THE "FORTY-FIVE."

Evening Star, Issue 25770, 17 April 1946, Page 6

THE "FORTY-FIVE."

Two hundred years ago yesterday was fought the battle of Culloden, which ended the rebellion of the " FortyFive." No Scotsman has been grieving this week and no Englishman .been elated. Apart from the fact that 1 " old, unhappy, far-off things " and battles which marked their earlier feuds have ceased long since to stir emotions as between those two peoples, the adventure that ended with Culloden was not a national rising; a " nine months incident," it has been called. If little Wilhelmine had ever thought to inquire what good came of it at last the answer would be a rich efflorescence of Scottish songs, stories, and other literature which Englishmen would be only less sorry than Scotsmen to lose, and a sentiment for the youthful Prince which lives still, after two centuries, as a triumph, perhaps, of romanticism over rationality. The Prince was bonny; the Prince was brave. There was a charm about him, clearly, in those earlier years, whose memory has survived that of his later excesses. The Prince also was unfortunate, It was forgotten, then and now, that the political opinions which he held as strongly as all his family would have made him as a ruler hopeless; Scotsmen could only follow him against their own interests. The romantic appeal must have been 'strong indeed) when King George 111. " always spoke with tenderness of the unfortunate Charles Edward," and even Queen Victoria could come near to persuading herself that she was some sort of a Jacobite. , Yet the importance of "FortyFive " must not he over-estimated. There have been attempts of late to put the rebellion in its proper setting. It was not a national, hut purely a Jacobite rising, though, for a few weeks at least, the English _ Government was as much scared by it as if, it had been the former. The Prince's forces never exceeded ten thousand men. An estimate of the time was that George 11. had " two-thirds of the country " [Scotland] zealous for him on principle. " There was no armed opposition to the Pretender," it has been said, " because the people had no arms and! the Government neglected sending them any; but there was determined passive resistance, and the few Lowland noblemen and gentlemen from south of Forth who joined the Prince could not bring a single. recruit with them but their personal servants." His army did not even represent nearly all of the Highland clans, who followed their chiefs. The English army at Culloden included three Scottish regular regiments, besides the Campbell irregulars. And for good results of progress, settlement, and prosperity which were supposed to have followed the rising and to have arisen out of the " new order," with whatever first rigours, that was instituted after it, the modern tendency has been strongly to readjust credit for them so far as Scotland generally is concerned. They had begun long before '45. To quote a recent—and Scottish—historian : " The Jacobite rebellion of 1745 must be regarded not only as a mere episode in Scottish history, but also as an anachronism and an anomaly, strangely unrelated to the life of an age over which it passed like a dream vividly but momentarily recollected in waking hours,"