day’s supply of powder might be found at Aberdeen.  Nevertheless the fighting clans were eager to meet Argyll, and would have sold their lives at a high price.  They scattered to their western fastnesses.  The main political result, apart from executions and the passing of forfeited estates into the management of that noted economist, Sir Richard Steele, and other commissioners, was—­the disgrace of Argyll.  He, who with a petty force had saved Scotland, was represented by Cadogan and by his political enemies as dilatory and disaffected!  The Duke lost all his posts, and in 1716 (when James had hopes from Sweden) Islay, Argyll’s brother, was negotiating with Jacobite agents.  James was creating him a peer of England!

In Scotland much indignation was aroused by the sending of Scottish prisoners of war out of the kingdom for trial—­namely, to Carlisle—­and by other severities.  The Union had never been more unpopular:  the country looked on itself as conquered, and had no means of resistance, for James, now residing at Avignon, was a Catholic, and any insults and injuries from England were more tolerable than a restored nationality with a Catholic king.

Into the Jacobite hopes and intrigues, the eternal web which from 1689 to 1763 was ever being woven and broken, it is impossible here to enter, though, in the now published Stuart Papers, the details are well known.  James was driven from Avignon to Italy, to Spain, finally to live a pensioner at Rome.  The luckless attempt of the Earl Marischal, Keith, his brother, and Lord George Murray, brother of the Duke of Atholl, to invade Scotland on the west with a small Spanish force, was crushed on June 10, 1719, in the pass of Glenshiel.

Two or three months later, James, returning from Spain, married the fair and hapless Princess Clementina Sobieska, whom Charles Wogan, in an enterprise truly romantic, had rescued from prison at Innspruck and conveyed across the Alps.  From this wedding, made wretched by the disappointment of the bride with her melancholy lord,—­always busied with political secrets from which she was excluded,—­was born, on December 31, 1720, Charles Edward Stuart:  from his infancy the hope of the Jacobite party; from his cradle surrounded by the intrigues, the jealousies, the adulations of an exiled Court, and the quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, Irish, Scottish, and English.  Thus, among changes of tutors and ministers, as the discovery or suspicion of treachery, the bigotry of Clementina, and the pressure of other necessities might permit, was that child reared whose name, at least, has received the crown of Scottish affection and innumerable tributes of Scottish song.

CHAPTER XXXI.  THE ARGATHELIANS AND THE SQUADRONE.