He was a boy and a peer, and he would make pretty play of his position.
He had considerable talents, and now, as he sat in the Irish House,
devoted them entirely to the support of the government.
For the next four years he was employed, on the one hand in political,
on the other in profligate, life. He shone in both; and was no less
admired, by the wits of those days, for his speeches, his arguments, and
his zeal, than for the utter disregard of public decency he displayed in
his vices. Such a promising youth, adhering to the government, merited
some mark of its esteem, and accordingly, before attaining the age of
twenty-one, he was raised to a dukedom. Being of age, he took his seat
in the English House of Lords, and had not been long there before he
again turned coat, and came out in the light of a Jacobite hero. It was
now that he gathered most of his laurels.
The Hanoverian monarch had been on the English throne some six years.
Had the Chevalier's attempt occurred at this period, it may be doubted
if it would not have been successful. The 'Old Pretender' came too soon,
the 'Young Pretender' too late. At the period of the first attempt, the
public had had no time to contrast Stuarts and Guelphs: at that of the
second, they had forgotten the one and grown accustomed to the other;
but at the moment when our young duke appeared on the boards of the
senate, the vices of the Hanoverians were beginning to draw down on them
the contempt of the educated and the ridicule of the vulgar; and
perhaps no moment could have been more favourable for advocating a
restoration of the Stuarts.
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