"And in order that the present act may have all power and requisite authenticity, we have ordered it to be registered in the Chancery of the kingdom, and have signed it with our own hands, and confirmed it with the seal of the kingdom.—Given in Parliament, Dec. 27, 1737."
Similar declarations were repeated also in the year 1739, when Theodore again landed in Corsica in the midst of great popular rejoicings. On his way back to the island, he narrowly escaped being burnt alive. A German, Captain Wigmanshausen, who commanded his ship, had been bribed by the Genoese to blow it up during the night. Theodore awoke several times with a sensation as if he were being burnt alive. His suspicions were at last roused, and going into the captain's cabin, accompanied by three of his attendants, he found him busy making preparations to set fire to the powder-magazine. King Theodore sentenced him on the spot to be burnt, but afterwards changed the punishment to hanging on the ship's mast; and the sentence was immediately executed. Thus it happened, that Theodore, in his short royal career, among other kingly experiences, nearly fell a victim to an attempt upon his life.
Theodore's further fortunes in Corsica are already known to us. After attempting in vain to regain his island-crown, he returned to England. He left behind him a wonderful life-dream, in which he had once beheld himself on a semi-barbarous island, with a crown upon his head, and a sceptre in his hand—marquises, counts, barons, cavaliers, chancellors, and keepers of the Great Seal, around him:—now, he sat melancholy and a beggar in the London debtor's prison, and, as he thought on the king-romance of his changeful wandering life, complained no less bitterly and with no less suffering, that it should now be his fate to pine away a captive in the hands of English shopkeepers, than Napoleon did at a later period in the English prison of St. Helena. Theodore, too, had been a king; he, too, was fallen greatness, a tragic personage. The Minister Walpole opened a subscription to aid the poor king of the Corsicans, and in this way he was freed from confinement. As a mark of gratitude, Theodore sent him the Great Seal of his kingdom. Like Paoli and Napoleon, he died on the soil of England in the year 1756. He lies buried in Westminster churchyard.