My brother is on the point of finishing all his affairs with his countess; she is to have fifteen hundred per year; and her mother gives her two thousand pounds.  I suppose this will send her back to you, added to her disappointments in politics, in which it appears she has been tampering.  Don’t you remember a very foolish knight, one Sir Bourchier Wrey?(1174) Well, you do:  the day Lord Bath was in the Treasury, that one day! she wrote to Sir Bourchier at Exeter, to tell him that now their friends were coming into power, and it was a brave opportunity for him to Come Up and make his own terms.  He came, and is lodged in her house, and sends about cards to invite people to come and see him at the Countess of Orford’s.  There is a little fracas I hear in their domestic; the Abb`e-Secretary has got one of the maids with child.  I have seen the dame herself but once these two months, when she came into the Opera at the end of the first act, fierce as an incensed turkey-cock, you know her look, and towing after her Sir Francis Dashwood’s new Wife,(1175) a poor forlorn Presbyterian prude, whom he obliges to consort with her.

Adieu! for I think I have now told you all I know.  I am very sorry that you are so near losing the good Chutes, but I cannot help having an eye to myself in their coming to England.

(1170) Lady Maria Walpole, married to Charles Churchill, Esq.

(1171) Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, a man of parts, but of infamous character.  He had the folly, at the age of eighty, to enter into the rebellion, upon a promise from the Pretender, that he would make him Duke of Fraser.  He was taken, tried, and beheaded.-D.

)1172) Thomas Watson, third Earl of Rockingham, succeeded his elder brother Lewis in the family honours in 1745, and died himself in 1746.  The earldom extinguished upon his death’; but the Barony of Rockingham devolved upon his kinsman, Thomas Watson Wentworth, Earl of Malton, who was soon afterwards created Marquis of Rockingham. ant`e, p. 458, letter 191.

(1173) Lady Isabella Fitzroy, daughter of Charles, Duke of Grafton, and wife of Francis, Lord Conway, afterwards Earl of Hertford.

(1174) Sir Bourchier Wrey of Tavistock, in Devonshire, the fifth baronet of the family.  He was member of parliament for Barnstaple, and died in 1784.-D.

(1175) Widow of Sir Richard Ellis.

470 Letter 197
To Sir Horace Mann. 
Arlington Street, March 21, 1746.

I have no new triumphs of the Duke to send you:  he has been detained a great while at Aberdeen by the snows.  The rebels have gathered numbers again, and have taken Fort Augustus, and are marching to Fort William.  The Duke complains extremely of the loyal Scotch:  says he can get no intelligence, and reckons himself more in an enemy’s country, than when he was warring with the French in Flanders.  They profess the big professions wherever he comes, but, before he is out of sight of any town, beat up for volunteers for rebels.  We see no prospect of his return, for he must stay in Scotland while the rebellion lasts; and the existence of that seems too intimately connected with the being of Scotland, to expect it should soon be annihilated.