In a portion of the Duke of Newcastle’s speech he asserted that the right claimed for the king was indispensable, on the ground that not only were private soldiers being recruited in London for ‘foreign service,’ but that officers might be tampered with, and that there was no real security that a general-in-chief might not be seduced into the enemy’s camp. This spread some alarm. The debates, indeed, were supposed to be delivered in private, but what was called ‘the impudence of some fellows’ gave all that was essential to the public. For defence of the nation, however, every precaution had been taken. Early in the spring, a fleet of twenty sail of the line was sent to the Downs. Eight regiments were brought from Ireland to England. It is certain that these precautions preserved the public tranquility of the kingdom. ◆[Sidenote: _THE YOUNG CHEVALIER._]◆ Young Prince Charles Edward was serving ‘with particular marks of distinction’ in the army of Don Carlos; and the boy gave no obscure hints that he would, whenever it was in his power, favour the pretensions of his family. An exclamation of Sergeant Cotton, at a review in Hyde Park, that he would shoot the king; and the fact that the sergeant’s musket was loaded with ball, and that he had a couple of bullets in his pocket which had no right to be there, seemed to imply that Cotton was ready to favour the Stuart family’s pretensions. The metropolis, moreover, was disturbed this year by the appearance of strangers in the streets, with more or less of a military air about many of them. These were, however, for the most part, Jacobites who were void of offence, and who had hastily come over from France. The Government there had given them a taste of what it was to live under such a system in Church and State as the Stuarts would establish in England, if they could get permanent footing there. A royal edict was published throughout France, peremptorily commanding all English, Irish, and Scotch, of the ages between eighteen and fifty, who were without employment, to enter the French army, within a fortnight. Disobedience to this edict was to be punished:――civilians, by condemnation to the galleys;――men who had formerly served, to be shot as deserters! Those who were not fortunate enough to get away from such a paternal Government found friends in the ministers of that George II. whom they still styled ‘Duke of Brunswick’ and ‘Elector of Hanover.’ Lord Waldegrave, the British Ambassador in France, sharply censured the edict, remonstrated against the injustice of treating the persons named in the edict worse than the natives of any other country, and pointed to the ingratitude of the French Government for various good service rendered to it by England on recent occasions. There was not a place in London where men met, but there Lord Waldegrave’s health was drunk. Whatever the politics of the drinkers were, all parties were glad to find a cause for drinking which carried unanimity with it.