In the Chatham Correspondence, it is stated that the King of Prussia had said he should consider it a personal favour done to himself. The pardoning of such an able military Jacobite as Keith, Earl Marischal, indicated that the ‘Elector of Hanover’ considered Jacobitism as dead, or at least powerless. At the same time, the more mysteriously secluded Charles Edward kept himself, the more curiosity there was among ‘curious’ people in London to learn something about him and his designs, if he had any. The apparently mortal illness of the Chevalier de St. George, in May 1760, caused some of the London papers to publish a sort of exulting paragraph, not over the supposed dying Chevalier, but over the fact, announced in the words: ‘We shall soon know where the young Pretender is!’ Of the father’s impending death no doubt was made. Was he not seventy-two years of age? And had he not for thirty years of the time been worn out with anxieties caused by his sons? One saucy paragraph included the saucier remark:――‘He has left his estates, which may be Nothing, to his eldest son, whom many think is Nobody.’ But all this was premature. The old prince did not die this year. George II. _did_. The grandson of the latter began to reign in October. The Jacobites laughed at his new Majesty’s boast of being born a Briton, for ‘James III.’ was more purely British than he; born in London, and son of a father who was also born in this metropolis, he was less of a foreigner than George III., whose parents were purely German. The Jacobites made the most of this difference; and when such of them as were in Hyde Park saw the king’s horse nearly break his rider’s neck by suddenly flinging him out of the saddle, those spectators probably thought of the results of King William’s fall from horseback, and hoped that heaven was on their side. The newspapers admiringly recorded the presence of mind of the young king, who, though shaken, went to the play the same night, to calm the supposed anxieties of his faithful people. [Sidenote: _ACCESSION OF GEORGE III._]