Descendants of the Stuarts

1]6 THE DESCENDANTS
James II. enumerated (as before mentioned) a son
and three daughters, named respectively, James,
Mary, Anne, and Louisa, Of these, James, Prince
of Wales, his father's heir^ was excluded the throne
of Great Britain by the base fiction of his being a
supposititious child ; a fallacy which only the malig-
nity of party faction could have devised or success-
fully imposed on its followers ; but which, for the
credit of human nature, has long been abandoned
by its pretended dupes as an untenable theory. This
prince, after the abortive attempts of 1708-15-19,
seems to have abandoned all idea of regaining his
lost inheritance, though the brilliant heroism of his
son, the daring Young Pretender, in 1745 cast a
meteoric gleam of splendour over his fallen cause.
*' Por him alone," touchingly remarks Madame de
Maintenon, in one of her letters, " is there no revo-
lution, but an eternal continuance of misfortunes."
James married, 1719, the Princess Clementine,
grand-daughter of Poland's great warrior-monarch,
John Sobieski; by whom he had issue two sons,
Charles, born 31st December, 1720, and Henry,
born 6th March, 1725 ; the former of whom is
immortalized in our annals as the Gallant Hero of
1745. That his conduct in this undertaking was
not the rash daring of a heedless boy (as his
maligners have so pertinaciously and for a time so
successfully led his countrymen to imagine), but
the maturely digested plan of a sagacious and
chivalric captain, is proved by recent authorities ;