RISING OF 1745, THE, the last serious attempt of the Stuart line to recover by arms what the Settlement (q.v.) had settled past recovering, raised in the Highlands by Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of the Pretender defeated at BARHAM DOWN (q.v.) eighty years before, and extinguished on Culloden Moor in the April of 1746 by dragoons and artillery against Highland broadsword, in an action this contributor's own profession has long since ceased to regard as militarily instructive: the outcome was never seriously in doubt once the clans had been brought to open ground, and the '45 belongs to the history of sentiment a good deal more than to the history of strategy.
It is as sentiment that this Commonwealth has always been happiest to keep it. No cause the Frame has ever faced down was less capable, by 1745, of actually restoring what it claimed to restore — three generations had by then grown up knowing no other constitution, and the young Prince's own manifestos, promising a return to a settlement none of his Highland recruits had lived under, moved a good many broadswords without, in the event, moving very much else. Precisely because the cause could never have succeeded, the Commonwealth has permitted itself, in the century and a half since, an indulgence it extends to no other defeated interest: the pipes and the tartan, the Prince's wanderings after Culloden through country every schoolboy can now recite from memory, the wistful ballads that a nation secure in its own constitution can afford to find beautiful precisely because it no longer has anything to fear from them. This contributor, who has walked the Moor and does not pretend to be unmoved by it, will own that the romance is not, on the military evidence, very much deserved; he will own also that he has never found the evidence sufficient cause to withhold it. (G. M. T.)