There was, of course, no offence in the play; and if there had been, penalty was not certain to follow. Law and justice ‘danced the hays’ in the wildest fashion.
INCIDENTS.
Beckingham’s tragedy at Lincoln’s Inn Fields really had no political element in it. This was not the case with a tragedy produced four days later (Nov. 11) at Drury Lane, namely, Dennis’s ‘Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment.’ It was a mutilation of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus,’ and Booth was the hero. There is significance in the fact that neither party made any application of its speeches or incidents. After three nights the play was shelved, and Dennis swore in print that Cibber and other actors were ignorant, incapable, and destitute of all love of country; for the sake of which and for that of the king, Dennis declared he had constructed the piece. A sore point with Dennis was that his benefit was fixed for a night, when a hundred persons who designed to be at the theatre, ‘were either gone to meet the king, or preparing in town to do their duty to him on his arrival from abroad.’ When the king, on his arrival, passed through St. James’s Park, a Nonjuring minister indiscreetly gave uncourteous expression to his Jacobite thoughts, and found his liberty curtailed, in consequence.
ROYAL CONDESCENSION.
The latter half of the year was not a cheerful one in London. An epidemic distemper carried off hundreds, especially young persons. Women who ventured in the streets in calico gowns had them torn from their backs by the weavers, who hung the shreds on the gibbets in the suburbs. For many weeks the Jacobites were busy in collecting subscriptions for the Spaniards who had surrendered at Glenashiel, and the Whigs went day after day to the northern road to see the foreign captives led in to the Savoy, but they were disappointed. There was something wrong about Lord Forrester’s troop of Horse Guards, the gentlemen of which were ordered to dispose of their places. Even the jollity of the time had a demoniacal quality about it; and it was not edifying to see young gentlemen of large fortunes and ‘coaches and six,’ distributing gin and brandy to the basket-women in Covent Garden, and dancing country dances with them ‘under the piazza.’ One young gentleman, to show his joy at the Jacobite defeat, dressed as a baker and cried pies and tarts through the whole length of Long Acre, followed by two of his footmen in laced liveries. This sort of affability was perhaps the result of example given in higher quarters; example which set on the same level royal princesses and vendors of pipkins. On one night in this popularity-hunting year, the Prince of Wales went to a masquerade in the Haymarket; and the Princess was carried in a sedan chair into the City, where, as the papers said: ‘Her royal Highness supped with Mrs. Toomes who keeps a great china-warehouse in Leadenhall Street.’ The Prince of Wales had so upheld his popularity by visiting Bartholomew Fair, without ceremony, seeing the best of the shows, that when he made the first bid for the Duke of Ormond’s confiscated house at Richmond—6,000l.—nobody bid against him. One Jacobite Surrey magistrate had the pluck, however, to withstand him. The prince announced that, on a certain day, he would have a bull baited on Kew Green. The justice publicly announced that he would order the arrest of the chief persons present—on the ground that the meeting put in peril the public peace; and the Lord Chancellor (Macclesfield) turned the justice out of the commission! Jacobitism turned up in various directions, and the pluck of the prince at going among the populace at ‘Bartlemy Fair’ was to be admired, since, at Epsom, a Jack lad came close to him, and shouted ‘Ormond and Seaforth for ever!’—to be sure, the gentlemen near the prince caned the fellow till their arms grew weary of the work!
THE KING’S GOOD NATURE.
As the year waned through the autumn quarter, the Jacobites upheld the divinity, as it were, of their king, James, by referring to his having touched, and healed, by the touching, a score of diseased persons. The Whigs laughed at the story as fabulous. One Whig lady, following the example of a predecessor, asserted the divinity in the touch of her own sovereign, King George, in a singular way. She made known to the Secretary of State that she was in a condition of health which would make no progress to any issue, till she had kissed the king’s hand. The secretary informed the sovereign of this womanish caprice, and the good-natured monarch laughingly said, she might meet him in the gallery of St. James’s, and have her wish gratified. She hung two minutes with her lips to the royal hand, King George looking down on her, the while, in the greatest good humour. But what the issue was is not noted in contemporary history.
ROB ROY AND THE DUKE OF MONTROSE.
In this year, the ultra-Whig Duke of Montrose (the first of that degree), one of the king’s principal Secretaries of State, pleaded hotly at the Privy Council, at St. James’s, for suppressing the Jacobite Rob Roy. A halo of romance has been thrown round this Robert Campbell Macgregor, by which he has acquired a measure of respect and admiration of which his memory is totally undeserving. He was a semi-savage, without any principle of honour or honesty; his courage was that of the wolf; and his sense of loyalty was so unstable that he was traitor to his own supposed side—the Jacobites—without being intentionally serviceable to the Hanoverians. Montrose was charged by the outlaw as having had (at the London Council Board) ‘the impudence to clamour at Court for multitudes to hunt me like a fox, under pretence that I am not to be found above ground.’ For this insult to dignity, Rob circulated a mock challenge, from Argyle to the Duke in London. It was simply intended to bring him to whom it was addressed, ‘ane High and Mightie Prince, James, Duke of Montrose,’ into contempt. It was composed in a flow of coarse and vulgar bluster.
