AN AMERICAN MONARCHY.
After the downfall of Napoleon I., in 1815, several young Americans who subsequently earned high position as writers and statesmen, among them Irving, Everett, Ticknor, Legaré, and Preston, (afterward Senator from South Carolina,) went to Europe for the benefit of foreign travel. While abroad, they took an opportunity to pay a visit to Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Preston relates that during the evening, in the course of conversation, Sir Walter gave an account of a curious discovery he had made.
Not long after it had been divulged who was the author of the “Waverley Novels,” Scott was the Regent’s (afterward George the Fourth) guest in the royal palace, where, one day, the latter ordered the key of a certain room to be given to the great writer, saying that it opened the door of the Stuart Chamber, where all the papers concerning the Stuarts and their pretenders were kept. George gave Scott full permission to rummage among all these records, and to use what he liked for his works. “I depend on your discretion,” he said, and Scott went. He spent several days in this curious chamber, and, so he told Preston, one day stumbled upon what seemed to him a remarkable paper. It consisted of a call and petition, by Scottish in America, chiefly, however, by the Gaelic Scottish who had a settlement—“saddle-bagging” as it is sometimes expressed in the West—in North Carolina, addressed to the Pretender (Prince Charles Edward, grandson of James the Second), as he was then called, to come to America and assume the crown of this realm.
The question whether this country had not best be turned into a monarchy was seriously and very naturally mooted, in the earliest days of our national existence, but until this singular revelation was made, it was not known that such a positive offer, a very strange one, to say the least, had been made.