Charles--Obvious blunders--Talk of a marriage--Count Bruhl's opinion-
-Proposal to kidnap Charles--To rob a priest--The King of Poland's
ideas--Lord Hyndford on Frederick the Great--Lord Hyndford's mare's
nest--Charles at Berlin--'Send him to Siberia'--The theory
contradicted--Mischievous glee of Frederick--Charles discountenances
plots to kill Cumberland--Father Myles Macdonnell to James--London
conspiracy--Reported from Rome--The Bloody Butcher Club--Guesses of
Sir Horace Mann--Charles and a strike--Charles reported to be very
ill--Really on the point of visiting England--September 1750.

Europe, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, was like a vast political
gambling establishment. Nothing, or nothing but the expulsion of
Prince Charles from every secular State, had been actually settled.
Nobody was really satisfied with the Peace. The populace, in France
as in England, was discontented. Princes were merely resting and
looking round for new combinations of forces. The various Courts,
from St. Petersburg to Dresden, from London to Vienna, were so many
tables where the great game of national faro was being played, over
the heads of the people, by kings, queens, abbes, soldiers,
diplomatists, and pretty women. Projects of new alliances were
shuffled and cut, like the actual cards which were seldom out of the
hands of the players, when Casanova or Barry Lyndon held the bank,
and challenged all comers. It was the age of adventurers, from the
mendacious Casanova to the mysterious Saint-Germain, from the
Chevalier d'Eon to Charles Edward Stuart. That royal player was
warned off the turf, as it were, ruled out of the game. Where among
all these attractive tables was one on which Prince Charles, in 1749,
might put down his slender stake, his name, his sword, the lives of a
few thousand Highlanders, the fortunes of some faithful gentlemen?
Who would accept Charles's empty alliance, which promised little but