[148] The Princess Dowager (1719-1772), youngest daughter of Frederick II., Duke of Saxe Gotha, widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales, mother of George III. and the Queen Caroline of Denmark, died at Carlton House on February 8, 1772.
[149] Either Joseph Cradock's adaptation of Voltaire's play Les Scythes, acted at Covent Garden under the title of Zobeïde, with a prologue by Goldsmith, or Cumberland's Fashionable Lover, as acted at Drury Lane. Both plays were published early in 1772.
[150] The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas, otherwise Gerund Zotes. London, 1772. 2 vols., 8vo.
[151] George Wilbraham, of Delamere Lodge, Cheshire.
[152] Godfrey Bagnal Clarke, M.P. for Derbyshire, who had made the tour of Italy at the same time as Gibbon.
[153] The name by which Mr. Holroyd's son called himself.
[154] Colonel Isaac Barré (1726-1802), succeeded Lord Fitzmaurice as M.P. for Chipping Wycombe in 1761. He afterwards sat for Calne. He had served under Wolfe at Quebec, and appears in West's famous picture of the death of Wolfe. At the battle he lost his left eye, and in his picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds the right side of his face is turned towards the spectator. He was a prominent opponent of Lord North, and held office under the first Pitt, and subsequently in the Rockingham and Shelburne administrations.
[155] The Duke of Cumberland married, in October, 1771, Mrs. Horton, a daughter of Simon Luttrell, Lord Irnham (afterwards Earl of Carhampton), "a young widow of twenty-four, with the most amorous eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long." The Duke of Gloucester, a few months later, avowed his clandestine marriage with Maria, an illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, and widow of the second Earl of Waldegrave. The Royal Marriage Bill was brought in, in consequence of these marriages, on February 20, 1772, and became law in the following March.
[156] Colonel Luttrell (1743-1821), brother of the Duchess of Cumberland, had been declared by the House to be elected for Middlesex against Wilkes in April, 1769, although the latter polled 1143 votes to Colonel Luttrell's 296. He was made adjutant-general of the land forces in Ireland; but in 1772, being discontented with the post, threatened to resign his seat for Middlesex, and so renew the struggle with Wilkes. The circumstances in which the appointment was made are noticed by Junius (August 22, 1770).
[157] Walpole, writing in May, 1770, speaks of "a winter-Ranelagh erecting in Oxford Road at the expense of sixty thousand pounds." "Imagine Balbec in all its glory!" he writes, when it was approaching completion in April, 1771. The Pantheon, built by Wyatt, was opened on January 27, 1772, "to a crowded company of between fifteen hundred and two thousand people. In point of consequence, the company were an olio of all sorts; peers, peeresses, honourables, and right honourables, jew brokers, demireps, lottery insurers, and quack doctors" (Annual Register). It was destroyed by fire on January 16, 1792.