(1746.)
etween condemnation and execution, Drury Lane, as if London had not had enough of trials and judgments, got up a showy spectacle, in one act, partly obtained from Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V.,’ called ‘The Conspiracy Discovered, or French Policy Defeated,’ with ‘a representation of the Trial of the Lords for High Treason, in the reign of Henry V.’ This was first acted on the 5th of August. But the populace knew where to find a ‘spectacle, gratis.’
Gazing at the heads above Temple Bar became a pastime. Pickpockets circulated among the well-dressed crowd, reaping rich harvest; but, when detected, they were dragged down to the adjacent river, and mercilessly ‘ducked,’ which was barely short of being drowned. A head, called ‘Layer’s,’ had been there for nearly a quarter of a century. An amiable creature, in a letter to a newspaper, thus refers to it, in connection with those recently spiked there:—‘Thursday, August 7.—Councillor Layer’s head on Temple Bar appears to be making a reverend Bow to the heads of Towneley and Fletcher, supposing they are come to relieve him after his long Look-out, but as he is under a mistake, I think it would be proper to put him to Rights again, which may be done by your means.—An Abhorrer of Rebellion.’
THE DUKE AT VAUXHALL.
About this time Walpole offers, with questionable alacrity, evidence against the character of the Duke of Cumberland. The duke had fixed an evening for giving a ball at Vauxhall, in honour of a not too reputable Peggy Banks. The evening proved to be that of the day on which the lords were condemned to death, the 1st of August. The duke immediately postponed the ball, but Walpole says he was ‘persuaded to defer it, as it would have looked like an insult to the prisoners.’ After all, the unseemly festivity was only deferred from the 1st of August to the 4th; and Walpole was one of the company. He saw the royalties embark at Whitehall Stairs, heard the National Anthem played and sung on board state city-barges; and saw the duke nearly suffocated by the crowds that greeted him on his landing at Vauxhall. He was got safely ashore, not being helped by the awkward officiousness of Lord Cathcart who, a few evenings previously, at the same place, stepping on the side of the boat to lend his arm to the duke, upset it; and the conqueror at Culloden and my lord were soused into the Thames up to their chins.
OPINION IN THE CITY.
In another letter Walpole declares that the king was inclined to be merciful to the condemned Jacobites, ‘but the Duke, who has not so much of Cæsar after a victory as in gaining it, is for the utmost severity.’ Walpole adds the familiar incident: ‘It was lately proposed in the city to present him with the freedom of some company;’ one of the aldermen said aloud: ‘Then let it be of the Butchers!’ If this alderman ever said so, he represented the minority among citizens. ‘Popularity,’ writes Walpole (August 12th, 1746), ‘has changed sides since the year ’15, for now, the city and the generality are very angry that so many rebels have been pardoned. Some of those taken at Carlisle dispersed papers at their execution, saying they forgave all men but three, the Elector of Hanover, the pretended Duke of Cumberland, and the Duke of Richmond, who signed the capitulation of Carlisle.’ This bravado in the North was not calculated to inspire mercy in the members of the administration (who were the real arbiters of doom) in London.
IN THE TOWER.
People of fashion went to the Tower to see the prisoners as persons of lower ‘quality’ went there to see the lions. Within the Tower, the spectator was lucky who, like Walpole, in August, ‘saw Murray, Lord Derwentwater (Charles Radcliffe), Lord Traquair, Lord Cromartie and his son, and the Lord Provost, at their respective windows.’ The two lords already condemned to death were in dismal towers; and one of Lord Balmerino’s windows was stopped up, ‘because he talked to the populace, and now he has only one which looks directly upon all the scaffolding.’ Lady Townshend, who had fallen in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at the first sight of ‘his falling shoulders,’ when he appeared to plead at the bar of the Lords, was to be seen under his window in the Tower. ‘She sends messages to him, has got his dog and his snuff-box, has taken lodgings out of town for to-morrow and Monday night; and then goes to Greenwich; foreswears conversing with the bloody English, and has taken a French master. She insisted on Lord Hervey’s promising her he would not sleep a whole night for Lord Kilmarnock! And, in return, says she, “Never trust me more if I am not as yellow as a jonquil for him!” She said gravely the other day, “Since I saw my Lord Kilmarnock, I really think no more of Sir Harry Nisbett than if there was no such man in the world.” But of all her flights, yesterday was the strongest. George Selwyn dined with her, and not thinking her affliction so serious as she pretends, talked rather jokingly of the executions. She burst into a flood of tears and rage, told him she now believed all his father and mother had said of him; and with a thousand other reproaches, flung upstairs. George coolly took Mrs. Dorcas, her woman, and made her sit down to finish the bottle. “And pray, Sir,” said Dorcas, “do you think my mistress will be prevailed upon to let me go see the execution? I have a friend that has promised to take care of me, and I can lie in the Tower the night before.”—My lady has quarrelled with Sir Charles Windham, for calling the two lords, malefactors. The idea seems to be general, for ’tis said, Lord Cromartie is to be transported, which diverts me for the dignity of the peerage. The Ministry really gave it as a reason against their casting lots for pardon, that it was below their dignity.’ Walpole, who has thus pictured one part of London, in 1746, says, in a subsequent letter,—‘My Lady Townshend, who fell in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at his trial, will go nowhere to dinner, for fear of meeting with a rebel-pie. She says, everybody is so bloody-minded that they eat rebels.’
LORD CROMARTIE.
The Earl of Cromartie, the smallest hero of the Jacobite group, was among the most fortunate. He owed his comparative good luck to the energy of his countess who, having driven him into rebellion, moved heaven and earth to save him from the consequences. One Sunday, she obtained admission to St. James’s, and presented a petition to the king, for her husband’s pardon. The sovereign was civil, but he would not at all give her any hope. He passed on, and Lady Cromartie swooned away. On the following Wednesday, she presented herself at Leicester House, to procure the good offices of the Princess of Wales, accompanied by her four children. The princess, seeing the force and tendency of this argument, ‘made no other answer,’ says Gray, in a letter to Wharton, ‘than by bringing in her own children, and placing them by her; which, if true, is one of the prettiest things I ever heard.’ Lady Cromartie and her daughter, who was as actively engaged as her mother, prevailed in the end. Her lord was pardoned; and Walpole made this comment thereupon: ‘If wives and children become an argument for saving rebels, there will cease to be a reason against their going into rebellion.’ Walpole’s remarks are only the ebullition of a little ill-temper. Writing to Mann, in August, 1746, he says, ‘The Prince of Wales, whose intercession saved Lord Cromartie, says he did it in return for old Sir William Gordon (Lady Cromartie’s father), coming down out of his death-bed, to vote against my father in the Chippenham election. If His Royal Highness,’ adds Walpole, ‘had not countenanced inveteracy, like that of Sir Gordon, he would have no occasion to exert his gratitude now, in favour of rebels.’
LORD KILMARNOCK.
The doomed peers bore themselves like men, and awaited fate with a patience which the unpleasantly circumstantial old Governor Williamson could not disturb for more than a moment. On the Saturday before the fatal Monday, he told Lord Kilmarnock every detail of the ceremony, in which he and Balmerino were to bear such important parts. The summoning, the procession, the scaffold in sables, the whole programme was minutely dwelt upon, as if the governor took a sensual delight in torturing his captive. There was something grim in the intimation that my lord must not prolong his prayers beyond one o’clock, as the warrant expired at that hour; and, of course, he could not lose his head, that day, if he was unreasonably long in his orisons. There was not much, moreover, of comforting in the assurance that the block, which had been raised to the height of two feet, to make it comfortable for Lord Kenmure, had been so steadied, that Lord Kilmarnock need not fear any unpleasantness from its shaking. They talked of the heads and the bodies as if they belonged to historical personages. ‘The executioner,’ said the governor, ‘is a good sort of man.’ Kilmarnock thought his moral character might make him weak of purpose and performance. My lord hoped his head would not be allowed to roll about the scaffold. The governor satisfied him on that point; but, he added, ‘it will be held up and proclaimed as the head of a traitor.’ ‘It is a thing of no significance,’ said the earl, ‘and does not affect me at all.’—The governor then visited Lord Balmerino, whose wife, ‘my Peggy,’ was with him. At an allusion to the fatal day, the poor lady swooned. ‘Damn you!’ said the old lord, ‘you’ve made my lady faint away.’
ON TOWER HILL.
The details of the last scene on Tower Hill are better known than those of any similar circumstances. It was nobly said by Balmerino, when he met Kilmarnock, on their setting out, ‘My Lord, I greatly regret to have you with me on this expedition.’ Careful of the honour of his prince, he questioned Kilmarnock on the alleged issue of the order to give no quarter to the English, at Culloden. Lord Kilmarnock believed that the order was in the hands of the Duke of Cumberland, signed only by Lord George Murray. ‘Then, let Murray,’ said Balmerino, ‘and not the Prince, bear the blame.’ He exhorted Kilmarnock, who preceded him to the scaffold, ‘not to wince;’ and, when he himself appeared there, he prayed for King James, requested that his head might not be exposed, and that he might be buried in the grave where lay the Marquis of Tullebardine. These requests were granted.
THE EXECUTIONS.
The sight-seers were disappointed in one respect. The papers had announced that Lord Balmerino had bespoken a flannel waistcoat, drawers, and night-gown, in which he had resolved to make his appearance on the scaffold. But he came in his old uniform, and had nothing eccentric about him. The newspapers compared the two sufferers much to Balmerino’s disadvantage. ‘Lord Kilmarnock’s behaviour,’ says the ‘General Advertiser,’ ‘was so much the Christian and gentleman that it drew tears from thousands of spectators.’ Then, remarking that ‘the executioner was obliged to shift himself by reason of the quantity of blood that flew over him,’ the ‘Advertiser’ announces that, ‘Balmerino died with the utmost resolution and courage, and seemed not the least concerned; nor even the generality of spectators for him.’
A sympathising Jacobite lady honoured Balmerino with the following epitaph:—
Here lies the man to Scotland ever dear,
Whose honest heart ne’er felt a guilty fear.
A much more remarkable, and altogether uncomplimentary, effusion was to be found in verses addressed ‘to the pretended Duke of Cumberland, on the execution of the Earl of Kilmarnock, who basely sued for life by owning the usurper’s power, whereby he became a traitor, and, though apprehended and condemned for a loyalist, died a rebel:—
The only rebel thou hast justly slain
Was base Kilmarnock, &c.
But this censure sprang from the fact of Kilmarnock’s declaration that Charles Edward had no religious principle at all, and that he was prompt to profess membership with every community where a shadow of advantage was to be derived from the profession.
There remained two other rebels of quality who were destined to afford another savage holiday to the metropolis.
CHARLES RADCLIFFE.
On the 21st of November, the road from the Tower to Westminster was crowded, in spite of the weather, to see Charles Radcliffe ride, under strong military escort, to his arraignment in the Court of King’s Bench. He was the pink of courtesy on his way, but spoilt the effect by his swagger in Court. He denied that he was the person named in the indictment, asserted that he was Earl of Derwentwater; and, it is supposed, he wished to create a suspicion that he might be his elder brother, Francis. He would not address the Chief Justice as ‘my Lord,’ since he himself was not recognised as a peer. He also refused to hold up his hand, on being arraigned, though the Attorney-General appealed to him as a gentleman, and assured him there was nothing compromising in what was a mere formality. In short, Mr. Radcliffe, according to the news-writers, behaved very ‘ungentlemanly to Governor Williamson as also to Mr. Sharpe for addressing a letter to him as Mr. Radcliffe. He said he despised the Court and their proceedings, and he behaved in every respect indecent and even rude and senseless. He appeared very gay, being dressed in scarlet faced in black velvet, and gold buttons, a gold-laced waistcoat, bag wig, and hat and white feather.’
THE TRIAL.
On the above Friday, his trial was fixed for the 24th, the following Monday. On the Friday evening, Radcliffe had one more chance of escape, if he had only had friends at hand to aid him. ‘As the Guards,’ says the ‘Daily Post,’ ‘were conveying him back through Watling Street to the Tower, the coach broke down at the end of Bow Lane, and they were obliged to walk up to Cheapside before they could get another.’ This last chance was unavailable, and the captive remained chafed and restless till he was again brought, in gloomy array, on the long route from the Tower to the presence of his judges and of a jury whose mission was not to try him for any participation in the ’45 Rebellion, but to pronounce if he were the Charles Radcliffe who, when under sentence of death for high treason, in 1716, broke prison, and fled the country. Two Northumbrian witnesses, who had seen him in arms in ’15, and who had been taken to the Tower to refresh their memories, swore to his being Charles Radcliffe, by a scar on his cheek. A third witness, whose name has never transpired, but who seems to have been ‘planted’ on Radcliffe, swore that the prisoner, when drunk, had told him he was Charles Radcliffe, and that he had described the way in which he had escaped from Newgate. This witness said, he was not himself drunk at the time; but Radcliffe, who had evidently treated him to wine in the Tower, flung at him the sarcasm,—that there were people ready enough to get drunk if other people would pay for it. The jury very speedily found that the prisoner was the traitor who, when under sentence of death, had escaped to the Continent. This old sentence must, therefore, now be executed. There seemed no room for mercy. MR. JUSTICE FOSTER. Mr. Justice Foster, however, made an effort to save the prisoner. The latter had pleaded that he was not the Charles Radcliffe named in the indictment. The jury had found that he was. At this point the prisoner pleaded the king’s general pardon. The other judges held that the prisoner must stand or fall by his first plea; it failed him, and execution, it was said, must follow. ‘Surely,’ remarked the benevolent Foster, ‘the Court will never in any state of a cause award execution upon a man who plainly appeareth to be pardoned.’ He thought that if anyone could show that Mr. Radcliffe was entitled to the benefit of the Act of Pardon, he should be heard. The Chief Justice ruled otherwise, and it was ultimately shown that as the prisoner had broken prison when under attainder, he came within certain clauses of exception in the Act—and could therefore not be benefitted by it.
The papers of the day make an almost incredible statement, namely, that Radcliffe was informed, if he himself would swear he was not the person named in the indictment, he should have time to bring witnesses to support him; but he remained silent. Still, ‘he was very bold,’ is the brief journalistic comment on his hearing. It is quite clear that Charles Radcliffe did not keep his temper, and he therefore lost some dignity on the solemn occasion of his being brought up to Westminster Hall to have the day of his execution fixed. He is described, in the Malmesbury correspondence, as acting with unheard-of insolence, and apparently wishing to set the whole Government at defiance. This is the evidence of a contemporary. Lord Campbell (in the ‘Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’) says, on the contrary, that the calmness of his demeanour, added to his constancy to the Stuart cause, powerfully excited the public sympathy in his favour. Moreover, Lord Campbell does not think that the identity of the Charles Radcliffe of ’45 with him of ’15 was satisfactorily established by legal evidence, though he has no doubt as to the fact.
CONDUCT OF RADCLIFFE.
Radcliffe was condemned to die on the 8th of December. His high pitch (naturally enough, and with no disparagement to his courage) was lowered after his sentence; and he stooped to write in a humble strain to the Duke of Newcastle, for at least a reprieve. His niece, the dowager Lady Petre, presented the letter to the duke, and seconded her uncle’s prayer with extreme earnestness, as might be expected of a daughter whose father had suffered, thirty years before, the terrible death from which she wished to save that father’s brother. The duke was civil and compassionate, but would make no promise. In fact, it was resolved that the younger brother of the Earl of Derwentwater should die, lying as he did under the guilt of double rebellion. ‘If I am to die,’ said Radcliffe, splenetically, ‘Lord Morton ought to be executed at Paris, on the same day.’ Morton was a gossiping tourist, who, being in Brittany, made some idle reflections on the defences of Port L’Orient in a private letter, which the French postal authorities took the liberty to open. This brought the writer into some difficulty in France, but as no harm was meant, Lord Morton suffered none.
TO KENNINGTON COMMON.
The ever-to-be-amused public were not left without diversity of grim entertainment between the condemnation of Radcliffe and the execution of his sentence. On Friday, November 28th, there was the strangling (with the other repulsive atrocities), of five political prisoners, on Kennington Common, in the morning, and the revival of a play (which had years before been condemned because of the political opinions of the author), in the evening. In the morning, two sledges stood ready for the dragging of eight prisoners from the New Prison, Southwark, to the gallows, disembowelling block, and fire, on the Common. This was not an unfrequent spectacle; and on this occasion, as on others, there was, without cowardly feeling, a certain dilatoriness on the part of the patients, who never knew what five minutes might not bring forth. Sir John Wedderburn, indeed, went into the foremost sledge, with calm readiness, and Governor (of Carlisle) Hamilton stept in beside him. Captain Bradshaw stood apart, hoping not to be called upon. There was a little stir at the gate which attracted feverish attention on the part of the patients.—‘Is there any news for me?’ asked Bradshaw, nervously. ‘Yes,’ replied a frank official, ‘the Sheriff is come and waits for you!’ Bradshaw had hoped for a reprieve; but hope quenched, the poor fellow said he was ready. Another Manchester Captain, Leath, was equally ready but was not inclined to put himself forward. Captain Wood, after the halter was loosely hung for him around his neck, called for wine, which was supplied with alacrity by the prison drawers. When it was served round, the captain drank to the health of the rightful king, James III. Most lucky audacity was this for Lindsay, a fellow officer from Manchester, bound for Kennington. While the wine was being drunk, Lindsay was ‘haltering,’ as the reporters called it. He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was being courteously invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved his life. Two other doomed rebels, for whom that day was to be their last, had been reprieved earlier in the morning, and that was why the puzzled spectators, on the way or at the place of sacrifice, were put off with five judicial murders when they had promised themselves eight.
CIBBER’S ‘REFUSAL.’
In the evening, the play which was to tempt the town was a revival of Cibber’s ‘Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It had not been acted for a quarter of a century (1721), when it had failed through the opposition of the Jacobites, who damned the comedy, by way of revenge for the satire which Cibber had heaped on the Nonjurors. Now, the play went triumphantly. No one dared,—when the hangman was breathless with over-work, and the headsman was looking to the edge of his axe, for the ultimate disposal of Jacobites,—to openly avow himself of a way of thinking which, put into action, sent men to the block or the gallows. All that could be done in a hostile spirit was done, nevertheless. The Jacks accused Cibber of having stolen his plot from predecessors equally felonious; but they could not deny that the play was a good play; and they asserted, in order to annoy the Whig adaptor, that the Witling of Theophilus Cibber was a finer touch of art than that of his father in the same part.
EXECUTION OF RADCLIFFE.
On the 8th of December, Charles Radcliffe closed the bloody tragedies of the year, with his own. He came from the Tower like a man purified in spirit, prepared to meet the inevitable with dignity. They who had denied his right to call himself a peer, allowed him to die by the method practised with offenders of such high quality. The only bit of bathos in the scene on the scaffold was when the poor gentleman knelt by the side of the block, to pray. Two warders approached him, who took off his wig, and then covered his head with a white skull cap. His head was struck off at a blow, except, say the detail-loving newspapers, ‘a bit of skin which was cut through in two chops.’ The individual most to be pitied on that December morning was Radcliffe’s young son, prisoner in the Tower, who was still believed by many to be the brother of the young Chevalier.
There was another prisoner there whose life was in peril; namely Simon, Lord Lovat. The progress up to London of Lovat and of the witnesses to be produced against him was regularly reported. There was one of the latter who hardly knew whether he was to be traitor or witness, Mr. Murray of Boughton. The following describes how he appeared on his arrival at Newcastle, and is a sample of similar bulletins. ‘July 17th. On Thursday Afternoon, arrived here in a Coach under the Care of Lieutenant Colonel Cockayne, escorted by a Party of Dragoons, John Murray, Esq., of Boughton, the Pretenders Secretary, and yesterday Morning he proceeded to London. He seem’d exceedingly dejected and looked very pale.’
LOVAT’S PROGRESS.
The London papers sketched in similar light touches the progress of Lovat. In or on the same carriage in which he sat were other Frasers, his servants or retainers who, as he knew, were about to testify against him, and whose company rendered him extremely irritable. The whole were under cavalry escort, travelling to London, only by day. On the morning Lovat left his inn at Northampton, the landlady was not there to bid him farewell. The old gallant enquired for her. He was told that she was unavoidably absent. ‘I have kissed,’ said he, ‘every one of my hostesses throughout the journey; and am sorry to miss my Northampton landlady. No matter! I will salute her on my way back!’ On Lovat’s arrival at St. Albans, Hogarth left London, for what purpose is explained in part of the following advertisement, which appears in the papers under the date of Thursday, August 28th. ‘This day is published, price one shilling, a whole length print of Simon Lord Lovat, drawn from the life and etch’d in Aqua fortis, by Mr. Hogarth. To be had at the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields, and at the Print shops. Where also may be had a Print of Mr. Garrick in the character of Richard III., in the first scene, price 7s. 6d.’
HOGARTH’S PORTRAIT OF LOVAT.
On the day on which the above advertisement appeared, the Rev. Mr. Harris enclosed one of the sketches of Lovat in a letter to Mrs. Harris, written in Grosvenor Square, in which he says:—‘Pray excuse my sending you such a very grotesque figure as the enclosed. It is really an exact resemblance of the person it was done for—Lord Lovat—as those who are well acquainted with him assure me; and, as you see, it is neatly enough etched. Hogarth took the pains to go to St. Albans, the evening that Lord Lovat came thither in his way from Scotland to the Tower, on purpose to get a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up; and this he obtained with a greater ease than could well be expected; for, in sending in his name and the errand he came about, the old lord, far from displeased, immediately had him in, gave him a salute and made him sit down and sup with him, and talked a good deal very facetiously, so that Hogarth had all the leisure and opportunity he could possibly wish to have, to take off his features and countenance. The portrait you have may be considered as an original. The old lord is represented in the very attitude he was in while telling Hogarth and the company some of his adventures.’
ARRIVAL AT THE TOWER.
The old roystering Lovelace who kissed his hostesses on his way up, and talked of saluting them on his way back, was so infirm that to descend from his carriage he leaned heavily on the shoulders of two stout men, who put their arms round his back to keep him from falling. As he crossed Tower Hill he came suddenly on the partly dismantled scaffold on which the two lords had recently suffered; and he was heard to mutter something as to his perception of the way it was intended he should go. But, on being lifted from the carriage, he said to the lieutenant, ‘If I were younger and stronger, you would find it difficult to keep me here.’—‘We have kept much younger men here,’ was the reply. ‘Yes,’ rejoined Lovat, ‘but they were inexperienced; they had not broke so many gaols as I have.’ The first news circulated in London after Murray, the Chevalier’s ex-secretary, had passed into the same prison, was that he had given information where a box of papers, belonging to the Pretender, was buried, near Inverness. A couple of king’s messengers riding briskly towards the great North Road were taken to be those charged with unearthing the important deposit.
Of the two prisoners,—one was eager to save his life by giving all the information required of him. The other, equally eager, pleaded his innocence, his age, and his debility; but apart from declaring that he was a loyal subject, and that he willingly had no share in the rebellion, although his son had, he remained obstinately mute to all questioning, or he answered the grave queries with senile banter.
REBELS AND WITNESSES.
Murray yielded at the first pressure. As early as July, Walpole speaks of him as having made ‘ample confessions, which led to the arrest of the Earl of Traquair and Dr. Barry; and to the issuing of warrants for the apprehension of other persons whom Murray’s information had put in peril. Walpole believed that the Ministry had little trustworthy knowledge of the springs and conduct of the rebellion, till Murray sat down in the Tower and furnished them with genuine intelligence.
While he and Lord Lovat were travelling slowly by land to the Tower, traitors were coming up, by sea, to depose against him, or any other, by whose conviction they might purchase safety. The ‘General Advertiser’ announced the arrival in London (from a ship in the river) of six and twenty ‘Scotch rebels,’ who were conducted to the Plaisterer’s Corner, St. Margaret’s Lane, Westminster, where they were kept under a strong military guard. ‘They are brought up,’ says the above paper, ‘as evidences for the king. Several of them are young. Some have plaids on; others in waistcoats and bonnets, and upon the whole make a most despicable and wretched figure.’ Meanwhile Lovat struggled hard for the life he affected to despise, and which he tried to persuade his accusers was not worth the taking. He kept them at bay, for months, by his pleas; and he vehemently declared his innocence of every one of the seven heads of accusation brought against him,—of every one of which he was certainly guilty. Towards the close of December, he was arraigned at the bar of the House of Lords. There is no better condensation of what took place than that furnished by Walpole, on Christmas Day, 1746:—‘Old Lovat has been brought to the bar of the House of Lords. He is far from having those abilities for which he has been so cried up. He saw Mr. Pelham at a distance, and called to him, and asked him, if it were worth while to make all this fuss to take off a grey head fourscore years old. He complained of his estate being seized and kept from him. Lord Granville took up this complaint very strongly, and insisted on having it enquired into. Lord Bath went farther and, as some people think, intended the duke; but I believe he only aimed at the Duke of Newcastle.... They made a rule to order the old creature the profits of his estate till his conviction. He is to put in his answer on the 13th of January.’
TILBURY FORT.
In the meantime, the papers reported that there were nearly four hundred Scottish rebels cooped up in Tilbury Fort. Watermen’s arms were weary with rowing boats full of Londoners down to the fort, to visit the wretched captives, or to stare at the fort which held them in. Most of them were transported to the Plantations. There was a sanguinary feeling against all such offenders. The last words in the ‘General Advertiser’ for December 31st, 1746, are contained in the two concluding lines of a poem, signed ‘Williamite,’ and which are to the following charitable effect:—
A righteous God, with awful hands,
In justice, Blood for Blood demands.
At the same time a print was selling which represented ‘Temple Bar, the City Golgotha,’ with three heads on the spikes,—allegorical devils, rebel flags, &c.,—and more ‘blood for blood’ doggrel intimating that the naughty sons of Britain might there see ‘what is rebellion’s due.’
FRENCH IDEA.
The idea of altogether sacrificing Charles Edward was as distasteful to his numberless friends in France, as it was to the English Jacobites. One of the most singular of the French suggestions for a definite arrangement was made to this effect, in some of the French papers, namely:—that George II. should withdraw to his electorate of Hanover, taking his eldest son and heir with him; renouncing the English crown for himself and successors, of the elder line, for ever;—that the Chevalier de St. George should remain as he was;—that the Prince Charles Edward should be made King of Scotland and Ireland;—and that the Duke of Cumberland should, as King of England, reign in London. It was a thoroughly French idea,—making a partition of the United Kingdom, and establishing the duke in the metropolis to reign over a powerless fragment of it,—a Roi de Cocagne! Both political parties laughed at it in their several houses of entertainment.
The Prince of Wales, himself, was something of a Jacobite; but he was a Jacobite for no other reason, probably, than because his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, had crushed the Jacobite cause. It is due to the Prince, however, to notice that he once solemnly expressed his sympathy when the Princess, his wife, had just mentioned, ‘with some appearance of censure,’ the conduct of Lady Margaret Macdonald, who harboured and concealed Prince Charles when, in the extremity of peril, he threw himself on her protection. ‘And would not you, Madam,’ enquired Prince Frederick, ‘have done the same, in the same circumstances? I am sure,—I hope in God,—you would.’ Hogg relates this incident in the introduction to his ‘Jacobite Relics,’ and it does honour to the prince, himself,—who used at least to profess fraternal affection, if not political sympathy, by standing at an open window at St. James’s overlooking the Park, with his arm round the Duke of Cumberland’s neck.
A LONDON ELECTOR’S WIT.
Frederick, however, was not a jot more acceptable to the Jacobites, because he was on bad terms with the king, and that he refrained from paying any other compliment than the above-named one to the Duke of Cumberland, on his victory at Culloden. The prince invariably came off, more or less hurt, whenever he engaged personally in politics. When his sedan-chair maker refused to vote for the prince’s friend, Lord Trentham, a messenger from his royal highness’s household looked in upon the elector, and bluntly said, ‘I am going to bid another person make his royal highness a chair!’ ‘With all my heart!’ replied the chair maker, ‘I don’t care what they make him, so they don’t make him a throne!’ Again, on that day which all Tories kept as an anniversary of crime and sorrow, the 30th of January,—‘the martyrdom of King Charles,’ the prince entered a room where his sister Amelia was being tended by her waiting woman, Miss Russell, who was a great grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell. Frederick said to this lady, sportively, ‘Shame, Miss Russell, why have you not been to Church, humbling yourself, for the sins on this day committed by your ancestors?’ To which she replied, ‘Sir: I am a descendant of the great Oliver Cromwell. It is humiliation sufficient to be employed, as I am, in pinning up your sister’s tail!’
TRIAL OF LOVAT.
During the early months of 1747, the Londoners waited with impatience for the trial of Lord Lovat. The old rebel had exhausted every means of delay. The time of trial came at last. On the 9th of March, Lovat was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall. An immense crowd lined the whole way, and the people were the reverse of sympathetic. One woman looked into his coach, and said: ‘You ugly old dog, don’t you think you will have that frightful head cut off?’ He replied, ‘You ugly old ——, I believe I shall!’ Lovat was carried through the hall in a sedan-chair, and to a private room, in men’s arms. Mr. Thomas Harris, writing of the trial next day, from Lincoln’s Inn, says:—‘It was the largest and finest assembly I ever saw: the House of Commons on one side; ladies of quality on the other, and inferior spectators without number, at both ends.’—After much pantomimic ceremony on the part of officials, Lovat, having been brought in, knelt (as he is described to have done on each of the nine days of the trial). On each occasion Lord Hardwicke solemnly said to him, ‘My Lord Lovat, your Lordship may rise.’ On the opening day, the prosecuting managers of the impeachment sent up by the Commons, ‘went at him,’ at dreary, merciless, length. After them, the prosecuting counsel opened savagely upon him, especially Murray, the Solicitor-General, whose chief witness was his own Jacobite brother, and who was himself suspected of having drunk the Pretender’s health on his knees. Lovat lost no opportunity of saving his life. SCENE IN WESTMINSTER HALL. He pitifully alluded to his having to rise by 4 o’clock, in order to be at Westminster by 9. He spoke of his frequent fainting fits; he often asked leave to retire, and, in short, he so exasperated the Lord High Steward as to make that official grow peevish, and to wrathfully advise Lord Lovat to keep his temper. When the Attorney-General called his first witness, Chevis of Murtoun, the lawyer described him, with solemn facetiousness, as being as near a neighbour as man could be to Lovat, but as far apart from him as was possible in thought and action. Lovat protested against the legal competency of the witness, he being Lovat’s tenant and vassal. Hours were spent over this objection, and the old lord wearied the clerk, whom he called upon to read ancient Acts of Parliament, from beginning to end. The protest was disallowed; and the witness having been asked if he owed Lovat money, and if a verdict of guilty might help him not to pay it, emphatically declared that he owed Lovat nothing. He then went into a long array of evidence, sufficient to have beheaded Lovat many times over, as a traitor to the reigning family, and indeed no faithful servant of the family desiring to reign. The traitor himself laughed when this witness quoted a ballad in English, which Lovat had composed, ‘in Erse’:—
When young Charley does come over,
There will be blows and blood good store.
‘When,’ said the witness, ‘I refused a commission offered me by the Pretender, Lord Lovat told me I was guilty of High Treason.’ Further, Lovat had drunk ‘Confusion to the White Horse and the whole generation of them;’ and had cursed both the Reformation and the Revolution. Lovat retorted by showing that this not disinterested witness was a loyal man living at the expense of Government. ‘He is trying to hang an old man to save himself,’ said Lovat. This was warmly denied, but Lovat was right in the implication.
FATHER AND SON.
Lovat’s secretary, Fraser, was a dangerous witness. He proved that, by Lord Lovat’s order, he, the secretary, wrote to Lord Loudon (in the service of George II.) informing him that he was unable to keep his son out of the rebellion, and another letter to the Pretender that, though unable to go himself to help to restore the Stuarts, he had sent his eldest son to their standard. It was shown that the son was disgusted at his father’s double-dealing, and only yielded to him at last (in joining the army of Charles Edward), on the ground that he was bound to obey his sire and the chief of the clan Fraser. Undoubtedly, the attempt to save himself by the sacrificing of his son, was the blackest spot in Lovat’s mean, black, and cruel character. According to Walpole, ‘he told’ Williamson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, ‘We will hang my eldest son and then my second shall marry your niece!’
THE FRASERS.
Fraser after Fraser gave adverse evidence. Lovat maintained that they were compelled to speak against him. One of them confessed, with much simplicity, that he lived and boarded at a messenger’s house; but that he had no orders to say what he had said. ‘I am free: I walk in the Park or about Kensington; I go at night to take a glass,’—but he allowed that the messenger went with him. One or two witnesses had very short memories, or said what they could for their feudal superior. Another, Walker, spoke to the anger of Lovat’s son, on being driven into rebellion. ‘The Master of Lovat took his bonnet and threw it on the floor. He threw the white cockade on the fire, and damned the cockade, &c.’ Lord Lovat, on the other hand, had sworn he would seize the cattle and plaids of all the Frasers who refused to rise, and would burn their houses. One of these adverse Frasers, being hard pressed by Lovat, allowed that he expected to escape punishment, for his evidence, but that he had not been promised a pardon. ‘If,’ said he, ‘I give evidence, in any case it should be the truth; and,’ he added, with a composure so comic that it might well have disturbed the august solemnity, ‘if the truth were such as I should not care to disclose, I would declare positively I would give no evidence at all.’ Another witness, a Lieutenant Campbell, in the king’s service, but who had been a prisoner in the power of the Jacobites, being questioned as to a conversation he had had with Lovat, made the amusingly illogical remark, ‘As I did not expect to be called as a witness, so I do not remember what passed on that occasion.’ The lieutenant did, however, recollect one thing, namely, that Lovat had said that his son had gone into the rebellion, but that he himself was a very loyal person. A second officer, Sir Everard Falconer, secretary to the Duke of Cumberland (and very recently married to Miss Churchill, daughter of the old general), stated that he had been sent by the duke to converse with Lovat, and he repeated the loyal assertions that the prisoner had made. ‘Will your Lordship put any question to Sir Everard?’ asked the Lord High Steward, of Lovat. ‘I have only,’ replied Lovat, ‘to wish him joy of his young wife.’
MURRAY OF BOUGHTON.
The most important witness of all was, of course, Mr. Murray, of Boughton, late secretary to the young Chevalier, and, only a day or two before, a prisoner in the King’s Bench, from which he had been discharged. In the course of his answers, Murray said he had been ‘directed’ to give a narrative of the springs and progress of the late rebellion,—when he came to be examined at the Bar of the High Court of Justice, where he was then standing. ‘Directed?’ exclaimed the Earl of Cholmondely, ‘who directed you?’ The Lord High Steward and the Earl of Chesterfield protested they had not heard the word ‘directed’ used by the witness. There was a wish to have the matter cleared up, and Murray then said, ‘Some days after my examination in the Tower, by the honourable Committee of the House of Commons, a gentleman, who, I believe was their secretary, came to me to take a further examination; and to ask me as to any other matter that had occurred since my last examination. Some days after that, he told me I should be called here before your Lordships, upon the trial of my Lord Lovat, and that at the same time, it would be expected that I should give an account of the rise and progress of the Rebellion in general.’
MURRAY’S EVIDENCE.
The above shows pretty clearly how the weak natures of prisoners in the Tower were dealt with, in order to get evidence by which they would destroy at once the life of a confederate and their own honour. Murray did what he was ‘directed’ or ‘expected’ to do, without passion but with some sense of pain and shame. The whole rise and course of the insurrection may be found in his testimony; he was prepared for the questions, equally so with the answers he gave to them; and his evidence is of importance for a proper understanding of the outbreak. Some merit was made of his ‘voluntary surrender,’ but Lord Talbot, quite in Lovat’s interest, roughly asked if Murray had really intended to surrender himself at the time he became a prisoner to the Royal forces. The poor man truthfully answered that ‘it was not then my intention particularly to surrender myself’;—adding, ‘it was not my intention till I saw the dragoons;’—but that he had never since attempted to escape.—‘Have you ever taken the Oaths of Allegiance and Fidelity to the King?’ asked Lord Talbot. He never had. ‘Did you ever take such Oaths to anybody else?’ CROSS EXAMINATION. Murray let drop a murmured ‘No’; and then Sir William Yonge, one of the Managers for the Commons, came to his help, with the expression of a hope that the king’s witness should not be obliged to answer questions that tended to accuse himself of High Treason. To which Lord Talbot replied that the gentleman had already confessed himself guilty of that crime. Lord Talbot then asked Murray if he was a voluntary evidence. Murray requested him to explain what he meant by those two words. ‘Are you here?’ said Talbot, ‘in hopes of a pardon? And if you had been pardoned, would you now be here as a witness at all?’ The Attorney-General came to the rescue. It was an improper question, he said, resting upon the supposition of a fact which had not happened. Lord Talbot insisted: he asked Murray, ‘Do you believe your life depends upon the conformity of the evidence you shall give on this trial, with former examinations which you have undergone?’ There was a fight over this matter, but a lull came in the fray, and then Murray spoke with a certain dignity, and said: ‘I am upon my oath and obliged to tell the truth; and I say that possibly and very probably, had I been in another situation of life, I should not have appeared before your Lordships as a witness against the noble Lord at the Bar.’ There was a touch of mournful sarcasm in Murray’s truthful answer, which escaped Lord Talbot, for he remarked: ‘I am extremely well satisfied with the gentleman’s answer; and it gives me a much better opinion of his evidence than I had before.’
THE VERDICT.
The conclusion of the protracted affair was that Lovat was pronounced guilty by the unanimous verdict of 117 peers. He made no defence by which he could profit; and when he spoke in arrest of judgment, he said little to the purpose. There was a sorry sort of humour in one or two of his remarks. He had suffered in this trial by two Murrays, he said, by the bitter evidence of one, and the fatal eloquence of another, by which he was hurried into eternity. Nevertheless, though the eloquence had been employed against him, he had listened to it with pleasure. ‘I had great need of my friend Murray’s eloquence for half an hour, myself; then, it would have been altogether agreeable to me!’ In whatever he himself had done, there was, he said, really no malicious intention. If he had not been ill-used by the Government in London, there would have been no rebellion in the Frasers’ country. George I. had been his ‘dear master;’ for George II. he had the greatest respect. He hoped the Lords would intercede to procure for him the royal mercy. The Commons had been severe against him, let them now be merciful. Nothing of this availed Lovat. The peevish Lord Hardwicke called him to order; and then, with a calm satisfaction, pronounced the horrible sentence which told a traitor how he should die. Lovat put a good face on this bad matter.—‘God bless you all!’ he said, ‘I bid you an everlasting farewell.’ And then, with a grim humour, he remarked:—‘We shall not meet all in the same place again, I am quite sure of that!’ He afterwards desired, if he must die, that it should be in the old style of the Scottish nobility,—by the Maiden.
GENTLEMAN HARRY.
While this tragic drama was in progress, there arose a report in the coffee-houses of a Jacobite plot. It came in this way. At the March sessions of the Old Bailey, a young highwayman, named Henry Simms, was the only offender who was capitally convicted. ‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ said the handsome highwayman, ‘you would have had a kind of maiden assize; so, you might as well let me go!’ As the judges differed from him, he pointed to some dear friends in the body of the court, and remarked, ‘Here are half a dozen of gentlemen who deserve hanging quite as much as I do.’ The Bench did not doubt it, but the remark did not profit Gentleman Harry, himself, as the young women and aspiring boys on the suburban roads called him. But Mr. Simms was a man of resources. As he sat over his punch in Newgate, he bethought himself of a means of escape. He knew, he said, of a hellish Jacobite plot to murder the king and upset the Happy Establishment. Grave ministers went down to Newgate and listened to information which was directed against several eminent persons. Harry, however, lacked the genius of Titus Oates; and besides, the people in power were not in want of a plot; the information would not ‘hold water.’ The usual countless mob of savages saw him ‘go off’ at Tyburn; and then eagerly looked forward to the expected grander display on Tower Hill. But Lovat and his friends spared no pains to postpone that display altogether.
The Scots made a national question of it. The Duke of Argyle especially exerted himself to get the sentence commuted for one of perpetual imprisonment. This was accounted for by Mr. Harris (Malmesbury Correspondence), in the following manner: ‘The Duke owes Lord Lovat a good turn for letting the world know how active his Grace was in serving the Government in 1715, and for some panegyric which the Duke is not a little pleased with.’
In the Tower, Lovat mingled seriousness and buffoonery together. But this was natural to him. There was no excitement about him, nor affectation. He naturally talked much about himself; but he had leisure and self-possession to converse with his visitors on other topics besides himself. Only two or three days before his execution he was talking with two Scottish landed proprietors. The subject was the Jurisdiction Bill. ‘You ought to be against the Bill,’ said Lovat; ‘the increase of your estates by that Bill will not give you such an interest at Court as the power did which you are thereby to be deprived of.’ The interest of his own friends at Court was gone.
THE DEATH WARRANT.
On April the 2nd, the Sheriffs of London received the ‘death warrant’ from the Duke of Newcastle for Lovat’s execution. At the same time, a verbal message was sent expressing the duke’s expectation that the decapitated head should be held up, and denounced as that of a traitor, at the four corners of the scaffold.
EXECUTION.
On the 9th, the hour had come and the old man was there to meet it. It is due to him to say that he died like a man, therein exemplifying a remark made by Sir Dudley Carleton, on a similar occurrence, ‘So much easier is it for a man to die well than to live well.’ Lovat was very long over his toilet, from infirm habit, and he complained of the pain and trouble it gave him to hobble down the steps from his room, in order to have his head struck off his shoulders. On the scaffold, he gazed round him and wondered at the thousands who had assembled to see such a melancholy sight. He quoted Latin lines, as if they illustrated a patriotism or virtue which he had never possessed or practised. He would have touched the edge of the axe, but the headsman would not consent till the Sheriffs gave their sanction. With, or apart from all this, ‘he died,’ says Walpole, ‘without passion, affectation, buffoonery, or timidity. His behaviour was natural and intrepid.’ Walpole adds, ‘He professed himself a Jansenist.’ Other accounts say, ‘a Papist,’ which is a Jansenist and something more. ‘He made no speech; but sat down a little while in a chair on the scaffold, and talked to the people round him. He said, he was glad to suffer for his country, dulce est pro patriâ mori; that he did not know how, but that he had always loved it, Nescio quâ natale solum, &c.; that he had never swerved from his principles, (!) and that this was the character of his family who had been gentlemen for 500 years! He lay down quietly, gave the sign soon, and was despatched at a blow. I believe it will strike some terror into the Highlands, when they hear there is any power great enough to bring so potent a tyrant to the block. A scaffold fell down and killed several persons; one, a man that had ridden post from Salisbury the day before to see the ceremony; and a woman was taken up dead with a live child in her arms.’ This scaffold consisted of several tiers which were occupied by at least a thousand spectators. It was built out from the Ship, at the corner of Barking alley. About a dozen people were killed at the first crash, which also wounded many who died in hospital. The master-carpenter who erected it, had so little thought of its instability, that he established a bar and tap beneath it. He was joyously serving out liquors to as joyous customers, when down came the fabric and overwhelmed them all. The carpenter was among the killed.
GEORGE SELWYN.
The head was not held up nor its late owner denounced as a traitor. The Duke of Newcastle was displeased at the omission, but the Sheriffs justified themselves on the ground that the custom had not been observed at the execution of Lord Balmerino, and that the duke had not authorised them to act, in writing. A sample of the levity of the time is furnished in the accounts of the crowds that flocked to the trial as they might have done to some gay spectacle; and an example of its callousness may be found in what Walpole calls, ‘an excessive good story of George Selwyn.’ ‘Some women were scolding him for going to see the execution, and asked him how he could be such a barbarian to see the head cut off?’ “Nay,” says he, “if that be such a crime, I am sure I have made amends, for I went to see it sewed on again!” When he was at the undertaker’s, Stephenson’s in the Strand, as soon as they had stitched him together, and were going to put the body into the coffin, George, in my Lord Chancellor’s voice, said, “My Lord Lovat, your Lordship may rise.”’
LOVAT’S BODY.
Lovat had expressed a passionate desire to be buried in his native country, under the shadow of its hills, his clansmen paying the last duty to their chief, and the women of the tribe keening their death-song on the way to the grave. The Duke of Newcastle consented. The evening before the day appointed for leaving the Tower, a coachman drove a hearse about the court of the prison, ‘before my Lord Traquair’s dungeon,’ says Walpole, ‘which could be no agreeable sight, it might to Lord Cromartie, who is above the chair.’ Walpole treats Lord Traquair with the most scathing contempt, as if he were both coward and traitor, ready to purchase life at any cost. After all, Lovat’s body never left the Tower. ‘The Duke of Newcastle,’ writes Walpole to Conway, 16th April, on which night London was all sky-rockets and bonfires for last year’s victory, ‘has burst ten yards of breeches-strings, about the body, which was to be sent into Scotland; but it seems it is customary for vast numbers to rise, to attend the most trivial burial. The Duke, who is always at least as much frightened at doing right as at doing wrong, was three days before he got courage enough to order the burying in the Tower.’
Lovat’s trial brought about a change in the law. On the 5th of May, Sir William Yonge, in the House of Commons, brought in a good-natured Bill, without opposition, ‘to allow council to prisoners on impeachment for treason, as they have on indictments. It hurt everybody at old Lovat’s trial, all guilty as he was, to see an old wretch worried by the first lawyers in England, without any assistance, but his own unpractised defence. This was a point struggled for in King William’s reign, as a privilege and dignity inherent in the Commons—that the accused by them should have no assistance of council. How reasonable that men chosen by their fellow-subjects for the defence of their fellow-subjects should have rights detrimental to the good of the people whom they are to protect. Thank God! we are a better-natured age, and have relinquished this savage principle with a good grace.’ So wrote Walpole in Arlington Street.
After Lovat’s death, the friends of the Happy Establishment ceased to have fears for the stability of the happiness or for that of the establishment. Walpole declined thenceforth to entertain any idea of Pretender, young or old, unless either of them got south of Derby. When Charles Edward ‘could not get to London with all the advantages which the ministry had smoothed for him, how could he ever meet more concurring circumstances?’ Meanwhile, the ‘Duke’s Head,’ as a sign, had taken place of Admiral Vernon’s in and about the metropolis, as Vernon’s had of the illustrious Jacobite’s—the Duke of Ormond.
THE WHITE HORSE, PICCADILLY.
There was in Piccadilly an inn, whose loyal host, Williams, had set up the then very loyal sign of ‘The White Horse’ (of Hanover). While Lovat’s trial was proceeding, that Whig Boniface had reason to know that the Jacobites were not so thoroughly stamped out as they seemed to be. Williams attended an anniversary dinner of the Electors of Westminster, who supported ‘the good old cause.’ He was observed to be taking notes of the toasts and speeches, and he was severely beaten and ejected. He laid an information against this Jacobite gathering, and he described one of the treasonable practices thus:—‘On the King’s health being drunk, every man held a glass of water in his left hand, and waved a glass of wine over it with the right.’ A Committee of the House of Commons made so foolish an affair of it as to be unable to draw up a ‘Report.’ If the enquiry had extended three years back, Walpole thinks, ‘Lords Sandwich and Grenville of the Admiralty would have made an admirable figure as dictators of some of the most Jacobite toasts that ever were invented. Lord Donerail ... plagued Lyttelton to death with pressing him to enquire into the healths of the year ’43.’
JACOBITE TOASTS.
On the first anniversary of Culloden, the celebration of the day was as universally joyous as when the news of the victory first reached town. The papers speak of a ‘numerous and splendid appearance of nobility,’ at St. James’s; of foreign ministers and native gentry, eager to pay their compliments to his Majesty on this occasion. At night, London was in a blaze of bonfires and illuminations. At the same time, in houses where Jacobites met, they drank the very enigmatical toast, ‘The three W’s,’ and talked of a private manifesto of the Chevalier to his faithful supporters, which stated that the late attempt was an essay, which would be followed in due time by an expedition made with an irresistible force. But there were also Jacobites who ‘mourned Fifteen renewed in Forty-five,’ and whose sentiments were subsequently expressed by Churchill’s Jockey in the ‘Prophecy of Famine’:—
Full sorely may we all lament that day,
For all were losers in the deadly fray.
Five brothers had I on the Scottish plains,
Well do’st thou know were none more hopeful swains:
Five brothers there I lost in manhood’s pride;
Two in the field, and three on gibbets died.
Ah! silly swains to follow war’s alarms;
Ah, what hath shepherd life to do with arms?
THE EARL OF TRAQUAIR.
There was still an untried rebel peer in the Tower, the Earl of Traquair. He bore the royal name of Charles Stuart, and had some drops of the Stuart blood in his veins. Captured in 1746, he had seen the arrival of Lovat at, and also his departure from, the Tower. Soon after the latter event, there was some talk of impeaching the earl; but this was held to be idle talk when the earl was seen enjoying the liberty of the Tower—walking in one of the courts with his friends. Whether he had rendered any service to Government, to be deserving of this favour and subsequent immunity, is not known. Walpole, when Lovat’s trial was going on, said, ‘It is much expected that Lord Traquair, who is a great coward, will give ample information of the whole plot.’ However, it is certain that many Jacobites were pardoned without any such baseness being exacted from them. Sir Hector Maclean and half-a-dozen other semi-liberated rebels were to be seen going about London, with a messenger attending on them. Other messengers, however, were often sudden and unwelcome visitors in private houses, in search for treasonable papers and traitorous persons. Gentleman Harry’s idea of a plot was said, in loyal coffee-houses, to be a reality; and the quidnuncs there were quite sure that money was going into the Highlands from France, and small bodies of Frenchmen were also being sent thither, and capable Scottish and English sergeants were now and then disappearing. The only ostensible steps taken by the Government was to make a new army-regulation, namely, that the 3rd (Scottish) regiment of Foot Guards, and all other regiments, bearing the name Scottish, should henceforward be called English, and ‘the drums to beat none but English marches.’
PLOTTING AND PARDONING.
Therewith came a doubtful sort of pardoning to about a thousand rebels cooped up in vessels on the Thames, or in prisons ashore. They, and some Southwark prisoners who had been condemned to death, were compelled to suffer transportation to the American Plantations. ‘They will be transported for life,’ the papers tell their readers, ‘let them be of what quality and condition soever.’
ÆNEAS MACDONALD.
There was one Jacobite prisoner in Newgate who was disinclined to live in durance, to take his trial, or to be hanged after it or transported without it. This was Æneas or Angus Macdonald, known as the Pretender’s Banker. He had surrendered soon after Culloden, and was lodged in Newgate. Seeing the death-like aspect of things, Macdonald got two friends to call upon him, one evening. There was nothing strange in such a visit. Newgate was like a huge hotel, open at all hours, where turnkeys acted as footmen who introduced visitors. Young Mr. Ackerman, the keeper’s son, received Mr. Macdonald’s friends. As soon as he had opened the wicket, behind which the prisoner was standing, they knocked Ackerman down, and as he was attempting to rise, they flung handfuls of snuff into his face. He succeeded in getting on his legs, but, when he could open his eyes, the captive and his friends had disappeared. Alarm was given; young Ackerman led the pursuit, and he came up with Macdonald in an adjacent street. Æneas faced his pursuer as if to quietly surrender, but as soon as Ackerman came near, he flung a cloud of snuff into his face. The gaoler struck him down with his keys and broke his collarbone. When Macdonald was again within the prison walls, he politely apologised for the trouble he had given. Mr. Ackerman quite as politely begged him not to think of it, ‘but, you see, Sir,’ he added, ‘I am bound to take care it does not happen again,’ and clapping a heavy suit of irons on the prisoner’s limbs, he stapled and screwed the banker down to the floor, sending the surgeon to him to look to his collarbone.
THE COUNTESS OF DERWENTWATER.
The banker’s trial was put off from time to time, between July and December. The public in general were beginning to doubt its ever coming on at all; and the autumn seemed dull to people now long used to excitement, when London suddenly heard that Charles Radcliffe’s widow, with a son and two daughters, had arrived in London, and had taken a mansion in, then highly fashionable, Golden Square. She was a Countess (of Newburgh), in her own right; but, of course, the gentry with Jacobite sympathies, who called on her, recognised her as Countess of Derwentwater. This arrival in Golden Square may have had some influence on a demonstration at Westminster Abbey. For years, on the anniversary of that rather un-English king and canonized saint, Edward the Confessor, groups of Roman Catholics were accustomed to gather round his shrine, kneeling in prayer. ‘Last Tuesday,’ says the ‘Penny Post,’ ‘being the anniversary of Edward the Confessor, the tombs were shut in Westminster Abbey, by order of the Dean and Chapter, to prevent the great concourse of Roman Catholics, who always repair there on that day. Notwithstanding which, most of them were kneeling all the day at the gates, paying their devotions to that Saint.’
This incident having passed out of discussion, the trial of Macdonald was looked for. When it did come on, in December, at St. Margaret’s, Southwark, it disappointed the amateurs of executions, and delighted the Jacobites. The prisoner’s main plea was that he was French, and was legally at Culloden. The jury found that he was not French, but was a Scotch rebel. He was sentenced to death; but the whole thing was a solemn farce, the sentence was not carried out; and we shall presently see wherefore he was immediately liberated on condition of leaving the kingdom for ever, with liberty to live where he pleased, out of it.
SERGEANT SMITH.
This was on December 10th. All public entertainment for the death-delighting mob seemed suppressed; but there was an exulting crowd the next day, lining the road from the barracks and military prison, in the Savoy, to the parade, St. James’s Park, and from the latter place to Hyde Park, where savages had come ‘in their thousands,’ and assembled round a gibbet in the centre of the Park. From the Savoy was brought a stalwart sergeant, in gyves, marching, without music, and eagerly gazed at as he passed on his way to the Parade. He was a good soldier, something of a scholar, knew several languages, and was utterly averse from serving any other sovereign than King James or his friend King Louis. Sergeant Smith had deserted, had been caught, and was now to suffer, not a soldier’s death by shooting, but the ignominious one of a felon. On the Parade, he was received by his own regiment, in the centre of which he was placed, and so guarded went slowly on to Hyde Park, to a dead roll of the drums. He was dressed in a scarlet coat, all else white. In token of his Jacobite allegiance, he wore, and was allowed to wear, a rosette of tartan ribbons on his bosom, and similar bunches of ribbons on each knee. The sergeant went on with a smile. His self-possession made the hangman nervous, and Smith bade his executioner pluck up a spirit and do his duty. And so he died; what remains of him may perhaps still lie in the Park, for the Jacobite sergeant was buried beneath the gibbet. The quality of the newspaper reporting at this time is illustrated by the fact that, in some of the journals, Jacobite Smith is said to have been shot.
THE JACOBITE’S JOURNAL.
In December 1747, a new paper was started, called the ‘Jacobite’s Journal.’ It was eminently anti-Jacobite, and was adorned with a head-piece representing a shouting Highlander and his wife on a donkey, to whose tail is tied the shield and arms of France; and from whose mouth hangs a label ‘Daily Post;’ the animal is led by a monk with one finger significantly laid to the side of his nose. The journal joked savagely at the idea of the above-named Sergeant Smith, being compelled to listen to his own funeral sermon in the Savoy Chapel, and hoped there was no flattery in it. As to the gay rosettes of tartan ribbons which he wore, the journal was disgusted with such a display on the part of a traitor.
CARTE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
There remains to be noticed the appearance this year of the first volume of the Jacobite Carte’s History of England. It was received with a universal welcome which was soon exchanged for wrath on the part of the Hanoverians. Although Carte was a non-juring clergyman, had been in ’15 and again in ’22 ‘wanted’ by the Secretary of State, and had been secretary to Atterbury, he was permitted to live unmolested in England, after 1729, at the request, it is said, of Queen Caroline. Belonging to both Universities, the two antagonistic parties in politics were disposed to receive him on friendly terms. His ‘Life of James, Duke of Ormond,’ published in 1736, was such a well-merited success, that when Carte subsequently circulated his proposals for putting forth a general History of England, the proposal was received with the greatest favour. All parties recognised his ability. The Tories expected from him freedom of expression; the Whigs trusted in his discretion. In the collecting of materials, Carte was assisted by subscriptions from the two Universities, the Common Council, and several of the Civic Companies of London, and from other public bodies. These subscriptions are said to have amounted to 600l. a year. The sum was honestly laid out. Carte spared no pains nor expense, at home or abroad, in collecting materials. We may add that England still possesses the collections, including much of great interest, which Carte had not occasion to use. At length, in 1747, the first volume appeared. Almost immediately afterwards, the London Corporation and the City Companies withdrew their subscriptions. All public support from the Whigs fell away from the author. The Jacobite author offended the Hanoverians by unnecessarily thrusting in his Jacobitism. The offence which shocked the Hanoverian sensibilities was conveyed in a note which was, to say the least, indiscreet. Therein, speaking of the power, supposed to be reserved to kings, of curing ‘the evil,’ Carte betrayed his own belief in the right divine of the Stuart family, by ascribing to the Pretender the preternatural cure of one Lovel, at Avignon, in 1716, ‘by the touch of a descendant of a long line of kings.’ The consequences of this indiscretion, which London was the first to resent, materially crippled Carte’s means of proceeding; but he lived to see three volumes through the press, and to leave one more in manuscript, which brought the history down to the year 1654, and which was published in 1755, the year after that in which Carte died. Carte was dying when the loyal feelings of London were stirred with an emotion which spread to such Whig readers as were to be found in the country. HUME’S ‘HISTORY.’ The feeling was aroused by the publication of Hume’s ‘History of the Reigns of James the First and Charles the First,’ the first instalment of the general History of England which Hume wrote, so to speak, backwards. Such opposition was shown by the Hanoverians, to what was looked upon as a defence of the proscribed family, that Hume was disposed to give up his assumed office of a writer of English history. Fortunately, he thought better of it, and completed a great work which is as unjustly abused as Carte’s is undeservedly forgotten.
In this year, the first taste of the quality of Johnson’s political feelings is furnished by Boswell. At this period, Johnson was a thorough Jacobite.
JACOBITE JOHNSON.
The highest praise which he could give to Dr. Panting, the Master of Pembroke (Johnson’s College), was to call him ‘a fine Jacobite fellow.’ The worst he could say of the Gilbert Walmsley, of Lichfield, whom he loved and honoured, was that ‘he was a Whig, with all the virulence and malevolence of his party.’ Boswell’s father pelted Johnson with the term which Johnson applied to Panting, as one of laudation, and spoke of him contemptuously as ‘that Jacobite fellow.’
The truth is, that if Johnson felt the principle of allegiance due to the Stuarts, he felt no love for the system which prevailed where the Stuarts found their best friends: ‘A Highland Chief, Sir, has no more the soul of a chief, than an attorney who has twenty houses in a street, and considers how much he can make by them.’ Johnson had but scant eulogy for a convert from Whiggery. To join the Tories was to ‘keep better company.’ In an honest Whig, the learned Jacobite had no belief; ‘Pulteney,’ he remarked, ‘was as paltry a fellow as could be. He was a Whig who pretended to be honest, and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out.’ It would be difficult to say whether Cibber or George II. was the more hateful object to Johnson. He gibbeted both in the epigram he took care not to publish:—
Augustus still survives in Maro’s strain,
And Spenser’s verse prolongs Eliza’s reign;
Great George’s acts let tuneful Cibber sing;
For Nature formed the Poet for the King.
JOHNSON’S SYMPATHIES.
It was perhaps accidental that during the years 1745-6 Johnson’s literary work seems to have been almost suspended. ‘That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate house’ (of Stuart, said Boswell) ‘is well known, and some may fancifully imagine that a sympathetic anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers, but I am inclined to think that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.’ It is not certain that Johnson was the author of the following lines, which appeared in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ for April 1747, but his fond habit of repeating them, ‘by heart,’ is some proof of his sympathy with the Jacobites named therein; and their publication demonstrates that the Government respected hostile opinion when it was becomingly expressed.
On Lord Lovat’s Execution.
Pity’d by gentle minds, Kilmarnock died;
The brave, Balmerino, were on thy side;
Radcliffe, unhappy in his crimes of youth,
Steady in what he still mistook for truth,
Beheld his death so decently unmovèd,
The soft lamented and the brave approvèd.
But Lovat’s fate indifferently we view,
True to no King, to no Religion true;
No fair forgets the ruin he has done;
No child laments the tyrant of his son;
No Tory pities, thinking what he was;
No Whig compassions, for he left the cause;
The brave regret not, for he was not brave;
The honest mourn not, knowing him a knave.
For the sake of ‘the cause,’ Johnson could tolerate persons of very indifferent character, always providing they were not fools. Topham Beauclerk was a handsome fellow, of good principles, to which his practices in no wise answered. Boswell calls him lax in both, but Johnson said to Beauclerk himself, ‘Thy body is all vice, and thy mind all virtue.’ And why did Jacobite Johnson love, nay, become fascinated by this other Jacobite? Boswell gives the reason: ‘Mr. Beauclerk, being of the St. Alban’s family, and having in some particulars a resemblance to Charles II., contributed, in Johnson’s imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk were companions.’
FLORA MACDONALD.
The arrival in London of the most interesting of all the Jacobite prisoners in 1746, and her departure in 1747, are left unrecorded, or dismissed in a line, by the journalists. Flora Macdonald, on board the ‘Eltham,’ arrived at the Nore, on the 27th of November, 1746. Transferred to the ‘Royal Sovereign,’ Flora was brought up to the Tower. Soon after, she was allowed to live in the house, and under the nominal restraint, of Mr. Dick, the messenger. After her release, and complete liberation in 1747, without any questioning, Flora Macdonald is said to have been the favoured guest of Lady Primrose, in Essex Street, and the lionne of the season. Tradition says she owed her liberty to the Prince of Wales, and the romance of history has recorded a visit paid by the prince to the guest in that Jacobite house, and has reported all that passed and every word that was uttered when Flora was thus ‘interviewed.’ Imagination built up the whole of it. The only known fact is that Flora was captured and was released. Among other liberated prisoners was Macolm Macleod, of Rasay. The two together, Flora having chosen Macleod for her protector on her journey to Scotland, started from Essex Street in a post-chaise; and ‘conjecture,’ which has freely played with this London incident, suggests that loud cheers were given by Jacobite sympathisers as the couple drove off. When they arrived in Scotland, Macleod remarked joyously to his friends: ‘I went to London to be hanged, and I came back in a post-chaise with Miss Flora Macdonald.’
FLORA’S SONS.
Flora, it is well known, married Macdonald of Kingsburgh, settled in America, took the royalist side, when the Colonies revolted, returned to Skye, and gave her five sons to the military or naval service of the Georges! When the latest survivor of the five brothers, Lieut.-Col. Macdonald, was presented to George IV., the imaginative king fancied himself a Stuart, of unmixed blood, and said to those around him: ‘This gentleman is the son of a lady to whom my family owe a great obligation.’ And such was the debt of the ‘family’ for Flora’s five sons.
