But no French force appeared. Probably France had all her available armies fully engaged. Charles Edward did not show determination. He went back to Edinburgh, and the clans, held together by no central authority, but only by their sympathy with the Scottish royal family of Stuart, dispersed to their Highland homes. For a while the Pretender played the king in Edinburgh, but at length a strong English force under the Duke of Cumberland was sent to Scotland. A decisive engagement was fought on the wild moor of Culloden, near Inverness. It settled for all time the fate of the Stuart dynasty, and set the Hanoverians firmly on the throne of England. The clans which had arisen for the Stuarts in the previous attempt by the Old Pretender in "the {121} Fifteen" had suffered slight punishment at the hands of the victorious English. After "the Forty-five," on the contrary, their punishment was cruelly severe; but it had at least the effect of quelling their spirit so that they did not imperil the peace of the realm again. [Sidenote: Ireland's misfortunes] At the same moment, towards the middle of this eighteenth century, Ireland was in terrible suffering also. In 1739 had happened her worst famine, due to failure of the potatoes on which most of the people depended, almost entirely, for their livelihood. It was estimated that no less than one-fifth of the population actually died, and there can be no doubt that the effect of that starvation on the survivors must have been to weaken the stock for more than one generation. And we are obliged to confess, with shame, that England's dealing with Ireland during all that half-century was as cruel and selfish as it was stupid and short-sighted. There was a moment when it seems as if the people of the smaller island were anxious for union with the greater; but that union was opposed by a section of the English themselves--especially the powerful section interested in the trade of wool with the continent of Europe. A law passed as far back as the second half of the seventeenth century prohibited the Irish from exporting cattle. Consequently they had largely devoted their excellent pasture to producing sheep, for the wool. The English wool traders wished to keep this profitable commerce to themselves. To attain that selfish end they opposed the proposed union, which presumably would have put the Irish wool producers on the same footing as the English. Further, under William III., they succeeded in passing through Parliament a bill prohibiting the Irish from either making up their home-grown wool or from exporting it. {122}