HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT, K.G., F.R.S.,

ETC., ETC., ETC.,

OF THE EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS OF INDUSTRY

OF ALL NATIONS IN 1851.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS,

THE proposition, execution and termination of the great and wondrous exhibition of the natural productions, industry and arts of all nations, which forms the characteristic feature and the crowning triumph of the memorable year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, has transmitted the name of your Royal Highness to the most distant regions of the earth, and will convey it to the latest posterity among those benefactors of the human race who have rendered the greatest honour to HIM who is "the author of peace

and lover of concord."

THEREFORE a memoir of that period of English history which gave birth to the Royal Society, witnessed

PREFACE.

THE quarto volume of "Memoirs of the Life and Works of Sir Christopher Wren," which I published some years ago, was almost exclusively devoted to that distinguished man and his works. It has long been my intention to publish a new edition of that work in octavo, but the size and number of the plates, the great extent of the appendix and other causes, induced me to defer it.

AFTER Some deliberation, I proposed to write a new work, in a more general and less technical style than the former; taking WREN for the principal subject, and adding illustrative sketches and anecdotes of celebrated persons and of striking events, connected with him and his times: and, as many of these illustrations are of a peculiar character, the authorities whence they are derived are specifically and invariably given.

AMONG these episodes are some which tend to prove the secret, but intimate connection between Louis XIV., many of his ministers and some of his mistresses, with the Jesuits, and the pernicious influence of those persons over the minds of those misguided Princes, Charles II. of England, and his brother

the expatriated James II. There is also, the mysterious embassy of the Duchess of Orleans, to her brother Charles II. at Dover, and her sudden and suspicious death at St. Cloud, immediately after the accomplishment of her mission; also the secret causes of the expulsion of the Jacobites and their Monarch, whom Louis XIV. had, not long before, acknowledged as the rightful heir to the Crown of England, from every part of France, and many other illustrative facts, which serve to throw a light on the history of the times, and are enumerated in the table of contents.

I HAVE also endeavoured to show, by indisputable facts, how the Crown* of Royalty has been tarnished by the Bourbons and the Stuarts; how the Crown of the Priesthood, has been cast down and trampled on, by the Richelieus, the Mazarins, the Le Telliers, the Duboises, the Choisys, and others, all eminent in the Romish hierarchy, whose united tyranny and persecution, debauchery, levity and corruption, sowed the seeds of that deadliest and most sanguinary of revolutions, in which anarchy, sacrilege, murder, rapine and crimes, till then unheard of, and which for nearly sixty years has devastated, and is still devastating, the finest countries in Europe and how the Crown of a Good

* See the motto in the title-page.