The Life and Loyalties of Thomas Bruce. A Biography of
Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury and Elgin, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King Charles II and to King James II : 1656-1741. By the Earl of Cardigan. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 2 Is.)* THOMAS, Earl of Ailesbury was born in 1656. He was Gentleman of the Bed- chamber to King Charles II for a few weeks and to King James 11. Accused of plots against William and Mary, he fled, after imprisonment in the Tower, to the Conti- nent in 1698, and died in Brussels in .1741. In 1728 he began an autobiography which he finished in a couple of years. He must have had all the pleasures of authorship and few of its pains, for he wrote straight on as fancy moved him, with no plan, no divisions into chapters, no attempt at chronology. He described his work modestly as "a Domestic Diary, a Discourse by the Fireside." His descendant, Lord Cardigan, has retold the events in chronological1order with numerous quotations from the original, which was printed by the Roxburghe Club in 1890. There must be many statements in the original which would be useful to the social historian. One such is the account of a kind of life insurance, arranged between two private individuals, with the dreadful result that one of them is always longing for the death of the other. In this volume the only event that raises the subject of the biography to interest is his part in the return of James to his capital for one week after his flight. By crediting his hero with feelings and obser- vations for which he does not give written evidence, Lord Cardigan clothes him with the unreality of a historical novel. A re- print of the original document, prefaced by a chronological statement of events, would have been more useful to historians.
H. F.
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