HISTORY OF ENGLAND, CIVIL, MILITARY, AND ECCLESIASTICAL; FROM THE INVASION BY JULIUS CAESAR TO THE YEAR 1846. CABINET HISTORY OF ENGLAND. BOOK IX.-Continued. A.D. 1746-1760. CHAPTER I.-Continued. GEORGE II.-Continued. A FEW circumstances remain to be noticed in con nexion with this unhappy civil war. Sir John Cope, after being most virulently abused, caricatured, and put into ballads, was brought to trial by a court-martial, and honourably acquitted. Hawley, who deserved a courtmartial far more than Cope, escaped the ordeal through the friendship and protection of the Duke of Cumberland, who continued to treat him as an ornament to the service. Flora MacDonald was released after twelve months' confinement, and went back to the Highlands with some 15007. in her pocket, which had been collected for her chiefly among Jacobite ladies in London.* * Chambers's Hist.-Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather.-Flora MacDonald afterwards married the son of Kingsburgh. At the time when she smuggled the young Pretender in her train she was about twenty-four years old. Dr. Johnson saw her in the year 1773, when Boswell contrived to get the great moralist to the Highlands and to the Isle of Skye. Flora, or, as she spelled the name, Flory, was then past her seventh climacteric; but Johnson describes her as "not old, of a pleasing person, and elegant behaviour;" and his companion Boswell sets her down as a little woman of VOL. XVII. 66 B After many delays, and, alas! too many executions, ministers prepared an act of indemnity, granting pardon to all who had been engaged in the rebellion except some eighty individuals named-a wide and ungenerous exception. This act was passed without opposition through parliament, which subsequently confirmed with equal facility-a bill not only for disarming the clans, but for restraining the use of their national garb;—a bill making it imperative on the master and teacher of every private school in Scotland to swear allegiance to King George, his heirs, and successors, and to register their oaths; a bill to check the episcopalian divines, who in Scotland were all Jacobites, and to restrain non-jurors in general;-a bill to abolish for ever the system of herit able jurisdictions, by which many Scottish lord and lairds had been allowed, on their own estates, to administer law in their own way. At the same time some encouragement was given to the Highlanders to emigrate to our American colonies, or to enlist in the army; and, by virtue of all these and other measures, and the slow but sure effects of time, and custom, the strong remnant of the feudal system in Scotland was rent into pieces, and clanships and distinctive Highland customs were destroyed, with all their evil and with all their good. Badly as it had ended for the Stuarts and those engaged with them, the Scotch war of 1745 had been a most advantageous diversion for the French, who, while the English were intent upon putting it down, had been marching from conquest to conquest, and at the time when the battle of Culloden was fought were threatena genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well bred." Johnson says, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, "She was carried to London, but dismissed without a trial, and came down with Malcolm MacLeod, against whom sufficient evidence could not be procured. She and her husband are poor, and are now going to try their fortune in America --Sic rerum volvitur orbis." They did emigrate to America, but returned to Scotland during the war of independence; and Flora died in the Isle of Skye on the 4th of March, 1790.-Boswell's Life of Johnson, with Mr. Croker's notes. |