It was in answer to such a summons from King George that Walpole left Houghton for London, though suffering from a painful malady, and greatly increased it by the journey. So great was his pain that he had to be kept under the influence of opium for the greater part of the day, but it is said that during the few hours that his mind was clear, his conversation had all the life and brilliancy of former times, which during his retirement to Norfolk, a lonely old man, had entirely left him. However, these moments were but the last expiring flashes of his great intellect. He died on the 18th March, 1745, just at the time when he was most needed by the King, at the commencement of that fateful year for England, when Bonnie Prince Charlie came over the water, raised an army in Scotland, and made a victorious march on air, almost to London itself. Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir, son of the Old Pretender, James Stuart, and his wife Clementine Sobieski--granddaughter of John Sobieski, King of Poland--and grandson of James the Second of England, was born in Rome in 1720, consequently when he started on his expedition to Scotland he was about twenty-five. Lord Mahon describes him as follows:-- “The person of Charles (I begin with this for the sake of female readers) was tall and well formed; his limbs athletic and active. He excelled in all manly exercises, and was inured to every kind of toil, especially long marches on foot, having applied himself to field sports in Italy, and become an excellent walker. “His face was strikingly handsome, of a perfect oval and a fair complexion; his eyes light blue; his features high and noble. Contrary to the custom of the time which prescribed perukes, his own fair hair usually fell in long ringlets on his neck.[67] This goodly person was enhanced by his graceful manners; frequently condescending to the most familiar kindness, yet always shielded by a regal dignity; he had a peculiar talent to please and to persuade, and never failed to adapt his conversation to the taste, or to the station of those whom he addressed.” (At the age of thirteen, Pope Innocent the XII pronounced Prince Charlie, dressed in a little bright cuirass and a rich point lace cravat, “truly an angel.”) Such was the man who came secretly from France in August, 1745, with but two ships, to challenge Frederick’s right to the title of Prince of Wales. The two aforesaid vessels of Prince Charlie being chased by men-of-war and somewhat roughly handled, they had to separate, so that it was simply an unconvoyed little merchant ship which at last brought the Stuart to the western isles. There at first he passed as a young English clergyman come to see the Highlands; but on the 19th of that month of August, he threw off his clerical garb and raising his standard at Glenfinnan called the clans to assemble round it.