most certainly true that great numbers were compelled to join the active rebels, by threats which were justly terrible to them." It would have been well if these sound views could have been more regarded by the members of the gov ernment, which had a task before them, where no passion or party. zeal could furnish even the shadow of an excuse for excess of punishment. The opinion of dispassionate writers upon the legal severities that followed the Rebellion of 1745,-which were more extensive than those of 1715,—was that they were really less necessary for any purpose of warning than at the former period. In England, Jacobitism, as the march to Derby had proved, was rather a form of discontent shown to the Whig ministries than any active partizan, "Jacobite Memoirs,” p. 334. ↑ "Culloden Papers," p. 284. ship for the exiled family. England, therefore, could only feel disgusted at wholesale hangings on Kennington Common, and at seeing crowds of plebeian heads on Temple-bar. In Scotland the commercial towns had been adverse to Charles Edward, and, as Forbes pointed out, the numbers of those of the clans who had not actually rebelled, although their chiefs were Jacobites, were greater than those who were in arms. An Act had been passed, suspending that portion of the law of high treason which required that bills should be found in the counties where the offence was alleged to have been committed. The object was to try Scottish prisoners in England. The first persons brought to trial were eighteen officers of the Manchester regiment who were left to their fate at Carlisle by the prince for whom they had risked their lives and estates. Mr. Townley, the colonel, and seventeen of his companions, were tried, and nine were executed on the 30th of July. James Dawson, the son of a Lancashire gentleman, the hero of the ballad of Shenstone-was amongst the number. The catastrophe which followed the determination of the lady to whom he was betrothed, to witness his execution, is not a poetical fiction: "The dismal scene was o er and pass'd, The lover's mournful hearse retir'd; Three of the Scottish officers who were left at Carlisle were condemned and executed at Kennington Common in August; and five others, taken at various places, suffered in November. A special commission was opened at Carlisle in August. There were three hundred and eighty-two prisoners in the castle; but they were al lowed to draw lots, that one in twenty might be selected for trial. Thirty-three were executed. At York twenty-two were also subjected to the brutal penalties of high-treason. We shall dismiss this painful subject with a brief relation of the fate of the rebel lords we were taken prisoners. Whilst the populace of London were gazing upon the heads of Mr. Townley and other Manchester rebels upon Temple-bar, "where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a half-penny a look," † three rebel lords were in the Tower awaiting their fate. The trials of lord Kilmarnock, lord Cromartie, and lord Balmerino, began on the 28th of July. "London," wrote Walpole to Montagu, "will be as full as at a coronation." There was to be a show which, happily, England had not seen for more than thirty years. The anecdotes connected with this melancholy exhibition "Culloden Papers," p. 284. Walpole to Mano, August 16, 1746. |