did not retrieve the honour of his blood, and though very brave in his person, and tolerably brutal, had every other failure of his race. Nor was he happier in his own issue. Not intending to return to his native country, Ireland, he had given up his house there to his son, but changing his mind, went thither. His son shut both his father and mother out of the mansion house, and was countenanced by his brothers and sisters,--a scene of vexation that pierced the mother’s heart, and threw her into religious melancholy. But to the King the most grievous part of the affliction was the connection with Colonel Lutterell, and the satisfaction it must give to the friends of the constitution to see the invasion of their privileges punished by the same hand by which they had been attacked; for it was soon known that Mrs. Horton’s brothers had been privy to the matrimonial transaction between the Duke and their sister. The Duke’s flight to Calais with his bride spoke as little heroism as he had exerted on former occasions, and showed how little consultation he had held on the validity of his marriage; yet it proved indissoluble, the royal family being expressly excepted out of the late Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act. That proud legislator had indeed inserted them; but the late Duke of Cumberland and Lord Holland, in order to traverse Hardwicke, had represented to the late King that it was an indignity to the Princes of the Blood to be levelled with the mass of his subjects, and the haughty Monarch had ordered them to be erased out of the bill, saying, “I will not have my family laid under those restraints.” The King, Queen, and Princess Dowager were beyond measure enraged at this degradation of their house; but the misfortune was regarded with indifference or ridiculed by almost every one else. Yet though the King was not pitied, no indulgence was shown to the Duke; even the Opposition giving him up as Lutterell’s sister had been the object of his choice. The zealous--that is, the servile courtiers were loud in their condemnation. Even the placid and plausible Lord Barrington pronounced that the new Princess deserved to lose her head,--a wretched imitation of Lord Clarendon’s[210] outrageous strain of affectation, who pretended to demand the trial and execution of his own daughter for marrying the Duke of York. The Duchess of Buckingham, natural daughter of James the Second, a steady and active Jacobite, observing Sir Robert Walpole’s partiality to his natural daughter, Lady Mary, sent for him, and asked him if he recollected what had not been thought too great a reward to Lord Clarendon for restoring the royal family? He pretended not to understand her. She said, Was not the Duke of York allowed to marry his daughter? Sir Robert smiled, but told her he was content with the honours he had attained. He little thought his natural granddaughter would obtain a rank he declined for his natural daughter!