Into an island thus divided the heir of the ancient family to whom in undoubted right of legitimacy the crown belonged, a young, gallant, and handsome prince, had thrown himself with a chivalrous confidence that touched every heart.  There was every reason to suppose that the interests of England’s powerful enemy across the Channel were secretly pledged to sustain his cause.  Scotland was soon ablaze with sympathy and devotion.  The Prince advanced on Edinburgh.  The city opened its gates.  He was acknowledged, and held his court in the old Palace of Holyrood, where generation after generation of Stuarts had maintained their state.  The castle alone, closely beleaguered, held out like our own Sumter in the centre of rebellion.  A battle was fought almost beneath the walls of the Scotch capital, and the first great army upon which the English hope depended was ignominiously routed.  A portion of the soldiery fled in disgraceful panic; those who stood were cut to pieces by the charges of a fiery valor against which discipline seemed powerless.  The border fortress of Carlisle was soon after taken.  Liverpool, not the great commercial port it now is, but of rising importance, and Manchester, were menaced.  Even London was in dismay.  Men like Horace Walpole wrote to their friends of a retreat to the garrets of Hanover.  The funds fell.  The leading minister had been a man of eminently pacific policy, whose chief state-maxim was Quieta non movere, and was taken by surprise.  There are many historians and students of history who now admit, in looking back upon those times, that the fate of the established government hung upon a thread, and that the daring advance of the Pretender followed by another victory might have converted him into a Possessor and Defender.  Had any one then asked as to the possibilities of a reconstruction of the severed Union, the answer would probably have been not much unlike the predictions of the croakers of to-day who clamor for acceptance of the Davisian olive-branch and an acknowledgment of the fact of Secession.  Yet the strength of numbers, of means, and of public sentiment was altogether on the English side.  Though paralyzed somewhat by the sense of private treachery, with the feeling that all branches of the public service were harboring men of doubtful loyalty, and the knowledge that a great body of “submissionists” were ready to acquiesce in the course of events, whatever that might be, the Government prepared for an unconditional resistance. From the outset they treated it as a rebellion, and the adherents of the Stuarts as rebels.  Time, the ablest of generals and wisest of statesmen, happened to be on their side.  The Pretender turned northward from Derby, and on the field of Culloden the last hope of the exiled house was forever broken.  Yet it would even then seem as if reconstruction had been rendered impossible.  The Chevalier escaped to France, guarded by the fond loyalty of men and women who defied alike torture and temptation.