The passage of the prophet Isaiah which formed the substance of his mother's last benediction is chap. xli. verses 8 and 9, and chap. xliii. verses 2 and 3: "Thou Israel art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham, my friend," &c. He inclines to think that "the writer of the book called Isaiah was a friend to the British nation, and that the islands of Great Britain and Ireland are those addressed to, in order to renew their strength."
It was on April 23, 1730, O.S., that "by the unanimous consent of the people he was made law-giver, commander, leader, and chief of the Cherokee nation, and witness of the power of God, at a general meeting at Nequisee, in the Cherokee Mountains." He brought with him to England six Cherokee chiefs, and on June 18, in that year, he was allowed to present them to the King in the Royal Chapel at Windsor. This was at the time of the installation of the Duke of Cumberland and the Earls of Chesterfield and Burlington. On June 22nd was the ceremony of laying his crown at the feet of the King, when the Indian chiefs laid also their four scalps and five eagles' tails.
In a few years the scene was changed, and in 1737 we find him confined within the limits of the Fleet Prison; but having a rule of court, on the 8th of November he was at Knightsbridge, where about ten in the morning he opened the Bible for an answer to his prayers, and chanced upon the fifty-first and fifty-second chapters of Isaiah. He feels a call to a mission to the Jews, and contemplates visiting Poland. With that disposition of a mind disordered as his was, to turn everything towards a particular object, he thinks there was some mysterious connexion between the fact that Queen Caroline was seized with the illness which proved fatal, in her library, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 9th of November, the day after his call.
In 1750 he was still in the Fleet Prison, from whence, on May 15, he addressed a letter to Lord Halifax, asserting his right to the Cherokee Mountains, and proposing a scheme for the discharge of eighty millions of the National Debt; the scheme being, that 300,000 families of Jews should be settled in that country for the improvement of the lands, as industrious honest subjects. This letter notices also two facts in the Cuming history: 1. That Sir Alexander's father had been the means of saving the life of King George the Second; and 2. That he, Sir Alexander, had been taken into the secret service of the crown, at Christmas, 1718, at a salary of 300l. a-year, which was discontinued at Christmas, 1721.
J. H.
Torrington Square.
GENERAL WOLFE.
(Vols. iv. and v., passim.)
As everything connected with General Wolfe is entitled to notice, the following names and public positions of his direct or collateral ancestors may not be uninteresting to your readers. I lately furnished you, from Ferrar's History of Limerick, a statement of the circumstances under which his great-grandfather, Captain George Woulfe, sought refuge in Yorkshire (I believe) from the proscription of Ireton, after the capitulation, in 1651, of Limerick, when his brother Francis, the superior of the Franciscan friars, not having been equally fortunate in escaping, was executed, with several others, excepted from the general pardon.
The family, of English origin, like the Roches, the Arthurs, Stackpoles, Sextons, Creaghes, Whites, &c., settled in Limerick between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and gradually obtained high civil positions, when their successful commercial pursuits enabled them to acquire landed property in the adjoining county of Clare, where nearly all the above-named English families equally became extensive proprietors. In
1470. Garret Woulfe was one of the city bailiffs, as those subsequently called sheriffs were then named.