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Edingburgh, that towards the end of his life, the Duke of Argyle grew in terror of being sent to the Tower, & if any

body named the Tower before him, he started, & repeated the word with great marks of fear.

5.

ANECDOTES RELATING TO SIR ROBERT WALPOLE AND HIS TIME, AND FAMILY.

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The Instant She was dead, Bishop Atterbury offered to go in pontificalibus & proclaim the Pretender at Charingcross Lord Bolinbroke was afraid-The Bishop swore a great oath, there was the best cause lost for want of Spirit. If it had been done, I believe it woud have succeeded-especially as I am persuaded the late King woud never have come over. He spoke no EngHe spoke no English, was not young nor ambitious, loved Hanover & his Ease & hated his Son.

Sir R. W. had a great Inclination, instead of building at Houghton, to have bought the old Cavendish House, built

at Roehampton by the Countess Shrewsbury, called Bess of Hardwicke, & have built there -but was afraid of the expense of living so near London-He saved nothing by not.

He took the idea of the Towers of Houghton from Mr Child's at Osterley, built by Sir Thomas Gresham, who like the Duc de la Feuillade, built the wall of a court in a night's time, while Queen Elizabeth was there, because She said it wanted one.

The Queen used to press Sir R. W. to read Dr Butler's Analogy ; He replied, 'No, Madam, my Faith is fixed, you shall not make me a Heretic.' When Butler was Bishop of Bristol, he set up a Crucifix in the Chapel there, which was removed by his Successor. From Mr Hawkins.

Sir R. Walpole being asked why he suffered Lord Bolinbroke to come home, & yet woud not restore him to the House of Lords, replied, 'I was once with a Lady at a critical minute; She desired me to lock the door; I answered, 'nobody will come in '; She said, 'do lock it, & then they cant come in.'

When Sir Robert's brother Horatio, who had married the daughter of Lombard, a French staymaker, was embassador at Paris, the Queen told his wife that she spoke French like a Frenchwoman: She replied, 'Madam, that is not extraordinary, for I am one.'-' Indeed! said the Queen; of what family are you? 'D'aucune, of none, Madam.'

Sir Rob. Walpole being taxed by the Opposition with corruption, replied one day in the House of Commons thus: 'I am accused of corrupting others; will any body say that I am corrupted myself? '

Another time being reproached by Sir W. Windham with obtaining Votes by promising places, he replied-'I coud gain few Votes that way; for I shoud be pressed with my promises, & shoud make more enemies than friends, if I promised more than I coud perform -no; it is that Gentleman 1 & his Friends who Promise places & as They see no likelyhood of coming into power, they can venture to promise fifty places, where I promise One.'

Thomas Coke Earl of Leicester was a very cunning false man, but not a deep one. He affected frankness & a noisy kind of buffoonery, both to disguise his art, & his superficiall understanding. He owed all his preferments to Sir Robert Walpole, who patronized him for his great Estate & for being a

near neighbour in Norfolk, & a sort of Relation, his grandmother mother having married Sir Robert's Uncle. Lord Leicester kept up great intimacy with Lord Chesterfield & W. Pulteney Earl of Bath, not only as fashionable men of wit, but to provide friends in case of a change of Administration; & Sir Robert, who knew & did not trust him, did not doubt but he gave them what intelligence he coud. Sir Robert one day having said something which Lord Leicester thought the Opposition woud be glad to take hold of, said, 'God, I will tell That to Pulteney.' Sir Robert looked at him with great gravity & said, 'My Lord, I am sure you will by your telling me so '-Leicester coud not stand the rebuke & went out of the room.

In November 1781, the Duke of Montrose asked my Brother Sir Edward Walpole, whether it was true that my Father Sir Rob. Walpole said that every man had his price. My Brother replied that he had often heard that saying imputed to his Father, but had never heard him himself say so [nor did I ever hear him say so.] The Duke said, 'Sir Edward, I will tell you a Story apropos to that saying, which perhaps you never heard. Sir Robert being one day in the House of Lords, & sitting by a great Scotch Lord, that Lord asked him whether he had ever said so? Sir Robert

1 Presumably Pulteney,

France.

replied, My Lord, is that a Horace the Embassador in fair question?'-Well then, It appears from the said the Lord haughtily, will same book that while the Maryou at least answer me another shal was endeavouring to unite question? Do you know my France and Spain, & to prevent Price?'-Sir Robert with Spain from joining the Emamazing quickness & infinite peror, that Sir Robert & his sense, replied, 'My Lord, you Brother dexterously balanced do not know it yourself.' the French politics, & sometimes supported Spain & sometimes the Emperor, kept England out of War, & till the death of Augustus 2d, King of Poland, prevented any Union amongst those three great powers, that woud have been prejudicial to England. This Defence out of the mouth of an enemy so well Informed, is the highest Panegyric on Sir Robert Walpole.

The Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole accused him of being duped and influenced by France. It appears by the authentic Memoirs of the Marshal de Villars published in four volumes in 1784,1 that the Marshal who was of the French Cabinet Council was convinced that Cardinal Fleury was governed, & as he says, duped by Sir Robert and his Brother

1 An edition in three volumes had been published in 1734, of which the first only was genuine.

THE FIRST NAVAL KITE-BALLOON.

BY JOHN MACKWORTH.

DURING the war dwellers by the coast began to be perplexed by the appearance of queerlooking objects in the sky, which hung above certain ships and followed their movements with great exactness. Seen from a distance they resembled (to the uninitiated) airships, but as a rule were too far out to sea for their details to be made out with any exactness.

They were, as a matter of fact, balloons; but why they were attached to ships, and how they came to be used at all, is a matter not generally known even now, those who felt any curiosity on the subject having mostly satisfied themselves with the vague but comfortable word "blimphs."

These balloons were used for very definite purposes. They certainly were not ornamental, and their artistic demerits were even such as to weigh against their practical advantages; for no one could possibly claim that the appearance of a battleship was improved by having one of these monsters attached to it, while to some captains who loved every line of their ships they remained to the end an abomination and a hissing. Lesser men might have quailed at the task of presenting themselves before these master mariners with the information

"balloon for you to-day, sir," as fell to the lot of the recently commissioned officers (civilians but a short time before) who were in charge of the balloon ships or depots on shore; and it speaks volumes both for their tact and the progressive spirit of the Navy that no lives were lost in the process.

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The functions of the balloons all turned on one single fact: that they could provide reasonably steady observation post two or three thousand feet above the deck of the ship, and in direct telephonic communication with its control positions. The advantages of this are too obvious to need enumeration - improved fire control, immensely extended field of vision, power to see over smoke screens and lowlying fog, and of spotting submarines and the tracks of torpedoes being some of the most important; every factor, in short, that the Fleet most sadly lacked in the various actions that culminated in the battle of Jutland. Had balloon observation been available at that engagement, it is arguable that the result might have been different, for from first to last it was mainly a matter of visibility. To the man on deck the action was a series of flashes in the mist, but to the observer in the sky the

movements of both fleets would have been perfectly clear.

At the time of the battle the naval balloon was still in its infancy, and was not yet capable of towing with fast ships except in calm weather. There was only one ship fitted to carry a balloon, and that, by force of circumstances, was prevented from taking part. Later, with progressive improvements, balloons were carried by the warships themselves, and became capable of keeping the air for days at a time, and of withstanding the tremendous wind pressures encountered when towing head on against a stiff breeze.

Failing a fleet action, their main work was directed against submarines, a favourite method being for four destroyers, each carrying a balloon, to work together, and if a submarine were sighted to hunt it down to exhaustion. It is a significant fact that in proportion to the cost, balloons were concerned with the sinking of more submarines than any other form of aircraft. Another is that. during the entire war no ship carrying a balloon was ever itself sunk.

In view of these results an interest may attach to the tale of how balloons came to be employed with the Navy. The trials which led to their adoption were curious and in some ways amusing, and had the additional peculiarity that they were carried out on active service.

Before the war the kite

balloon was unknown in England except as an object that occasionally disfigured the photographs of the German army on manœuvres. For some reason it was never taken seriously, but dismissed as a species of vast bumble bee in the Teutonic bonnet, too unwieldy and complicated to have any practical value. All that we had for the purpose of stationary observation was a flight of man-lifting kites that served no object but to raise the hair and harden the stomach, and an old spherical equipment as used in the South African War. The former was immediately (and properly) discarded, but the latter did service on the Belgian coast against the right wing of the German drive. In this region it did good work, but its chief value lay in opening the eyes of the unfortunates condemned to operate it to the immense superiority of the German "Drachen."

One of these was stationed opposite the spherical, and when the latter was pitching and rolling in a moderate wind, its vis-à-vis was hanging motionless in the sky, thousands of feet higher and steady as a rock. Naturally this set the sufferers thinking, and an exchange of compliments with the French (who had also been thinking, though to though to rather better effect) resulted in the Royal Naval Air Service being presented with two very creditable imitations of the ParsevalSigsfeld kite-balloon.

These were intended for the

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