[176] These letters are intituled “Letters to Lord Mansfield on the Douglas Cause, 1773,” 4to. They partly deserve the commendation bestowed on them by Walpole, and may still be read with almost unabated interest. Mr. Stuart had been a Writer of the Signet in Edinburgh. He was the proprietor of a fair estate called Torrence, in Lanarkshire, and for some years he represented the county in Parliament. In the Letters cited above, he calls himself “one whose birth entitles him, when provoked by injury, to feel no inferiority” to Lord Mansfield. The Appendix to his work contains letters to him from Charles Yorke, Dunning, Wedderburne, and Sir Adam Ferguson (who had all been of counsel for the Hamiltons), testifying to his honour in the conduct of the cause. It is difficult, nevertheless, to acquit him of very reprehensible tampering with the evidence. He wrote several tracts on Indian affairs, and likewise “A Genealogical History of the Stuarts, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time,” a work more curious than valuable. It led to some controversy long since forgotten. He died in 1801.--E. [177] Without examining the records of France this fact cannot safely be altogether denied; but after many inquiries both among Scotch and English lawyers, the authenticity of it seems to rest with Walpole alone. Had it happened before Mr. Stuart’s Letters was published in 1773, of course he would never have omitted so important a fact; but neither in his Letters, nor in a French account of the Douglas cause published in 1786, nor in any other publication that has fallen in the editor’s way, is there the least notice of any such thing: besides this, nobody remembers even to have heard of it; and it is not a story likely to be forgotten, had it ever been mentioned.--E. [178] He was the fifth son of the Earl of Shannon, [and M.P. for Knaresborough. He went out to the West Indies some years afterwards as Commodore, in the Thunderer, seventy-four, and perished with all his crew in the celebrated hurricane of 1779. He had married one of the daughters and co-heirs of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams.--E.] [179] The trial is reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1768, p. 587; 1769, p. 51–53, 108. Certainly the execution of these men would have been an act of gross injustice.--E. [180] Mr. Joseph Martin, M.P. for Gatton, an ancestor of the present Member for Tewkesbury.--E. [181] The Petition from “the major part of the Council of Massachusets,” signed by Mr. Dunsford the President of the Council. Lord North contended that by the constitution of the colony the Council could not act separate from the Government except in their legislative capacity, and in that case the Governor was President of the Council. Owing to the recent dissolution, they could no longer act in their legislative capacity. The President, therefore, had no authority to sign in that character. (Cavendish’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. i. p. 185.)--E.