She obtained, however, about a year after, a sort of equivocal acknowledgment of what she was. The Duke of Gloucester gave a ball to the King and Queen, to which nobody, without exception, but certain of their servants and their husbands, and wives, and children, were admitted: yet Lady Waldegrave and her eldest daughter appeared there. She could have no pretension to be present, being attached by no post to either King or Queen; and it spoke itself, that the Duke could not have proposed to introduce his mistress[257] to an entertainment dedicated to the Queen. The Princess Dowager (and she was then believed to be the principal obstacle to the publicity of the marriage) alone treated Lady Waldegrave with coldness[258]--another presumption of their being married. His declining health often carried the Duke abroad. The Great Duke, with whom he contracted a friendship, told Lady Hamilton, wife of our Minister at Naples, that the Duke had owned his marriage to him. It was this union that was censured in the _North Briton_, as threatening a revival of the feuds of the two roses, by a Prince of the blood marrying a subject. END OF THE THIRD VOLUME. LONDON: Printed by S. & J. BENTLEY, WILSON and FLEY, Bangor House, Shoe Lane. FOOTNOTES [1] The pamphlet alluded to was intituled “A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Grafton, First Commissioner of his Majesty’s Treasury.” Editions were printed at London, Paris, and Berlin. It bears with less severity on the Duke than on Lord Chatham, who is held up to public ridicule and scorn as an apostate to the cause of liberty, and “the abject crouching deputy of the proud Scot,” whom he is represented as having previously persecuted and insulted. This virulent and tedious invective concludes thus:--“But I have done with Lord Chatham; I leave him to the poor consolation of a place, a pension, and a peerage, for which he has sold the confidence of a great nation. Pity shall find and weep over him.” It is altogether a poor performance. The only part now of any interest, is the narrative it contains of Wilkes’s arrest and examination for the publication of the _North Briton_, in 1763.--(Almon’s Life of Wilkes, vol. iii. p. 184.--Biographical Anecdotes, vol. i. p. 6.)--E. [2] Walpole must have meant weeks. The Pope declined receiving them on account of the expenses attending the support of so large a body. Subsequently the miserable pittance of a franc per diem was assigned to each of them.--E. [3] M de Mello afterwards became Minister of Marine in Portugal, under the Marquis of Pombal, and held that post several years with great reputation. His ability and experience in business, obliged the Court to retain him in the Government after the disgrace of Pombal, notwithstanding his connexions with that statesman, and the known liberality of his opinions.--(Dispatch from Mr. Walpole, minister at Lisbon, in Smith’s Life of Pombal, vol. ii. p. 301.)--E.