is nearest the truth. It is said that, on one occasion, while witnessing a procession at Rome, he exclaimed to a Roman Catholic Peer, "Oh that our family should deprive themselves of three kingdoms for such nonsense."[1] He died at Rome in 1788, and was buried, with great pomp and splendour, in the Church of Frescati, of which his brother Henry, the Cardinal of York, was Bishop.[2]
At the period of Charles Edward's death, few Nonjurors survived. For several years, notwithstanding the efforts of some active individuals, they had been gradually diminishing in numbers. Gordon, the last Bishop of the regular body, died in 1779: so that the Nonjurors became extinct, as a regularly constituted Church, with its Bishops, Priests and Deacons, at that time: but the Separatists continued some years longer, and individual Clergymen of the other body survived, until a comparatively recent period. Of Gordon an unfavourable, and probably not a true picture, is drawn by King. "It never entered my thoughts," says he, "that a Nonjuring Clergyman, who values himself much upon the sanctity of his manners, and with whom I had once lived in some degree of friendship, should conspire with two or three villanous attorneys to traduce me by a public advertisement. I don't know whether he would be a martyr, but no man is a greater enthusiast in religion than he is in the Jacobite cause. Hereditary right and passive obedience are the chief articles of his creed. And this is the doctrine which
