The Jacobite risings form a curious link in the conduct of European politics, and not only led to active interference in them because of the support given by France and Spain to the Stuart cause, but they are also domestically interesting as being the last cases in which armed bodies have met in civil war in England. They also emphasise the curious personal and sentimental attraction which long hung round the dynasty of the Stuarts, and for which there is no sufficient reason to be advanced. They were neither great nor noble, neither good nor trustworthy. Their reigns were either years of disturbance at home or ineptitude abroad. Their attraction was only that of romance, coupled with that odd personal reverence for the divinity of kingship, which James I. brought prominently forward as a political creed, and which no previous sovereign had been successful in establishing. Men of repute and renown often changed sides when the “Roses” reigned; but this was rare when the Stuarts ruled, or tried to rule. It is this romantic feeling that makes the efforts on the part of the Jacobites to restore King James seem sorrowful. One cannot but sympathise with those who sacrificed all for the most ungrateful group of kings that have ever occupied the English throne, and at the same time wonder why they did so. The Winchester motto of “Aimez loyauté,” meant in the abstract but obedience or love for law, the ordinances of the realm. It was for the enthusiastic Cavalier to translate loyalty into personal regard for an indifferent, to say the very least of it, group of kings, who had as a race scarcely one attribute of true kingship. One’s sympathy, therefore, goes out more fully towards the adherents than the leaders of the hopeless cause; and it is well that the strong common sense of the nation saw that the restoration of either of the Pretenders was hopeless. The peace of Ryswick was the first blow to the faint hopes of James II.’s restoration. His no longer receiving the active sympathy of France reduced, for the time being, his “party” to a “faction.” The mistakes of the Governments which followed were by no means the least of the causes that re-formed it again into a “party” dangerous to the reigning dynasty of Great Britain. There is no doubt that the injudicious conduct of the statesmen of the early Georges, and even of the kings themselves, did little to smooth matters. To have let small bickerings and insurrections severely alone, by treating them as of no great importance, might have rendered serious troubles less probable. Making martyrs strengthened, rather than weakened the Jacobite cause; while, on the other hand, the judicious conduct of the sovereign, later in the century, destroyed for ever the hopes of seeing a Catholic James on the British throne.