hiel.

Two or three months later, James, returning from Spain, married the fair
and hapless Princess Clementina Sobieska, whom Charles Wogan, in an
enterprise truly romantic, had rescued from prison at Innspruck and
conveyed across the Alps. From this wedding, made wretched by the
disappointment of the bride with her melancholy lord,--always busied with
political secrets from which she was excluded,--was born, on December 31,
1720, Charles Edward Stuart: from his infancy the hope of the Jacobite
party; from his cradle surrounded by the intrigues, the jealousies, the
adulations of an exiled Court, and the quarrels of Protestants and
Catholics, Irish, Scottish, and English. Thus, among changes of tutors
and ministers, as the discovery or suspicion of treachery, the bigotry of
Clementina, and the pressure of other necessities might permit, was that
child reared whose name, at least, has received the crown of Scottish
affection and innumerable tributes of Scottish song.

CHAPTER XXXI. THE ARGATHELIANS AND THE SQUADRONE.

Leaving the fortunes of the Jacobite party at their lowest ebb, and
turning to the domestic politics of Scotland, after 1719, we find that if
it be happiness to have no history, Scotland had much reason to be
content. There was but a dull personal strife between the faction of
Argyll and his brother Islay (called the "Argathelians," from the
Latinised _Argathelia_, or Argyll), and the other faction known, since
the Union, as the _Squadrone volante_, or Flying Squadron, who professed
to be patriotically independent. As to Argyll, he had done all that man
might do for George I. But, as we saw, the reports of Cadogan and the
jealousy of George (who is said to have deemed Argyll too friendly with
his detested heir) caused the disgrace of the Duke in 1716, and the
_Squadrone_ held the spoils of office. But in February-April 1719 George
reversed his policy, heaped Argyll with favours, made him, as Duke of
Greenwich, a peer of England, and gave him the High Stewardship of the
Household.

At this time all the sixteen representative peers of Scotland favoured,
for various reasons of their own, a proposed Peerage Bill. The Prince of
Wales might, when he came to the throne, swamp the Lords by large new
creations in his own interest, and the Bill laid down that, henceforth,
not more than six peers, exclusive of members of the Royal Family, should
be created by any sovereign; while in place of sixteen