CHAPTER XI. THE DEFEAT. Soon heels o'er gowdie! in he gangs, As dangling in the wind he hangs, BURNS. ON the first day of April, commonly called in Scotland hunt the gowk day,' the Radicals were to rise in arms all over Scotland, expecting those in England to have risen a day or two sooner. The signal agreed upon between the English and Scotch Radicals for their co-operation, was the stopping of the London mail by the former, on its way northward. On the preceding day, printed placards were stuck up in many places of the city of Glasgow, and in the adjoining country-towns and villages, announcing that they were to take the field, and calling upon all the defenders of liberty to flock to the Radical standard. Wilson, whom we mentioned in the foregoing chapter as having long been a man of consequence among the Straven reformers, being chosen for their leader by a few half-witted enthusiasts, and having girt on an old rusty sword by his side, like a man of war, with front erect, and his sword drawn in his hand, on the afternoon before the day appointed for the revolt, he marched up Straven causeway, and assembled his forces at the tuck of drum. A very few only could be induced to leave their VOL. II. 13 firesides for the tented field; and instead of the whole inhabitants of this Radical hive rising to a man to assert their rights at the point of the bayonet, as he had persuaded himself would have been the case, this gallant hero had the mortification to find himself only at the head of little more than half a dozen tatterdemalions, one armed with an old fowling piece, as rusty as his own sword; another with a broken scythe stuck in the end of a stick, as the ingenuity of Cobbett had suggested to the mob to do with their knives and forks; and the others with a hay-fork or hedge-bill in their hands. How must his bosom have swelled with indignation that his townsmen who had wasted so much time in talking about a reform, sat still supinely, when, as he thought, they should have rushed with the fury of a lion on those who enslaved them, and with a voice loud as the roar of the ocean in a tempest, have made Heaven and Earth resound with the cry of liberty, as they marched to the place of general rendezvous. But as if it had not been enough for his patriotic mind to have suffered disappointment, on seeing that no one would bestir himself, the very old wives laughed at him, asking him with a jeering look, "whare's thou gawn, Jemie, man, wi' the rusty auld raper;" and when he could contain himself no longer among such renegadoes from Radicalism, but marched off at the head of his little band, the very boys followed, singing "Willie the moorland laddie, Was mounted upon the gray cowt, `Wilson, having so few to support him at starting, and meeting with few or no recruits on his march to Glasgow, halted his men at the distance of a few miles from the city, and bivouacked at Cathkin braes, where he and his followers slept, under arms, to be in readiness to join the Radical forces from Paisley and Glasgow. On the first of April, there was a general strike among the mechanics; the labourers did not go to their work, and those who were not informed respecting the measures which government were secretly pursuing, were under the greatest alarm, for the result of a contest between the army and so vast a body of the lower classes, as were said to be in a state of open rebellion. The London mail arrived at the usual hour in the city; it was therefore no longer doubtful that there had been no rising of consequence in the south of the kingdom, and that the Radicals at Birmingham and Manchester had either made no attempt, or had completely failed in the very beginning of their insurrection. The hopes of the Radicals in the west of Scotland were blasted; for from the very beginning, their designs of revolting against the established government of their country was a mere chimera; they possessed the bones and sinews of war, but they were destitute of the material. They were without arms, without money, and without a single leader to direct their movements. They were plotting to overthrow their government without having any other which they intended to have substituted in its stead, for some among them called themselves republicans, and others constitutional monarchists. At the very moment when they were to have risen with the overwhelming force of five hundred thousand men, in arms, which they foolishly boasted of, and were to have put down the established authorities almost without opposition-the magistrates were every where on the alert-the military were ready to crush rebellion in the bud-and not a single Radical durst show his face, excepting a few fanatics, who were too despicable to have been taken any notice of, and who, in the course of a few hours, must have come to their senses, and throwing away their arms, would have been glad to have hid themselves in any corner. This really was the case with Wilson and his party, who sneaked off and returned to Straven, perceiving that their cause was hopeless, and that all the vaunted valour of the Radicals, when it came to the push, was mere idle bluster, which had served to deceive themselves and those who had placed any confidence in it. For instead of showing any spirit or determination, they were panic struck, and consternation prevailed among them from one end of the kingdom to the other. After Wilson was apprehended, Laird Shadow induced his friend Lord Ringsdale to do every thing in his power to obtain his liberty, or to-mitigate his punishment; but he had long rendered himself obnoxious to the magistrates, and it was all to no purpose. Finding himself unable to serve this poor misguided and unfortunate man, he called on him during his sentence of condemnation, and took a most affectionate farewell of him. A nice little plot is adding another spoke to the wheel of government, but it had given those in office a great deal of trouble to produce any thing like insubordination among the people; for had they been left to themselves, they could never have so imposed upon their better judgment as to think seriously that a mere mob could do any thing against such a powerful government as that of Great Britain. They must soon have seen the folly of meeting as they did, and discussing on measures hostile to the public peace. Because, had they been permitted to meet without interruption, they must have known from the very lenity that was exercised towards them, that government had its eye upon them, and in due time would deal with them according to their deserts. In this case, had the people, of their own free choice, and of their own accord, acted as they did, no one could have attached any blame to those in whom the public authority was vested, if they had brought to condign punishment those who disturbed the internal quiet of the nation, and who sought to overthrow the sovereign dignity vested in the crown. But we execrate the baseness of introducing a system of espionage, and of having recourse to the mean petty artifice of exciting discontent, and of fermenting sedition for a cloak to cover the corruptions of government, and for a pretext to tighten the yoke of bondage, which, year after year, had been preparing for our servile necks. It is the irrefragable proofs which exist that the bonds of good fellowship were torn asunder by those whose duty it was to have established harmony among the people, and to have promoted the interest of all ranks in society it is the conviction that those deluded men, whose fanatic enthusiasm in the cause of reform exposed them to become the dupes of the spies and agents of government-were instigated and encouraged to take up arms in their desperate undertaking, that excites pity in our breasts, for the fatal consequences of their misguided conduct. Glasgow, from its extensive trade and numerous manufactories, probably contained the greatest number of men of Radical principles that were collected together within so small a compass any where in Scotland. But it did not suit the policy of those, who, behind the curtain, directed the |