I Don't See Myself Blogging on This Topic Across Five Aprils

I suppose I shouldn't let April pass without making at least one comment on the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States. This will probably be it, though. The great conflagration that took over 600,000 lives just isn't really my cup of tea when it comes to American history. I find the entire topic to be altogether depressing. I'll never forget leaving Gettysburg completely overtaken by melancholy - a feeling of depression that didn't leave me for days.

If you really want some excellent commentary on the War, generally with some great insights from a Catholic perspective, then I recommend you follow the posts on the subject by my friend Don McClarey at The American Catholic.

For my part, I will just leave it at my general philosophy about the conflict between North and South:

I am, by virtue of having spent most of my life in those states, both a Texan and a Virginian, although I am now exiled to the land of Grant and Sherman. Nevertheless, I would like to think that, had I lived back then, I would have opposed secession. But once the decision was made, my loyalty would have been to my home states.

Of course, slavery and secession were unjustifiable blights on America's history. But, in my view, so was Lincoln's decision to make war against the populations of those states once they decided they no longer wished to be associated with the Union. There is nothing sacrosanct about an America undivided, and such an exalted notion does not justify making war against the populations of the Southern states.

I do not deny (nor am I proud of) the fact that the Southern states seceded to preserve the systematic enslavement of their fellow man. But I DO deny that the average Confederate soldier (or even General Lee and General Jackson, for that matter) was fighting for the preservation of slavery - they were fighting because what they considered their "country" (i.e. the states of their birth) had been invaded.

All the Proof You Need That the GOP Did NOT Get the Message ...

... "After gains, Cornyn likely to stay on as head of NRSC".

So, the guy who backed Charlie Crist (soon-to-be-unemployed RINO-to-"Independent" turncoat and shameless flip-flopper extraordinaire) over Marco Rubio, and who backed Arlen Specter (soon-to-be-unemployed RINO-to-Democrat turncoat) over Pat Toomey, and who sat by and did nothing while Princess Lisa (RINO-to-Write-In turncoat) overtook Joe Miller, gets to keep his job?

Want additional proof that the establishment GOP is completely out of touch? Try this on for size:

"Former Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) has even floated Cornyn’s name as a promising presidential candidate in 2012."

Idiots. The whole lot of them.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
"Party Unity" is Only for Wing Nuts (Suckers)

The Archbold Boys Go Off on the GOP [UPDATED]

John Cornyn and the Rest of the Idiots at the NRSC Will Never Learn, Will They?

The "Stupid Party" is All the More Stupid for Having John Cornyn Among Its Ranks

Look on the Bright Side, Cleveland ...

... at least you're not Detroit.

Goodbye Cleveland

For some reason, this song is stuck in my head today:

Goodbye Cleveland.
Turn down the rock and roll,
Turn out the light.
Goodbye Cleveland.
Goodbye, good luck and good night.

~ Robert Earl Keen

You can listen to an excerpt here.

The Smear, Part 2: Stupak Attacks Catholic Bishops

This is a follow-up to my post from yesterday titled "The Smear", in which we examined Bart Stupak's remarks from the floor of the House of Representatives and discovered that he had attacked pro-lifers (who were merely seeking to enact his own Stupak Amendment) utilizing the stinging words of the enemies of the pro-life movement.

In response to my post, I heard such things as "Oh, he wasn't attacking pro-lifers, he was criticizing the Republicans who were merely politicizing pro-life rhetoric in order to defeat health care."

Well, with this full frontal assault on the U.S. Catholic Bishops, I think any benefit of the doubt that Stupak might have received may now be officially removed:

Stupak says Catholic bishops and pro-life groups hypocrites for condemning health-care vote

Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat whose support for President Obama’s health bill ensured it was passed into law Sunday, on Tuesday accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and pro-life groups of “hypocrisy” for condemning the executive order that sealed the deal.

“The [National] Right to Life and the bishops, in 2007 when George Bush signed the executive order on embryonic stem cell research, they all applauded the executive order,” Stupak said in an interview with The Daily Caller.

“The Democratic Congress passed [a bill] saying we’ll do embryonic stem cell research. Bush vetoed it in 2007. That same day he issued an executive order saying we will not do it, and all these groups applauded that he protected life,” Stupak said.

“So now President Obama’s going to sign an executive order protecting life and everyone’s condemning it. The hypocrisy is great,” he said.

Obama will sign the order at the White House on Wednesday, the White House announced Tuesday night. Stupak and 12 other pro-life Democrats who voted for the health bill are invited to the signing ceremony.

Stupak also said he suspected groups such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Right to Life, and others were actually “just using the life issue to try to bring down health-care reform.”

“I question, did they want to protect the sanctity of life, or did they want to defeat health care?” he said. [ED.: Yeah, it's not like the U.S. Bishops have been pushing for universal healthcare for close to a century, or anything. It's rather funny in a pathetic sort of way that Stupak is now accusing the Bishops of doing exactly what the opponents of the Stupak Amendment were accusing him of doing. Besides, I thought the whole point of the Stupak Amendment, and the Bishops' involvement therein, was that protecting the sanctity of life and promoting health care were not only NOT mutually exclusive, but that you couldn't have one without the other.]

[...]

The pro-life groups said their criticism had to do specifically with Obama’s executive order, which they say can do nothing to override provisions in the health bill.

“We haven’t said anything to suggest we think executive orders are never of value,” said Douglas Johnson, NRLC’s legislative director, in a phone interview.

Johnson said that Bush’s 2007 executive order, which followed his veto of legislation that would have expanded embryonic stem cell research, did not contravene existing law, but instead supported it, making it more “airtight.”

In addition, Bush’s 2001 executive order banning the use of most embryonic stem cell research simply undid authorization that had been put in place by federal regulations, not legislative action.

The problem with Obama’s executive order, Johnson said, it is “it basically just recites what’s in the Senate bill.” [ED.: For Stupak not to recognize the distinction between Bush's executive order prohibiting federal funding of ESCR when there was no federal law in place providing for such funding and Obama's promised executive order "clarifying" a federal law regarding funding of abortion exposes Stupak either as not very intelligent or as being a mendacious fraud.]

[Read more]

It's almost as if the show of loyalty the former rebel must pay to be fully accepted back into the king's good graces is to offer up the blood of his former compatriots.

Pro-life Democrats, R.I.P.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn writes that "Bart Stupak's vote for the health bill shows that in the end you can't count on prolife Democrats":

And then there were none.

When Bart Stupak announced Sunday he was now a "yes" on the health-care bill, six Democrats stood with him. Even that handful would have been enough to defeat the bill. Instead, they accepted the fig leaf of an executive order—and threw away all the hard-won gains they had made.

Amid the recriminations it's easy to overlook what Mr. Stupak had cobbled together. His amendment restricting federal funding for abortions, passed in November, marked the only bipartisan vote in this whole health-care mess. For the first time since Roe v. Wade, pro-life Democrats had seized the legislative initiative in the teeth of their leadership's opposition—and brought the party of abortion to heel.

Now Mr. Stupak has thrown it away. By caving at the last hour, he discredited all who stood with him. (What does it say about Ohio's Marcy Kaptur and Pennsylvania's Chris Carney that they had already agreed to vote yes even before the fig leaf of the executive order had come through?) In addition to undermining an encouraging partnership with pro-lifers across the congressional aisle, Mr. Stupak signaled that, in the end, you can't count on pro-life Democrats.

"The peer pressure to be part of the team can be overwhelming," says Chris Smith, a pro-life GOP congressman from New Jersey. "But sometimes it's absolutely necessary, regardless of the cost, to bend into the wind, unmovable, committed to what your heart, mind and conscience know to be right."

"For so long, Bart did that. Then he was like a runner who stopped a hundred feet before the finish line. It's a sad day for the unborn, a sad day for their mothers, and a serious setback for the culture of life."

[Read the whole thing]

Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Stupak Sells Out ... [UPDATED]

Stupak Sells Out ... [UPDATED]

... and speaks out against and then votes against his own Stupak Amendment (which all the House Republicans, not to mention the U.S. Bishops, supported):



Deep down, I always had a feeling that this would happen. After all, he is a Democrat:

I have to admit that, when push comes to shove, I fear ... no ... I truly expect the pro-life Democrat contingent - including Stupak - to do what they always do: put party over pro-life principle and line up lockstep behind Pelosi and the Democrat leadership.

Any notion that there is a REAL pro-life presence in the Democrat Party ought to officially be laid to rest at this point.

Kathryn Lopez shares this view:

I think we’re witnessing Bart Stupak write the obit for the concept of the “pro-life Democrat”.

(Hat tip: Chris Blosser)

As I noted the other day:

... by undermining a solidly pro-life [ED.: cough, cough!] Catholic Democrat like Stupak, these folks have all but quashed any meaningful chance of there being a subtantial pro-life voice or presence in the Democratic Party. What pro-life Democrat is going to go out on a limb and take an unpopular stand within his or her party or against his or her party leadership after this?

Rather than fight what could have been a winnable battle to include the Stupak language in health care reform, they've sold out the unborn, they've sold out the Church and her Bishops, they've sold out their allegedly pro-life principles, and they've even sold out their own party by consigning it to perpetual "pro-choice" status. They'll never win their party back to the pro-life cause after this.

Too bad Stupak was among those selling himself out. Again, I had a feeling that, in the end, even Stupak would sell out his pro-life principles.

My friend Don McClarey aptly sums it up:

For pro-lifers the Republican party is the only game in town for meaningful pro-life legislation. This will be distasteful for pro-lifers who hate the Republican party only a little less than they love the unborn, but that is the simple truth. For people who wish to continue the effort to spread the pro-life message in the Democrat party, may you have success. I expect that you will fail, and in future I will assume that all elected pro-life Democrats are being mendacious until they prove otherwise by hard votes.

Yep.


UPDATE
Yeah, what Joe Hargrave said:

The viciousness with which he [Stupak] then attacked pro-life Republicans during the following vote was like a victory dance with salt-coated shoes over open wounds. And all they were trying to do was get HIS language in the bill – his reason for berating them was that he had the utmost confidence in Obama’s EO.

What a chump. What an irrational, foolish man.

(emphasis added)

When an allegedly "pro-life" Democrat would rather party with and be feted by death cultists (who just a few days ago were reviling him as "un-American") and rub his supposedly fellow pro-lifers' faces in excrement than stand firm on HIS OWN anti-abortion language, that's when I feel quite comfortable in assessing the notion of a "pro-life" Democrat to be an utter lie.


UPDATE #2
Congressman Mike Pence to Stupak:

"You traded 30 years of pro-life law for a promise from the most pro-abortion president in history."

Yeah, something like that.


UPDATE #3
Susan B. Anthony List rescinds pro-life award to Stupak:

Stupak Stripped of "Defender of Life" Award

... Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund President Marjorie Dannenfelser offered the following statement:

"This Wednesday night is our third annual Campaign for Life Gala, where we were planning to honor Congressman Stupak for his efforts to keep abortion-funding out of health care reform-We will no longer be doing so. By accepting this deal from the most pro-abortion President in American history, Stupak has not only failed to stand strong for unborn children, but also for his constituents and pro-life voters across the country."

"Let me be clear: any representative, including Rep. Stupak, who votes for this healthcare bill can no longer call themselves 'pro-life.' The Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund will not endorse, or support in any capacity, any Member of Congress who votes for this bill in any future election. Now through Election Day 2010, these representatives will learn that votes have consequences. The SBA List Candidate Fund will work tirelessly to help defeat Members who support this legislation and make sure their constituents know exactly how they voted. We will actively seek out true pro-life candidates to oppose Members who vote 'yes' on this bill, whether it be in general or primary elections...

(emphasis added)


UPDATE #4
From CatholicVoteAction.org:

... [Stupak's] actions gutted any hope for a bipartisan pro-life movement that many argued would have been possible had he stood firm.

After everything we did to support Stupak and his coalition, his actions yesterday were devastating. We were betrayed.

Confronting a loss of such significance is dispiriting. The emails pouring into CatholicVote range from frustration with politics in general to questions about whether there can truly be a pro-life Democrat.

I share many of these frustrations. Our staff did everything possible to stop this disaster. We worked around the clock last week and all weekend to hold the votes together. We worked with individual bishops and staff to encourage wavering votes to hold firm. We were in regular communication with key representatives and their staffs. We ran radio ads, and launched the Stand With Stupak campaign.

We were confident that we had the votes to stop the legislation, until the end, when Stupak and his key allies folded.

The “Stand With Stupak” campaign was about a principle, not a single man. The principle was simple – no compromise on abortion.

And in the end, even Bart Stupak didn’t stand with Stupak...

(emphasis added)


UPDATE #5 (23 March)
Bill McGurn: "Pro-life Democrats, R.I.P."

The Irish in America (Part 1): Songs of the Rebel Irish

The first in a series of posts over the next week-and-a-half leading up to St. Patrick's Day.

Deal Hudson: "Why Catholics Will Not Get Abortion Out of the Health Care Bill" [UPDATED]

Deal Hudson writes at Inside Catholic:

The Congress and the White House have little to fear from the bishops' official statements opposing the abortion provisions in the health care bill. Unlike with President Barack Obama's appearance at Notre Dame, there is no chorus of bishops' voices rising in protest against the bill; most of the Catholics in Congress support it, and mainstream Catholic organizations like Catholic Charities USA and the Catholic Health Association -- which some assume speak for the bishops -- have also voiced their support.

The overall impression given by Church leadership thus far is that universal health care coverage is so badly needed that they are not willing to endanger the legislation by protesting too loudly against abortion coverage.

The only notable resistance against the abortion provisions has come from a Catholic, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ); an Evangelical, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN); and 20 "blue dog" Democrats, led by Catholic Bart Stupak (D-MI), who signed a letter asking explicitly that abortion coverage be removed from the bill.

Two official letters from the USCCB have been sent to members of Congress. Bishop William Murphy, chairman of the USCCB's Committee on Domestic Policy, wrote on July 17 asking Congress to remove abortion coverage. And on July 26, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, wrote asking them to support an amendment to exclude the abortion mandate from any health care bill.

***
Many Catholics are asking why Catholic Charities USA and the Catholic Health Association are backing a health care bill that two USCCB letters have sharply criticized for its abortion coverage. A LifeSiteNews (LSN) interview with the head of another mainstream Catholic organization supporting the present health care bill may answer the question.

When told by the LSN interviewer that the health care bill included an abortion mandate, Roger Playwin, the national executive director of the venerable St. Vincent de Paul Society, replied:

The bishops' office has advised us that that's not accurate. So I can't speak to it, because all I know is that the bishops' office has said that story is going around, but it's inaccurate. That's all I know.

When asked for clarification about where he got that information, Playwin clarified that it did not come from the USCCB but rather from Catholic Charities USA. In other words, Playwin somehow received a message from Catholic Charities USA that abortion coverage was not contained in the House and Senate versions of the bill -- which is simply not true, as the letters from Bishop Murphy and Cardinal Rigali attest.

Yet both Catholic Charities USA and the St. Vincent de Paul Society sent out legislative alerts asking for support for health care reform and did not mention the issue of abortion services.

[More]

(Hat tip: Chris Blosser at Catholics in the Public Square)


UPDATE
"Please Turn Me In to the White House"

Robert Edward Lee, Gentleman [UPDATED]

Fresh off his series paying tribute to Lincoln, Don McClarey shifts his focus to the man whose military genius, tenaciousness, and ability to command the loyalty of his men very nearly deprived Lincoln of his military objective of maintaining the Union by force of arms: General Robert Edward Lee.

But his military feats are only part of what made General Lee a great man in the eyes of his countrymen. What made him great (and beloved) was his embodiment of all that was noble about the South - personifying all of its virtues (hearing the word "genteel" immediately evokes in my mind's eye a portrait of Robert E. Lee), while devoid of most of its vices (having even been opposed both to secession and slavery and having freed his slaves years prior to the great conflagration that engulfed North and South in bloodshed).

Maybe less so today, but certainly in years past, any Southern man seeking to live a virtuous life sought to emulate 2 men: Our Lord Jesus Christ ... and the gentleman known as Robert Edward Lee.


UPDATE
Of particular note to Pro Ecclesia readers may be the fact that General Lee was descended from the patron of this blog ... St. Thomas More, and from Robert Stewart - King Robert II of Scotland.



Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Which Civil War [sic] General Are You?

A Portrait of General Lee in His Daughter's Letters

Don McClarey on The Gettysburg Address

At American Catholic.

Up From Conservatism

At The American Conservative, Reid Buckley writes that "America needs a better Right than the GOP can provide":

... I cry within myself, where is the inspiration? Where is the audacity? And I wonder often whether the young radical today reading conservative publications does not suffer from the tedium that suffocated me as a young man reading the liberal press.

Tell me quickly: what is new in conservative political thinking since 1955? Can you come up with a single tenet that rises fresh to the mind in treating vicissitudes that were undreamed of back when my brother founded National Review—the worldwide torrent of the Internet, bursting through ethnic, national, and ideological barriers, maybe reducing all philosophies of government to chauvinism; or the impact of economic globalization, which snatches some Third World peoples from penury but as suddenly dumps them back into it; or the acceptance of infanticide and euthanasia by a majority of the American people, upon whom, according to populist conservative creed—descending from Ronald Reagan, intoned from all platforms—we conservatives exhort ourselves to depend; or the religious and imperial irredentist menace of Islamic terrorism, which threatens a 100-year war of civilizations? What have conservatives to hurl at these urgent historic challenges other than the same bromides? For 40 years, smug, snide right-wingers have made merry mocking Greenpeace fanatics and ecological doomsayers without learning a blessed thing about the precariousness of the ecology and the effect of human action (not to speak of avarice) on it, as when we promiscuously exfoliate the rain forests or condemn yet one more green acre on the southeastern shore of New Jersey to the desolation of heedless urban development. We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the antics of idiots and the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers that their hysterical rhetoric obscures. The climate is most probably changing, and the human impact on it should be studied.

When last did you hear a conservative spokesman deplore yet another six-lane highway, yet another fast-food alley, yet another graceless subdivision, yet another Super Wal-Mart or Lowe’s that sucks the life out of small village businesses, yet one more onslaught against neighborhood and nature that is masked under the name of progress? Unless it is a bridge in Alaska from nowhere to nowhere, you will not hear the deepest red-dyed congressman denounce the progressive uglification of our natural inheritance, as though beauty is of no concern. Have you flown recently from Newport News to Boston at 25,000 feet on a clear day and gazed down upon the horror of American civilization? What man hath wrought! What we have done to this beautiful land? Dear God, forgive us! But when last did you hear a conservative oppose a new mall because it is ugly, an affront to the eye, accustoming thousands of human beings to dehumanizing blows against the aesthetic sense until it is benumbed? The good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparably joined. One cannot damage one without doing harm to the others. Those who fail to comprehend this are morally in error on the dialectical front, though they may be personally virtuous.

***
I wonder—I am nagged by the doubt—has the disheartening failure of the conservative movement on the domestic front, dating from the second Reagan administration, been anywhere sufficiently acknowledged or analyzed by our great conservative institutions of scholarly learning? Has sodomy become the groovy kinkiness in our society? Is prayer ever to be restored to our schools? Are the unborn in America never to be safeguarded? And our infirm or derelict elderly—are they now to be at the mercy of the avariciousness of their heirs or the parsimony of the state? Will ever an amendment to the Constitution win through defining the Republic now and forever as Christian bred and born and deliberately affirmed at the founding, putting the quietus to secularists, who seek to desacralize society as well as life?

Recall heroic General Armistead pinning his hat on the tip of his sword and—thrusting the blade high, yelling to his brave men to follow—charging through the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, at once to fall mortally wounded. That’s been called the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Did the high-water mark of the 20th-century conservative movement of the United States take place back in December 1995/January 1996 when—in what might as well have been a railroad car’s tobacco-sodden men’s room, among the cuspidors—squat, puffy Newt Gingrich stonewalled smooth, sleazy Bill Clinton?

Judging from the political deportment of the Republican Congresses and the White House in domestic matters since that time, has anyone had the audacity, courage, and honesty to tell the bald truth—which is that the Republican Party has failed the cause to which my brother Bill and so many other brilliant souls—Frank Meyer, Jim Burnham, John Chamberlain, to mention just a few—gave unstintingly of their lives? Is any establishment conservative organ today declaring unequivocally that conservatives who have any respect at all for the political philosophy they profess must forswear the Republican Party and on many major issues break ranks with government-trusting (and agnostic) neocons? Or is that fresh young mind this minute deciding that whatever the right wing says about anything is tired polemics from which candor and the imagination have long since leaked out?’

When I ponder the future of American culture, I wonder, first, whether in the future there will ever again be respect for truth in this Republic or whether we conservatives, like the vainglorious Greeks 2,500 years ago, are so tainted intellectually and corrupted philosophically that we have lost the capacity for critical thinking about ourselves, relying on euphemisms in place of truth.

***
On the political level, then, what will be the future of American civilization as far as we conservatives are concerned? Why, of knaves and charlatans on both sides of the aisle driving the Republic headlong into a metastatic colossus of a state in which the citizen has been reduced to a hapless serf; in which blunt, honest language has been euphemized out of existence; and in which a bland and servile acceptance of the inevitability of Big Brother is the received wisdom.

Where are our Friedrich Hayeks of The Road to Serfdom, our Eric Voegelins of The New Science of Politics, our Russell Kirks of The Conservative Mind? Where is our philosopher? Meantime, on the practical front, what can conservatives do? The very first thing is to dissociate from the Republican Party, which has become an albatross around the neck of integrity.

[Read the whole thing]

As a Native-Born Southerner ...

... I agree with Feddie 100%.

The image of the Confederate Battle Flag has, unfortunately, become tainted because of its association with white supremacists. It's a matter of good manners (something with which any true Southern gentleman should be primarily concerned) not to display something that causes such deep offense to so many of your fellow Americans.

Instead, if you're gonna fly a flag, fly the Bonnie Blue:



UPDATE:
And, by the way, I am amazed at the number of people I see here in Northern Ohio displaying the Confederate Battle Flag in their cars, on their homes, or on pieces of clothing. It's not a whole lot of people that do it, but enough to catch my notice.

What's up with that? Ohio has a proud history of contributing heroes to the Union cause. Virtually every town in the state has a monument to those who sacrificed their lives for the preservation of this Nation. So, what's going on?

Lochaber No More: Why HRH Elizabeth II is the Legitimate Monarch

Roman Christendom on why Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, is the legitimate monarch of the United Kingdom and all the Commonwealth Realms.

I'm sure I'm calling my own Jacobite credentials into question by posting this one.

;-)


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
An Honored Guest in The Old Dominion

Which Civil War [sic] General Are You?

(Hat tip: Dale Price)

As a native Southerner, I am both honored and thrilled with this result:

Which Civil War General are You?

Robert E Lee: You are the very image of the gentleman warrior with the soul of a river boat gambler. You place a very high price on honor and personal loyalty. Lee is widely regarded as one of the greatest generals in US history. Personally opposed to slavery, he only joined the Confederate army after Virginia seceded from the Union. Some say that he personally prolonged the war at least two years with his tactical brilliance
Take this quiz!








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Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
A Portrait of General Lee in His Daughter's Letters

This Day in Jacobite History: Lochaber No More - 20 September 1746

On 20 September 1746 - 260 years ago today - Prince Charles Edward Stuart, rightful heir to the thrones of England and Scotland, left the shores of his beloved Scotland at the same place where he had first set foot over a year earlier - Loch nan Uamh.

He boarded a French frigate, which would take him to safety and exile in France following the disastrous defeat of the Jacobite forces at Culloden and the subsequent 5-month-long manhunt for the Bonnie Prince by Hanoverian government authorities.

Thus ended the Bliadhna Thearlaich ("Charlie's Year") - known throughout history as "The '45" - and the last serious Jacobite effort to regain the thrones of England and Scotland. Charles Edward Stuart - the Bonnie Prince of the Mists - would never again set foot in Scotland.

Will Ye No Come Back Again?

Bonnie Chairlie's noo awa',
Safely ower the friendly main;
Mony a heart will break in twa',
Should he ne'er come back again.

Refrain:
Will ye no come back again?
Will ye no come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be,
Will ye no come back again?

Ye trusted in your Hielan' men,
They trusted you dear Chairlie.
They kent your hidin' in the glen,
Death or exile bravin'.

Refrain

We watched thee in the gloamin' hour,
We watched thee in the mornin' grey.
Tho' thirty thousand pounds they gie,
O there is nane that wad betray.

Refrain

Sweet the laverock' s note and lang,
Liltin' wildly up the glen.
But aye tae me he sings ae sang,
Will ye no' come back again?

Refrain:
Will ye no come back again?
Will ye no come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be,
Will ye no come back again?

Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
This Day in Jacobite History: Mary Queen of Scots Deposed - 24 July 1567

This Day in Jacobite History: The Battle of Killiecrankie - 27 July 1689

This Day in Jacobite History: Death of Queen Anne; George, Elector of Hanover, Becomes King - 1 August 1714

This Day in Jacobite History: Proscription Act Introduced, Banning Tartan and Carrying of Weapons - 1 August 1747

This Day in Jacobite History: Latin Mass Outlawed in Scotland - 11 August 1560

This Day in Jacobite History: Raising of the Jacobite Standard at Glenfinnan - 19 August 1745

This Day in Jacobite History: Marriage Ceremony of James Francis Edward Stuart and Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska - 1 September 1719

This Day in Jacobite History: Death of King James II and VII - 16 September 1701

This Day in Jacobite History: Charles Edward Stuart Arrives in Edinburgh, Proclaims His Father Rightful King - 17 September 1745