0, returning to Paris on
September 13th. Here, as we know from the document left by Archibald
Cameron, Lochiel's brother, the last man executed for the rising, or
rather for a later plot, Charles renounced the Catholic faith. Charles
himself gives 1750 as the date of this conversion. It came five years
too late, and he recanted his recantation. He was in England again later
(1752), and held his last council in Merriworth Castle in Kent. There is
a legend of his ghost haunting a house in Godalming, which probably
comes from a tradition of his residence there. Since 1750 or
thereabouts, a Miss Clementina Walkinshaw, of Barrowfield, had been his
mistress. He is said to have met her near Glasgow, and flirted with her;
when or where she fled to him on the continent is obscure. Mr. Ewald
supposes her to have been with him in Paris before the affair of
Vincennes (1748). The writer, however, has seen a letter from Paris to a
sister of Miss Walkinshaw describing the arrest at the Opera House,
without the most distant allusion to Clementina, about whom her sister
would be concerned. Clementina, judging by a miniature, was a lady with
very large black eyes; a portrait in oil gives a less favorable view of
her charms. In 1754 Charles was again in England, and in Nottingham. He
actually walked in Hyde Park, where someone, recognizing him, tried to
kneel to him. He therefore returned at once to France. He is reported to
have come back in 1755 or 1756, braving the reward of L30,000 for his
head. The Jacobites now requested him to dismiss Clementina Walkinshaw,
whose eldest sister was a lady housekeeper in the Hanoverian family. A
scrap in Charles's hand at Windsor proves that he regarded some lady as
a possible traitor, but he declined to be dictated to, in his household
matters, by his adherents. This gave the English Jacobites an excuse for
turning their coats, of which they availed themselves. Sir Walter Scott
makes the romance of "Redgauntlet" hang on the incident. About this time
jottings of Charles prove that he fancied himself a Republican. He hated
Louis XV., and declined on one occasion to act as a bug-bear
(_epouvantail_), at the request of France. He had already struck a medal
in honor of the British Navy and contempt of the French. He is now lost
sight of till 1760, when Miss Walkinshaw, with his daughter, left his
protection for that of a convent. This lady, in some letters, now
unluckily lost, endeavored to persuade her fa