Their title’s avow’d by my country.
But why of that epocha make such a fuss,
That gave us the Hanover stem?
If bringing them over was lucky for us,
I’m sure ’twas as lucky for them.
But loyalty truce! we’re on dangerous ground,
Who knows how the fashions may alter?
The doctrine to-day, that is loyalty sound,
To-morrow may bring us a halter.
This sort of reserve was practised by many Jacobites, in London, as well as in Scotland. There was no knowing what might happen. In 1770, the French minister, De Choiseul, was strongly disposed to help Charles Edward to be crowned at Westminster, but that prince was so helplessly drunk when he arrived at the minister’s house in Paris that he was at once sent back. But the hapless adventurer never lost all hope of finding himself in the Hall or the Abbey. In 1779, Wraxall says that Charles Edward exhibited to the world a very humiliating spectacle. Mrs. Piozzi, on the margin of her copy, wrote—‘Still more so at Florence, in 1786. Count Alfieri had taken away his consort, and he was under the dominion and care of a natural daughter who wore the Garter and was called Duchess of Albany. She checked him when he drank too much or when he talked too much. Though one evening, he called Mr. Greathead up to him, and said in good English, and in a loud though cracked voice: “I will speak to my own subjects in my own way, Sir; aye! and I will soon speak to you, Sir, in Westminster Hall!”’