This was the house about which the Pretender and Lord Cowper went to law. That delightful old gossip Sir Horace Mann writes to Walpole in 1776: “The quarrel was about a house, which he [Charles Edward] wanted to buy; but some obstacles obstructed the conclusion of the bargain. In the mean time Lady Cowper wanted a more proper house than her own to lay in; and proposals were made to the proprietor, to have it for a certain number of months, and he inclined to let it to Lord Cowper. This displeased the Comte Albanie, and the dispute was carried to a publick tribunal, which decided in the Comte’s favour. This displeased the Great Duke, who favoured the Cowpers. In short, the whole town took part in it, but I dissuaded my Lord from making an appeal to another court, so that the Albanies now reside in it; though the contract heightened the price considerably. What the Comte complained of most was, that he should meet with so rebellious an opposition from one of his own subjects. The ladies still vye with each other in beauty, so that they can never more be friends.” The following year Sir Horace again mentions the Pretender: “I have told you how dangerously ill the Count Albanie has been. His physicians sent to inform me that a mortification had begun in his legs, that his body was swelled, and that the _affanno_ was great, so that he thought him to be in the most imminent danger. This account was sent post to Rome to his brother and the Countess.... He made a will in a hurry; and it has been said, in joke, that he has bequeathed his three kingdoms to the son of the Great Duke, in example of what King Theodore did, by leaving his crown to his creditors.... I formerly gave you an account of the _fracas_ in the Pretender’s family, by the elopement of his wife, whom everybody then pitied and applauded. The tables are now turned. The cat, at last, is out of the bag. The Cardinal of York’s visit to his brother gave the latter an opportunity to undeceive him, by proving to him that the complaints laid to his charge, of ill-using her, were invented to cover a plot formed by Count Alfieri, who (by working up Tragedies, of which he has wrote many, is most expert, though he always kept behind the curtain) had imposed upon the Great Duke, the Pope and the Cardinal, and all those who took her part. All that he said on that subject, at a time that he thought himself and was supposed by everybody to be in the most imminent danger, made a great impression on his brother, who, on his return to Rome, exposed the whole to the Pope, and obtained an order from him to Count Alfieri to leave the Pope’s state in fifteen days. Not content with that satisfaction, the imprudent Cardinal (for a more silly mortal never existed) published the whole of the Countess’s intrigues with Alfieri. This has exasperated all the Roman Nobility against the Cardinal, insomuch that, instead of considering the delinquencies of the parties, their wrath is turned against the