“THE GOTHAM ADDRESSERS; OR, A PEEP AT THE HEARSE.”
“Sing the Addressers who lately set out
To flatter the great and honesty rout,
Where Frenchmen, and Swiss, and Hollanders shy
United their forces with Charley Dingley,” etc.
The procession and hearse (the driver is exclaiming “Wilkes and Liberty”) are again shown at St. James’s Palace. The chief promoter, Charles Dingley, is made the principal butt of this satire, and, as the address began with him, it is appropriately so terminated. The hearse with the placards is succeeded by a coach bearing on the roof a windmill, an allusion to Dingley’s too famous saw-mills at Limehouse, which were dismantled by the sawyers out of work and other rioters. The coachman of this equipage is endeavouring to pacify the mob: “Wilkes and Liberty, Gentlemen; I had no hand in the d——d Address.” The chief offender, seen inside the coach, is also appealing to the incensed crowd: “For God’s sake, Gentlemen, spare me; I wish the Address had been in Hell before I meddled with it.” His bemired footman is declaring, “My livery’s like my master, d——d Dirty.” The next coach has on it a zany with cap and bells, seated “on the Massacre of Aboyna;” this figure of folly is exclaiming, “I give Mr. Dingle the lead;” the rider, one of the loan-contractors and bidders for ministerial favour, cries, “Ayez pitié de moi!” “Dingle’s Downfall, a new Song,” is chanted by a female ballad-singer. Dead cats and mud are thrown at the procession, which is followed by the groans and hisses of the spectators.
The foregoing events are further elucidated in “A Dialogue between the Two Heads on Temple Bar.” The narrator professes to have overheard the following conversation upon politics between the decapitated heads of the 1745 rebels stuck over Temple Bar:—
“But soon more surpris’d, and I’ll tell you the cause, sir,
The heads on Temple Bar were in a deep discourse, sir.
‘Why, Fletcher,[55] your head and mine has been fixed hither
These full twenty years, expos’d to all weather
For being concerned in a Scottish rebellion:
Not like Bute, the nation to rob of three million.’
‘Ay, Townsend, but Bute play’d the jockey so fair, sir,
Got the money for riding the old Georgian mare, sir,
But his tricks at St. James’s Wilkes soon did disclose, sir,
Tho’ squint-ey’d, saw how Bute led the King by the nose, sir.’
‘Why, Fletcher, that’s worse than open rebellion!
And here’s room on the Bar if they would but behead him;
In St. George’s Fields there’s room for a gibbet,
But justice of late, they don’t choose to exhibit.
If justice took place, ’twould cause Jack some trouble,
Lord Mansfield himself, might, by chance, mount the scaffold.
No more alt’ring records; but this joke might be said,
As blind with the scales, he appears without head.
And half a score more, tuck’d up in a halter;
But don’t forget to hang Luttrell and Proctor,
For ’tis such rogues as these that corrupted the nation,
And caus’d these disturbances, strife, and vexation.
Then the King would be freed from all of roguish party,
And let those fill their places who are loyal and hearty.’”
CHAPTER VIII.
PETITIONS AND REMONSTRANCES TO THE THRONE, 1769-70.
Petitions and remonstrances began to make ministers tremble lest finally the sympathies of the throne might be turned into the proper channel, and the king be led to espouse the cause of the people, who, to do them justice, remained loyal under both the critical emergencies described as occurring under Charles II. and George III., and which had more than a casual resemblance.
The remonstrances of the citizens were persistently laid before the king, although every obstacle was interposed in the way of their presentation by petty indignities imposed upon those bold enough to approach the presence with objects thus distasteful to the royal ideas of sovereign right—
“Make prayers not so like petitions
As overtures and propositions.”
(Hudibras.)
On July 5, 1769, the Livery of London presented a petition to the king; the lord mayor, Samuel Turner, Sir Robert Ladbrooke,[56] Alderman Beckford, and other friends of popular liberty being charged with this statement of grievances, of which the following extracts must suffice:—
“We should be wanting in our duty to your Majesty, as well as to ourselves and our posterity, should we forbear to represent to the throne the desperate attempts that have been, and are too successfully, made to destroy that constitution to the spirit of which we owe the relation which subsists between your Majesty and the subjects of these realms, and to subvert those sacred laws which our ancestors have sealed with their blood.
“Your ministers, from corrupt principles and in violation of every duty, have, by various enumerated means, invaded our invaluable and inalienable right of trial by jury.
“They have, with impunity, issued general warrants, and violently seized persons and private papers.
“They have rendered the laws non-effective to our security, by invading the Habeas Corpus.
“They have caused punishments and even perpetual imprisonment to be inflicted, without trial, conviction, or sentence.
“They have brought into disrepute the civil magistracy, by the appointment of persons who are, in many respects, unqualified for that important trust, and have thereby purposely furnished a pretence for calling in the aid of the military power.
“They avow, and endeavour to establish, a maxim absolutely inconsistent with our constitution, that ‘an occasion for effectually employing a military force always presents itself, when the civil power is trifled with or insulted;’ and by a fatal and false application of this maxim, they have wantonly and wickedly sacrificed the lives of many of your Majesty’s innocent subjects, and have prostituted your Majesty’s sacred name and authority, to justify, applaud, and recommend their own illegal and bloody actions.
“They have screened more than one murderer from punishment, and in its place have unnaturally substituted reward.
“And after having insulted and defeated the law on different occasions, and by different contrivances, both at home and abroad, they have at length completed their design, by violently wresting from the people the last sacred right we had left, the right of election, by the unprecedented seating of a candidate notoriously set up and chosen only by themselves. They have thereby taken from your subjects all hopes of parliamentary redress, and have left us no resource, under God, but in your Majesty.
“All this they have been able to effect by corruption; by a scandalous misapplication and embezzlement of the public treasure, and a shameful prostitution of public honours and employments; procuring deficiencies of the civil lists to be made good without examinations; and, instead of punishing, conferring honours on a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions.
“From an unfeigned sense of the duty we owe to your Majesty, and to our country, we have ventured thus humbly to lay before the throne these great and important truths, which it has been the business of your Ministers to conceal. We most earnestly beseech your Majesty to grant us redress. It is for the purpose of redress alone, and for such occasions as the present, that those great and extensive powers are entrusted to the Crown by the wisdom of that Constitution which your Majesty’s illustrious family was chosen to defend, and which we trust in God it will for ever continue to support.”
Of each paragraph given in the foregoing the meaning was conclusive, the instance known to all. There is in this petition no statement exaggerated, no sentiment overcoloured, considering that one paragraph alone describes no less than the suicidal measures which dismembered the empire, and cost the mother country the allegiance of “the colonies,” i.e. the continent of America, in these plain words:—
“They [the Grafton administration] have established numberless unconstitutional regulations and taxations in our colonies. They have caused a revenue to be raised in some of them by prerogative.”
However meritorious the cause, it was an offence to a king whose mind, never remarkable for lucidity, was then under “the influence of the worst of counsellors,” as stated in the first prayer of the petition. The document—when the petitioners were, after much discouragement, delay, and many subterfuges, and, “although no time could be fixed for its acceptance,” permitted to approach the presence at a levee—was at last presented; but the king made no reply, but, handing the petition to the lord-in-waiting, turned his back on the presenters, who represented the integrity and commercial greatness of the city of London and were its elected guardians, and addressed Baron Dieden, the Danish ambassador, who was standing in his vicinity, on an indifferent topic.
After the late fulsome reception of “bogus addressers” nothing could be more contemptible than the studied impertinence with which the Corporation of London was treated, and the affront of leaving the civil magistrate to
“skulk about the passages of the Court that he may have a glimpse of His Majesty as he passes along in state, in order to deliver into his hands a remonstrance affecting the most essential interests of above twelve millions of people, who by the sweat of their brow support the pomp and parade of royalty and swell the fastidious pride and coxcombical vanity of empty courtiers.”
It was boldly hazarded at this emergency, from the premeditated affront to the representatives alike of the city and the people, that the rulers, blinded to their own destruction, then concluded—
“themselves sufficiently prepared for the final extirpation of liberty in this island, and that by deliberate insults they were urging the people to commit some outrage, which might give them a pretence for putting their scheme of tyranny into immediate execution.”
If the city, by its dignified and law-abiding demeanour, disappointed these expectations, it was argued that the Court party would not wait for an excuse to wreak their vengeance under some thin disguise of retributive justice, but would proceed to order out the “Scotch Regiment, as in the affair of St. George’s Fields, without waiting for the least appearance of necessity.”
A correspondent of the Oxford Magazine, writing under the signature “Philopolis,” referring to the threatened massacres in St. George’s Fields, and, on the grounds that the late firing did comparatively little damage to the rioters concerned, declared:—
“I have heard it indeed alleged by courtiers in excuse, that all the military execution of that day was solely aimed at Mr. Wilkes, who they hoped would be despatched by some lucky shot, as Herod expected our Saviour would be murdered among the innocents he murdered at Bethlehem. As a proof of this extenuation of the crime, they show flatted balls, which were discharged by heroes planted in proper places for the purpose, and which have left marks in the walls about the windows of Mr. Wilkes’s apartments in the King’s Bench.” “If this has any foundation in truth,” writes “Philopolis,” “I would advise the city to be cautious, and never allow above a dozen of its inhabitants to be seen together at one time, for fear the Riot Act should arrive unexpectedly, with two or three brigades of musqueteers, headed by a trading justice, who may think nothing of the citizens’ lives, provided he has any hopes of murdering Beckford and the two sheriffs through their sides.”
The petition presented by the lord mayor with such difficulty, and after many insolent subterfuges and repulses, failed to bring the king to a reasonable sense of his situation or of the dangers to which the throne was exposed by the reckless and unconstitutional conduct of the administration. Subsequently, on the presentation of a “remonstrance,” the king returned a written reply to the original petition, visiting with severe censure the persevering claim of invaded birthrights, urged by “the afflicted citizens,” and treating their just grievances with reprimand instead of redress; the pleas set forth in the petitions being considered by His Majesty “as disrespectful to himself, injurious to his parliament, and irreconcileable to the principles of the constitution”—a piece of bold duplicity more worthy of the Stuart dynasty.
The vexed question of Middlesex election, the imprisonment of Wilkes, the unconstitutional admission of Luttrell into the House, and particularly the supineness of the King to the petitions and just remonstrances of his people, are embodied in a metrical form, as—