There was a considerable remnant of Jacobite feeling in the county, particularly amongst the clergy, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The Stuart rising of 1715, which came to an end at Preston, caused much stir in Derbyshire, and there were several small tumults in the county town. The town of Derby became much distinguished in 1745 as the furthest place in England to which the brave Prince Charles Edward with his little army penetrated, in what has been rightly termed a gallant effort to achieve the impossible. There is no doubt that a very considerable majority of the upper and middle classes of Derbyshire were on the side of the constituted powers as then established; but the local authorities were fully aware that there was a certain amount of faith in a direct monarchical descent still current, and they were in some doubts as to the views of others in a district such as North Derbyshire, where there was still a considerable minority of adherents to Roman Catholicism. They did not dare, therefore, to call out the militia or any general forces of the county; but at a meeting summoned by the Duke of Devonshire on the 28th of September, at the “George Inn,” Derby, it was resolved to raise 600 volunteers in two companies to resist the pretensions of a “Popish Pretender,” of which the Marquis of Hartington and Sir Nathaniel Curzon, the two knights of the shire, were to be colonels. A subscription list for the necessary funds soon reached a sum of upwards of £6,000, and in the course of the next month the number of troops raised was increased to a thousand. On December 12th these troops were reviewed in the forenoon at Derby by the Duke as Lord-Lieutenant. An hour later an express reached Derby that the vanguard of the Scots had entered Ashbourne, whereupon in the afternoon, to the astonishment of many, the local troops were again drawn up in the market-place, and at ten in the evening “marched off by torchlight to Nottingham, headed by His Grace the Duke of Devonshire.” On the following morning the Scots entered Derby, and though they tarried there for two days, the Derbyshire volunteers had no share in their subsequent retreat and dispersion, for they were well out of the way in the adjoining shire of Nottingham. An amusing and bitter skit was written on the behaviour of this Derbyshire regiment, known as the “Blues” from the colour of their uniform, wherein they were upbraided for vanishing at the very moment when they were urgently needed. The following is one of the concluding paragraphs:— “And when they came to Retford, they abode until word was brought that the young man was returned from Derby by the way which he came. And they returned back, and when they came nigh Derby they gave great shouts, saying, ‘Hail, Derby! happy are we to behold thee, for we greatly feared never to have seen thee.’”