w, 'coming in on the ground-floor,'
or buying stock before issue at the lowest prices, sold out at the
top of the market.
Paris was full of Jacobites from Ireland and Scotland--Seaforth,
Tullibardine, Campbell of Glendaruel, George Kelly (one of the Seven
Men of Moidart), Nick Wogan, gayest and bravest of Irishmen, all
engaged in a pleasing plan for invading England with a handful of
Irish soldiers in Spanish service. The Earl Marischal and Keith his
brother (the Field-Marshal) came into Paris broken men, fleeing from
Glenshiel. _They_ took no Mississippi shares, but George Kelly, Fanny
Oglethorpe, and Olive Trant, all _lies_ with Law and Orleans,
'plunged,' and emerged with burdens of gold. Fanny for her share had
800,000 livres, and carried it as her dowry to the Marquis des
Marches, whom she married in 1719, and so ceased conspiring. The
Oglethorpe girls, for penniless exiles, had played their cards well.
Fanny and Eleanor had won noble husbands. Poor Anne went back to
Godalming, where--in the very darkest days of the Jacobite party, when
James was a heart-broken widower, and the star of Prince Charles's
natal day shone only on the siege of Gaeta--she plotted with Thomas
Carte, the historian.
The race of 1715 was passing, the race of 1745 was coming on, and
touching it is to read in the brown old letters the same loyal
names--Floyds, Wogans, Gorings, Trants, Dillons, Staffords,
Sheridans, the Scots of course, and the French descendants of the
Oglethorpe girls. Eleanor's infants, the de Mezieres family, had been
growing up in beauty and honour, as was to be expected of the children
of the valiant Marquis and the charming Eleanor. Their eldest
daughter, Eleonore Eugenie, married Charles de Rohan, Prince de
Montauban, younger brother of the Duc de Montbazon, whose wife was the
daughter of the Duc de Bouillon and Princess Caroline Sobieska, and so
first cousin to the sons of James III. That branch of Oglethorpes thus
became connected with the royal family, which would go far towards
rousing their hereditary Jacobitism when the Forty-Five cast its
shadow before.
In May 1740, Madame de Mezieres took it into her head to run over to
England, and applied to Newcastle for a pass, through Lady Mary
Herbert of Powis--a very _suspect_ channel! The Minister made such
particular inquiries as to the names of the servants she intended to
bring, that she changed her mind and did not go. One wonders what
person purposed travell
|