Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 113, December 27, 1851 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

When found, make a note of. —CAPTAIN CUTTLE.
VOL. IV.—No. 113.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27. 1851.
Price Threepence. Stamped Edition, 4 d.
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Have you ever amused yourself by tracing historical parallels? did you ever note how often one age reflects the character of another, so that the stage of real life seems to us at intervals as a theatre on which we see represented the passions of the past, its political tendencies, and monied speculations; the only change being that of costume, and a wider but more modified method of action? So true it is that men change, institutions vary, and that human nature is always the same. The church reproduces its Laud, the railway exchange its Law, the bench has its Mansfield, the Horse Guards its greater Marlborough, and Newgate its Mrs. Brownrigg. We have giants as great as King Charles's porter, and a Tom Thumb who would have frightened the very ghosts of all departed Jeffery Hudsons,—a class not generally accused of fear, except at daybreak,—by his unequalled diminutiveness . Take the great questions which agitate the church and the senate-house, which agitated them in the sixteenth, during much of the two following centuries, and you will find the same theological, political, commercial, and sanitary questions debated with equal honesty, equal truth, and similar prospects of satisfactory solution. I confess, however, that for one historical coincidence I was unprepared; and that Barclay and Perkins, in the case of assault upon a noted public character, should have an historical antecedent in the seventeenth century, has caused me some surprise. It is not necessary for me to recall to your attention how Barclay and Perkins were noised about on the occasion of the attack on General Haynau. The name of the firm was as familiar to our lips as their porter:
Never came reformation in a flood
With such a heady currance.
There had been no similar émeute , as I was told by a civic wit, since the days of Vat Tyler. Now let me remind you of the Barclay and Perkins and the other Turnham Green men's plot, who conspired to assault and assassinate King William III. Mind, the coincidence is only in name. The historic parallel is rather of kind than event, but it is not the less remarkable when we consider the excitement twice connected with these names. The character of James II. may be described as the villainy of weakness . It possessed nothing of elevation, breadth, or strength. It was this weak obliquity which made him deceive his people, and led them to subvert the laws, supplant the church, and to become a tyrant in the name of religious liberty. His means to recover the throne were as mean as the manner of its desertion was despicable. He tried cajolery, it failed; the bravery of his Irish soldiers, it was unavailing. He next relied on the corruption of Russell, the avarice of Marlborough; but as these men were to be bought as well as sold, he put his trust finally in any villain who was willing to be hired for assassination. In 1692 M. de Grandval, a captain of dragoons, was shot in the allied camp, who confessed that King James at St. Germain, in the presence of the queen, had engaged him to shoot King William. Four years later James had contrived another plot. At the head of this were Sir George Barclay and Sir William Perkins, and under their guidance twenty men were engaged to assist in the assassination of King William. The plan was as follows. It was the custom of the king to hunt near the house of Mr. Latten, in the neighbourhood of Brentford, and they designed to surprise the king on his return at a hollow part of the road between Brentford and Turnham Green, one division of them being placed behind some bushes and brushwood at the western end of the Green. Some of your correspondents may perhaps fix the spot; but as the Green extended then far beyond what it now does, I suspect it was about the road leading to Gunnesbury; the road itself I recollect as a boy seeing much elevated and improved. The design failed, two of the gang betrayed the rest,—Barclay escaped, but Perkins and some others were hung. Jeremy Collier attended them on the scaffold, and publicly gave them absolution in the name of Christ, and by imposition of hands, for all their sins. I need not describe to you the excitement caused by this plot of Barclay and Perkins: the event connected with their names, as at our later period—