QUEEN ANNE'S SON.* THERE is often a peculiar interest, for

those who do not hold very strict theories of the philosophy of history, in the memoirs of princes who were born to a crown, which a premature death did not suffer to burden their brows. For instance, who can tell what might have been, if Henry VII. had been suc- ceeded by King Arthur, or James I. by Henry IX.? It is possible that the history of England might have wanted some of its darkest pages, if Henry VIII. had not been called on to preside over the Reformation of the English Church, or Charles I. to cope with the Puritan Revolution in Church and State. And possibly the greatest of all social convulsions might have been averted by gradual and constitutional reform, if the son of Louis XV., whose life was sympathetically sketched for us a few years ago by Prince Emmanuel de Broglie, had been at the helm (to use a favourite phrase of the Queen-Anne writers), instead of his ill-starred son. But there are other cases where death has stepped in, as in some middle-age woodcut, between the expectant heir and his throne, of which we may affirm that they were but ripples on the surface of history. The death of Marcellus gave rise to one of Virgil's loftiest flights of poetry, and that of the Princess Charlotte caused a sorrow in our fathers' days such as the nation has not known since ; but it may be affirmed without hesitation that neither changed the course of a people's destiny. To this latter category belongs the death of the only one of Queen Anne's seventeen sous and daughters who attained even to childhood. It is strange that that event caused so comparatively slight a sensation in the country, and has left but insignificant traces in literature. It must, one would think, have come upon the Whigs as a death-blow to their hopes, and we can under- stand the fierce exultation with which the Jacobites saw the greatest obstacles swept, as it were providentially, from their path by the almost sudden death of Queen Mary, followed by that, at a few years' interval, of the only son of the Princess Anne. Surely nothing but the wildest blundering in the counsels of the Jacobites, nothing but an utter defiance of the views and desires of the moderate men of all parties, could have rendered it possible, on the death of the childless Queen, to place George I., without a struggle, on the throne that, by right of descent, belonged to James III.

It may well be that both parties had, to use the phraseology of the Stock Exchange," discounted" the death of the Duke of Gloucester. He was evidently doomed from his birth. This is suggested by the somewhat intimate detail with which the present author obliges us of his life in the nursery, though the removal from Hampton Court to Kensington proved salutary. But his whole subsequent existence seems to have been a struggle with agues and "chin-coughs," and general feebleness of constitu- tion, for which he was treated by the famous Dr. Radcliffe, to whom both the University and the City of Oxford are so deeply indebted, and who was in such high repute in his day, that he was accused of killing Queen Mary by attending her in her last illness, and Queen Anne by neglecting to attend her in hers. If Dr. Radcliffe could not cure the young prince, recourse was had to quackery, and in one case,—" The Princess herself went to Bloomsbury, to consult Dr. Richley, a very old man, famous for curing complaints in the eyes, who gave the Prin- cess a small bottle of liquid, which cared him in a very short time, for which he was rewarded with fifty guineas." Another time an apothecary was called in "who had the receipt of a medicine approved of by King Charles II., which had cured every kind of ague." This was all of a piece with the judgment shown in every part of the Prince's training. After the early time when he used to be driven out every day in the little coach, with horses "no larger than a good mastiff," with which the Duchess of Ormond had presented him, those about him

• Queen Anne's Son. The Memoirs of William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, reprinted from a Tract published in 1788, and edited, with Notes, by W. J. Loftie, B.A., F.S.A. London : Edward Stanford. 1881.

appear to have vied with one another in mismanaging the hope of the nation. He was scarcely allowed to think about any- thing but war from his cradle. At the age of two he said " Dub-a-dub " at the sight of a sentinel, and soon after raised a regiment of boys, numbering at first twenty-two and afterwards ninety, armed with wooden swords and muskets. Need it be added that these boys "were very rude, presuming upon their being soldiers, and would challenge men and fall on many people, as they came to and from Kensington to London, which caused complaints "? In 1696, when " associations " were in vogue, these young loyalists signed a declaration :—" We, your Majesty's dutiful subjects, will stand by you as long as we have a drop of blood." The young Prince's relaxations .seem to have been entirely connected with glory and gunpowder. On his first visit to Windsor, like a juvenile Bliicher, he was greatly impressed by St. George's Hall as an excellent place to fight in, but found great fault with the Round Tower, as having no parapet or bastion. His chaplain found it necessary to excuse him pretty often from prayers, and to betake himself to the study of fortification ; indeed, Dr. Pratt finally drove the author of this memoir out of the field, by constructing for his pupil a pentagon with outworks at Tunbridge Wells. His ser- vants had to be continually standiug sentinel, or marching, or beating the tattoo, or making fortifications, at his bedside. The only toye he cared for were small cannon, Highland swords, drums, and so forth ; and on one occasion, when he showed a more excusable partiality for a wooden horse, he was promptly shamed out of it. Here is an amusing anecdote, which is, for two or three reasons, characteristic :— "Mrs. Butt, privy purse to the Princess, who had bought most of his toys, sent by Whetherby, the chairman, a machine of wood, representing Prince Lewis of Baden fighting with the Turks. The Duke was so enraged at being now treated like a baby, that he had it torn to pieces ; and we were ordered to bring Whetherby before him, who, for the present, escaped ; but after diligent search he was found in Kensington, and ordered to be detained all night. In the morning, he was to be punished for presuming to bring the Duke toys; and accordingly, when the prisoner was produced, he was ordered to be drawn about upon the wooden horse, without a saddle, with his face towards the tail ; while we four men were to ply him well, in

the Duke's sight, with syringes and squirts of all sorts Indeed, it proved a good sousing."

In 1695, the King visited the Princess Anne at Camden House, and asked the boy, who was a favourite, whether he had any- horses yet :—

Yes,' replied the Duke, I have one live one and two dead ones ;' meaning the wooden horses that were to draw him upon ; at which the King laughed, which enraged the Duke, who, when the King retired, gave orders to bury them out of sight ; and in a short time after he made an epitaph on his horse Ball, to be wrote on a stone, in these words :—

'Here lies poor Ball, Killed by a fall, Under his General.'"

Another epigram on "The two-legged He's" is equally worthy of a place among the productions of Royal authors. Nor was the Duke ignorant of naval matters. He said one day to his biographer, "Lewis, when we are at sea, I will cannonade my enemies, and then lie by ; BO make them believe they may board us. I will send a boy up the top-masts, to let fall from thence a bag of pease, that when the enemy comes to board us, they will fall down by means of the pease ; and I and my men will rush from the corners of the ship, and cut them to pieces." He was naturally delighted with "taking say," that is, at having his face smeared with the blood of the first deer be saw slaughtered, and "would fain have had the Duchess of St. Alban's, do., to take say, but they were afraid of being bloody." No wonder that he once attacked his nurse with his drawn sword, so that he would probably have killed her, had it been pointed. What enjoyment he would have derived from a cock- fight, a bear-baiting, or a pigeon-match !

But whatever objection may be made to his education, he- possessed several princely characteristics. For instance, at a very tender age "he had the faculty of forgetting even his greatest favourites, when out of sight." When the Queen in- quired whether he was not sorry to hear that his nurse was dead, he very frankly answered, "No, madam!" When his mother, "weeping sadly," told him of Queen Mary's death, "he was not so much affected as one might have imagined." When Robin Church, who had tossed him in his arms when an infant, died, the Duke was only interested in his death as affording him an opportunity for a military funeral. He was liable to uncon- trollable fits of anger, and he loved a flatterer. He had a habit of calling bad names, apparently learnt from his young troopers.

but "I vow" is the strongest expression here quoted. His fibs appear to have been of no very deep dye. Here is a sample :—

"One day, upon a visit to the Princess in her apartment at Camden House, he happened to say, I am confounded dry !' which the Prin- cess hearing, asked who taught him those words ? He turned about, and said to himself, 'If I say Dick [his coachman], he will be turned downstairs. Mamma, I learnt 'em myself.'"

However, it is only fair to the poor boy to admit that nature appears to have given him his share of good qualities. He was not wanting in courage, in self-respect, and in personal dignity ; the latter two of which characteristics can scarcely have de- scended to him from his maternal grandfather. He evidently had

g3od abilities, which might have come to something, despite the c 3ntempt of Lady Fitzharding, his governess, for "notions of the mathematics, and stuff." The following, considering his opinion of his chaplain, strikes us as one of his sharpest sayings here recorded :—" He was one day at the Princess's toilet, when she dressed. Mamma,' said he, you have two chaplains, and I have but one!' ' Pray,' said the Princess, what do you give your one chaplain?' ' I give him his liberty, Mamma,' said he, at which the Princess laughed very heartily."

It would be easy to multiply quotations from this little book, which abounds in curious details regarding many persons and things ; but we must conclude with •a general account of its contents, which are somewhat miscellaneous. There is a little introduction by Mr. Loftie, a considerable part of which is occu- pied with a description of the Prince's funeral. Then follows a reprint of the original tract published in 1789, which contains a reproduction of the original MS., by Jenkin Lewis, who was a servant of the Princess Anne and of the Duke. Unfortunately,

Lewis, who found it difficult to agree with Dr. Pratt, both wishing to be first in the favour of their Royal charge, retired from his post in disgust in October, 1697, and the continuation which the original editor supplied is very meagre and derived from the most obvious sources, so that for the last three years of the Duke's life—he died a few days after his eleventh birth- day, in 1700—we cannot follow his career in any detail. A few interesting references will be found in Luttrell, but the Duke, as a personality, passes almost completely from our view when

• Jenkin Lewis took his departure for "Roan." Bishop Burnet, however, who was afterwards his tutor, shows us that "cram- ming" is tot altogether a nineteenth-century invention, as some would have us believe :-

"I had been trusted with his education now for two years, and he had made an amazing progress ; I had read over the Psalms, Proverbs, and Gospels with him, and had explained things that fell in my way very copiously ; and was often surprised with the questions that he put me, and the reflections that he made; he came to understand things relating to religion beyond imagination ; I went through geography so often with him that he knew all the maps very particularly ; I explained to him the forms of government in every country, with the interests and trade of that country, and what was both bad and good in it. I acquainted him with all the great revolutions that had been in the world, and gave him a copious account of the Greek and Roman histories, and of Platarch's Lives ; ' the last thing I explained to him was the Gothic constitution, and the Beneficiary and Feudal laws."

The poor boy had survived convulsions, and agues, and chin- coughs, Dr. Radcliffe, Dr. Lower, and sundry quacks ; but his constitution, always ricketty, fairly broke down under Burnet -on the Gothic constitution and the beneficiary and feudal laws.

It is only fair to the editor of 1789 to add a sample of his -quality. He occasionally obliges his readers with moral re- flections, which, though they add a certain piquancy to the book, by imparting to it a slight flavour of the age of sentiment, some people might consider a little trite and obvious. In a passage where Lewis had been giving an instance of the jealousy of Dr. Pratt, he remarks :—

"0 jealousy, thou canker of the breast, how dost thou alter human mature, by giving fearful apprehensions to mortals of being supplanted by those who possess some degree of merit, yet tread in a lower sphere than themselves ! Just so it was with the reverend tutor, upon finding that his Royal charge had discovered the clue that led to knowledge, though one whose province it was to watch his foot- steps only, by an innocent and undesigning method, which seemed best calculated to incite the young Prince to glorious deeds. Happy would it be," &c.

On the whole, it may be as well that the Master of the Rolls should not sanction such interpolations in the text of the documents printed under his direction. Mr. Loftie has better understood his duties as an editor; and his little book, though many of the " plums " have already been extracted by Miss Strickland, will be entirely new to most readers, and will certainly have a emcee de cupiosite. It must be added that, as -concerns externals also, it a most desirable possession.