The royal body was committed to the family vault in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, on the 16th of February, amidst a concourse of the great and the noble of the land. The usual ceremony of proclamation and salutation announced the accession of George IV. and another important era commenced.
Immediately following these events came the Cato-street conspiracy. On the 24th of February the newspapers contained the startling intelligence that, on the previous evening, a party of eleven men, headed by Arthur Thistlewood, who was already known as a political agitator, had been apprehended at a stable in Cato-street, an obscure place in the locality of Grosvenor-square, on the charge of being the parties to a conspiracy to assassinate the greater part of the King’s Ministers. The truth of the intelligence was soon confirmed by the proceedings which took place before the magisterial authorities; and in due course all the parties were put on their trial at the Old Bailey, on a charge of high treason, Arthur Thistlewood, the leader, being the first tried on the 17th of April; the Lord Chief Justice Abbott presiding. The names of the other prisoners were—William Davidson, a man of colour; James Ings, John Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd, James William Wilson, John Harrison, Richard Bradburn, James Shaw Strange, and Charles Cooper, of whom the first four, together with Thistlewood, were executed as traitors on May 1st.
The Cato-street conspiracy proved a rich harvest to all concerned in the production of street literature. Catnach came in for a fair share of the work, and he found himself with plenty of cash in hand, and in good time to increase his trade-plant to meet the great demand for the street-papers that were in a few months to be published daily, and in reference to the ever-memorable trial of Queen Caroline; then it was that his business so enormously increased as at times to require three or four presses going night and day to keep pace with the great demand for papers, which contained a very much abridged account of the previous day’s evidence, and taken without the least acknowledgment from an early procured copy of one of the daily newspapers.
Great as was the demand, the printers of street literature were equal to the occasion, and all were actively engaged in getting out “papers,” squibs, lists of various trade deputations to the Queen’s levées, lampoons and songs, that were almost hourly published, on the subject of the Queen’s trial. The following is a selection from one which emanated from the “Catnach Press,” and was supplied to us by John Morgan, the Seven Dials bard, and who added that he had the good luck—the times being prosperous—to screw out half-a-crown from Old Jemmy for the writing of it. “Ah! sir,” he continued, “it was always a hard matter to get much out of Jemmy Catnach, I can tell you, sir. He was, at most times, a hard-fisted one, and no mistake about it. Yet, sir, somehow or another, he warn’t such a bad sort, just where he took. A little bit rough and ready, like, you know, sir. But yet still a ‘nipper.’ That’s just about the size of Jemmy Catnach, sir. I wish I could recollect more of the song, but you’ve got the marrow of it, sir:—
‘And when the Queen arrived in town,
The people called her good, sirs;
She had a Brougham by her side,
A Denman, and a Wood, sirs.
‘The people all protected her,
They ran from far and near, sirs,
Till they reached the house of Squire Byng,
Which was in St. James’s-square, sirs.
‘And there my blooming Caroline,
About her made a fuss, man,
And told how she had been deceived
By a cruel, barbarous, husband.’”
Street papers continued to be printed and sold in connection with Queen Caroline’s trial up to the date of her death, in the month of August, 1821.
A Copy of Verses in Praise of Queen Caroline.
“Ye Britons all, both great and small,
Come listen to my ditty,
Your noble Queen, fair Caroline,
Does well deserve your pity.
Like harmless lamb that sucks its dam,
Amongst the flowery thyme,
Or turtle dove that’s given to love:
And that’s her only crime.
Wedlock I ween, to her has been
A life of grief and woe;
Thirteen years past she’s had no rest,
As Britons surely know.
To blast her fame, men without shame,
Have done all they could do;
’Gainst her to swear they did prepare
A motley, perjured crew.
Europe they seek for Turk or Greek,
To swear her life away,
But she will triumph yet o’er all,
And innocence display.
Ye powers above, who virtue love,
Protect her from despair,
And soon her free from calumny,
Is every true man’s prayer.”