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Theodore de Neuhoff

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Extract

Horace Walpole’s charities were on a much larger scale than a perusal of Lord Macaulay’s bitter and waspish character-sketch of him might lead one to expect. Walpole had an especial fondness for relieving the necessities of those poor souls who lay languishing in the many debtors’ prisons of the age. Again and again we find him writing to his man of business to expend for him in this way two, five, or six guineas, as the case might be, for the prisoners in the Compter, the Clink, the Fleet, or the King’s Bench prisons. He would take pains to raise similar subscriptions for them among his friends, would write to the press on their behalf, and in one instance at least he was at the expense of raising a striking memorial over the grave of a heart-broken bankrupt.

Right in the centre of the metropolis, amid the purlieus of Soho, surrounded by play-houses and taverns, there lies a sad little graveyard. Those who read this may often have passed by it. The gates stand ever open in the day-time, there are seats amid the tombs, the poor and the homeless can rest there awhile, and the children make the place their familiar playground. On a wall opposite the entrance is an old and crumbling monument surmounted by a royal crown. The inscription tells us that near that place is buried Theodore, King of Corsica, ‘who died on Dec. n, 1756, immediately on leaving the King’s Bench Prison’; and it concludes with these lines :

‘The grave—great teacher—to a level brings Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings;

But Theodore this moral learn’d ere dead;

Fate pour’d its lesson on his living head—?

Bestow’d a kingdom, and denied him bread.’

The verse is from the pen, as the cost of the tombstone was defrayed from the purse, of Horace Walpole.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1925 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 There is a good notice of De Neuhoff, drawn up from his own State Papers in the French Foreign Office, in Nouvelle Biographie Générale (Paris, 1866), Vol. 45. See also Boswell's Corsical (Edition of 1769); Horace Walpole's Letters (Toynbee Edition) Vol I; and Doran's Monarchs Retired (Landon, 1857), Vol. I.