A poor affair at the best, this muster in Northumberland; and though the county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all.  Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day.  However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—­Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred.  The bag was a heavy one, that day of disaster to the Stuart cause; and alas, for many of those who filled it!  Alas, too, for the wives and the mothers who sat at home, waiting!  Not to everyone was given the opportunity to dare all for husband or son; to few came such chance as was seized by the Countess of Nithsdale, who so contrived that her husband escaped from the Tower disguised in woman’s clothing.  It was boldly schemed, and success followed her attempt.  Others could but pray to God and petition the King.  She not only prayed, but acted.  Would that there might have been one so to act for Derwentwater!  More happy had it been, perhaps, for his Countess had she never uttered the taunt that ended his hesitation to join in the Rebellion:  “It is not fitting that the Earl of Derwentwater should continue to hide his head in hovels from the light of day, when the gentry are up in arms for their lawful sovereign.”  They say that her spirit mourns yet within the tower of Dilston.

Away up the valley of the Tyne, amongst the wild Northumberland hills, news went with lagging gait, those leisurely days of the eighteenth century; even news of battle or of disaster did not speed as it is the wont of ill news to do:  “For evil news rides fast, while good news baits.”  Tidings, in those good old days, but trickled through from ear to ear, slowly, as water filters through sand.  Little news, therefore, of Lord Derwentwater, or of the Rising, was heard in or around Haltwhistle after the insurgent force left Brampton; no man knew for a certainty what fortune, good or bad, had waited on the fortunes of his friends.

Night was closing down on the desolate Border hills on a drear November evening of 1715.  Throughout a melancholy day, clinging mist had blurred the outline of even the nearest hills; distance was blotted out.  Thin rain fell chillingly and persistently, drip, dripping with monotonous plash from the old inn’s thatched eaves; a light wind sobbed fitfully around the building, moaning at every chink and cranny of the ill-fitting window-frames.  “A dismal night for any who must travel,” thought the stableman of the inn, as he looked east and then west along the darkening road.  No moving thing broke the monotony of the depressing outlook, and the groom turned to his work of bedding down for the night the few animals that happened to be in his charge.