London in the Jacobite times, Volume I

by Dr. Doran

A little later, he ‘is afraid the time is lost for any attempt that shall not be of force sufficient to encourage people to come in to it.’ He did not fail to encourage people who were ready to come into it. When Sacheverel preached a Charity Sermon at Bromley, Atterbury and a numerous body of High Tory clergy attended, with, as the Jacobite papers say, ‘A handsome appearance of Nobility and Gentry.’ On the other hand, if a quiet Nonjuror ventured to open a school, hostile papers denounced him as the evil genius of young people. The coffee-houses frequented by Nonjurors were pointed out for the rough attention of the Whig mob. There was grief, with indignation, in those coffee-houses when news came there of the death of the Rev. Laurence Howell. He was thrown into Newgate for publishing an explanatory book on the Nonjurors: ‘The Case of Schism truly stated;’ and in Newgate he was slowly murdered by the intolerable horrors of the place; intolerable, at least, to a sensitive and refined nature. IN HYDE PARK. For the general mob there was a new pleasure, apart from politics, to be had in Hyde Park. These censors of the time resorted there to pelt and hiss the ‘South-Sea Bubblers’ who had made enormous fortunes, and who came to the Ring in offensively magnificent equipages. The occupants were called by their names, and were told who their fathers and what their mothers were. The vociferators and pelters received the Nobility and Quality with cheers, and the Nobility and Quality sanctioned the ruffianism by laughter, and received the homage with familiar nods. To abuse any of these great ones was ‘Scan-Mag,’ and brought highly painful consequences. While these scenes were one day being enacted in the Ring, a soldier of ‘the Duke of Marlborough’s company’ was being cruelly whipt in another part of the park, ‘for abusing Persons of Quality.’

AT BARTHOLOMEW FAIR.

The only public profession of an insurrectionary spirit this year was made, where it was to be expected, at Bartholomew Fair, which was then held in August. There came to the fair, when revelry was at its highest tide, a Yorkshire ‘squire named More. He was said to be of the blood of the famous Chancellor of that name. The ‘squire entered the Ram Inn, in Smithfield, and called for wine. The chambers were so crowded that he could find no place where to quaff it in comfort, nor the sort of company whom he cared to ask to make room for him. At length, he espied a table at which were seated two ‘Gentlemen of the Life Guards,’—a Captain Cunliffe and one of the same regiment variously described as ‘Corporal Giles Hill,’ and as the Captain’s ‘right-hand man.’ The ‘squire, saluting them, asked their leave to take a seat and drink his wine at their table. This was readily granted, and no small quantity of Bartholomew Fair wine seems to have been quaffed. Presently, entered the Fiddlers, who, after giving some taste of their quality, were ordered by the Yorkshire ‘squire to play the ‘Duke of Ormond’s March.’ In an instant the room was in an uproar. The Whigs were frantic with rage and the Jacks with delight. The gentlemen of the Life Guards grew angry, as they were bound to do; and their anger flamed higher when the descendant of the Lord Chancellor got to his feet and proposed the Duke of Ormond’s health. The landlord ran out of the room to escape being involved in unpleasant consequences. The Life Guardsmen railed at the Jacobite ‘squire as rogue and knave and liar. More persisted in giving the treasonable sentiment. ‘The Duke is an honest man,’ said the wine-flushed ‘squire,—‘let us drink his health.’ ‘You are a rascal Jacobite,’ cried the ‘right-hand man,’ ‘to propose such a health to gentlemen who wear his Majesty’s cloth and eat his bread.’ Corporal and ‘squire clapt their hands to their swords, and in less time than it takes to tell it, the Life Guardsman’s sword was ten inches deep in the ‘squire’s body; and the ‘squire himself, after a throe or two, was lying dead on the floor. The Jacobites swore that the trooper had slain him before the ‘squire could draw his own sword to defend his life. The Whigs swore all was done in fair fight, and pointed to the naked sword lying at More’s side. The Jacks accused them of having taken advantage of the confusion that prevailed, when the ‘squire fell, to draw his sword from the scabbard and lay it at his side.—The issue of all was that Hill was tried and was convicted of ‘Manslaughter.’ His sentence was ‘to be burnt in the hand;’ but this could be done, on occasions, with a cold iron; and the loyal soldier was restored, nothing the worse, to his regiment.

STOPPING THE KING’S EXPRESSES.

The severity of the Government against the outspoken defiances of the Jacobites does not appear to have silenced many of them. Even the keeper of the Hounslow toll-bar was not afraid to publish such seditious principles as Atterbury more prudently kept within the knowledge of himself and his confederates. One night, a ministerial messenger,—a mounted post-boy, in fact,—with expresses for Scotland, rode up to the bar, announced his office, and demanded free and instant passage. The toll-collector, Hall, refused to accede to either demand. ‘You don’t know,’ said the post-boy, ‘what comes of stopping the king’s expresses.’ —‘I care no more for the one than I do for the other!’ was the disloyal reply of Hall, who actually kept the lad from proceeding for a couple of hours. When he raised the bar he was reminded of what would follow, at which he laughed; but he looked solemn enough a little later, when he stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, and lay for a fortnight in that Hell upon Earth, Newgate.

The year 1721 began with a burst of spring which terrified nervous people. ‘Strange and ominous,’ was the comment on the suburban fields full of flowers, and on the peas and beans in full bloom at Peterborough House, Milbank. When the carnations budded in January, there was ‘general amazement’ even among people who cut coarse jokes on the suicides which attended the bursting of the South Sea bubble. The papers were quite funny, too, at the devastation which an outbreak of smallpox was making among the young beauties of aristocratic families. The disease had silenced the scandal at tea-tables, by carrying off the guests, and poor epigrams were made upon them. Dying, dead, or ruined, everyone was laughed at. ‘Among the many persons of distinction,’ say the papers, ‘that lie ill of various distempers, is the Lady of Jonathan Wild, Esq., Chief Thief-Taker-General to Great Britain. She is at the point of death at his worship’s house in the Old Bailey.’

CIBBER’S REFUSAL.

On St. Valentine’s day, in this year, at Drury Lane, Cibber reaped the first fruits of politics grafted on the drama, from the seed he had sown, in 1717, by his ‘Nonjuror.’ The anti-Jacobite piece, on the present occasion, was ‘The Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It is a poor adaptation of Molière’s ‘Femmes Savantes,’ but it served its purpose of crying up present Whiggery and crying down the Toryism of Queen Anne’s reign. Applause or murmurs, according to individual circumstances, greeted such a provocative passage as this: ‘What did your courtiers do all the last reign, but borrow money to make war, and make war to make peace, and make peace to make war; and then to be bullies in the one and bubbles in the other!’

IN STATE TO THE PILLORY.

This matter, however, was forgotten in the prosecution of Mist, the proprietor of one of the three Weekly Journals. Mist had dared to speak sarcastically of King George’s interference on behalf of the Protestants of the Palatinate. On prosecution for the same, a Whig jury found him guilty, and a Whig judge sentenced the obnoxious Jacobite to stand in the pillory twice, at Charing Cross and at the Royal Exchange, to pay a fine of 50l., to be imprisoned three months, and to find unquestionable security for his good behaviour, and the reform of his paper for seven years! There is no trace of the reform ever having been begun. Mist and his correspondents made the columns of his journal crackle with their fun. Jacobite writers complimented him on his elevation to the pillory as being equal to raising him to the rank of surveyor of the highways. When the Marshalsea gates opened for him to proceed to the high position in question, a countless guard of Jacobites received him, and they preceded, surrounded, or followed his coach to the Cross and the Exchange. At each place they gathered about the scaffold, in such numbers, that the most audacious and loyal of Whigs would not have dared to lift an arm against him. After Mist had stood his hour in both places, the carefully guarded object of popular ovation resumed his seat in his coach, escorted by his Jacobite friends, and cheered by the thundering hurrahs! of the densely-packed spectators.