But, something more definite is reached in a despatch from the British Minister at Florence (Mann), which Lord Stanhope published in his ‘Decline of the Stuarts.’ The minister, who writes in 1783, describes a conversation which took place at Florence, between Charles Edward (then known as Count d’Albany) and Gustavus, King of Sweden, in the course of which the count told the king that, in September, 1750, he arrived secretly in London with a Colonel Brett; that together they examined the outer parts of the Tower, and came to the conclusion that one of the gates might be blown in by a petard. After which, at a lodging in Pall Mall, where fifty Jacobites were assembled, including the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Westmoreland, the prince said to these Jacobites, or rather to Gustavus, that if they could have assembled only 4,000 men, he would have publicly put himself at their head. He added that he stayed a fortnight in London, and that the Government were ignorant of his presence there. It is to be remembered that this story was told three and thirty years after the alleged occurrence. The narrator was then an aged man, whose brains and memory and general health were so damaged by ‘the drink, the drink, dear Hamlet!’ that not the slightest trust could be placed in any single word that he uttered in respect to his past history. He may have dreamed it all, but that any two gentlemen, the face of one of whom was familiar, from prints and busts publicly sold, could have so carefully examined the Tower as to find out where it was vulnerable, without the sentinels having discovered the same part in the explorers, is surely incredible. The vaunt of the secret visitor publicly placing himself at the head of an army of Jacobites, was just such a boast as the brainless drunkard of 1783 would be likely to make. There is as little reliance to be put on the statement of the Duke of Beaufort and Earl of Westmoreland being present at a Jacobite meeting in Pall Mall. The really Jacobite duke died in 1746. His successor, and also the Earl of Westmoreland (of the year 1750), may have been often in opposition to the Government, but no act of their lives would warrant the belief that they could be insane enough to attend a meeting of half a hundred Jacobites in Pall Mall, to listen to a project for blowing up the Tower and pulling down the throne. [Sidenote: _THE VISIT IN 1752-3._]