[1359] Letter to Charles, 14th April, 1755, among Stuart Papers.
[1360] Letter to Charles of 3d February, 1747.
[1361] Lord Mahon thinks that Charles had contracted a disparaging opinion of the tender sex in general. Among the Stuart Papers is the following written by Charles about the time of his marriage:—“As for men, I have studied them myself, and were I to live till fourscore, I could scarcely know them better than now, but as for women, I have thought it useless, they being so much more wicked and impenetrable.” “Ungenerous and ungrateful words,” justly exclaims Lord Mahon; “surely as he wrote them, the image of Flora Macdonald should have risen in his heart and restrained his hand.”—Mahon’s England, v. iii., p. 527.
[1362] Letters from Italy by an Englishwoman, London, 1776. Quoted by Lord Mahon.
[1363] Klose’s Memoirs, v. ii., p. 241.
[1364] Mahon’s England, v. ii., p. 528.
[1365] Mahon’s England, v. iii. p. 529.
[1366] See the whole story set forth and conclusively refuted in the Quarterly Review for June 1847.
[1367] A gentleman of Jacobite sympathies, to whom this part of the work has been submitted, appends the following note:—
“It is but justice, however, to these gentlemen to say, that they have never made any loud or noisy assertion of their claims, leaving, what they believe to be, the fact of their descent to be indicated, rather than asserted in the work above mentioned. It is understood, also, that they do not encourage much reference being made to those claims, which they consider to amount only to the fact of their being descended from Prince Charles, not to any ‘Divine Right’ to the throne in virtue of that descent; that right having been forfeited, they believe, by the fact of themselves and their ancestors having been Roman Catholics—the nation having declared for a Protestant succession. It looks also as if they depended on the strength of truth, or what they believe to be truth, that they have never answered the criticisms of the Quarterly reviewer, whilst at the same time it is understood that they maintain that they could answer him, if they were so minded. They bore a high character during their residence in the Highlands of Scotland, which character they still retain. It is some time since the writer of this note has seen them, but the resemblance which their features bore to the features of the ancient Stuart race used to be remarked by all who knew them. This, however, would not prove much. Even the Quarterly reviewer does not allege that they were conscious or knowingly impostors.”