The book of days : a miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar, including anecdote, biography, & history, curiosities of literature and oddities of human life and character / edited by R. Chambers.

Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The book of days : a miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar, including anecdote, biography, & history, curiosities of literature and oddities of human life and character / edited by R. Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    region of history, that any hying link between it and the present time is necessarily heard of with extreme surprise. Yet Lord Lyndhurst, who still (1862) takes a part in our public affairs, was born in Boston, a British subject, the State of Massachusetts being then and for some years later a British province. The affair of the Forty-jive precedes the strug- gle for American independence by thirty years ; yet even that event is brought into apparent closeness to us by many surprising connections. There were still one or two Culloden men living when George IV. was king : one came to see him at Holyrood in 1822, and greeted him as ‘the last of his enemies.’ It is worth noting that an uncle of the present Lord Torphichen (1862) was an officer in the royal army in 1745, was present at the battle of Prestonpans, and is noted by Dr Carlyle in his Autobiography as the only wounded man on the king’s side who was carried to Bankton House, all the other wounded people taken there being Highlanders. [Lord Torphi- chen, however, had another uncle, who, when a boy in 1720, was supposed to be bewitched, and thus was the cause of a fast being held in Calder parish, and of three or four poor persons being imprisoned under suspicion of sorcery!] That there should be now moving in society in Edin- burgh, a lady whose father-in-law attended the Prince in his wanderings, does not call for parti- cular remark. It becomes more startling to hear Mr Andrew Coventry, of Edinburgh, a gentleman in the vigour of life, speak of having dined with the mother-in-law of the gallant Charles Edward. He did so in 1823, at the house of Mr Bethmann in Frankfort. This lady was the Princess Stol- berg, then ninety years of age. Her daughter, the Princess Louisa de Stolberg, had married the Prince about fifty years before. It appears from a note in Earl Stanhope’s History of England, that his lordship also was introduced to the Princess at Frankfort. He states that she was ‘still lively and agreeable,’ and that she lived till 1826. ‘ It is singular,’ his lordship very naturally adds, ‘ that a man born eighty-five years after the Chevalier, should have seen his mother-in-law.’ When George IV. acceded to the throne in 1820, he had occasion to remark a very curious circumstance connecting his reign with one which we are accustomed to consider as remote. The decorations of the Order of the Garter, which then returned to the king from his deceased father, had only been worn by two persons since the reign of Charles II.! By that monarch they had been conferred upon the Duke of Somerset— he who was commonly called the Proud Duke— and by him they had been retained till his death m 1748, when they were conferred upon the young Prince of Wales, subsequently George III. The entire time embraced by the two tenures of the honour was about a hundred and forty years. It was remarkable of the Duke of Somerset, that he figured in the pageants and politics of six reigns. ‘ At the funeral of Charles II., he was one of the supporters of the chief mourner, Prince George of Denmark. He carried the orb at the coronation of James II.; at the coronation of William and Mary, he bore the queen’s crown. At the funeral of King William, he was again one of the supporters of the chief mourner, Prince George ; and at the coronations of Queen Anne, George I., and George II., he carried the orb.’ Mr Jesse, in relating these circumstances a few years ago, makes the remark, that there might be individuals still living, who had con- versed with the Duke of Somerset, who had con- versed with Charles II.* Lord Campbell quotes, in his Lives of the Chief Justices, the statement of the Earl of Mansfield to Mr Murray of Henderland, about 1787, that ‘he had conversed with a man who was present at the execution of the Blessed Martyr.’ Mr Murray, who died a very few years ago, accompanies his report of this statement with the remark, ‘ How wonderful it seems that there should be only one person between me and him who saw Charles’s head cut off !’f Perhaps this is scarcely so wonderful as that the mother of Sir Walter Scott, who survived 1820, had seen a person who had seen Cromwell make his entry into Edinburgh in 1650; on which occasion, by the way, the individual in question remarked nothing in the victor of Dunbar butthe extraordinary mag- nitude of his nose ! It was also quite as singular that Charles James Fox, who might have lived to attend the levees of Queen Victoria without being much older than Lord Lyndhurst now is, had an uncle in office as joint paymaster of the forces in 1679 ! This last person was a son of Sir Stephen Fox by his first marriage. All Sir Stephen’s first family having predeceased him, he wedded in his old age, in Queen Anne’s time, a healthy young woman, the daughter of a Lin- colnshire clergyman, and by her left two sons, one of whom was the father of Charles James. Dr Routh, who died December 22, 1854, Pre- sident of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the hundredth year of his age, ‘ knew Dr Theophilus Leigh, Master of Baliol, the contemporary of Addison, who had pointed out to him the situa- tion of Addison’s rooms : and he had been told by a lady of her aunt, who had seen Charles II. walking round the parks at Oxford (when the parliament was held there during the plague of London) with his dogs, and turning by the cross path to the other side when he saw the heads of horses coming.’—Times, Dec. 25, 1854. One more such case may be noticed in refer- ence to the reign of Charles II. Dr John Mac- kenzie, who had been Burns’s medical attendant at Mauchline, and who died in Edinburgh in 1841 at no very advanced age, had attended * It would appear that George IV. could not, with strict truth, say that his father succeeded in the order of the Garter to Charles Duke of Somerset. He in reality succeeded to John first Earl of Poulett, who died 28th May 1743. But, the Duke of Somerset dying 2nd December 1748, John Earl Granville was invested as his grace’s successor on the same day with Prince George, along with four other knights. f A Mr Evans, who died October 9, 1780, at the age of 139, in the full possession of his faculties, ‘could well remember the execution of Charles I., being seven years old at the time.’—Bailey's Records of Longevity. If this be a true statement, Mr Evans was probably the last person in life who remembered the Blessed Martyr’s death.