He nothing common did or mean

On this day 30 January in 1788 died in Rome Charles Edward Stuart, King Charles III of England, Scotland and Ireland to Jacobites, known to history as the Young Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie. 

He died due to a stroke at the age of 67. 

His brother Prince Henry, Cardinal York who was at his deathbed arranged for the official record to state that he died on the morning of 31 January, because he considered it inauspicious to declare his brother dead on the same date as the execution of their great-grandfather, King Charles I.

Cardinal York became the Pretender and for Jacobites King Henry IX. He was the last person to touch for the King's evil, scrofula. The usurpers William and Mary discontinued the practice. Anne reintroduced it and touched Samuel Johnson for it, of course, but George I ended the practice. It was considered a Popish superstition.

From Bowyer Nichol's Words and Days (1895): the entry for January 30th.

You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs ; still am I king of those.
KING RICHARD II. iv. I.


He walked across the park from the garden at St. James's that January morning with so firm and quick a pace that the guards could scarcely keep the step, and stepping from his own banqueting-house upon the scaffold, where the men who ruled England had so little understood him as to provide ropes and pulleys to drag him down in case of need, he died with that calm and kingly hearing which none could assume so well as he, and by his death he cast a halo of religious sentiment round a cause which, without the final act, would have wanted much of its pathetic charm, and struck the keynote of religious devotion to his person and the monarchy which has not yet ceased to reverberate in the hearts of men. 

SHORTHOUSE.


He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed.

MARVELL.