The Jacobite interest was kept up in 1755 by paragraphs which showed that the family were well with such a civil potentate as the King of Spain, and with such a religious one as the Pope. The King of Spain, it was said, had conferred a benefice on Cardinal York, worth 6,000 piastres yearly. In the autumn the London papers announced that ‘The Chevalier de St. George, who enjoyed the Grand Priory of England, of the Religion of Malta, which gave him an active and passive voice in the election of Grand Master, had resigned it, and conferred it on a Commander Altieri. The collation has been confirmed by the Pope.’ [Sidenote: _HUME’S ‘HISTORY.’_] In the same year London was stirred by the publication of Hume’s ‘History of England,’ which was denounced as a Jacobite history by the Whigs, and it was not warmly received by the Jacobites, as it did not sufficiently laud their historical favourites. ‘It is called Jacobite,’ wrote Walpole to Bentley, ‘but in my opinion it is only not _George-abite_. Where others abuse the Stuarts, he laughs at them. I am sure he does not spare their ministers.’ But it was still to the news sent from Rome that the Jacobites looked most eagerly for indications of what might be doing there, and the significance of it. Under date of January 3, 1756, the paragraph of news from Rome, the Eternal City, in the ‘Weekly Journal,’ informed all who were interested, that an Irish officer had arrived there with letters for the Chevalier de St. George, had received a large sum of money, on a bill of exchange, from Belloni, and had set out again with the answers to those letters. Again, on January 17th, the Chevalier’s friends in London were told that two foreigners had called on him with letters, but that he refused to receive either. ‘He refused to yield to their most earnest entreaties for an interview.’ ‘Read’ communicates a no less remarkable circumstance to the Jacobite coffee-houses. ‘Tho’ people have talked to him very much within the last two months of an expedition on Scotland or Ireland, he has declared that those kind of subjects are no longer agreeable to him, and that he should be better pleased to hear nothing said about them.’ Then came news of the Chevalier being sick, and the Pope, not only sending his own physician, but stopping his coach to enquire after the exile’s health. Occasionally, the paragraph of news is communicated by a ‘Papist,’ as, for instance, in an account of the reception into the Church of Rome of the young son of the Pasha of Scutari, where it is said that Cardinal York performed the ceremony of receiving the dusky convert, who had abandoned a splendid position ‘to come,’ says the writer, at Rome, ‘and embrace our holy religion.’ [Sidenote: _AT ROME._]