and Johnstone embarked for London, well knowing that by so doing he would estrange his father still further. He sailed as the guest of a Captain Walker, a worthy man who was a comparative stranger to him. Pending a reconciliation, Captain Walker put him up in his house, and for four or five months he received no money, nor were his letters answered. At the end of that period he was peremptorily ordered back to Edinburgh. In 1745, on the news of Prince Charles Edward's landing in the Highlands being confirmed, Johnstone took the bit between his teeth, and set out for the north. There had been the usual clash of wills, and again Lady Jane Douglas sided with the son. His father wished him to delay until the Prince made good his footing in the capital. He joined Charles at Perth, one of the first of the few Lowland Scots who threw in their lot with him, having awaited the Prince's arrival at Duncrub, Lord Rollo's seat near Perth. His sister was married to a younger son of Lord Rollo, who succeeded to the title and estates in 1765. He was at once appointed aidede-camp to Lord George Murray, Lieut.-General of the Prince's army, and assistant aide-decamp to the Prince himself. Johnstone was no longer a raw youth. He was twentysix, and had seen something of the world. His first impression was surprise at the smallness of the Prince's following, and he seems never to have entertained any real hope of success for the enterprise. He was a Jacobite, and did not go back on it, as so many did. He followed the Prince's fortunes from Perth to Culloden, and afterwards in Paris. But he had a poor opinion of the Prince. As his assistant aidede-camp Johnstone saw him at close quarters, and he does not appear to have liked what he saw. The correctness of his judgment in general is not now called in question. Without Lord George Murray the army would have been a rabble. His military genius carried them through so long as their luck held. It was luck that won for them the battle of Prestonpans. Sir John Cope's dispositions were not so ridiculous as is generally supposed. The more they examined his position, the more were they convinced that they could not attack without being cut to pieces. Their spirits were at a low ebb, when, in the evening, a local man, who knew the ground well, came to the Prince, and offered to show him a path through the marsh which protected the general's front. Lord George Murray seized the occasion. The Highlanders silently passed by it during the night, and the surprise was complete, just as later Wolfe scaled the heights of Abraham and surprised Montcalm at Quebec. Was the one indeed not an outcome of the other? We have never seen it suggested, but this seems almost certain. Wolfe was at his wits' end after having tried every other expedient, and we know that he searched long and anxiously until he descried a path up the cliffs. Wolfe was not at Prestonpans, but he fought at Falkirk and Culloden, and so keen a military student was sure to know all that had taken place. It is significant that he knew what to look for, and it is impossible that so recent a parallel was not in his mind. Johnstone charged by the side of the Prince in the second line. So swift was the victory that, though they were only some fifty paces behind the first line, they saw no enemy but the killed and wounded lying on the ground. At the end of the marsh there was a ditch three or four feet wide. In jumping this the Prince fell, and Johnstone caught him by the arm. On examining his countenance,' he says, "it seemed to me, from the alarm expressed in it, that he considered this accident as a bad omen." Charles gave him a captain's commission on the evening of the battle, without attaching him to any regiment, and he set about the raising of a company. He was successful, and the Duke of Perth put him in the artillery. Lord George Murray was piqued and unwilling to let him go, which speaks for his usefulness. There was more courage than capacity in that army. But he was worn out. Lord George did all the planning and directing, was untiring, slept little, and worked his aide-de-camp as he worked himself. The march south was Charles' doing. The chiefs were against it, and Johnstone, on military grounds, thought it a blunder of the first magnitude. He saw clearly that so small a force could not conquer England against the wishes of its inhabitants, and that it would be a diminishing force, as no accession to its strength would be available to make good the wastage of war. They knew before they crossed the border that the English were not with them. There would seem to have been much talk and shaking of heads among those, like Johnstone, whose business it was not to think; and with reason. The Lowland Scots looked on. They had not forgotten that under Charles II. and James II. they were, as Fletcher said, hunted from hill to hill by an army composed for the most part of barbarous Highlanders." To the English the Highlanders were savages, alien in race and language. Prince Charles might just as well have invaded England at the head of a band of Cherokee Indians. The terror of the English peasants, "the most stupid and credulous of mortals," was, as Johnstone says, "truly inconceivable.” They believed the Highlanders ate children. Even those who knew better were very illdisposed towards them. Some were simply curious. The poet Gray wrote to Horace Walpole : "I heard three sensible middleaged men, when the Scotch were said to be at Stamford and actually were at Derby, talking of hiring a chaise to go to Caxton (a place in the high road) to see the Pretender and Highlanders as they passed." It never was more than a raid. They were no more effective than a squirrel in a cage. Not one person of distinction declared for them. The chiefs became uneasy and depressed. The decisive stroke lay with the Government, who could land troops where they liked and when they liked. It was only a question of time. The army in Flanders had been recalled. The only cheerful episode was a d'Artagnan-like exploit by a sergeant of Johnstone's company named Dickson, who must have had something of the Gascon in him. The incident cannot be better told than in Johnstone's own words. "He had quitted Preston in the evening, with his mistress and my drummer; and having marched all night he arrived next morning at Manchester, which is about twenty miles distant from Preston, and immediately began to beat up for recruits for the yellowhaired laddie.' The populace at first did not interrupt him, conceiving our army to be near the town; but as soon as they knew that it would not arrive till the evening, they surrounded him in a tumultuous manner, with the intention of taking him prisoner alive or dead. Dickson presented his blunderbuss, which was charged with slugs, threatening to blow out the brains of those who first dared to lay hands on himself or the two who accompanied him; and by turning round continually, facing in all directions, and behaving like a lion, he soon enlarged the circle which a crowd of people had formed round them. Having continued for some time to manœuvre in this way, those of the inhabitants of Manchester who were attached to the house of Stuart took arms, and flew to the assistance of Dickson to rescue him from the fury of the mob, so that he soon had five or six hundred men to aid him, who dispersed the crowd in a very short time. Dickson now triumphed in his turn; and putting himself at the head of his followers, he proudly paraded undisturbed the whole day, with his drummer, enlisting for my company all who offered themselves." Thus was Manchester taken by a sergeant, a drummer, and a girl. Dickson got one hundred and eighty recruits, and his expenses did not exceed three guineas. On the retreat from Derby, which was conducted with consummate skill by Lord George Murray, Johnstone suffered more than most, but only from the inclemency of the weather. Owing to the incompetence of the English commanders, they were never in any danger of being cut off. His ammunition waggons broke down on Shap, and for the whole night he was exposed to a dreadful storm of wind and rain. From the badness of the roads this was a frequent occurrence. They recrossed the border on the Prince's birthday, the 20th a night attack. The 15th was the Duke's birthday, and the Prince believed that the English would be drunk and off their guard. The psychology may have been sound, but, as Johnstone says, "this march across the country, in a dark night, which did not allow us to follow any track, had the inevitable fate of all night marches." It was found impossible to preserve anything like order. They were in no condition to attack when they got there, and came back, arriving at Culloden about seven in the morning in a sorry state. There is a limit even to the endurance of a Highlander. The homing instinct of the clans asserted itself soon after the battle of Falkirk, at which Johnstone was present but not actively engaged, and Charles fell back on Inverness. "To our eternal shame," says Johnstone, "we fled with precipitation from the same army which we had completely beaten sixteen days before," which shows that he did not realise the situation. The time had gone by when they could profit by a victory. At Inverness provisions were scarce, the Prince had little or no money left, and his officers were in like case. Distress and discord ruled. The Prince hated Lord George Murray, and was completely dominated by the Irish adventurers who had landed with him, and who made no secret of their desire to quit, a desire which, we suspect, he shared. It could hardly be otherwise. So far as the object he had in view was concerned, the end came when the clans turned back at Derby. Johnstone's account of Cul- already one leg in the bed, and loden reflects all this. battle was fought on the 16th of April 1746. On the 13th the Prince took up his position, the Highlanders sleeping on the bare ground, without shelter and with only biscuit and water for food. The nights were very cold. Johnstone was fortunate: he slept on straw. On the evening of the 15th, about eight o'clock, they set out to surprise the Duke of Cumberland in his camp at Nairn by It was now their turn to be surprised. Johnstone graphically describes what happened to himself. "Exhausted with hunger, and worn out with the excessive fatigue of the three last nights, as soon as we reached Culloden I turned off as fast as I could to Inverness, where, eager to recruit my strength by a little sleep, I tore off my clothes, half asleep all the while; but when I had was on the point of stretching myself between the sheets, what was my surprise to hear the drum beat to arms, and the trumpets of the piquet of Fitzjames sounding the call to boot and saddle, which struck me like a clap of thunder. I hurried on my clothes, my eyes half shut, and, mounting a horse, I instantly repaired to our army, on the eminence on which we had remained for three days, and from which we saw the English army at the distance of about two miles from us." He was with the left wing in the battle, not twenty paces from the enemy, when the right gave way, and the flight spread to the left "with the rapidity of lightning." His friend Scothouse was killed by his side. The ground was marsh up to the middle of the leg, and he could scarcely walk. His horse and man, left on the eminence where the Prince remained during the battle, were not to be seen. Prince and servants alike had vanished. The enemy were advancing slowly, and had redoubled their fire. He was getting desperate when he perceived a horse, as he thought, without a rider. On getting to it he found to his astonishment that the bridle was in the hands of a man lying on the ground paralysed with fear. Without compunction he took possession of the horse and rode off. The clans rallied at Ruthven, and Johnstone joined them there on the 18th, where he found Lord George Murray, the Duke of Perth, and other chief officers. Only the Prince was missing. He had gone, as he came, with his five Irishmen. The Highlanders were in good heart. They felt that they had been defeated by exposure, fatigue, and want of food. Lord George sent an aide-de-camp to inform the Prince that his army was in being, and they eagerly awaited his arrival. Two days later the aide-de-camp returned with man seek his safety in the best way he can." Abandoned by the Prince they separated, each intent on escaping the scaffold. Johnstone's brother-in-law Rollo was at Banff, inspector of merchant ships under the Government, and he made for there, hoping that he would be afforded an opportunity of embarking for abroad, disguised as a sailor. On the way he exchanged his laced Highland dress for a ragged and dirty rig-out. Rollo, though becomingly sympathetic, was true to his salt, and Johnstone was in a dilemma. Orders had been issued to all towns and villages between Inverness and Edinburgh to stop any person without a passport, and the ports had been closed, any one conniving at the escape of a fugitive being liable to the same punishment as those who had taken up arms. Nevertheless, he decided to head south and, if possible, reach Edinburgh. The Tay and the Forth were the chief obstacles. The shores of both firths were patrolled by cavalry, and the populace was anti-Jacobite almost to a man. He got some assistance from gentlemen not hostile to the Stuarts though lacking in zeal, but mostly he had to rely on his own mother wit. At Cortachy, the native place of Lord Ogilvy, who had been with the Prince, he entered a publichouse in the village, and informed the landlady what he was. His intuition was not at fault. She told him of two |