His wife's death seems to have affected James's health and spirits greatly, and he now began to grow feeble and indifferent, so that the political adherents of the Stuarts were gradually led to fix their hopes upon the two young princes rather than upon their father. Travellers to Rome at this period note that James appeared seldom in public, and that much of his time was given up to religious exercises; he was _dévot à l'excès_, so Charles de Brosses, an unprejudiced Frenchman, informs us. It was with great reluctance that James allowed his elder son to leave Italy for France in 1744; nevertheless in the following year, he permitted Henry to follow his brother's example, but with the news of Culloden he evidently came to regard his cause as definitely lost. The estrangement from his elder and favourite son, which arose over Henry's adoption of an ecclesiastical career, so embittered his last years that he sank into a moping invalid and rarely left his chamber. With the crushing failure of the "Forty-five" and his quarrel with his heir, the once-dreaded James soon became a mere cipher in British politics, and his death at Rome on the 2nd of January 1766 passed almost unnoticed in London. He was buried with regal pomp in St Peter's, where Canova's famous monument, erected by Pius VII. in 1819, commemorates him and his two sons. As to James's personal character, there is abundant evidence to show that he was grave, high-principled, industrious, abstemious and dignified, and that the unflattering portrait drawn of him by Thackeray in _Esmond_ is utterly at variance with historical facts. Although a fervent Roman Catholic, he was far more reasonable and liberal in his religious views than his father, as many extant letters testify. See Earl Stanhope, _History of England and Decline of the Last Stuarts_ (1853); _Calendar of the Stuart Papers at Windsor Castle_; J. H. Jesse, _Memories of the Pretenders and their Adherents_ (1845); Dr John Doran, _"Mann" and Manners at the Court of Florence_ (1876); _Relazione della morte di Giacomo III., Rè d'Inghilterra_; and Charles de Brosses, _Lettres sur l'Italie_ (1885). (H. M. V.)