his good sense may have taught him that a taste for the military profession does not always constitute a great general; or he may have suspected, from his past defeats, that fortune was little likely to crown his efforts in future.

The last occasion on which we find his name connected with the public events of the period, was at the marriage of his nephew, King George the Third, with the Princess of Mecklenburg Strelitz, when the Duke gave away the bride. In 1759, indeed, when rumours were afloat of a projected invasion of England by the French, it was expected that he would be called upon to take the command of the army. When the Duchess of Bedford mentioned to him a report to this effect," I do not believe," he said, " that the command will be offered to me but when no wise man would accept it, and no honest man would refuse it." After his retreat from public life, the Duke principally resided in the Lodge in Windsor Great Park, where his time was chiefly passed in hunting, and in the prosecution of his not very creditable amours.*

In 1760 the Duke had an attack of palsy, and

*In a letter from Horace Walpole to George Montagu, the former, after alluding to Miss Pitt being mobbed in the Park in consequence of the Duke's presumed attachment to her, observes, "You heard, I suppose, of his other amour with the Savoyard girl. He sent her to Windsor, and offered her a hundred pounds, which she refused because he was a heretic; he sent her back on foot. Inclosed is a new print on this subject, which I think has more humour than I almost ever saw in one of that sort."—Walpole's Letters, vol. ii. p. 294.

though he recovered at the time, it was believed, from his large bulk, and the consequent grossness of his constitution, that he could not long survive. "His case is melancholy," writes Walpole; "the humours that have fallen upon the wound in his leg have kept him lately from all exercise as he used much, and is so corpulent, this must have bad consequences. Can one but pity him? A hero, reduced by injustice to crowd all his fame into the supporting bodily ills, and to looking on the approach of a lingering death with fortitude, is a real object of compassion."*

The Duke, who ever felt, or affected to feel, a stoical indifference to bodily pain, treated this serious attack with his usual unconcern, and, only five weeks afterwards, we find the royal invalid attending, on a November night, the melancholy ceremony of his father's interment in Westminster Abbey. "The real serious part," writes Walpole, " was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. He had a dark brown adonis, and a cloak of brown cloth, with a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant: his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and distorted with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes; and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which, in all probability, he must himself so soon de

Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, 28th August, 1760.

scend; think how unpleasant a situation! he bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance.” *

Notwithstanding the prognostication of Walpole and others, that the Duke would speedily follow his father to the grave, his death did not take place till nearly five years from the date of his recent attack, and then at a period when renewed health and vigour seemed to promise a longer existence. On the morning of the day on which he died he had been to court, apparently totally free from indisposition: he afterwards dined in Arlington Street, and spent the evening with the Duchess of Brunswick. Almost immediately, however, after he had reached his own house he was seized with a shivering fit, and just as the physician, who had been summoned, made his appearance, the Duke staggered into a sofa and expired. His death took place at his house in Upper Grosvenor Street, on the 31st of October, 1765, in the forty-fifth year of

his age.

As the character of the Duke of Cumberland is relieved by no soft, and by few redeeming, traits, we can take but a slight interest in its developement. His nature was stern; he was cold in his feelings, unbending in his disposition, and totally devoid of all those softer qualities which throw a charm over social life. His judgment is said to have been clear, and his understanding vigorous, but we can hardly accord him the merit of a capacious mind, when we find him

* Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 13th November, 1760.

202

WILLIAM, DUKE OF CUMBERLAND.

taking the same interest in the pattern of a military cockade, as in the sacking of a town or the disposition of an army. His best qualities were generosity, a nice sense of honour, personal courage, a contempt of money, and a proper estimate of fame. He was also a dutiful son and a good subject; qualities which prove, that however blind and indiscriminate was the obedience which he exacted from others, he at least practised the same submission himself when it was required. The principal blot on his character was cruelty; an offence so rarely the distinguishing feature of a brave man, that we trust the want of mercy shown by him after the battle of Culloden, as well as on other occasions, resulted rather from his conscientiously prosecuting a line of rigid policy, than from his conceiving any satisfaction in entailing misery on his fellow-creatures. When we call to mind, indeed, his conduct after the affair of ClosterSeven, affording, as it does, one of the noblest examples on record of a victory achieved over human passions, we would willingly believe that the same stern sense of duty also influenced him in other, though less creditable, transactions of his life.

ANNE,

PRINCESS OF ORANGE.

Eldest daughter of George the Second and Queen Caroline.Born in 1709.-Extract from Suffolk Correspondence.Accomplishments of the Princess. Her vanity and ambition. -Anecdote.-Married in 1733 to the Prince of Orange.His personal ugliness.-His death.-Lord Holderness sent by George the Second to condole with the Princess.-Her insulting treatment of him. Her dislike of her father, and the cause. Her death in 1759.

ANNE, eldest daughter of George the Second and Queen Caroline, was born on the 22nd of October, 1709. Dr. Arbuthnot writes to Mrs. Howard, from Tunbridge Wells, on the 4th of July, 1728, when the Princess was in her twentieth year, "Her Royal Highness goes on prosperously with the water. I think she is the strongest person in this place, if walking every day (modestly-speaking, as far as would carry her to Seven Oaks) be a sign of bodily strength. Her Highness charms everybody by her affable and courteous behaviour, of which I am not only a witness, but have the honour to be a partaker. I tell her Highness she does more good than