has Gabion Place, the ancient mansion of the
Gabion family which (house and family both),
were pulled down one hundred and seven years
ago in the manner I am going to tell you of.

In the fatal Forty-five, as all men know,
Charles Edward Stuart came from France into
Scotland, and from thence as far as Derby in
England to fight for what he conceived to be
his own. There were many widows and
orphans made in England and Scotland, many
tears of blood shed through his bootless
quarrel for the crown with George of
Hanover. In the more fatal Forty-six, after
Culloden, there was martial law in the
highlands of both countries. Dragoons scoured
the country side in search of fugitive Jacobite
officers, of Jesuits, and papal emissaries, of
disaffected persons of every degree. Gentlemen's
mansions were broken into, wainscoting
was torn down, flooring wrenched up, pictures
were pierced for the discovery of the "priest's
hole;"  farmhouses were ransacked, barns
searched, hay and straw turned up with swords
and bayonets lest Jacobite refugees should
be concealed beneath. In every ditch,
there was a corpse; in every rivulet, blood; in
every farm field, a smouldering haystack, or a
shattered plough; in every house, fear and
horror and trembling cheek by jowl with
savage brutality and drunken exultation. On
every hearth where the red stream of Civil
War had flowed to quench the fire of love and
household hope, there were the ashes of
desolation. Women and young children
slaughtered or outraged; men shot and
hanged without trial or shrift or hearing;
goods and chattels wantonly destroyed;
crops burnt, homesteads rased;—such was
martial law in Northern Scotland. In England
and at Bridgemoor, its aspect, though somewhat
less sanguinary, was as gloomy. One
hideous and uniform system of military
terrorism was in force; and though—from the
number of persons resident in the northern
counties who were attached to the existing
Government, and had never taken any part
with the adherents of the Pretender—there
did not exist the same pretence for the wholesale
plunder, spoliation, and blood-shedding
with which Scotland was ravaged; still an
unceasing round of domiciliary visits was
made, and in almost every house military
were quartered.

Of the many families directly or indirectly
compromised by the political events of the
foregoing, none were so seriously implicated
as that represented at Bridgemoor by the
Lady Earnest Gabion, who resided at Gabion
Place, and superintended for her son
the management of the vast estates he
owned. The lady's husband, Gervase Gabion
Lord of the Manor of Bridgemoor,
died in 1725, leaving issue one son, Gervase
Earnest, now 22 years of age. The
family were rigid Catholics, and as rigid
partisans of the House of Stuart. The last
Squire Gabion had been intimately mixed
up with the Earl of Mar's rash outbreak in
1715. In the course of a long sojourn in
France before he could make his peace with
the Government, he married, in 1720, the
Lady Earnest Augusta Mary, sole daughter
and orphan of Earnest Baron Brierscourt of
Brierscourt, in the Kingdom of Ireland, who
was attainted for his share in Sir John
Fenwick's conspiracy; but escaped, went abroad,
and—bidding adieu to the pomps and vanities
of the world, political and social—took the
cowl, and died in the famous Monastery of
La Trappe. The Lady Earnest would probably
have imitated his example, and have
been received as a nun in the convent where
she was already a boarder, had she not
been, at the passionate instance of her
brother, the titular Lord Brierscourt (who
under the name of the Baron de Bricourt
had taken service in the French king's
Grey Musketeers), eventually persuaded to
accept the hand of Mr. Gervase Gabion.
They lived together very happily, as the
story-books say, till the demise of the squire,
who died in his bed, and in decent odour with
Sir Robert Walpole, leaving an infant, as I
have told you, who at two years of age became
sole lord of Bridgemoor Manor and of a
rent-roll of twenty thousand pounds a year.

As the little lad grew he imbibed, together
with a doting affection for his mother and a
bigoted attachment to his Church, an attachment
as doting as bigoted, as self-denying,
as irrational may be to the princes and politics
of that ill-fated, false, and faithless house,
which never brought but misery and ruin upon
the lands they ruled over. Everything around
him conspired to confirm him in his love for
the house of Stuart. The mother he idolised
valued a golden crucifix she had received
from James the Second, at Saint Germain's,
next to the relics of the saints. His nurse
was never tired of telling him of the great
and good Earl of Derwentwater; of how
he fought and bled for James the Third;
of how the Whigs slew him on Tower Hill,
in London, and of the brave words he spake
to the people there; of how his body was
brought home to the Lakes in earl's state
and splendour, travelling only by night, and
resting in Catholic places of worship during
the day; of how she dressed him in a laced
shroud when he came home. The peasants
in the neighbourhood were for ever telling
him that, when he was a man, he was to
bring the rightful King home; his tutor, an
Irish priest, mixed up Jacobitism and the
Delphin Classics for him, and instilled the
divine right of kings into his accidence. Is
it to be wondered at, therefore, that at
eighteen years of age Gervase Gabion was
compelled to leave even orthodox and
Jacobitical Oxford, for openly expressed and
obstinately maintained anti-Hanoverian
principles; that at twenty-one he raised, equipped,
and commanded as fierce a troop of
Westmoreland troopers as you could find now in