The Duke took of his which he performed punctually." himself alludes to the care which he wife during her lying-in, or, as he expresses it, during the "mysteries of Lucina.” * The Duchess was ridiculously proud of her royal birth, but if we are to believe her mother, who was, unquestionably, the best judge in the matter, there existed some doubt whether in fact she were really the daughter of King James. Her mother is reported to have one day said to her," You need not be so vain, daughter; you are not the King's daughter, but Colonel Graham's." This person was a fashionable lounger at the Courts of Charles and James, and as Lady Dorchester was generally believed to have conferred her favours on him, there seems to have been something more in the speech than a mere taunt. Graham was himself willing to have the story believed. The Duchess of Buckingham, and Graham's legitimate daughter, the Countess of Berkshire, were thought to bear a strong resemblance to each other :"Well, well," said Graham, "kings are all-powerful, and one must not complain; but certainly the same man was the father of those two women." The Duchess was, of course, the person least likely to place any faith in these surmises, and, moreover, by the enthusiasm which she exhibited * Letter to the Duke of Shrewsbury, Works, vol. ii. p. 261. A short time before her death, the Duchess expressed an intention of being buried near her father at Paris. George Selwyn, alluding to her being the supposed daughter of Colonel Graham, remarked," She need not go out of England to accomplish that." We in the cause of her half-brother, the Pretender, and by the exertions which she made to restore the House of Stuart, proved how firmly she was convinced of her own affinity to the blood-royal. Dr. King informs us, that in her zeal for the exiled family, she paid more than one visit to Versailles with the singular object of inducing Cardinal Fleury to embark in the same cause.* learn also from Horace Walpole, that she paid occasional visits to the Pretender at Rome; and it appears by the Orford and Walpole Papers, that, when at Paris, she was in the habit of having frequent interviews with Bishop Atterbury in the Bois de Boulogne; ostensibly, with the view of obtaining his advice in regard to the education of her son, but in reality, to concert intrigues in favour of the Stuarts. It is even affirmed to have been owing to the arguments which she used with the Pretender, on a subsequent visit to Rome, that he was induced to remove his agents, Hay and Murray, and to invest Atterbury with the principal management of his affairs at the Court of France. † Dr. King, alluding to the visits which the Duchess paid to Cardinal Fleury at Versailles, observes,-" She got nothing from the Cardinal but compliments and civil excuses; and was laughed at by both Courts for her pompous manner of travelling, in which she affected the state of a sovereign prince." Meanness, it has been * Dr. King's Anecdotes of his Own Time, p. 38. + Coxe's Life of Sir Robert Walpole, vol. i. p. 173. said, is not always incompatible with magnificence, and, if we may rely on the following anecdote, the conduct of the Duchess of Buckingham affords sufficient evidence of the truth of the axiom. Horace Walpole, in allusion to her frequent visits to the continent, observes," She always stopped at Paris, visited the church where lay the unburied body of James, and wept over it. A poor Benedictine of the convent, observing her filial piety, took notice to her Grace that the velvet pall that covered the coffin was become thread-bare, and so it remained." * Previous to one of her journeys to Rome, dreading the consequences which would follow a discovery of her political intrigues, she is said to have caused a deed to be drawn up, making over the title to her estate to the celebrated William Pulteney, afterwards Earl of Bath. On her return to England, ascertaining there was little likelihood of her being molested by the government, she applied to Pulteney for the restoration of this important document. To her dismay, he informed her it could nowhere be found. The Duchess naturally became importunate for its restoration; but Pulteney still persisting in his inability to produce it, the probability seems to have been that she would never have received justice at his hands, had not Lord Mansfield told him plainly that unless he satisfied the Duchess he could never show his face again. On this, Lord Bath is said to have reluctantly signed a release to her of her estate. * A favourite and very ridiculous project of the Duchess of Buckingham was to entice the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, to join with her in effecting the restoration of the Stuarts. She proceeded, indeed, to such lengths in the prosecution of this extraordinary scheme, as actually to make Sir Robert an offer of her hand on condition that he should forward her views. The honour was politely declined by the minister. The Duchess, however, was so far from being offended by his want of gallantry, that she, shortly afterwards, appointed him one of the executors of her will. † We have on record another instance of her offering the minister a matrimonial bait, with the object of purchasing his adherence to the exiled family. The Duchess, aware of Sir Robert's extreme partiality for his daughter, afterwards Lady Churchill, enquired significantly of him if he remembered what had not been thought too great a reward for Lord Clarendon for restoring the royal family. Sir Robert affected not to understand her." Was not he allowed," she said, " to match his daughter to the Duke of York?" Sir Robert, we are told, merely smiled, and quitted the apart ment. There is extant a brief but curious correspondence which passed between the Duchess and Sir Robert, in connexion with her Jacobite intrigues. * Walpole's Reminiscences, p. 72. + King's Anecdotes of his Own Time, p. 38. The Duchess, it appears, on the occasion of one of her treasonable visits to the continent, had quitted England without obtaining the then requisite permission from the sovereign, and, accordingly, we find her writing to the minister from Boulogne, preferring her best excuses for the omission. "I know," she writes, "there is a usual form, as I take it only to be esteemed, of any peer's asking permission of the King (or Queen in the present circumstance) to go out of the kingdom, but even that ceremony I thought reached not to women, whose being in or out of their country seemed never to be of the least consequence." In the same letter, alluding to her wellknown intrigues for the exiled family, she speaks of them as "nonsensical stories," which it makes her "almost laugh to hear." No one, however, knew better than Sir Robert that these stories were but too true. Sir Robert Walpole, indeed, throughout his long administration, appears to have been perfectly well acquainted with all the Quixotic proceedings of the Duchess of Buckingham. His informant was Colonel Cecil, an agent of the Pretender, who, although a man of honour, was a weak and illiterate person, and unconsciously suffered himself to become a mere dupe in the hands of the minister. Fully persuaded that it was Sir Robert's intention to restore the House of Stuart, he suffered his secrets to be elicited from him, and was, in fact, a convenient tool of the English government, while he imagined himself to be performing the most |