During these transactions, the unfortunate Queen of Poland died suddenly at Dresden; a witness of calamities to which she had not contributed, and which she had in vain remained there to temper.
In England, Sir John Ligonier, to whom the supreme command of the British armies was entrusted, was created a Viscount of Ireland, and a Marshal, with his seniors, Sir Robert Rich and Lord Molesworth. Lord George Sackville succeeded as Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance; and by that employment escaped the unwelcome command in America, which he could not with any grace have otherwise avoided.
Colley Cibber, that good-humoured and honest veteran, so unworthily aspersed by Pope, and whose Memoirs, with one or two of his comedies, will secure his fame, in spite of all the abuse of his contemporaries, dying about this time at a very great age, the Duke of Devonshire bestowed the laurel on Mr. Whitehead, a man of a placid genius. His Grace had first designed it for Gray,[14] then for Mason, but was told that both would decline it. In truth, it was not Cibber’s silly odes that disgraced the employment, but an annual panegyric venally extorted for whatever King, and with or without occasion, that debased the office. Gray, crowned with the noblest wreaths of Parnassus, could not stoop to be dubbed poet by a Lord Chamberlain; and Mason, though he had not then displayed all the powers of his genius, had too much sense and spirit to owe his literary fame to anything but his own merit.
On the 28th of December died the King’s third daughter, Princess Caroline. She had been the favourite of the Queen, who preferred her understanding to those of all her other daughters, and whose partiality she returned with duty, gratitude, affection, and concern. Being in ill health at the time of her mother’s death, the Queen told her she would follow her in less than a year. The Princess received the notice as a prophecy; and though she lived many years after it had proved a vain one, she quitted the world, and persevered in the closest retreat, and in constant and religious preparation for the grave; a moment she so eagerly desired, that when something was once proposed to her, to which she was averse, she said, “I would not do it to die!” To this impression of melancholy had contributed the loss of Lord Hervey,[15] for whom she had conceived an unalterable passion, constantly marked afterwards by all kind and generous offices to his children. For many years she was totally an invalid, and shut herself up in two chambers in the inner part of St. James’s, from whence she could not see a single object. In this monastic retirement, with no company but of the King, the Duke, Princess Emily, and a few of the most intimate of the Court, she led, not an unblameable life only, but a meritorious one: her whole income was dispensed between generosity and charity; and, till her death by shutting up the current discovered the source, the jails of London did not suspect that the best support of their wretched inhabitants was issued from the Palace.
From the last Sunday to the Wednesday on which she died, she declined seeing her family; and when the mortification began, and the pain ceased, she said, “I feared I should not have died of this!”
Finished August 8th, 1759.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] He himself took a cutter and twenty marines and went to survey the coast. A battery fired on them; and one of the rowers said, “Sir, we are in great danger.” He replied, coolly, “Pho, they can’t hurt us;” and turning to young Fitzroy (Charles, afterwards Lord Southampton, from whom I received this relation), he said, “Now, if they would not say I was boyish, I would land with these twenty marines, to show them we can.” I have already mentioned his gallant behaviour at Fontenoy, at Laffelt, and at Culloden, at the first of which battles he was taken prisoner; but I cannot help repeating an unsuspected, because disinterested testimonial in his favour. When this miscarriage at Rochfort made so much noise, and the courage of the Generals was questioned, Lord Chesterfield said to Mr. Fox these words: “I am sure Conway is brave; I remember when I was praising George Stanhope (a young man of remarkable spirit, brother of Earl Stanhope), he replied, ‘Faith, my Lord, I believe I have as much courage as other people; indeed, I don’t pretend to be like Harry Conway, who walks up to the mouth of a cannon with as much coolness and grace, as if he was going to dance a minuet.’”
[11] Lord George Sackville, who was privy to this negotiation, and who hated the Speaker on former injuries, said, “Ponsonby is a dirty fellow; we have nothing to do but rub his nose against a Devonshire.”
[12] The conduct of one of his friends was not quite so judicious; Potter, then ill at Bath, sent the Mayor of the place an account of a private letter he had received from Mr. Pitt, lamenting his disappointment, which had broken his heart. This letter was left for public perusal in a bookseller’s shop, till getting into the Bath Journal, Potter thought proper to advertise that this had been done contrary to his intention.