This announcement was made, probably, to keep warm the interest of the Protestant Jacobites in the Stuart family generally, and in the person, particularly, of young Charles Edward, of whose equivocal Church-of-Englandism this is the equally equivocal foreshadowing. In the same month, little Prince William was created Duke of Cumberland. The future victor at Culloden was then five years old. The papers had at an earlier period recorded how he had cut his teeth, and they now noticed his military tendencies; but none could have conjectured how these were to be applied subsequently, at Fontenoy, and on the field near Inverness.
A simple act on the part of his father, the Prince of Wales, awoke the Whig muse to sing his praise. During the absence of the king in Hanover, a fire broke out in Spring Gardens. The Prince went down to it, not as an idle spectator in the way of the firemen, but as an active helper. This help was so effectively given as to induce a Whig poet to put the popular feeling in rhyme:—
Thy guardian, blest Britannia, scorns to sleep,
When the sad subjects of his father weep.
Weak Princes, by their fears, increase distress,
He faces danger, and so makes it less.
Tyrants, on blazing towers may smile with joy:
He knows to save is greater than destroy!
IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.
When the king was this year in town, he risked his popularity among the Whig mobile, by adding a considerable portion of Hyde Park to the pretty but confined grounds—Kensington Gardens. There was an outcry, but grumblers were informed that they should rather rejoice, seeing that the whole would be laid out ‘after the fashion of the Elector of Hanover’s famous gardens at Herrenhausen.’ The Jacobites wished the Elector had never quitted that ancestral home of beauty. The present generation may be congratulated that the King of England created such another home of beauty here. It was, indeed, for himself and family: the public were not thought of. A few peers and peeresses, with other great personages, were allowed to have keys, in the absence of the royal family; but, at the present time, the gardens have become the inheritance of the nation; and the national heir may be proud of such a possession.