This order could not have been obeyed by the petits maîtres among the officers. Perhaps they were exceptional, the Sybarites, whose tents were little palaces—tapestried and carpeted. Their gorgeously curtained beds were covered with heavily laced counterpanes. The military petit maître in the Park rose at ten, took his tea, and received friends in his dressing-gown till eleven. Then he slowly, languidly, yet elaborately, adorned himself, and when the world was sufficiently well aired for his Prettiness to appear in it, he issued from his retreat, a plumed, powdered, periwigged Adonis—a sword on his thigh, dice in his pocket, a gold-headed cane attached to one of his buttons, and a snuff-box, from which his diamonded finger, ever and anon, gave dust to the nose. The officers gave splendid entertainments to ladies from Court and ladies from the City. Of these, some took tea, some preferred ratifia. It was the humour of the belles to conform as nearly as they could to military fashions, by wearing red cloaks. These ladies in camp were severely satirised in a pungent pamphlet called ‘Whipping Tom, or a rod for a proud lady, bundled up in four feeling discourses, both serious and merry. First, of the foppish mode of taking snuff. Second, of the expensive use of drinking tea. Third, of their ridiculous walking in red cloaks, like soldiers. Fourth, of their immodest wearing of hoop-petticoats. To which is added a new satire for the use of the Female Volunteers in Hyde Park.’
A CAVALRY BISHOP.
But for military fashion the ladies had an example in no less a person than the Bishop of Durham. That prelate was the nearly nonagenarian Nathaniel, Lord Crew, the first bishop of noble birth since the Reformation. At one of the reviews by the king—gallant spectacle, when peers and commoners, and illustrious foreigners, gathered round the sovereign, and ‘the Right Honourable Robert Walpole, the famous Minister,’ was coming among them, with bevies of semi-military ladies to soften the scene—the noble old bishop nobly caracolled in the presence, on a well-trained war-horse, which the right reverend father in God bestrode in a lay habit of purple, jack-boots, his hat cocked, and his black wig tied up behind in true military fashion. The ladies adored the old bishop; they perhaps had some awe of a man who as a boy had ridden his pony in the park in the days of Charles I. The amazons having seen him ride away, and gazed at the spectacle of the procession of royalty, from its position near the walnut trees, to the magnificent banqueting pavilion, they prepared for the dance, and, oblivious of politics, ended the day in camp to the stimulating music of the fiddles.
One of the disciplinary regulations seemed harsh to the gayer lads in arms, namely, the prohibition to ‘lie out of their tents at night,’ but as the ladies remained late to dance, there was not much to complain of.
THE LADIES IN CAMP.
Never was a Metropolis more merrily guarded. Pope remarks that the Scythian ladies that dwelt in the waggons of war were not more attached to the luggage than the modern women of quality were to Hyde Park Camp. ‘The Matrons,’ he writes to Digby, ‘like those of Sparta, attend their sons to the field, to be the witnesses of their glorious deeds; and the Maidens, with all their charms displayed, provoke the spirit of the Soldiers. Tea and Coffee supply the place of Lacedemonian black broth. The Camp seems crowned with perpetual victory, for every sun that rises in the thunder of cannon, sets in the music of violins. Nothing is yet wanting but the constant presence of the Princess to represent the Mater Exercitus!’
While the military were encamped in the Park, the civil authorities were busy in hunting down traitors. Unlucky Jacobite printers and their apprentices were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, and they thought themselves fortunate if, instead of fine, imprisonment, or ruin in worse shape, they were admitted to even heavy bail in the morning. The shops of sword- and gun-makers were overhauled, and forfeiture of weapons followed detection of sword blades bearing some questionable motto on them, or of gun-barrels directed to as questionable localities.
WHIG SUSCEPTIBILITY.
Whigs recognised the bloodthirstiness of the Tories in the stabbing of honest Mr. Barrett in the Strand, who had recently quitted the Romish religion for that of King George. For the safety of that royal person, they were so anxious as to consider with fear the fact that he occasionally walked for an hour or two together, almost alone, in Kensington Gardens, and went to dine with his most favoured nobles, or to the playhouse with its mixed audience, almost unattended. They were dissatisfied with messengers, assumed to be Jacobites, from whose custody traitors of mark escaped, as was supposed in return for costly bribes. They plucked up courage when an Irish papist priest, having been seized with dangerous papers upon him, was held to such bail as it was impossible for the wretch to procure. They shook their heads in displeasure when Colonel Arskine (Erskine) was allowed to go at large, on the security of his brother, the Earl of Buchan. The hanging of two Irish soldiers, lately in the Spanish service, Carrick and Mulhoney, who had come to London to be ready for the outbreak that was preparing, was perhaps justifiable; but a couple of strange gentlemen could not take lodgings in St. James’s parish without risk of being arrested; and ladies unprotected, and having apartments in the same district, were often invited to give an account of themselves to the nearest magistrate. The lightest words were strangely perverted; and when the Rev. Mr. Mussey, in Sacheverel’s old church, St. Andrew’s, Holborn, preached against the practice of Inoculation, contending factions thought there might be something in it; but neither party could well make out what!
MORE ARRESTS.