Slowly and surely, however, time does its appointed work; royal personages, in stirring epochs, cannot always give their orders viva voce; letters and autographs are kept in self-defence by their agents; and these given to the public long after the persons they would compromise-nay, even after their great-grandchildren-have passed away, cast the required light on characters purposely concealed. Lo! the veiled idols cast aside their mysterious shrouds, and assume the semblance of humanity-erring and perverse humanity, perchance-but yet more attractive and interesting than the mere abstract idea the political historian has given. They are thus seen, not as expediency has painted them, but as they were in life, subject to the same passions and infirmities as ourselves, and acting according to the impulses of anger, generosity, ambition, grief, tenderness, disappointment, revenge and avarice. These impulses, of course, produce varied and even contradictory actions, which, however, when related according to the testimony of eye-witnesses, as much as possible in their very words, are found to blend together into a course of narrative, by no means outraging probability, when one fact is viewed according to its connexion with another. Yet, there are two adverse parties in this country, each imagining that the continuous narrative of facts must be prejudicial to their present interests; each have chosen their political idols or their reprobated characters from the royal personages that have existed from the days of Henry VIII. It is most curious to watch the attempts of these parties, to force the inexorable past to comply with fancied expediency-conduct which has had the natural effect of hitherto exiling many important characters from their proper stations on the pages of historical biography: one party wholly refusing to listen to any wrong of its idol, and the other to any right of its victim. Now, if the one faction insists upon snatching all the black yarn and the other all the white, which, mythological metaphor affirms, make the blended thread of human life, where is an honest narrator, willing to present that mingled twine, to look for any material?

Away with these childish wranglings with the unalterable past! Facts regarding the queenly sisters, both of Tudor and of Stuart, remain extant, defying all attempts to stifle them, guarded in manuscript among our archives, or those of France. Incidents may be told maliciously or apologetically-in both cases, the author's comment may stand in absurd contradiction to quoted authority; but these deviations from the majestic simplicity of rectitude will have the consequence of disgusting the public, and will ever render a narrative unreadable. Can a more absurd spectacle exist than when the comments of writers appear at open war with the facts they have just cited from documents?

Judging merely by the princess Anne's outward demeanour, it has been said, that she bore the death of her son, the duke of Gloucester, with the characteristic apathy of her nature-a nature supposed to have been devoid of the tenderer emotions of the female heart. She gave, however, one proof of sensibility on this melancholy occasion,' which affords indubitable evidence that feelings of a more poignant nature than

'Lamberty's Memoirs for the Seventeenth Century, vol. i. p. 121.

maternal grief were awakened in her heart by the unexpected blow that had made her house desolate. Temporal judgments were according to the spirit of the theology of that century, and the conscience of Anne Stuart brought them home to herself. The daughter who had assisted in dethroning and driving her king and father into exile, for the sake of aggrandizing her own offspring and supplanting her brother, was rendered childless. Her sin was called to remembrance by the death of her son. He, the desire of her eyes, has been taken from her by a stroke.

In that dark moment, when the object of all her sinuous policy was in the dust, the princess Anne felt a yearning and desire for the sympathy of that injured parent, who had so often mourned with her over her blighted maternal hopes on former occasions; and she despatched an express, but very secretly, to St. Germains, with her letter, to inform king James of the calamity that had befallen her in the untimely death of her son and his grandchild, the duke of Gloucester.'

Upon lord Marlborough, the duke of Gloucester's governor, had devolved the duty of announcing to the king the death of his near relative. The demise of the duke of Gloucester took place in July, and the information to king William was sent as soon as it occurred; but it was October before his majesty condescended to reply.

The princess Anne pertinaciously remained at Windsor Castle, although the body of her only child lay in state in the suite of apartments which had been devoted to his use there. On the 4th of August, the earl of Marlborough and Mr. Sayer escorted the corpse from thence, by torchlight, through the Little Park and Old Windsor, and by Staines and Brentford, to Westminster. The body of the young prince arrived at the place of destination, being the "prince's robing-room," Westminster Hall, at two o'clock the same morning; where it lay in state until the night of solemn interment in the vault, near Henry VII.'s chapel, on the night of August 9th.2

The reason of king William's unexampled neglect of the communication announcing the death of his heir was, beyond all dispute, because the princess Anne had written, in her grief, to her father. As some historians have bestowed great pains in clearing the princess of this crime, it is only proper to verify the fact from documentary sources.

3

Lamberty, whose evidence is indisputable, as he had been the confidential secretary of Portland and William III., thus declares his knowledge on the subject: "The duke of Gloucester, who was the hope 1 Christian Cole, the author of Memoirs of Affairs of State, endeavours to controvert this assertion, which he affects to consider highly derogatory to Anne's duty to her brother-in-law, William III. He even says that the contrary is proved by the earl of Manchester's Letters, edited by him. He could neither have read the work he edited himself, nor could he ever have expected any other person so to do, for the earl of Manchester says positively, "that his first intelligence of the death of the duke of Gloucester came from St. Germains." These are his words: "Yesterday morning, they had an express at St. Germains from England, with news that the duke of Gloucester is dead. I fear it is too true. My letters are not yet come."-(Letter of the earl of Manchester to Mr. Blathwayte, in Christian Cole's Affairs of State, p. 193.)

'Pyne's Palaces. Roger Coke and Toone's Chronology.

'Lamberty's Memoirs for the History of Seventeenth Century.

of the English, happening unfortunately to die, the princess Anne, his mother, sent very clandestinely an express to the court of St. Germains, to notify his death there. The earl of Manchester, who was ambassador from England at Paris, and who watched that court, was advised of it. He despatched his secretary, Chetwynd, under other pretences, to Loo, to inform the king of it." This person was actually sent to Loo, to communicate to William the particulars of a new plot for poisoning him. "It was because," pursues Lamberty, "such a sort of step-so contrary to what the princess Anne had always shown-made it appear that she had ill designs; we shall see it by a secret writing, which was found when she was dead." William's coldness and contempt to the feelings of the princess Anne and her consort, in regard to the mourning for the young prince, their son, though he had always professed affection for him, afford confirmation of this statement. In fact, his conduct, on that occasion, was not commonly humane, considering the nearness of the relationship of the boy to himself, independently of his being the nephew of queen Mary. Court mournings are lightly passed over in these days of utilitarianism; but the state of feeling in that age was different-everything being then regulated according to the solemn régime of state etiquette on funereal matters.

Vernon, one of William's secretaries of state, writes on the subject of young Gloucester's death: "We have very little news at present, after having had too much last week. The prince and princess are as well as can be expected under their great affliction. The duke of Gloucester's body was brought up last Thursday night, by my lord Marlborough and Mr. Sayers, and deposited in the Prince's Chamber at Westminster." This letter is dated August 5. The earl of Manchester says, in his next: August 18.

"You may easily imagine the great concern I was under when I received yours of the 1st inst., that being the confirmation of what I had heard before from St. Germains, they having had expresses both by way of Rouen and Calais; the latter was sent by Pigault, a merchant there. I desire the favour of you, as you think it proper or have an opportunity, to express my great sense of the loss to their royal highnesses.

"I suppose," pursues the perplexed ambassador, "I shall soon have orders how I am to act, which, I fear, if from Loo, will not be so full as I could wish. First, if my coaches and servants must be in mourning; in what manner I must notify the duke of Gloucester's death, whether in a private audience of the king [of France], or publicly of the whole court? If so, I must have letters to them, as I had at my first coming.

"I am told for certain that the court of St. Germains will go into mourning, and that they are already preparing. I need not say how pleased they are, and confident of being soon in England.

Yesterday," pursues his excellency, "I was at Versailles, where the king [Louis XIV.] asked me privately if the news of the duke of Gloucester's death

was true."

No one could be placed in a more embarrassing position, as regarded

'Lamberty's Memoirs for the History of Seventeenth Century, vol. viii. Much curious information has been found regarding Anne in these Memoirs of Lamberty, but not the paper here alluded to.

Letters of the Earl of Manchester, in Cole.

royal etiquette, than was William III.'s unlucky representative, at the court of the most ceremonious monarch in the world, by the perversity of his royal master, in giving him no intimation in what manner he was to announce the demise of his heir. In fact, William III. was in one of his long-lasting fits of silent rage, occasioned by the certainty of the renewed communication between the princess Anne and her father, nor did he perceive any possible way of awakening in her mind a contrary interest to that of her nearest relatives. As far as was apparent to his perception, his sister-in-law had no object of affection likely to stand between the yearning of her heart towards her father, brother, and sister in France. In this he was, perhaps, deceived. Quiet and retiring as he was, prince George of Denmark had exercised from the first the most unbounded political influence over his wife, of any person in the world. His religious feelings were far more earnest than those of the king, although he made little show of them, and had long ceased raising any political cry concerning his protestantism. He by no means despaired of future offspring, since his princess had, within the last few months, been the mother of an infant; while prince George lived, king William need have had little apprehension of the feelings of Anne towards her own family being other than evanescent. But then unfortunately William hated and loathed Anne much, but George still more, and he could only endure the least communication with them, while he looked upon them as the passive and submissive tools of his despotic will. There was assuredly, as shown on a particular occasion, soon after, an involuntary yearning of remorse and even of unconscious affection in the recesses of his heart towards his uncle James, but no circumstances, however calamitous they might be, could awaken the slightest feeling of sympathy in him for the bereaved parents of the duke of Gloucester, although they had repeatedly proved his most efficient allies in the

attainment of his desires.

According to the foregoing despatch of the English ambassador in France, the whole court of St. Germains was actually paying the external mark of respect to the memory of the princely child who was the hope of protestant England, and whose birth had been partly the cause of keeping his young uncle in a state of expatriation, before king William could be induced to acknowledge, either to his own or to foreign courts, that he had ever heard of his demise. Yet the injured son of James II. had put off his sports out of respect for the death of his nephew, while William III. refused to show the least token of concern.'

Louis XIV., in token of his own near kindred to the princess Anne, professed himself ready to order his court to put on mourning and to assume it himself for his youthful cousin, her son, as soon as the notification of his decease should have been formally announced to him by the British ambassador. That unfortunate diplomatist, meantime, fretted himself into a fever from the awkward predicament in which he stood between William and his successor Anne, to say nothing of his old sovereign king James. Not only was he unable to signify the demise of the

'Cole's Memoirs for Affairs of State, 199.

1

young prince to the king of France, but he was left in uncertainty what he and his suite were to do about their own mourning, till the 22d of August, when Mr. Blathwayte, William's secretary at Loo, communicated his royal master's gracious pleasure in the following pithy terms, brought in at the end of various political notices about foreign affairs, "Your lordship will have found the news of the duke of Gloucester's death too true. His majesty thinks that mourning for your person and such as are near you out of livery for three months all that need be on this melancholy occasion."1

Not a word, however, touching the important question of how the demise of the duke was to be communicated to his French majesty. More than a month had elapsed since his death; Anne and her husband had written letters themselves of formal announcement of their loss to Louis XIV., after long waiting for William to do so; but this only added to the dilemma of the ambassador.

"Last night," writes he to secretary Vernon,2 "I received letters from their royal highnesses for this court, which will not be received here, unless there is a letter at the same time from his majesty; neither can I offer them without being empowered to do it, either by you or Mr. Blathwayt, as you see by the enclosed. I freely tell Mr. Griffith, whom I have desired to consult with you and my lord Marlborough on this matter. There is so much time already past, that I wait with some impatience for your directions in what manner the duke of Gloucester's death is to be notified, the rather that I may prevent the discourses of some people, who would have it believed that this court is backward in paying us the respect of going into mourning on this occasion."

The same day the ambassador writes in more explicit terms, on this embarrassing topic, to Mr. Griffiths.

"Paris, Sept. 8, 1700.

"Sir, I have received yours, with the letters of her royal highness the princess Anne and his royal highness the prince, and I shall be always ready to obey their commands, though in this case, upon inquiry, I cannot deliver the letters unless I had also one from the king to the French king. This court says, that it is usual upon these occasions that the prince and princess send a person on purpose, with a character, who would be received as if he came from a crowned head, as they think was done in the case of the duke of Cambridge. If the prince and princess would avoid this, then, a letter from the king, to be delivered by me with those of their royal highnesses, will be sufficient to make this court go into mourning. And as for the other letters to the rest of the princes, they need not be delivered. This will avoid one inconvenience, as there is none for the dauphin. I am sensible of the reason why there is not; and I think it convenient not to make that matter so public as by consequence it would be, and cause various discourses.

"I desire you would assure their royal highnesses of my most humble duty. It will be convenient that you should inform my lord Marlborough and Mr. Secretary Vernon of this whole matter, since I have received from Loo no other orders than to put myself and family in mourning, which I have already done I hope I may know as soon as possible what measures are taken.-I am, &c. "MANCHESTER."

As late as the 15th of September, the poor ambassador was still fret

'Cole's Memoirs for Affairs of State, 206. Ibid. p. 207. Son of James II., when duke of York, deceased in the reign of Charles II.