(374) A scheme for obtaining a larger allowance for the Prince of Wales.
(375) Catherine, Duchess Dowager of Buckingham, natural daughter of King James II. (Supposed to be really the daughter of Colonel Graham, a man of Gallantry of the time, and a lover of her mother, Lady Dorchester.-D.) [This remarkable woman was extravagantly proud of her descent from James the Second, and affected to be the head of the Jacobite party in England. She maintained a kind of royal state, and affected great devotion to the memory of her father and grandfather. On the death of her son, the second Duke of Buckingham of the Sheffield family (whose funeral was celebrated in a most extraordinary manner), she applied to the old Duchess of Marlborough, who was as high spirited as herself, for the loan of the richly-ornamented hearse which had conveyed the great duke to his grave. "Tell her," said Sarah, "it carried the Duke of Marlborough, and shall never carry any one else." "My upholsterer," rejoined Catherine of Buckingham in a fury, "tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds."-" This last stroke," says the editor of the Suffolk Correspondence, " was aimed at the parsimony of their Graces of Marlborough, which was supposed to have been visible even in the funeral; but the sarcasm was as unjust as the original request of borrowing the hearse was mean and unfeeling."-E.]
(376) Angelo Maria Cori, prompter to the Opera.
(377) Mr. Sheffield, natural son of the late Duke of Buckingham, with whom she was at law.
(378) Francis, Baron, and afterwards created Earl Brooke.
(379) Robert Nugent, a poet, a patriot, an author, a lord of the treasury, (and finally an Irish peer by the titles of Lord Clare and Earl Nugent. He seems to have passed his long life in seeking lucrative places and courting rich widows, in both of which pursuits be was eminently successful.-D.) [He married the sister and heiress of Secretary Craggs, and his only daughter married the first Marquis of Buckingham. A volume of his ,Odes and Epistles" were published anonymously in 1733. He died in 1788.)
(380) Lord Gage was one of those persons to whom the privileges of parliament were of extreme consequence, as their own liberties were inseparable from them.
(381) Mary, fourth daughter of King George II.
(382) Ulrica, Queen of Sweden, sister of Charles XII.
(383) This relates to the revolution by which the young Czar John was deposed, and the Princess Elizabeth raised to the throne.