And tell him his Gilly is lately come down,
Who has just left his mitre, as he left his crown.
Whose lives till they died, in our service were spent;
They only come hither who never repent.
Let Heralds aloud then our victories tell;
Let George reign for ever!’—‘Amen!’ cried all hell.
Court-life was certainly not particularly exemplary. A Stuart Princess would not have dared to seek reception at St. James’s, but the mistress of a Stuart King was welcomed there. The old Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, chief of the royal Husseydom in the apartments of Charles II., was presented to the Princess of Wales by the Duchess’s granddaughter, the Countess of Berkeley, Lady of the Bedchamber, then in waiting! According to the records of the time, the Duchess was ‘most graciously received.’ Next evening (it was in March, 1715) this painted abomination of a woman sat at the king’s side, at a supper given by the Duke of Richmond, in Priory Gardens. The royal harridan’s granddaughter sat on the other hand of George I.! Her husband, the Earl of Berkeley, and the Earl of Halifax made up this highly respectable party of six.
FLYING REPORTS.
This laxity of moral practice, at Court, was made capital of by the Jacobites. Throughout April and May, they proclaimed that there was not a man about St. James’s who was not noted for disaffection or lukewarmness to Church principles. There was a report that a ‘new Academy was to be erected at Hampstead, for instructing youths in principles agreeable to the present times.’ The existing Parliament was declared to be as capable of burning Articles, Homilies, and Liturgies, as ‘Sacheverel’s Parliament’ was of burning the Oxford decree. Episcopalian clergymen were said to be looked on with such small favour by the Government, that a prelatic military chaplain in Scotland was removed by the authorities in London on the sole ground of his being an Episcopalian. This, the Duke of Montrose told the Archbishop of York, ‘could not be got over.’ Presbytery would be more perilous to England than Popery; but both menaces would disappear, if George and his hopeful family were ‘sent back to their own German dominions, for which Nature seems to have much better fitted them.’[1] This was said to be the opinion of the most sensible Whigs, as well as of all the Tories in England.
DECREE IN THE ‘GAZETTE.’