He [Charles Edward Stuart, the Young pretender] had never had strong religious convictions and only his father's undeviating faith and efforts to inculcate the necessity of his son's adherence to Catholicism prevented him from renouncing it before the Forty-Five. The irony of the story lies in the Prince's wavering. Had he boldly apostatized before he set out for Scotland he would probably have succeeded in this expedition and rallied that large body of secret Jacobite sympathizers who could not stomach the prospect of being ruled by another papist Stuart.
J. Lees-Milne, The last Stuarts (1983), 90
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