The Prince who believed himself invincible because he had not yet been beaten, defied by enemies whom he thoroughly despised, seeing at their head the son of the rival of his father; proud and haughty as he was, badly advised, perhaps betrayed, forgetting at this moment every other object, could not bring himself to decline battle even for a single day. I requested a quarter of an hour’s private audience. There I threw myself in vain at his feet. In vain I represented to him that he was still without half his army; that the great part of those who had returned had no longer targets--a kind of defensive armour without which they were unable to fight with advantage; that they were all worn out with fatigue by a long march made on the previous night, and for two days many of them had not eaten at all for want of bread; that it was necessary to fall back to defend Inverness; that it would be even more prudent to abandon that town, and to place between the enemy and ourselves the river near which this town is built; that if the worst came to the worst, we might betake ourselves to the neighbouring mountains--there it was that he would be truly invincible; there we would remain masters of that part of the coast, at which supplies of arms and of money ought to be arriving, and as soon as these reached us, we should march towards England by that same coast as had already been arranged; that the more the enemy should advance towards us, the greater would be their difficulty to retrace their steps so as to get to London before us; the capture of that great city should be made his one object, for successes that he might achieve elsewhere would have no decisive value, while, in a single hour, all would be lost without hope of recovery if he should chance to be beaten. In the end, finding him immovable in the resolve he had taken to fight at any cost, I made my desire yield to my duty. I left him for the first time. I retired in haste to Inverness, there to burn all my papers, and there to think over the means of preserving for your Majesty that portion of the [French] troops which might survive the action. I saw before the end of the day, the most striking spectacle of human weakness--the Prince was vanquished in an instant; never was a defeat more complete than his. THE WANDERINGS OF PRINCE CHARLES IN THE HEBRIDES This narrative by Neil Maceachain, the guide of Prince Charles and Flora Macdonald over the seas to Skye, appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_ for 1840. As a magazine article three-quarters of a century old is nearly as inaccessible as a manuscript, the Council of the Society authorised its inclusion in this volume as a fitting addition to the numerous narratives of the ’Forty-five collected by the Society.