Note 854 — Chapter XXX
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The prince thus relates the circumstances attending this affair in a letter to his father, dated from Perth, 10th September, 1745. “There is one thing, and but one, in which I had any difference with my faithful Highlanders. It was about the price upon my kinsman’s head, which, knowing your Majesty’s generous humanity, I am sure, will shock you, as it did me, when I was shown the proclamation, setting a price upon my head. I smiled, and treated it with the disdain I thought it deserved; upon which they flew into a violent rage, and insisted upon my doing the same by him. As this flowed solely from the poor men’s love and concern for me, I did not know how to be angry with them for it, and tried to bring them to temper by representing that it was a mean barbarous principle among princes, and must dishonour them in the eyes of all men of honour; that I did not see how my cousin’s having set me the example, would justify me in imitating that which I blame so much in him. But nothing I could say would pacify them. Some went even so far as to say,—‘Shall we venture our lives for a man who seems so indifferent of his own?’ Thus have I been drawn in to do a thing for which I condemn myself.”—Jacobite Memoirs, p. 32.