After a brief silence, the doomed three stood firmly upright. A rattle of musketry from the respective firing parties rolled over the ground; and a minute or two later a few clansmen of the Macphersons and comrades of Shaw reverently covered their bodies, and removed them for interment near the spot where they had perished. [Sidenote: _THREATENED INVASION._] The incident was not altogether apart from Jacobitism; nor probably was the subsequent fact, namely, that Lord John Murray, who afterwards was Colonel of the regiment, had the portraits of these three men hung up in his dining-room. The year closed with a threatening incident. Charles Edward left Rome in December for France, in order to accompany the expedition which was preparing in French ports for the invasion of England, under Marshal Saxe. There can be little doubt that the Government was well informed of the good intentions of France, by trustworthy agents abroad. There is a tradition, however, that the first intelligence of a plot to restore the Stuarts was sent up to London from the Post office at Bath. Ralph Allen (the _Squire Allworthy_ of Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’) had, since the year 1720, enjoyed a grant, or farm, of all the bye-way or cross-road letters in England and Wales, which grant he possessed till his death, in 1764. It is said that this Ralph Allen, of Prior Park, owed much of his large fortune to the result of his practice of opening letters; and it is added that by opening one of these cross-road letters he gained information of a plot for the Jacobite invasion of England,――and this information being sent to London, gave to its inhabitants the first announcement of an impending rebellion. In this same month of December, as was afterwards made known, a packet passed through the post, addressed to Simon, Lord Fraser of Lovat, hitherto a supposed friend of the Hanoverian dynasty. It contained matter which helped him to the scaffold on Tower Hill,――namely, his appointment to an important command in the Jacobite army about to be organised, and a flattering allusion to Lovat’s worthiness to wear a ducal title. Walpole was entitled to say, as he did:――‘We are in more confusion than we care to own.’ [Sidenote: _CONFUSION._] There was mirth enough in the opposition papers. Their columns crackled with epigrams against the king, court, and the Countess of Yarmouth. They were but slightly veiled and were still less slightly pointed. There was some regret perhaps that the reward offered by De Noailles, at Dettingen, to the troops that should capture George II., in that battle, had only resulted in the utter cutting to pieces of the Black Mousquetaires, who made the attempt.