Lavengro - George Borrow (nice books to read TXT) 📗

discipline or confidence in each other, and who were miserably massacred by the Highland army; he subsequently invaded England, nearly destitute of regular soldiers, and penetrated as far as Derby, from which place he retreated on learning that regular forces which had been hastily recalled from Flanders were coming against him, with the Duke of Cumberland at their head; he was pursued, and his rear guard overtaken and defeated by the dragoons of the duke at Clifton, from which place the rebels retreated in great confusion across the Eden into Scotland, where they commenced dancing Highland reels and strathspeys on the bank of the river, for joy at their escape, whilst a number of wretched girls, paramours of some of them, were perishing in the waters of the swollen river in an attempt to follow them; they themselves passed over by eighties and by hundreds, arm in arm, for mutual safety, without the loss of a man, but they left the poor paramours to shift for themselves, nor did any of these canny people after passing the stream dash back to rescue a single female life⁠—no, they were too well employed upon the bank in dancing strathspeys to the tune of “Charlie o’er the water.” It was, indeed, Charlie o’er the water, and canny Highlanders o’er the water, but where were the poor prostitutes meantime? In the water.

The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by the battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again o’er the water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of pusillanimity; there were the clans cut to pieces, at least those who could be brought to the charge, and there fell Giles Mac Bean, or as he was called in Gaelic, Giliosa Mac Beathan, a kind of giant, six feet four inches and a quarter high, “than whom,” as his wife said in a coronach377 she made upon him, “no man who stood at Cuiloitr was taller”⁠—Giles Mac Bean the Major of the clan Cattan⁠—a great drinker⁠—a great fisher⁠—a great shooter, and the champion of the Highland host.

The last of the Stuarts was a cardinal.

Such were the Stuarts, such their miserable history. They were dead and buried in every sense of the word until Scott resuscitated them⁠—how? by the power of fine writing, and by calling to his aid that strange divinity, gentility. He wrote splendid novels about the Stuarts, in which he represents them as unlike what they really were, as the graceful and beautiful papillon is unlike the hideous and filthy worm. In a word, he made them genteel, and that was enough to give them paramount sway over the minds of the British people. The public became Stuart-mad, and everybody, especially the women, said, “What a pity it was that we hadn’t a Stuart to govern.” All parties, Whig, Tory or Radical, became Jacobite at heart, and admirers of absolute power. The Whigs talked about the liberty of the subject, and the Radicals about the rights of man still, but neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves. As for the Tories, no great change in them was necessary; everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England, went over the water to Charlie. But going over to Charlie was not enough, they must, or at least a considerable part of them, go over to Rome too, or have a hankering to do so. As the priest sarcastically observes in the text, “As all the Jacobs were Papists, so the good folks who through Scott’s novels admire the Jacobs must be Papists too.” An idea got about that the religion of such genteel people as the Stuarts must be the climax of gentility, and that idea was quite sufficient. Only let a thing, whether temporal or spiritual, be considered genteel in England, and if it be not followed it is strange indeed; so Scott’s writings not only made the greater part of the nation Jacobite, but Popish.

Here some people will exclaim⁠—whose opinions remain sound and uncontaminated⁠—what you say is perhaps true with respect to the Jacobite nonsense at present so prevalent being derived from Scott’s novels, but the Popish nonsense, which people of the genteeler classes are so fond of, is derived from Oxford. We sent our sons to Oxford nice honest lads, educated in the principles of the Church of England, and at the end of the first term they came home puppies, talking Popish nonsense, which they had learned from the pedants to whose care we had entrusted them; ay, not only Popery but Jacobitism, which they hardly carried with them from home, for we never heard them talking Jacobitism before they had been at Oxford; but now their conversation is a farrago of Popish and Jacobite stuff⁠—“Complines and Claverse.” Now, what these honest folks say is, to a certain extent, founded on fact; the Popery which has overflowed the land during the last fourteen or fifteen years, has come immediately from Oxford, and likewise some of the Jacobitism, Popish and Jacobite nonsense, and little or nothing else, having been taught at Oxford for about that number of years. But whence did the pedants get the Popish nonsense with which they have corrupted youth? Why, from the same quarter from which they got the Jacobite nonsense with which they have inoculated those lads who were not inoculated with it before⁠—Scott’s novels. Jacobitism and Laudism, a kind of half Popery, had at one time been very prevalent at Oxford, but both had been long consigned to oblivion there, and people at Oxford cared as little about Laud as they did about the Pretender. Both were