LORD ELCHO OF THE " FORTY-FIVE."* Tam is one of

the most authoritative, and, from the stand- point of style, one of the most lively and interesting, con- tributions that have recently been made to the literature of the "Forty-five." The author of the Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland could write English well and with more than average piquancy ; Mr. Evan Charteris, who has printed the narrative from the MS. in the possession of his father, Lord Wemyss, shows in his biography of the narrator that he can write delightfully. The papers left by the Jacobite politician and grumbler who, but for an attainder, would have been the fifth Earl of Wemyss have not been altogether unknown to, or quite neglected by, the historians of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott saw them; more recently Mr. Andrew Lang has seen them ; Mr. Ewald was permitted to utilise both them and Lord Elebo's Journal, written in French, in his Life of Prince Charles. But never before has the Short Account seen the light in its entirety. The publica-

tion is so valuable that we may hope we shall soon havaby way of sequel a reprint of the Journal on which Mr. Charteris's Memoir is based.

David, Lord Elcho was a son of the fourth Earl of Wemyss, and was born at Wemyss Castle, in Fifeshire, on August 21st, 1721 ; he was thus a year younger than Prince Charles Edward. His mother was more notable than his father, being the daughter of Colonel Francis Charteris of Amisfield, the fortunate gamester celebrated by Pope, and declared by Arbuthnot to possess every vice except prodigality and hypocrisy. Lord Wemyss was a mild and somewhat sentimental partisan of the Stuarts. The bias of a tutor, and four years at Winchester School, where masters and pupils alike were divided into " Georgites" and "Jacobites," confirmed his son in the paternal faith, and also in a Scotch ultra- patriotic hatred of England and Englishmen. In 1738 Elcho went with a tutor to Rheims, where a lady taught him the French language and manners, and subsequently he spent a

year at the Military Academy of Angers. There had not been much study at Winchester. Of Angers we are told.:- " The course of study at Angers inclined to the lighter side of education. It is not without interest to read what was then thought necessary to round off and complete a man of the world. Let us take a day at Angers in the summer. At five o'clock a.m. the day's work began with riding. This was followed by instruc- tion in fencing, the rest of the morning being taken up with lessons in mathematics, design, and music. Dinner concluded, there was an adjournment to the dancing-saloon, where steps and figures and the intricacies of deportment occupied the afternoon till it was time to dress for the Assemblies in the town. At the Assemblies concerts and comedies were given, and the weary student late in the evening returned to supper and games of hazard. After a year of this inspiriting substitute for a University training he left Angers, and with three brother Academicians and a tutor, all of the same political persuasion, started on the usual

grand tour of eldest sons." •

In the course of this tour—at Florence—Elcho made the acquaintance of Horace Walpole, who seems to have thought a good deal of him, and, in particular, of his personal appearance. From Florence he went with some Jacobite friends to Rome. There he saw both the Old and the Young Pretender. Of the one he says : " He appeared to be a Prince most affable, most well-informed, and most sensible ; bigotry was his worst fault." Of the other he says : " He appeared to have no tastes except for hunting and music, and had no conversational power "; • whereas the Duke of York " was suave, loved conversation, and pleased people more than his brother." Nevertheless, Elcho left Rome in the spring of 1741 fully committed to the Jacobite cause. His temper towards Englishmen was not improved by the -treat- ment be received in England. He was stoned,. hissed as

"the French dog," and driven out of Drury Lane Theatre with candles and apples. When he reached Wemyss Castle, Lord Sinclair, who had been out in the "Fifteen," and had written a caustic account of it, advised him to take service with King George, as he considered the Stuarts —by that time lie had himself abjured Jacobitism—an ungrateful race. But although Elcho may well have hesitated, and although he did visit " Whigs " like the Earl of .Suther- land, the men who influenced him most, like the Earl of

A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1748. By David, Lordt I0 r gina lManuscript Gaston', with aremorunrini:Inionsytheu1.bvaueftrteris. Edinburgh: David Douglas. [15s. net.i Traquair, Sir James Steuart of Coltness, and, above all, the

arch-conspirator—and " brain" of the " Forty-five "—John Murray of Broughton, were Jacobites. As a consequence he not only threw in his lot with the Stuart cause, but took an active part in making preparations in 1743 and 1744 for the

memorable Rising. His younger brother gave to the, cause £1,500, which Lord Elcho frequently endeavoured, but always in vain, to recover from Charles. He paid more than one private visit to Charles at Paris, either alone or in the company

of Murray. During the course of one of them he received a commission as Colonel of Dragoons. Nevertheless, Elcho was, on his own showing at least, one of those Jacobites who kept imploring their Prince not to attempt a landing in Britain unless be had a substantial French force with him. He

helped to found the Buck Club in Edinburgh, from which rendezvous of the Scottish Jacobites was written to the Young Chevalier the celebrated letter which told him that unless he could bring with him some six thousand troops and thirty thousand Ionia d'or his expedition would spell ruin. Had this letter been delivered by Lord Traquair, to whom it was entrusted, the Rising might have been prevented. As things turned out, Elcho always blamed Murray of Broughton for that unfortunate venture, and

maintained that he would not have "come out" at all but for his brother Jacobite's misrepresentation of the Prince's resources in men. He did not join the expedition till the eve of its entry into Edinburgh. He was given command of the Prince's Life Guards, perhaps because Charles dis- trusted his General, Lord George Murray. In 1746, " when all was • lost," he escaped to Paris, whence he wrote to the British Government asking for pardon. The request was not unnaturally refused. Charles also declined to see him: Yet Eleho spent years in seeking to recover the £1,500 which he had handed over in Scotland. Indeed, the best part of his life was consumed in fruitless efforts to better himself by solicitations—not all in vain—to the French Court for pecuniary aid, and in heiress-hunting. Among the persons he met in the course of his wanderings on the Continent was Clementine. Walkinshaw, who told him of Charles's brutal ill-treatment of her, and for whose daughter he almost secured a husband. .

In 1776 Elcho was at last successful in his matrimonial aspirations., and on September 9th, at the age of fifty-five, he

was married at Rental to a daughter of the Baron and Baroness D'Exhull :-

" With his wife ho received a dowry of three thousand imperial florins. • But financial considerations appear • to have played a small part in the marriage, and a new era of peace and content seemed about to bring consolation to the later years of the exile. But it was shert-lived. In November, 1777, Lady Elcho gave birth to a son. The child died within a few hours, the mother survived only a day. Elcho was once more alone and a wanderer. He was inconsolable. Their year of married life at his home in Switzerland had been attended with complete happiness He resumed his former life of travel, with occasional residence at his home, where, as the municipal archives show, he continued to gain the respect and esteem of the authorities and the inhabitants among whom his estranging lot was cast. He died in Paris in 1787; but in the town of Bale his memory is perpetuated by the bells of the parish church, which before his death he presented to the town in recognition of the welcome extended to him by tha Swiss."

Circumstances and environment had so much to do with both the formation and the warping of Eleho's character that it would be idle as well as uncharitable to dogmatise on the subject. He was not devoid of courage. It may or may not be true, as recorded by Sir Walter Scott in his Journal on the authority of Sir James Steuart Denham, Elcho's nephew and bosom friend, that when Charles rode off the field of Culloden " Lord Elcho called after him, There you go for a damned cowardly, Italian ! " The chances are against the truth of the story. Elcho has many bitter things to say of Charles in his narrative, but he does not say this. It is on record that after Culloden he was one of the officers who accompanied the Prince part of the way to Arisaig. This he could not have done if he had insulted Charles on the field. On Elcho's own bravery—once he had thrown in his lot and his money with the Jacobite cause—no imputation, as we have said, has been cast, although " Jupiter " Carlyle, who saw him after the rout of Cope at Prestonpans, says he had an air of savage ferocity that disgusted and alarmed people, and Horace Walpole declares that " he had distinguished himself beyond all the rebel commanders by brutality and insults and cruelty to our prisoners." Mr. Charteris's admirable characterisation of Elcho is worth giving :—

" It has often been said that Adam Smith thought there was a Scotsman inside every man. In Eleho there was little else. The political character of his training made escape from the bond of nationality impossible. His fights as a boy at Winchester, his treatment as a young man in London, the open hatred of the Union which he was taught to develop in Scotland, all combined to establish in him a deep-seated aversion to the prevailing system of Anglicised government and the dominance of what he considered a hectoring nationality. He was one of the ' master spirits who have got the start of this majestic world.' In politics and. the larger movement of national interests he was always at sea, and• his soundings, when ho took them, were invariably wrong. He was blind to the true significance of the Union. Ho totally miscalculated the forces opposed to a Stuart restoration. In war, when the watch-fires were kindling through Europe, he was unable to see beyond the clash of arms, and the incidents of tho campaign. In peace he never doubted the permanence of the existing order of things. To the pent-up energy below, and deliberating tendency of opinion above, he was equally dead. Cast in a feudal mould, be carried into a new world of change and progress the outfit of a generation for whom there was no longer foothold He was practical, and perhaps sordid—so were his contem- poraries. He was not fired by any stirring aspirations—neither was the generation to which he belonged. He took no thought for the things of the mind. It is not on record that; once away from school, he over read a book. It is true also that in his constant negotiations for marriage he displayed those practical instincts which are conventionally said to be Scottish characteristics. On the other hand, ho was candid and sincere. Ho was gifted with soldierly qualities ; he played a distinguished part in '45-'46, and ho favourably impressed not a few of those with whom he served. If his observation of passing events was superficial, it was at least accurate, and no more trustworthy account of Charles's campaign is to be found than that' contained in the narrative."

This may be supplemented and confirmed by an extract from Elcho's own writing :— "Ferocious in prosperity, and abject in adversity —that is the national character of the English. Their hatred towards' all nations of Europe is well known. They cannot oven tolerate their subjects, the Irish. Their conduct towards their subjects in America brought upon them a civil war. Their animosity against their own compatriots in Scotland is such that a turmoil arises when the King appoints a Scotsman to be his Minister ; yet without Scotland what would they do ? The Scots are their mainstay in all their wars. Take three years of the war in America and see how the brave Frazer, Agnew, Campbell, Aber- crombie, and Pitcairn, all officers of rank, and Scotsmen, have laid down their lives, but not an Englishman of rank has done so. Their Howe and their Clinton did nothing with their numerous troops, and their Burgoyne, with all his hosts, laid down their arms."

Here we have Elcho—and "Charley-over-the-water " patriotism as well—at their richest, and perhaps worst.

Mr. Walter Blaikie, who has made a special study of the details of the great Jacobite failure, says of the Short Account that it is a document of greater interest than the narrative of James Maxwell of Kirkconnell, who was an officer in Elcho's regiment, and that "if we except The Lyon in Mourning and the soldierly letters of Lord George Murray, it is the most important contemporary contribution to the history of the Forty-five that has been published." This is no doubt correct; the bitterness against the Prince which inspires and pervades the Short Account speaks for its sincerity, if not for its accuracy. His chief charges against Charles are these :- "What displeased the people of fashion was that he did not seem to have the least sense of what they had done for him, but on the contrary would often say that they had done nothing but their duty as his father's subjects were bound to do; then as he had his head full of the notion of commanding his army as if they had been mercenaries and had their fortunes depending upon his will and pleasure, he never consulted with any of them, or let them know in the least any of his schemes, but managed all his affairs in a hidden way with his favourites, Sir Thomas Sheridan, Mrs. O'Sullivan, Murray, and Hay, but particularly Mr. Hay, who governed him entirely Then there were people about him that profited of his displeasure, to represent the Scots to him as a mutinous people, and that it was not so much for him they were fighting as for themselves, and repeated to him all their bad behaviour to Kin" Charles the first and second, and put it into the worst lights to him, which wrought upon him so far that at the Battle of Culloden ho thought all the Scots in general were a pareell of traitors, and he would always have continued of the same way of thinking if ho had immedi- ately got out of the country, but the care they took of his person while he was hiding made him change his mind and fix treason only to particulars."

Elcho's obviously accurate account of the disposition of the Highland army at Duddingston, near Edinburgh, before the march into England deserves to be given as a relief to his bitterness :-

" It was a very irregular sort of camp, for the Highlanders chose as soon to lay without the tent as within, and never had them rightly pitched. The Prince lay always in the camp, and never strip'd. He used to come into town early and assemble his Council. After that he din'd with his principal officers in publick. After dinner, he rode out with his Guards and reviow'd his army, came back and sup'd in town, and after supper went and sleep'd in the camp. Sometimes he sup'd in the camp. The Prince lived iu Edinburgh from the 22nd of September to the 31st October with great splendour and magnificence, had every morning a numerous Court of his officers. After he had held a Council! ho din'd with his principal! officers in publick, where there was always a crowd of all sorts of people to see him dine. After dinner be rode out attended by his lifeguards, and review'd his army, where there was always a great number of spectators in coaches and on horseback. After the review, he came to the Abbey, where he received the ladies of fashion that came to his drawing-room. Then he sup'd in publick, and generally there was music at supper and a ball afterwards."