With Culloden the last hopes of the Jacobite “faction”--for it had again become one now--died. Whatever hold, up to 1745, the Stuart “idea” may have had on a section of the people, the wisest of them saw that it was hopeless, and only the hopeful enthusiasts still had dreams. It is difficult to know in these days whether there ever really was a Jacobite party after “the ’45.” The idea seems to have died in despair. Of course there were feeble and hysterical conspiracies like the, possibly legendary, one of the young Scot who plotted the assassination of the royal family; and the studied ignorance of Sir Robert Walpole, who kept his eyes shut to these last faint flashes of the fire of the cause, may have deepened the hopefulness of those who still dreamed of “another opportunity,” as an old rebel of the name of Scott did. There was one exception, in the cruel treatment and death of Dr. Cameron about 1750 or 1751; but there may be some justification for his execution, as he was no doubt a “go-between” the Pretender in France and the few left faithful to him in the north. The Young Pretender, too, seems to have been as blind as his adherents. Dr. King, in his _Anecdotes of His Own Time_, states that in 1750 the prince was in London; but he gives prominence to the undoubted fact that the real destruction of the party was due to the decadence, physically and morally, of the last real aspirant to the throne, and to the dread that his mistress--Walkinshaw--was a paid spy of the house of Hanover, her sister being housekeeper at Leicester House. Well might one of the party ask this hopeless scion of a hopeless house, when endeavouring to separate him from this woman, “What has your family done, sir, thus to draw down the vengeance of Heaven on every branch of it for so many ages?” The answer is simple enough. They had done little but bad. Their kingship was only honourable with those who believed that any sovereign was divinely appointed. The last of the Stuarts more than proved the worthlessness of the whole race as far as the English throne was concerned. Whether, as Scott romantically suggests in _Redgauntlet_, the Young Pretender ever returned to Great Britain about 1765, is improbable. Even if he did, his cause was lost, and that by his own fault. What scion of the house of Stuart but so fell? It is not that the early members of the house of Hanover were really great or good, but it was because the last of the house of Stuart were irretrievably mean and bad that the embers of the Civil War remained such, and never after 1745 burst into a serious flame.