Meanwhile, the Government was not meanly hostile to their dead enemies. The Duke of Ormond, the boldest and frankest of conspirators against the Hanoverian succession; the man who more than once would have invaded his country at the head of foreign troops; he who had fostered rebellion, and maintained foiled rebels, during his thirty years’ exile, had, at last, died in his eighty-third year. King and ministers made no opposition to the interment of this splendid arch-traitor in Westminster Abbey. His anonymous biographer (1747), after stating that the duke died, on November 14th, 1745, at Avignon, says: ‘On the 18th, his body was embalmed by four surgeons and three physicians, and in the following month, May, as a bale of goods, brought through France to England, and lodg’d in the Jerusalem Chamber, and soon after, decently enterr’d.’ [Sidenote: _BURIAL OF ORMOND._] There was something more than mere ‘decency.’ In the ‘General Advertiser,’ May 23rd, it is announced, but without a word of comment on the great Jacobite:――‘Last night, about Eleven o’Clock, the Corps of the late Duke of Ormond was, after lying in State, in the Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Abbey, interr’d in great Funeral Pomp and Solemnity, in the Ormond Vault in King Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, the whole Choir attending, and the Ceremony was perform’d, by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster.’ But the popular attention was directed to the other ‘Duke.’ Whatever Tories may have said at the time, or people generally, since that period as to the character of the Duke of Cumberland, he was the popular hero from the moment he arrived in London, after the victory at Culloden. The papers were full of his praises. They lauded not only his valour but his piety. After the battle, so they said, he had gone unattended over the battle-field, and he was not only seen in profound meditation, but was heard to exclaim,――his hands on his breast, and his eyes raised to heaven――‘Lord! what am I that I should be spared, when so many brave men lie dead upon the spot?’ Even Scotsmen have owned that the duke attributed his victory to God, alone, and that he was unmoved by the adulation of that large body of Englishmen who were grateful at having been relieved by him from a great danger. They compared him with the Black Prince, who won the day at Poictiers, when he was about the same age as the duke, when _he_ triumphed at Culloden. The latter was then in his twenty-sixth year. [Sidenote: _THE QUESTION OF INHUMANITY._]