’Before I talk of any public news, I must tell you what you will be very sorry for.  Lady Granville (Lady Sophia Fermor) is dead.  She had a fever for six weeks before her lying-in, and could never get it off.  Last Saturday they called in another physician, Dr. Oliver.  On Monday he pronounced her out of danger; about seven in the evening, as Lady Pomfret and Lady Charlotte (Fermor) were sitting by her, the first notice they had of her immediate danger was her sighing and saying, “I feel death come very fast upon me!” She repeated the same words frequently, remained perfectly in her senses and calm, and died about eleven at night.  It is very shocking for anybody so young, so handsome, so arrived at the height of happiness, to be so quickly snatched away.’

So vanished one of the brightest stars of the court.  The same autumn (1745) was the epoch of a great event; the marching of Charles Edward into England.  Whilst the Duke of Cumberland was preparing to head the troops to oppose him, the Prince of Wales was inviting a party to supper, the main feature of which was the citadel of Carlisle in sugar, the company all besieging it with sugar-plums.  It would, indeed, as Walpole declared, be impossible to relate all the Caligulisms of this effeminate, absurd prince.  But buffoonery and eccentricity were the order of the day.  ‘A ridiculous thing happened,’ Horace writes, ’when the princess saw company after her confinement.  The new-born babe was shown in a mighty pretty cradle, designed by Kent, under a canopy in the great drawing-room.  Sir William Stanhope went to look at it.  Mrs, Herbert, the governess, advanced to unmantle it.  He said, “In wax, I suppose?” “Sir?” “In wax, madam?” “The young prince, sir?” “Yes, in wax, I suppose?” This is his odd humour.  When he went to see the duke at his birth, he said, “Lord, it sees!"’

The recluse of Strawberry was soon consoled by hearing that the rebels were driven back from Derby, where they had penetrated, and where the remembrance of the then gay, sanguine, brave young Chevalier long lingered among the old inhabitants.  One of the last traces of his short-lived possession of the town is gone:  very recently, Exeter House, where he lodged and where he received his adherents, has been pulled down; the ground on which it stood, with its court and garden—­somewhat in appearace like an old French hotel—­being too valuable for the relic of bygone times to be spared.  The panelled chambers, the fine staircase, certain pictures—­one by Wright of Derby, of him—­one of Miss Walkinshaw—­have all disappeared.

Of the capture, the trial, the death of his adherents, Horace Walpole has left the most graphic and therefore touching account that has been given; whilst he calls a ‘rebellion on the defensive’ a ’despicable affair.’  Humane, he reverted with horror to the atrocities of General Hawley, ‘the Chief Justice,’ as he was designated, who had a ’passion for frequent and sudden executions.’  When