In 1766 Villa Palmieri was inhabited by Lord Cowper who had come on a visit to Florence and found the place so attractive that he refused to return to England. He married the beautiful Miss Gore who was most popular in her Tuscan home, and the Villa was the scene of many brilliant entertainments, as the Grand Duke admired the young and lovely Countess and was a frequent guest. That dear old gossip, Sir Horace Mann, tells us “the birth of her son [the late Lady Palmerston’s first husband], diffused a riotous joy among the common people who have expressed it for three days by little bonfires and lights at their paper windows.” He also informs us that at a dull Court dinner “the Comptroller of the Table has pleased the Grand Duke much by his giving Lord Cowper and Lord Tylney beer and punch, which he thinks is the constant beverage of the English.” The ambition long cherished by Lord Cowper to be created a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire was at length gratified in 1778, though his desire to be Prince Overkirk was frustrated by the Nassaus, who, as Sir Horace writes, “objected to his bearing their name with the title of Prince. The Emperor [Joseph II.] therefore thought he had found a medium by substituting Overquerque[3] but his cousins of that family have likewise put their negative to that; so that it is now reduced to plain Prince Cowper, for which he must pay ten thousand zecchins (about £5000). The heralds of the Empire have objected to his bearing the arms of Nassau. They don’t allow such a right from females, and more particularly when there is any male branch of the family. Neither the Emperor nor my Lord seem to know what they were about, when it was asked and granted, and I believe that both now repent of it.” Horace Walpole in a letter to Mann criticising Zoffany’s well-known picture of the Tribune in the Uffizzi (now at Windsor) sneers at Lord Cowper’s title of Prince. He says “it is crowded by a flock of travelling boys, and one does not know nor care whom. You and Sir John Dick, as Envoy and Consul, are very proper. The Grand Ducal family would have been so too.... I do allow Earl Cowper a place in the Tribune; an Englishman who has never seen his Earldom, who takes root and bears fruit in Florence and is as proud of a pinchbeck principality in a third country, is as great a curiosity as any in the Tuscan collection.” Though eccentric, Lord Cowper was a patron of men of letters and had a passionate admiration for Niccolò Macchiavelli; he subscribed large sums to the erection of the great secretary’s tomb in Santa Croce and to the publication of a complete edition of his works; while his generous, hospitable character gained him great favour among the Italians, who are generally inclined to quote the old proverb “an italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate.”