London in the Jacobite times, Volume I

by Dr. Doran

AT THE PLAY.

If more taste had been shown in those who catered for the royal family when they went to the play, it would have been as well. At an evening drawing room, in February, the Duchess of Roxburgh, hearing that the Princess of Wales was going to Drury Lane the following day, told the Countess of Lippe and Buckinberg that the play which was to be acted on that occasion ‘was such a one as nobody could see with a good reputation.’ ‘It was “The Wanton Wife,”’ says the Countess Cowper in her Diary, and the Princess’s irreproachable lady-in-waiting adds of Betterton’s play, which is better known by its second title, ‘The Amorous Widow,’—‘I had seen it once, and I believe there are few in town who had seen it so seldom; for it used to be a favourite play, and often bespoke by the ladies. I told this to the Princess, who resolved to venture going, upon my character of it.’ The result is admirably illustrative of the morals of the time.—‘Went to the play with my mistress; and to my great satisfaction she liked it as well as any play she had seen; and it certainly is not more obscene than all comedies are.’ ‘It were to be wished,’ adds the lady, ‘our stage was chaster, and I cannot but hope, now it is under Mr. Steele’s direction, that it will mend.’

FLIGHT OF ORMOND.

While Princesses and their ladies were amusing themselves in this way, the public found amusement in watching the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was to be seen looking, half the day long, through his windows into the street. They knew therefrom that he had been turned out of his Lord Chamberlainship. Whigs who rejoiced at this disgrace were almost as glad at seeing the Earl of Cardigan leisurely riding down Piccadilly. He had nothing more to do, they said, with the Buckhounds. It was reported in the coffee-houses that Dean Swift had been arrested. This was not correct. It was quite true, however, that Lord Oxford was not only in the Tower, but was kept in closer restraint than ever. While Tories were buying Ormond’s portrait, ‘engraved by Grebelin,’ for 1s. 6d., as the portrait of a leader who had not fled, and was not under ward in the Tower, there was one morning partly a cry, partly a whisper running through the town,—‘Ormond’s away!’ It was time. Secretary Stanhope had impeached him and other, but less noble, peers, of High Treason; and the tender-hearted Whig, Sir Joseph Jekyll, had said in the Commons, ‘If there is room for mercy, he hoped it would be shown to the noble Duke.’ When the warrant reached Richmond, the nest was warm but the bird had flown.

On Sundays, the general excitement nowhere abated. At church, political rather than religious spirit rendered congregations attentive. They listened with all their ears to a clergyman, when he referred to the king’s supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and when he had to enumerate the royal titles in the prayer before the sermon. If he omitted to note the supremacy, and the congregation were Whiggish, there was a loyal murmur of disapproval. If he happened to speak of his Majesty, not as ‘King by the Grace of God,’ but as ‘King by Divine Permission,’ the more sensitive loyalists would make a stir, withdraw from the church; and certain of the papers would be full of a holy horror at such proceedings on the part of the minister.

SACHEVEREL.

In the sermon preached at St. Andrew’s, on the 20th of January—the Thanksgiving day for the accession of George I.—Sacheverel (while the king was being almost deified at St. Paul’s) reflected severely on the Government, and obliquely on the king himself and his family. Court, city, and army were alike charged with degrading vices. With still greater boldness did he attack the ministry for appointing as a Thanksgiving time the anniversary of the day on which Charles I. was brought to trial. Finally, Sacheverel denounced the Crown’s interference with the clergy. They who advised that course, he said, might any day counsel the king to commit acts hostile to both Law and Gospel. During the delivery of this political harangue, the Doctor’s friends were disturbed by an individual who took notes of the sermon. They said ‘it was more criminal to steal the Doctor’s words out of his mouth in the church than to pick a man’s pocket in the market, or to rob him on the highway.’ This sermon, which fired London, seems now to be but a poor thing. The text was from Matthew xxiii. 24-26. The discourse affirmed that national sins brought national punishment, especially ‘the sin of that day,’ which, it was inferred, had for its penalty—the present sad condition of England. The Jacobite spirit manifested itself most sharply in a passage referring to the regicides ‘who were concerned in the bloody actions of that bloody tragedy of that glorious martyr, King Charles the First, who was next of all to the Son of God himself.’ After murdering the king, the greatest sin, said Sacheverel, was to usurp the place of the heir. Every hearer felt that George I. was here hinted at as the usurper of the seat which by right belonged to James III. The putting to death of Charles, Sacheverel declared to be ‘the greatest sin that ever was.’ The ‘rebellion of the creature against the Sovereign’ was censured almost as heavily. The censure appeared to point against those who dethroned James II., but every hearer felt that it was directed against those who kept the throne—against James II.’s son and heir.

POLITICS IN THE PULPIT.

When the discourse was ended, the congregation fell upon the note-taker. They demanded his papers, and were not enlightened by his exclamation:—‘Ah! you’ve spoilt my design!’ Each party took him for an adversary, and the man would have been murdered had not Sacheverel ordered his clerk and servant to go to his rescue. When it was discovered that the victim was ‘one Mologni (sic), an Irish Papist,’ the Whigs were probably sorry that they had not rolled him in the gutter that then ran down the centre of Holborn Hill.

CALUMNY AGAINST SACHEVEREL.