The
Oglethorpe girls, for penniless exiles, had played their cards well.
Fanny and Eleanor had won noble husbands. Poor Anne went back to
Godalming, where--in the very darkest days of the Jacobite party, when
James was a heart-broken widower, and the star of Prince Charles's
natal day shone only on the siege of Gaeta--she plotted with Thomas
Carte, the historian.
The race of 1715 was passing, the race of 1745 was coming on, and
touching it is to read in the brown old letters the same loyal
names--Floyds, Wogans, Gorings, Trants, Dillons, Staffords,
Sheridans, the Scots of course, and the French descendants of the
Oglethorpe girls. Eleanor's infants, the de Mezieres family, had been
growing up in beauty and honour, as was to be expected of the children
of the valiant Marquis and the charming Eleanor. Their eldest
daughter, Eleonore Eugenie, married Charles de Rohan, Prince de
Montauban, younger brother of the Duc de Montbazon, whose wife was the
daughter of the Duc de Bouillon and Princess Caroline Sobieska, and so
first cousin to the sons of James III. That branch of Oglethorpes thus
became connected with the royal family, which would go far towards
rousing their hereditary Jacobitism when the Forty-Five cast its
shadow before.
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