469 Letter 196 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, March 6, 1746.

I know I have missed two or three posts, but you have lost nothing:  you perhaps expected that our mighty commotions did not subside at once, and that you should still hear of struggles and more shocks; but it all ended at once; with only some removals and promotions which you saw in the Gazette.  I should have written, however, but I have been hurried with my sister’S(1170) wedding; but all the ceremony of that too is over now, and the dinners and the visits.

The rebellion has fetched breath; the dispersed clans have reunited and marched to Inverness, from whence Lord Loudon was forced to retreat, leaving a garrison in the castle, which has since yielded without firing a gun.  Their numbers are now reckoned at seven thousand:  old Lord lovat(1171) has carried them a thousand Frasers.  The French continually drop them a ship or two:  we took two, with the Duke of Berwick’s brother on board:  it seems evident that they design to keep up our disturbances as long as possible, to prevent our sending any troops to Flanders.  Upon the prospect of the rebellion being at an end, the Hessians were ordered back, but luckily were not gone; and now are quartered to prevent the rebels slipping the Duke, (who is marching to them,) and returning into England.  This counter-order was given in the morning, and in the evening came out the Gazette, and said the Hessians are to go away.  This doubling style in the ministry is grown so characteristic, that the French are actually playing a farce, in which harlequin enters, as an English courier, with two bundles of despatches fastened to his belly and his back:  they ask him what the one is?  “Eh!  Ces sont mes ordres.” and what the other?  “Mais elles sont mes contre-ordres.”

We have been a little disturbed in some other of our politics, by the news of the King of Sardinia having made his peace:  I think it comes out now that he absolutely had concluded one with France, but that the haughty court of Spain rejected it:  what the Austrian pride had driven him to, the Spanish pride drove him from.  You will allow that our affairs are critically bad, when all our hopes centre in that honest monarch, the King of Prussia-but so it is:  and I own I see nothing that can restore us to being a great nation but his interposition.  Many schemes are framed, of making him Stadtholder of Holland, or Duke of Burgundy in Flanders, in lieu of the Silesias, or altogether, and that I think would follow-but I don’t know how far any of these have been carried into propositions.

I see by your letters that our fomentations of the Corsican rebellion have had no better success than the French tampering in ours-for ours, I don’t expect it will be quite at an end, till it is made one of the conditions of peace, that they shall give it no assistance.

The smallpox has been making great havoc in London; the new Lord Rockingham,(1172) whom I believe you knew when only Thomas Watson, is dead of it, and the title extinct.  My Lady Conway(1173) has had it, but escaped.