Although there was plotting in 1753, and mischief was a-foot, and Government spies were far from having an idle time of it, the royal family lived in comparative quiet, save one passing episode connected with a charge laid, in the month of March, against Bishop Johnson, of Gloucester, Murray (Solicitor-General), and Stone (one of the sub-preceptors to the Princes George and Edward)――as Jacobites――of having had, as Walpole puts it, ‘an odd custom of toasting the Chevalier and my Lord Dunbar (Murray’s brother and one of the Chevalier’s peers) at one Vernon’s, a merchant, about twenty years ago. _The Pretender’s counterpart_ (the King) ordered the Council to examine into it.’ The accuser, Fawcett, a lawyer, prevaricated. ‘Stone and Murray,’ says Walpole, ‘took the Bible, on their innocence. Bishop Johnson scrambled out of the scrape at the very beginning; and the Council have reported to the King that the accusation was false and malicious.’ Vernon was in reality a linen-draper. Few people doubted the alleged drinking of Jacobite healths at his house. The dowager Princess of Wales told Bubb Dodington that her late husband had told her that Stone was a Jacobite,――the prince was convinced of it, and when affairs went ill abroad, he used to say to her in a passion: How could better be expected when such a Jacobite as Stone could be trusted? [Sidenote: _THE ROYAL FAMILY._] Lord Harcourt, Prince George’s governor, was a pedantic man, having no sympathies with the young. My lord was not much of a Mentor for a young Telemachus. He bored the prince by enjoining him to hold up his head, and, ‘for God’s sake,’ to turn out his toes. The tutors of Prince George, after his father’s death, were in fact divided among themselves. Bishop Hayter, of Norwich, and Lord Harcourt were openly at war with Stone and Scott (the last put in by Bolingbroke), who were countenanced by the dowager princess and Murray, ‘so my Lord Bolingbroke dead, will govern, which he never could living.’ Murray, and Stone, and Cresset were Jacobites. Cresset called Lord Harcourt a groom, and the bishop an atheist. The princess accused the latter of teaching her sons, George and Edward, nothing. The bishop retorted by declaring that he was never allowed to teach them anything. His chief complaint was that Jacobite Stone had lent Prince George (or the Prince of Wales) a highly Jacobite book to read, namely, ‘The Revolutions of England,’ by Father D’Orléans; but the objectionable work had really been lent by ‘Lady Augusta’ to Prince Edward, and by him to his elder brother. [Sidenote: _PARLIAMENTARY ANECDOTES._]