"Good!—second to none—good, very good!" said the young king, bowing very pleasantly, and presenting his hand, which I suppose I was expected to kiss; but which, in my ignorance, I shook very cordially, to the amusement of many fine lords and macaronies who stood by. I coloured, but said confidently—
"Commissioned by his Serene Highness Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, General of the allies, I have been sent from our camp at Warburg in Westphalia, to lay at your majesty's feet these trophies, the standards of the regiments of Dauphiné and Bretagne, captured in our late attack on Zierenberg."
From my hands the king took the colours, which were of blue silk, with the royal crown and cypher of France. One bore the silver fleurs-de-lys; the other the golden dolphin of Dauphiné in a field ermine, and both exhibited the holes where many a bullet had passed. He thanked me in a very handsome manner, while all the brilliant groups which crowded that magnificent apartment drew near to observe and to listen.
Something of my story, perhaps of my early misfortunes, my unmerited wrong, and my enlistment, with a hundred fables tacked thereto, had been buzzed or whispered about; thus I found many bright eyes and well-powdered personages in fashionable pasteboard skirts regarding me with well-bred interest.
"Good!" said the king, whose eloquence seldom overflowed; "this is very good, and your services shall be duly appreciated. Did you serve at Minden?"
"I had the honour."
"In the cavalry?"
"Yes, sire—in the Scots Greys."
At those words, a gentleman in a brigadier wig and suit of grey, corded with silver, turned abruptly and surveyed me with a louring eye. He was no other than my Lord George Sackville, who hated the Scots—as he afterwards did the Americans—because ten of the sixteen generals who found him guilty of misconduct at Minden were born north of the Tweed; and so blindly did he hate that portion of Britain, that for a time he was universally believed to be the author of "Junius' Letters;" thus, at the mention of the Greys, 'tis no wonder that he started as if a wasp had stung him.
The king gave the standards to my Lord Huntingdon, and bowed to us again, as we now withdrew to make way for others. In retiring, I then perceived near the throne one who had good reason to remember with gratitude and respect the uniform of a Scots Grey, the little Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York, whom Jack Charters had saved from drowning when the man-o'-war's boat was smashed by a cannon shot near Querqueville Point at Cherbourg.