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Her late majesty used to say that when she heard these tunes she became for the moment a Jacobite; just as the Empress Eugenie at the height of her power used pertly to remark that she herself was the only Legitimist left in France. It may be suggested that the Stuarts are still loved by many Englishmen because they were unfortunate; yet this is hardly true, after all.
They submitted with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to power.
And so every public man, in the England of the Tudors and Stuarts, entered on his career with the perfectly familiar expectation of possibly closing it it might be in an honourable and ceremonious fashion, in the Tower and on the scaffold just as he had to look forward to the possibility of closing it by small-pox or the plague.
He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which fronted him. It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts.
The long-bow had been introduced into England by the Normans, who are said to have been more indebted to that arm than any other, for their victory at Hastings. To encourage the use of the long-bow many statutes were passed, and so late as the time of the Stuarts, royal commissions were issued for the promotion of this national exercise.
Scroggs's enemies were wrong in stigmatizing him as a butcher's son, for the odious chief justice was born and bred a gentleman, and Jeffreys could boast a decent extraction; but there is abundance of evidence that throughout the reigns of the Stuarts the inns swarmed with low-born adventurers.
Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet family, the last branch of which has since been extinguished by its intermarriage and incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that, therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign Princes of Europe, but has more right to the throne of Great Britain than George the Third, being descended from the male branch of the Stuarts; while this Prince is only descended from the female branch of the same royal house.
Orders had been issued for all the militia to turn out, but there was little response, for although few had any desire to risk their lives in the cause of the Stuarts, fewer still had any intention of fighting for the Hanoverians.
The Stuarts have been condemned and laughed at, for the folly and impracticability of their attempts in 1715, and 1745. That they failed, I bless GOD; but cannot join in the ridicule against them.
Every person capable of reasoning on a political question must perceive that a monarch who is competent to issue such a declaration is nothing less than an absolute monarch. Nor is it possible to urge in defence of this act of James those pleas by which many arbitrary acts of the Stuarts have been vindicated or excused.
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