The appearance of Mayence struck me as very melancholy. So long as this city belonged to the Ecclesiastical Elector it was a capital at which many rich families resided, and where there was a corps diplomatique. But now no carriages were to be heard rolling through the streets; few foot passengers were to be seen; the garrison alone enlivening the place. This was composed of Austrians and Prussians, and each of those Courts in turn appointed a Governor for three years. The Austrians were quartered at one end of the city, and the Prussians at the other. The former, in their white regimentals, were tall, fine-looking men; the Prussians, in blue, not so tall, but apparently very active. Both had good bands of music.
I went to see the Cathedral, which, notwithstanding the eleven years of peace, still wore the desolate appearance in which it had been left by the French, to the great annoyance of the good old beadle who showed it to me, and who had witnessed the horrors of the war. The sacred edifice had served as an hospital for the wounded, and I recollect hearing the Count de M., a French general, say that the air was so mephitic, on account of the great number of sufferers lying there, that in the evening it extinguished the lights, or at least rendered them scarcely visible. The destruction of the tombs was wanton barbarism; but a few statues of Electors were left standing, and amongst them one belonging to an English family. These were placed at a great height, which, I suppose, was the reason they were spared.
At Frankfort I called on the Princess of Stolberg Goedern, who was in her ninety-second year. She told me she could not conceive how the Countess of Albany, her eldest daughter, could have died so young, for she had lost her a few months before at the age of seventy. She was the daughter of a Prince of Horn, by Lady Bruce, daughter of the Earl of Aylesbury, who, as a Roman Catholic, espoused the cause of the Stuarts, and died at Brussels. He was father of the first Earl, who settled at Tottenham Park, and left the estate to his nephew, Thomas Brudenell, whom he intended for the husband of his only daughter, Lady Mary,[96] but she married the Duke of Richmond, and his widow afterwards married General Conway. The Princess of Stolberg was quite the great lady, but had been reduced to poverty. The late and present Lord Aylesbury allowed her an annuity, on which she chiefly subsisted; but she has lately obtained for herself and her unmarried daughter, who lives with her, a pension of 500_l._ a year from the King of England, for which they appeared to be very grateful. His portrait was in one of their bedrooms. The old lady is now able to indulge in the constant use of a carriage, and in going to the theatre, to balls, and great parties, from which she is the last to retire. The daughter, whom I had formerly seen at Rome with the Countess of Albany, with whom I was not then acquainted, appeared to be a sensible woman, and by no means so young in her ideas and pursuits as her mother.