Sir Everard Waverley received this intimation with a mixture of feelings.  At the period of the Hanoverian succession he had withdrawn from Parliament, and his conduct, in the memorable year 1715, had not been altogether unsuspected.  There were reports of private musters of tenants and horses in Waverley-Chase by moonlight, and of cases of carbines and pistols purchased in Holland, and addressed to the Baronet, but intercepted by the vigilance of a riding officer of the excise, who was afterwards tossed in a blanket on a moonless night, by an association of stout yeomen, for his officiousness.  Nay, it was even said, that at the arrest of Sir William Wyndham, the leader of the Tory party, a letter from Sir Everard was found in the pocket of his night-gown.  But there was no overt act which an attainder could be founded on; and government, contented with suppressing the insurrection of 1715, felt it neither prudent nor safe to push their vengeance further than against those unfortunate gentlemen who actually took up arms.

Nor did Sir Everard’s apprehensions of personal consequences seem to correspond with the reports spread among his Whig neighbours.  It was well known that he had supplied with money several of the distressed Northumbrians and Scotchmen, who, after being made prisoners at Preston in Lancashire, were imprisoned in Newgate and the Marshalsea; and it was his solicitor and ordinary counsel who conducted the defence of some of these unfortunate gentlemen at their trial.  It was generally supposed, however, that, had ministers possessed any real proof of Sir Everard’s accession to the rebellion, he either would not have ventured thus to brave the existing government, or at least would not have done so with impunity.  The feelings which then dictated his proceedings, were those of a young man, and at an agitating period.  Since that time Sir Everard’s jacobitism had been gradually decaying, like a fire which burns out for want of fuel.  His Tory and High Church principles were kept up by some occasional exercise at elections and quarter-sessions:  but those respecting hereditary right were fallen into a sort of abeyance.  Yet it jarred severely upon his feelings, that his nephew should go into the army under the Brunswick dynasty; and the more so, as, independent of his high and conscientious ideas of paternal authority, it was impossible, or at least highly imprudent, to interfere authoritatively to prevent it.  This suppressed vexation gave rise to many poohs and pshaws, which were placed to the account of an incipient fit of gout, until, having sent for the Army List, the worthy Baronet consoled himself with reckoning the descendants of the houses of genuine loyalty, Mordaunts, Granvilles, and Stanleys, whose names were to be found in that military record; and, calling up all his feelings of family grandeur and warlike glory, he concluded, with logic something like Falstaff’s, that when war was at hand, although it were shame to be on any side but one, it were worse