WHAT HAS BECOME OF LORD CAMELFORD'S BODY?

by Charles Reade

THIS question comes not from an Old Bailey counsel squeezing a witness; 'tis but a mild inquiry addressed to all the world, because the world contains people who can answer it; but I don't know where to find them.

To trace a gentleman's remains beyond the grave would savor of bad taste and Paul Pry; but I am more reasonable: I only want to trace those remains into a grave, if they have reached one.

Even that may seem impertinent curiosity--to his descendants; but if it is impertinent, it is natural. To permit the world a peep at strange facts, and then drop the curtains all in a moment, is to compel curiosity; and this has been done by Lord Camelford's biographers. To leave his lordship's body for seven or eight years in a dust-hole of St. Anne's Church, packed up--in the largest fish-basket ever seen--for exportation, but not exported, is also to compel curiosity; and this has been done by his lordship's executors.

Now this last eccentric fact has come to me on the best authority, and coupled with the remarkable provisions for his interment made by Camelford himself, has put me into such a state that there is no peace nor happiness for me until I can learn what has become of Lord Camelford's body--fish-basket and all.

I naturally wish to reduce as many sensible people as I can to my own intellectual standard in re Camelford. I plead the fox who, having lost his tail--as I my head--was for decaudating the vulpine species directly.

To this bad end, then, I will relate briefly what is public about Lord Camelford, and next what is known only to me and three or four more outside his own family.

Eccentricity in person, he descended from a gentleman who did, at least, one thing without a known parallel: he was grandson or great-grandson of Governor Pitt.

I beg pardon on my knees, but being very old and infirm and in my dotage, and therefore almost half as garrulous as my juvenile contemporaries, I really must polish off the Governor first. He had a taste for and knowledge of precious stones. An old native used to visit him periodically and tempt him with a diamond of prodigious size. I have read that he used to draw it out of a piece of fusty wool, and dazzle his customer. But the foxy Governor kept cool, and bided his time. It came; the merchant one day was at low-water and offered it cheaper. Pitt bought it; and this is said to be the only instance of an Anglo-Saxon outwitting a Hindoo in stones. The price is variously printed--man being a very inaccurate animal at present--but it was not more than £28,000. Pitt brought it home, and its fame soon rang round Europe. A customer offered--the Regent of France. Price, £135,000. But France at that time was literally bankrupt. The representative of that great nation could not deal with this English citizen, except by the way of deposit and installment. Accordingly a number of the French crown-jewels were left in Pitt's hands, and four times a year the French agents met him at Calais with an installment, until the stone was cleared and the crown-jewels restored.

Thenceforth the Pitt diamond was called the Regent diamond. It is the second stone in Europe, being inferior to the Orlop, but superior in size to the Koh-i-noor; for it was from the first a trifle larger, and the Koh-i-noor, originally an enormous stone, was fearfully cut down in Hindostan, and of late years terribly reduced in Europe--all the better for the Amsterdam cutters.

Every great old stone has cost many a life in some part of the world or other. But in Europe their vicissitudes are mild. Only the Sancy has done anything melodramatic.* The Regent has always gone quietly along with France. No Bourbon took it into exile at the first Revolution. No Republican collared it. Napoleon set it in his sword-hilt, but it found its way back to the royal family who originally purchased it, from them to the Second Emperor, and again to this Republic. I am afraid, if I had been Bony, I should have yielded to Etymology, and boned it before I went on my travels. But delicacy prevailed, and it has only run one great risk. In 1848 it lay a week in a ditch of the Champ de Mars, after the sack of the Tuileries, but was given up at last under a happy illusion that it was unsalable. As if it could not have been broken up and the pieces sold for £100,000! The stone itself is worth £800,000, I am told.

* The Sancy, a beautiful pear-shaped diamond of, say, fifty-three carats, was first spoken of in the possession of Philip, Duke of Burgundy. Very likely he imported it, for he dealt habitually with the East for curiosities. It passed, after some generations, to a Portuguese Prince. He wanted to raise money on it, and sent it to Paris, instructing the messenger to swallow it if he found himself in trouble or danger. It did not reach Paris, and this news was sent to Portugal. The French authorities were applied to, and they searched diligently, and found a foreigner had been assassinated, and buried in a French village. They exhumed him, opened him, and found the Sancy in his stomach. The stone was purchased by James the Second, and afterward was in various French hands. I think it has now gravitated to the Rothschilds.

From the importer of this diamond descended a Mr. Pitt, who was made a peer in 1784. He had a son, Thomas, born in 1775, to astonish his contemporaries while he lived, and torment one with curiosity seventy years after his death.

Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, was a character fit for the pen of Tacitus or Clarendon: a singular compound of virtues and vices, some of which were directly opposed, yet ruled him by turns; so that it was hard to predict what he would do or say on any given occasion; only the chances were it would be something with a strong flavor, good or bad.

In his twenty-nine years, which is only nine years of manhood, he assassinated an unresisting man, and set off to invade a great and warlike nation, single-handed; wrenched off many London door-knockers; beat many constables; fought a mob single-handed, with a bludgeon, and was cudgeled and rolled in the gutter without uttering a howl; mauled a gentleman without provocation, and had £500 to pay; relieved the necessities of many, and administered black eyes to many. He was studious and reckless; scientific and hare-brained; tender-hearted, benevolent, and barbarous; unreasonably vindictive and singularly forgiving. He lived a humorous ruffian, with flashes of virtue, and died a hero, a martyr, and a Christian.

To those who take their ideas of character from fiction alone, such a sketch as this must seem incredible; for fiction is forced to suppress many of the anomalies that Nature presents. David was even more like David than Camelford varied from Camelford; and the chivalrous Joab, who dashed, with his life in his hand, into the camp of the Philistines to get his parched general and king a cup of water, afterward assassinated a brother soldier in a way so base and dastardly as merited the gibbet, and the lash to boot. Imagine a fellow hanging in chains by the road-side, with the Victoria Cross upon his bosom, both cross and gibbet justly earned! Such a man was, in his day, the son of Zeruiah.

Were fiction to present such bold anomalies, they would be dubbed inconsistencies, and Horace would fly out of his grave at our very throats, crying,

Amphora coepit
Institui, currente rotâ cur urceus exit.

It is all the more proper that the strange characters of history should be impressed on the mind, lest, in our estimate of mankind, men's inconsistencies should be forgotten, and puzzle us beyond measure some fine day when they turn up in real life.

Lord Camelford went to school first at a village of the Canton Berne in Switzerland, and passed for a thoughtful boy; thence to the Charter-house. He took a fancy to the sea, and was indulged in it. At fourteen years old he went out as midshipman in the Guardian frigate, bound for Botany Bay with stores. She met with disasters, and her condition was so desperate that the captain (Riou) permitted the ship's company to take to the boats. He himself, however, with a fortitude and a pride British commanders have often shown in the face of death, refused to leave the ship. Then Camelford and ninety more gallant spirits stood by him to share his fate. However they got the wreck--for such she is described--by a miracle to the Cape, and Camelford went home in a packet.

Next year, 1791, he sailed with Vancouver in the Discovery. But on this voyage he showed insubordination, and Vancouver was obliged to subject him to discipline. He got transferred to the Resistance, then cruising in the Indian seas, and remained at sea till 1796, when his father died, and he returned home to take his estates and title.

Though years had elapsed, he could not forgive Captain Vancouver, but sent him a challenge. Vancouver was then retired, and in poor health. The old captain appealed to the young man's reason, and urged the necessity of discipline on board a ship-of-war, but offered to submit the case to any flag-officer in the navy, and said that if the referee should decide this to be a question of honor, he would resign his own opinion and go out with Lieutenant Camelford.

Camelford, it is to be feared, thought no sane officer would allow a duel on such grounds; for he did not accept the proposal, but waited his opportunity, and meeting Vancouver in Bond Street, insulted him and tried to strike him. The mortification and humiliation of this outrage preyed upon Vancouver's heart, and shortened the life of a deserving officer and very distinguished navigator.

Little more than a year after this, Camelford took a very different view of discipline, and a more sanguinary one. Yet there was one key to these discordant views--his own egotism.

Peers of the realm rose fast in the king's service at that date, and Camelford, though only a lieutenant, soon got a command; now it so happened that his sloop, the Favorite, and a larger vessel, the Perdrix, Captain Fahie, were both lying in English Harbor, Antigua, on the 13th January, 1798. But Fahie was away at St. Kitts, and Peterson, first lieutenant, was in charge of the Perdrix. Lord Camelford issued an order which Peterson refused to obey, because it affected his vessel, and he represented Fahie, who was Camelford's senior. There were high words, and, no doubt, threats on Camelford's part, for twelve of Peterson's crew came up armed. It is not quite clear whether Peterson sent for them; but he certainly drew them up in line and bared his own cutlass. Camelford immediately drew out his own marines, and ranged them in a line opposite Peterson's men. He then came up to Peterson with a pistol and said, "Lieutenant Peterson, do you still persist in not obeying my orders?"

"Yes, my lord," said Peterson, "I do persist."

Thereupon Camelford put his pistol to Peterson's very breast and shot him dead on the spot. He fell backward and never spoke nor moved.

Upon this bloody deed the men retired to their respective ships, and Camelford surrendered to Captain Matson, of the Beaver sloop, who put him under parole arrest. He lost little by that, for the populace of St. John's wanted to tear him to pieces. A coroner's jury was summoned, and gave a cavalier verdict that Peterson "lost his life in a mutiny," the vagueness of which makes it rather suspicious.

Camelford was then taken in the Beaver sloop to Martinique, and a court-martial sat on him, by order of Rear-Admiral Hervey. The court was composed of the five captains upon that station, viz., Cayley, Brown, Ekers, Burney, and Mainwaring, and the judgment was delivered in these terms, after the usual preliminary phrases: "The court are unanimously of opinion that the very extraordinary and manifest disobedience of Lieutenant Peterson to the lawful commands of Lord Camelford, the senior officer at English Harbor, and his arming the ship's company, were acts of mutiny highly injurious to his majesty's service; the court do therefore unanimously adjudge that Lord Camelford be honorably acquitted."

Such was the judgment of sailors sitting in secret tribunal. But I think a judge and a jury sitting under the public eye, and sitting next day in the newspapers, would have decided somewhat differently.

Camelford was the senior officer in the harbor; but Peterson, in what pertained to the Perdrix, was Fahie, and Fahie was not only Camelford's senior, but his superior in every way, being a post-captain.

"Lieutenant" is a French word, with a clear meaning, which did not apply to Camelford, but did to Peterson--lieu tenant or locum tenens; I think, therefore, Peterson had a clear right to resist in all that touched the Perdrix, and that Camelford would never have ventured to bring him to a court-martial for mere disobedience of that order. In the court-martial Camelford is called a commander; but that is a term of courtesy, and its use, under the peculiar circumstances, seems to indicate a bias; like the man he slaughtered, he had only a lieutenant's grade.

Much turns, however, on the measure and manner even of a just resistance; and here Peterson was primá facie to blame. But suppose Camelford had threatened violence! The thing looks like an armed defense, not a meditated attack. For the lieutenant in command of the Favorite to put a pistol to the breast of the lieutenant in charge of the Perdrix, and slaughter him like a dog, when the matter could have been referred on the spot by these two lieutenants to their undoubted superiors, was surely a most rash and bloody deed. In fact, opinion in the navy itself negatived the judgment of the court-martial. So many officers, who respected discipline, looked coldly on this one-sided disciplinarian, Camelford, that he resigned his ship and retired from the service soon after.

THE CAPRICCIOS OF CAMELFORD.

It was his good pleasure to cut a rusty figure in his majesty's service. He would not wear the epaulets of a commander, but went about in an old lieutenant's coat, the buttons of which, according to one of his biographers, "were as green with verdigris as the ship's bottom." He was a Tartar, but attentive to the comforts of the men, and very humane to the sick. He studied hard in two kinds--mathematical science and theology; the first was to make him a good captain; the second to enable him to puzzle the chaplains, who in that day were not so versed in controversy as the Jesuit fathers.

Returning home, with Peterson's blood on his hands, he seems to have burned to recover his own esteem by some act of higher courage than shooting a brother officer à bout portant; and he certainly hit upon an enterprise that would not have occurred to a coward. He settled to invade France, single-handed, and shoot some of her rulers, pour encourager les autres. He went to Dover and hired a boat. He was sly enough to say at first he was bound for Deal; but after a bit, says our adventurer, in tones appropriately light and cheerful, "Well, no, on second thoughts, let us go to Calais; I have got some watches and muslins I can sell there." Going to France in that light and cheerful way was dancing to the gallows; so Adam, skipper of the boat, agreed with him for £10, but went directly to the authorities. They concluded the strange gentleman intended to deliver up the island to France, so they let him get into the boat, and then arrested him. They searched him, and found him armed with a brace of pistols, a dagger, and a letter of introduction, in French.

They sent him up to the Privy Council, and France escaped invasion that bout.

At that time, as I have hinted, it was a capital crime to go to France from England; so the gallows yearned for Camelford. But the potent, grave, and reverend seniors of his majesty's Council examined him, and advised the king to pardon him under the royal seal. They pronounced that "his only motive had been to render a service to his country." This was strictly true, and it was unpatriotic to stop him; for whoever fattens the plains of France with a pestilent English citizen, or consigns him to a French dungeon for life, confers a benefit on England, and this benefit Camelford did his best to confer on his island home. It was his obstructors who should have been hanged. His well-meant endeavor reminds one of the convicts' verses, bound for Botany Bay:

"True patriots we, for, be it understood,
We left our country for our country's good."

The nation that had retained him against his will now began to suffer for its folly, by his habitual breaches of the public peace.

After endless skirmishes with the constables, my lord went into Drury Lane Theater, with others of the same kidney, broke the windows in the boxes, and the chandeliers, and Mr. Humphries's head. Humphries had him before a magistrate. Camelford lied, but was not believed, and then begged the magistrate to ask Mr. Humphries if he would accept an apology; but word-ointment was not the balm for Humphries, who had been twice knocked down the steps into the hall, and got his eye nearly beaten out of his head. He prepared an indictment, but afterward changed his tactics judiciously, and sued the offender for damages. The jury, less pliable than captains in a secret tribunal, gave Humphries a verdict and £500 damages.

After this, Camelford's principal exploits appear to have been fights with the constables, engaged in out of sport, but conducted with great spirit by both parties, and without a grain of ill-will on either side. He invariably rewarded their valor with gold when they succeeded in capturing him. When they had got him prisoner, he would give the constable of the night a handsome bribe to resign his place to him. Thus promoted, he rose to a certain sense of duty, and would admonish the delinquents with great good sense and even eloquence, but spoiled all by discharging them. Such was his night-work. In the daytime he was often surprised into acts of unintentional charity and even of tender-heartedness.

HIS NAME A TERROR TO FOPS.

He used to go to a coffee-house in Conduit Street, shabbily dressed, to read the paper. One day a dashing beau came into his box, flung himself down on the opposite seat, and called out, in a most consequential tone, "Waitaa, bring a couple of wax-candles and a pint of Madeira, and put them in the next box." En attendant he drew Lord Camelford's candle toward him, and began to read. Camelford lowered at him, but said nothing. The buck's candles and Madeira were brought, and he lounged into his box to enjoy them. Then Camelford mimicked his tone, and cried out, "Waitaa, bring me a pair of snuffaa." He took the snuffers, walked leisurely round into the beau's box, snuffed out both the candles, and retired gravely to his own seat. The buck began to bluster, and demanded his name of the waiter.

"Lord Camelford, sir."

"Lord Camelford! What have I to pay?" He laid down his score and stole away without tasting his Madeira.

HIS PLUCK.

When peace was proclaimed this suffering nation rejoiced. Not so our pugnacious peer. He mourned alone--or rather cursed, for he was not one of the sighing sort. London illuminated. Camelford's windows shone dark as pitch. This is a thing the London citizens always bitterly resent. A mob collected, and broke his windows. His first impulse was to come out with a pistol and shoot all he could; but luckily he exchanged the firearm for a formidable bludgeon. With this my lord sallied out, single-handed, and broke several heads in a singularly brief period. But the mob had cudgels too, and belabored him thoroughly, knocked him down, and rolled him so diligently in the kennel, while hammering him, that at the end of the business he was just a case of mud with sore bones.

All this punishment he received without a single howl, and it is believed would have taken his death in the same spirit; so that, allowing for poetic exaggeration, we might almost say of him,

"He took a thousand mortal wounds
As mute as fox 'midst mangling hounds."

The next night his windows were just as dark; but he had filled his house with "boarders," as he called them, viz., armed sailors; and had the mob attacked him again, there would have been wholesale bloodshed, followed by a less tumultuous, but wholesale, hanging day.

But the mob were content with having thrashed him once, and seem to have thought he had bought a right to his opinions. At all events they conceded the point, and the resolute devil was allowed to darken his house, and rebuke the weakness of the people in coming to terms with Bony.

THE PITCHER GOES ONCE TOO OFTEN TO THE WELL.

Camelford had a male friend, a Mr. Best, and, unfortunately, a female friend, who had once lived with this very Best. This Mrs. Simmons told Camelford that Best had spoken disparagingly of him. Camelford believed her, and took fire. He met Best at a coffee-house and walked up to him and said, in a loud, aggressive way, before several persons, "I find, sir, you have spoken of me in the most unwarrantable terms."

Mr. Best replied, with great moderation, that he was quite unconscious of having deserved such a charge.

"No, sir," says Camelford, "you know very well what you said of me to Mrs. Simmons. You are a scoundrel, a liar, and a ruffian!"

In those days such words as these could only be wiped out with blood, and seconds where at once appointed.

Both gentlemen remained at the coffee-house some time, and during that time Mr. Best made a creditable effort; he sent Lord Camelford a solemn assurance he had been deceived, and said that under those circumstances he would be satisfied if his lordship would withdraw the expressions he had uttered in error. But Camelford absolutely refused, and then Best left the house in considerable agitation, and sent his lordship a note. The people of the house justly suspected this was a challenge, and gave information to the police; but they were dilatory, and took no steps till it was too late.

Next morning early the combatants met at a coffee-house in Oxford Street, and Best made an unusual and, indeed, a touching attempt to compose the difference. "Camelford," he said, "we have been friends, and I know the unsuspecting generosity of your nature. Upon my honor you have been imposed upon by a strumpet. Do not insist on expressions under which one of us must fall."

Camelford, as it afterward appeared, was by no means unmoved by this appeal. But he answered, doggedly, "Best, this is child's play; the thing must go on." The truth is, Best had the reputation of being a fatal shot, and this steeled Camelford's pride and courage against all overtures.

The duel was in a meadow behind Holland House. The seconds placed the men at thirty paces, and this seems to imply they were disposed to avoid a fatal termination if possible.

Camelford fired first, and missed. Best hesitated, and some think he even then asked Camelford to retract. This, however, is not certain. He fired, and Lord Camelford fell at his full length, like a man who was never to stand again.

They all ran to him; and it is said he gave Best his hand, and said, "Best, I am a dead man. You have killed me; but I freely forgive you."

This may very well be true; for it certainly accords with what he had already placed on paper the day before, and also with words he undoubtedly uttered in the presence of several witnesses soon after.

Mr. Best and his second made off to provide for their safety. One of Lord Holland's gardeners called out to some men to stop them; but the wounded man rebuked him, and said he would not have them stopped; he was the aggressor. He forgave the gentleman who had shot him, and hoped God would forgive him too.

He was carried home, his clothes were cut off him, and the surgeons at once pronounced the wound mortal. The bullet was buried in the body, and the lower limbs quite paralyzed by its action. It was discovered, after his death, imbedded in the spinal marrow, having traversed the lungs. He suffered great agonies that day, but obtained some sleep in the night. He spoke often, and with great contrition, of his past life, and relied on the mercy of his Redeemer.

Before the duel he had done a just and worthy act. He had provided for the safety of Mr. Best by adding to his will a positive statement that he was the aggressor in every sense: "Should I, therefore, lose my life in a contest of my own seeking, I solemnly forbid any of my friends or relations to proceed against my antagonist." He added that if the law should, nevertheless, be put in force, he hoped this part of his will would be laid before the king.

I have also private information, on which I think I can rely, that, when he found he was to die, he actually wrote to the king with his own hand, entreating him not to let Best be brought into trouble.

And if we consider that, as death draws near, the best of men generally fall into a mere brutish apathy--whatever you may read to the contrary in Tracts--methinks good men and women may well yield a tear to this poor, foolish, sinful, but heroic creature, who, in agonies of pain and the jaws of death, could yet be so earnest in his anxiety that no injustice should be done to the man who had laid him low. This stamps Camelford a man. The best woman who ever breathed was hardly capable of it. She would forgive her enemy, but she could not trouble herself and worry herself, and provide, moribunda, against injustice being done to that enemy; c'était mâle.

I come now to those particulars which have caused me to revive the memory of Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, and I divide them into public and private information.

THE PUBLIC INFORMATION.

The day before his death Lord Camelford wrote a codicil to his will which, like his whole character, merits study.

He requested his relations not to wear mourning for him, and he gave particular instructions as to the disposal of his remains in their last resting-place. In this remarkable, document he said that most persons are strongly attached to their native place, and would have their remains conveyed home, even from a great distance. "His desire, however, was the reverse. He wished his body to be conveyed to a country far distant, to a spot not near the haunts of men, but where the surrounding scenery might smile upon his remains."

He then went into details. The place was by the lake of St. Pierre, in the Canton Berne, Switzerland. The particular spot had three trees standing on it. He desired the center tree to be taken up and his body deposited in the cavity, and no stone nor monument to mark the place. He gave a reason for the selection, in spite of a standing caution not to give reasons. "At the foot of that tree," said he, "I formerly passed many hours in solitude, contemplating the mutability of human affairs." He left the proprietors of the trees and ground £1,000 by way of compensation.

COMMENT ON THE PUBLIC INFORMATION.

Considering his penitent frame of mind, his request to his relations not to go into mourning for him may be assigned to humility, and the sense that he was no great loss to them.

But as to the details of his interment, I feel sure he mistook his own mind, and was, in reality, imitating the very persons he thought he differed from. I read him thus by the light of observation. Here was a man whose life had been a storm. At its close he looked back over the dark waves, and saw the placid waters his youthful bark had floated in before he dashed into the surf. Eccentric in form, it was not eccentric at bottom, this wish to lay his shattered body beneath the tree where he had sat so often an innocent child, little dreaming then that he should ever kill poor Peterson with a pistol, and be killed with a pistol himself in exact retribution. That at eleven years of age he had meditated under that tree on the mutability of human affairs is nonsense. Here is a natural anachronism and confusion of ideas. He was meditating on that subject as he lay a dying; but such were never yet the meditations of a child. The matter is far more simple than all this. He who lay dying by a bloody death remembered the green meadows, the blue lake, the peaceful hours, the innocent thoughts, and the sweet spot of nature that now seemed to him a temple. His wish to lie in that pure and peaceful home of his childhood was a natural instinct, and a very common one. Critics have all observed it and many a poet sung it, from Virgil to Scott.

Occidit, et moriens dulces, reminiscitur Argos.

THE PRIVATE INFORMATION.

In the year 1858, I did business with a firm of London solicitors, the senior partner of which had in his youth been in a house that acted for Lord Camelford.

It was this gentleman who told me Camelford really wrote a letter to the king in favor of Best. He told me, further, that preparations were actually made to carry out Camelford's wishes as to the disposal of his remains. He was embalmed and packed up for transportation. But at that very nick of time war was proclaimed again, and the body, which was then deposited, pro tempore, in St. Anne's Church, Soho, remained there, awaiting better times.

The war lasted a long while, and, naturally enough, Camelford's body was forgotten.

After Europe was settled, it struck the solicitor, who was my friend's informant, that Camelford had never been shipped for Switzerland. He had the curiosity to go to St. Anne's Church and inquire. He found the sexton in the church, as it happened, and asked him what had become of Lord Camelford.

"Oh," said the sexton, in a very cavalier way, "here he is;" and showed him a thing which he afterward described to my friend M'Leod as an enormously long fish-basket, fit to pack a shark in.

And this, M'Leod assured me, was seven or eight years after Camelford's death.

Unfortunately, M'Leod could not tell me whether his informant paid a second visit to the church, or what took place between 1815 and 1858.

The deceased peer may be now lying peacefully in that sweet spot he selected and paid for. But I own to some misgivings on that head. In things of routine, delay matters little; indeed, it is a part of the system; but when an out-of-the-way thing is to be done, oh, then delay is dangerous: the zeal cools; the expense and trouble look bigger; the obligation to incur them seems fainter. The inertia of Mediocrity flops like lead into the scale, and turns it. Time is really edax rerum, and fruitful in destructive accidents; rectors are apt to be a little lawless; church-wardens deal with dustmen; and dead peers are dust. Even sextons are capable of making away with what nobody seems to value, or it would not lie years forgotten in a corner.

These thoughts prey upon my mind; and as his life and character were very remarkable, and his death very, very noble, and his instructions explicit, and the duty of performing them sacred, I have taken the best way I know to rouse inquiry, and learn, if possible,

WHAT HAS BECOME OF LORD CAMELFORD'S BODY.

CHARLES READE.

AUTHORITIES.--Annual Register, February 25, 1798; Times, January 14 and 17, 1799; True Briton, January 17, 19, 1799; "Humphries v. Camelford," London Chronicle, Times, True Briton, Porcupine, May 16, 17, 18, 1799; Porcupine, October 8 and 12, 1801; Times, October 9, 12,17,24, 1801; Morning Post, March 8,10,13, 14, 26, 28, 1804; Annual Register, 1804; Eccentric Mirror, 1807.

Rev. William Cockburn, "An Authentic Account of Lord Camelford's Death, with an Extract from his Will," etc., 1804. Letter from William Cockburn to Philip Neve, Esq., Morning Post, March 26, 1804.

M'Leod, deceased.



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