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 coronach 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, specially 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 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.
