The more loyal Whig mobile did not neglect to manifest their own opinions. They set out from the Roebuck, and attacked the Tory White Horse, in Great Carter Lane. They had heard that some of Mist’s servants were carousing there; and, consequently, they gutted the house, spilt all the liquor they could not drink, and cut off a man’s nose who attempted to remonstrate with them; all which they felt justified in doing, as the Jacobite Mist had not been treated in the pillory, according to his deserts! Meanwhile, the streets were melodious with street ballad-singers, who made Whigs mad with singing the ‘New Hymn to the Pillory,’ and with announcing the birth of Charles Edward at Rome, in December 1720, by the new and popular song, ‘The Bricklayer’s son has got a Son of his own!’
BIRTH OF THE ‘YOUNG CHEVALIER.’
Each party resorted to bell-ringing by way of manifestation of their feelings. On the anniversary, in February, of Queen Anne’s birthday ‘of glorious memory,’ Mist’s Jacobite journal recorded its disgust, that ‘honest ringers,’ who wanted to ring a peal at St. Mildred’s, were refused by puritanical Cheapside churchwardens, who spitefully told them that rather than suffer any ringing, they would cut the ropes and break the bells! At a later period, in April, the Jacobite churchwardens had it all their own way. Merry peals came rattling out from the tower of St. Mary Overy, and from other High Church summits. It was the turn of the Whig papers to sneer, as they explained that the ringing was in honour of ‘the Anniversary of the Padlock’s being taken off from the mouth of a certain Rev. Doctor, now living near St. Andrew’s, Holborn.’ This refers to Sacheverel’s appointment to the living of St. Andrews, in April 1713, before the expiration of the term of three years’ suspension from preaching, to which he had been condemned. The first sermon he preached there, as Rector, was published. Forty thousand copies were sold in London alone.
GOVERNMENT AND THE JACOBITES.
London saw the Duke of Gordon go northward, and were not sorry that he bore with him a pardon for Lochiel, who had been lately stirring among the Jacobites. Londoners saw the Countess of Mar drive with cheerful face, from the Secretary of State’s office. They rightly guessed that she had obtained a letter of license to visit her husband, abroad. Some uneasiness existed. Sanguine Whigs affected to see ‘the most hopeful and promising bulwark of the Protestant religion, in the charity schools,’ and they jeered the Jacobites, in very coarse terms, on the accounts of the birth of Charles Edward, in the presence of two hundred witnesses, in Rome. Occasionally a condemned rebel of no note, who had escaped, might be seen in Cheapside, but he soon disappeared. He was not molested, he was simply warned to depart. There was a disposition to get rid of them, and even such a once fierce Jacobite as ‘Major Mackintosh, brother to the late Brigadier Mackintosh,’ was discharged from Newgate on his own prayer and showing that ‘he was very old and altogether friendless.’ The depressed party found consolation in the fact that the High Church party had gained the elections in Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, and in the University of Cambridge; but the cheering of the mob, as the king went to open Parliament, dashed their hopes again. His Majesty, in spite of mysterious threatening letters, written anonymously to wondering lords, who gave them up to the Secretary of State, continued to go about in public without any show of fear. He went from the Opera, where he had been ‘mightily taken’ with ‘Rhadamanthus,’ to sup with the Duchess of Shrewsbury, quite careless at the thought that anyone might assassinate him on the way. And he stood Godfather in person to ‘Georgiana,’ daughter of the Duke of Kingston, when moody Jacobites, in solitary lodgings, were meditating as to where it would be most easy to fall upon and despatch him. Whigs shook their heads at the lax discipline of the sentinels at the prince’s house in Leicester Fields. They thought the king was too generous by half, when he sent Mr. Murphy, one of the gentlemen of his household, to Berlin, in charge of fifteen overgrown British Guardsmen, as a present to the ‘Great King of Prussia!’
TREASONABLE WIT.
Undaunted Mist, in his paper of the 29th May, had an article on the Restoration. It went heartily into a description of the joy which England must have felt (after being oppressed by an usurper and his fool of a son) at the restoration of the glorious House of Stuart to the British throne. But the authorities saw treason in every line of it, and Mist was brought before the Privy Council. Pressed to give up the name of the writer, he persistently refused, and did not shelter himself under a plea of ignorance. He protested, moreover, that there could be no treason in rejoicing at the overthrow of an usurper, and the restoration of a legitimate monarch. What could be done with so crafty a Jacobite? He was sent back to prison, and was cheered as he went, by a delighted mob, many of whom had just come from the hanging spectacle at Tyburn; and most of whom, after they had seen Mist disappear within the gates of his prison, rushed to the Park, to see a race, ‘fifteen times round,’ contested by a couple of running footmen.
RECRUITING FOR THE CHEVALIER.
The footmen, at least those of Members of Parliament, had ceased to be partisans. On the Speaker’s birthday, those people buried their and their masters’ differences in punch. Of that conciliating liquor they brewed upwards of forty gallons in a trough, and drank it uproariously, in the Court of Wards, the use of which was granted to them for the occasion! Meanwhile the Whigs were uneasy. They pointed to the fact that recruiting was carried on for the Pretender in the obscure Tory mug-houses; that money had been subscribed and conveyed to Rome as a gift to the young Charles Edward, and that an Irish gentleman had been openly drinking, in London and Oxford coffee-houses, the healths of the Duke of Ormond and James III. It was some consolation to the Whigs that the offender was arrested and sentenced to be whipped. When he prayed to be hanged, as a circumstance which might befal an Irish gentleman without disgracing him, the Whigs roared at the joke,—that he would be altogether spared as a gentleman, and flogged simply as an Irish traitor.
A goodly body of Tories, on more solemn purpose, followed Prior to his grave in the South Cross of Westminster Abbey, on the 25th of September, 1721. Jacobite Atterbury, Dean of the Abbey, as well as Bishop of Rochester, was looked for, but he was conspicuous by his absence. Two days after, the bishop wrote to Pope:—‘I had not strength enough to attend Mr. Prior to his grave, else I would have done it to have shew’d his friends that I had forgot and forgiven what he wrote on me.’ The offence thus condoned lay in the sting of an epigram purporting to be an epitaph on the prelate, who, for the nonce, was supposed to be dead. The lines ran thus:—