Be this as it may, Jacobitism was as surely dying out as he was who had crushed the hopes of Jacobites at Culloden. The victor on that field, and even now in the prime of life, died in 1765, of what Walpole called a ‘rot among princes.’ He was a ton of man, unwieldy, asthmatic, blind of one eye, nearly so of the other, lame through his old Dettingen wound, half breathless from asthma, half paralysed by an old attack, able to write a letter, yet not able to collect his senses sufficiently to play a game of piquet. On the 30th of October, he went to Court, and received Lord Albemarle to dine with him, at his house in Grosvenor Street. Unable to attend a Cabinet Council in the evening, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Northington called on him. As they entered the room, one of his valets was about to bleed him, at his own request. Before the operation could be performed, the duke murmured, ‘It is all over!’ and fell dead in Lord Albemarle’s arms.
Lord Albemarle remembered that when the duke’s brother, Frederick, Prince of Wales, died, his cautious widow immediately burned all his papers and letters. Lord Albemarle could not take upon himself to destroy the duke’s papers, but he sent the whole of them to the duke’s favourite sister, the Princess Amelia. She replied, from Gunnersbury, ‘You are always attentive and obliging, my good Lord Albemarle. I thank you for the letters, and I have burnt them.’ Many a secret perished with them. George III. conferred on Lord Albemarle the duke’s garter.
The bitterness and pertinacity of the Jacobites against the duke cannot be better illustrated than by an incident recorded by Boswell. Johnson, Wedderburne, Murphy, and Foote, visited ‘Bedlam’ (in Moorfields) together. At that time idle people went to look at the ‘mad people in dens,’ as they now go to a menagerie, or ‘the Zoo.’ Boswell says that Foote gave a very entertaining account of Johnson having his attention arrested by a man who was very furious, and who, while beating his straw, supposed it was William Duke of Cumberland, whom he was punishing for his cruelties in Scotland, in 1746. The entertainment was in the fact that Jacobite Johnson was amused by this sad spectacle.
The duke was soon followed on ‘the way to dusty death,’ by him whose life he had certainly helped to embitter.
DEATH OF THE OLD CHEVALIER.
The death of the Chevalier de St. George, at Rome, on New Year’s Night, 1766, was not known in London for nearly a fortnight. The only stir caused by it was at the Council Board at St. James’s, whence couriers rode away with despatches for foreign courts, which couriers speedily returned with satisfactory answers. The Chevalier might, like Charles II., have apologised to those who attended his death-bed, on his being so long adying. What had come to be thought of him in London may be partly seen in Walpole’s ‘Memoirs of the reign of George III.’ There the Chevalier is spoken of as one who had outlived his own hopes and the people who had ever given him any. ‘His party was dwindled to scarce any but Catholics.’ Of the church of the latter, Walpole calls him the most meritorious martyr, and yet Rome would not recognise the royalty of the heirs. ‘To such complete humiliation was reduced that ever unfortunate House of Stuart, now at last denied the empty sound of royalty by the Church and Court, for which they had sacrificed three kingdoms.’
FUNERAL RITES.
The newspapers and other periodicals of the time took less interest in the event than in a prize-fight. The feeling with trifling exception was one of indifference, but there was nowhere any expression of disrespect. The various accounts of the imperial ceremony with which the body of the unlucky prince lay in state, and was ultimately entombed, were no doubt read with avidity. The imagination of successive reporters grew with details of their subject. A figure of Death which appears among the ‘properties’ of the lying in state, in the earliest account, expands into ‘thirteen skeletons holding wax tapers’ in the later communications. To this state ceremony, the London papers assert, none were admitted but Italian princes and English—Jacobites of course,—several of whom left London for the purpose. At the transfer of the body to St. Peter’s, the royal corpse was surrounded by ‘the English college,’ and was followed by ‘four Cardinals on mules covered with purple velvet hangings.’ The Jacobites must have put down the London papers with a feeling that their king was dead, and a hope that his soul was at rest.
The death seems to have had a curious effect on at least one London Jacobite. In January, 1766, two heads remained on Temple Bar. The individual just referred to thought they had remained there long enough. For some nights he secretly discharged bullets at them from a cross-bow; and at last he was caught in the act. He was suspected of being a kinsman of one of the unhappy sufferers; but in presence of the magistrates he maintained that he was a loyal friend of the established government; ‘that he thought it was not sufficient that traitors should merely suffer death, and that consequently he had treated the heads with indignity by trying to smash them.’ This offender, who affected a sort of silliness, was dismissed with a caution. There were found upon him fifty musket bullets, separately wrapped in paper, each envelope bearing the motto ‘Eripuit ille vitam,’ the application of which would have puzzled Œdipus himself.
GEORGE III. AND DR. JOHNSON.