Henry Stuart was born in 1725. He died in 1807 in his eighty-third year. The birth of his father, the Old Pretender, had been the occasion of James the Second’s flight from England; and he himself lived to see the opening of negotiations for Catholic Emancipation in this country. He was created Cardinal at the unusually early age of twenty-two, and fourteen years later he was appointed to the bishopric of Frascati. In addition to this, he held the office of Dean of the Sacred College for the last four years of his life. Throughout this long and distinguished career he may be said to have had two interests, and two only, at heart: the service of his family and the service of his Church.

Of his devotion to the Stuart cause much has already been written. He has been alternately maligned by Hanoverian historians and white-washed by the assiduous supporters of the White Rose League. The former have pointed with contempt rather than with pity to the spectacle of this last of the Royal Stuarts begging George the Third for a further subsidy to support him in his old age : while the latter have either blamed him for becoming a Cardinal or else reminded the world of his untiring attempts to secure Papal recognition for his brother as Charles the Third, and later of his own constant, if tactful, assertion of his rights to the English throne. But these desultory tracts of historical controversy are profitless for any save the most dauntless student of lost causes; and neither an emphatic condemnation of Henry Stuart’s conduct nor his political rehabilitation would be likely to have any effect on modern life or thought.