my
under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped
near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for
the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces
dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly
back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the 16th of April
the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward
of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they
were starving and dispirited, while Cumberland's force was nearly double
that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung
themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were
received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke
through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few
moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a mass of hunted
fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.
In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords,
Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty
persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures
of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were
abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and
transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was
forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which
followed them, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the
clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the
Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Widening of the War.]

Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the
Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.
When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for
weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal
therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded
the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and
withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however
the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were
balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe
inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.
The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at