She
went to Bath; she made Lady Albemarle profoundly uncomfortable about
her lord's famous mistress in Paris, and no doubt she plunged, on her
return, into the plots with Prussia for a Restoration. In the Privy
Council, in November 1753, her arrest was decided on. Newcastle jots
down, on a paper of notes: 'To seize Madame de Mezieres with her
papers. No expense to be spared to find the Pretender's son. Sir John
Gooderich to be sent after him. Lord Anson to have frigates on the
Scotch and Irish coasts.'
By 1759 Eleanor was, perhaps, weary of conspiring. Her daughter, the
Princesse de Ligne, was the fair patroness of that expedition which
Hawke crushed in Quiberon Bay, while Charles received the news at
Dunkirk.
All was ended. For seventy-two years the Oglethorpe women had used
their wit and beauty, through three generations, for a lost cause.
They were not more lucky, with the best intentions, than Eleanor's
grandson, the Prince de Lambesc. With hereditary courage he rescued an
old woman from a burning cottage, and flung her into a duck-pond to
extinguish her blazing clothes. The old woman was drowned!
Not long ago a lady of much wit, but of no occult pretensions, and
wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes, looked over Westbrook Place, then
vacant, with the idea of renting it.
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