Upon the eleventh day of May, the year 1745, was fought in Flanders the battle of Fontenoy.  The Duke of Cumberland, Koenigsegge the Austrian, and the Dutch Prince of Waldeck had the handling of something under fifty thousand English.  Marshal Saxe with Louis XV at his side wielded a somewhat larger number of French.  The English and their allies were beaten.  French spirits rode on high, French intentions widened.

The Stewart interest felt the blood bound in its veins.  The bulk of the British army was on the Continent and shaken by Fontenoy; King George himself tarried in Hanover.  Now was the time—­now was the time for the heir of all the Stewarts to put his fortune to the touch—­to sail from France, to land in Scotland, to raise his banner and draw his sword and gather Highland chief and Lowland Jacobite, the while in England rose for him and his father English Jacobites and soon, be sure, all English Tories!  France would send gold and artillery and men to her ancient ally, Scotland.  Up at last with the white Stewart banner! reconquer for the old line and all it meant to its adherents the two kingdoms!  In the last week of July Prince Charles Edward, somewhat strangely and meagerly attended, landed at Loch Sunart in the Highlands.  There he was joined by Camerons, Macdonalds, and Stewarts, and thence he moved, with an ever-increasing Highland tail, to Perth.  A bold stream joined him here—­northern nobles of power, with their men.  He might now have an army of two thousand.  Sir John Cope, sent to oppose him with what British troops there were in Scotland, allowed himself to be circumvented.  The Prince, having proclaimed his father, still at Rome, James III, King of Great Britain, and produced his own commission as Regent, marched from Perth to Edinburgh.  The city capitulated and Charles Edward was presently installed in Holyrood, titularly at home in his father’s kingdom, in his ancient palace, among his loyal subjects, but actually with far the major moiety of that kingdom yet to gain.

The gracious act of rewarding must begin.  Claim on royal gratitude is ever a multitudinous thing!  In the general manifoldness, out of the by no means yet huge store of honey Ian Rullock, for mere first rung of his fortune’s ladder, received the personally given thanks of his Prince and a captaincy in the none too rapidly growing army.

CHAPTER XIX

The castle, defiant, untakable save by long siege and famine, held for King George by a garrison of a few hundreds, spread itself like a rock lion in a high-lifted rock lair.  Bands of Highlanders watched its gates and accesses, guarding against Hanoverian sallies.  From the castle down stretched Edinburgh, heaped upon its long, spinelike hill, to the palace of Holyrood, and all its tall houses, tall and dark, and all its wynds and closes, and all its strident voices, and all its moving folk, seemed to have in