ARRESTS.
Much of the safety of London was entrusted to the Westminster Cavalry Militia, who were now very active. Record is made of their rendezvousing in Covent Garden, going thence to Tuttle Fields, where, says the sarcastic ‘Weekly Packet,’ ‘they exercised without so much as one Man falling from the saddle.’ At the same time, captures were being effected in every direction. Now, a whole club might be seen, properly secured, and passing on their way to Newgate, amid the jeers of most spectators, and with the sympathy of a few. Country gentlemen of many thousands a year were not held sacred even in the middle of their dinner at an ordinary. It was a regular frolic to carry off half the guests in eating-houses, before they had finished their repast, for which perhaps they had little appetite left. Then, unlucky Italians or demonstrative Frenchmen were ever and anon being handcuffed in country places and hurried through London on suspicion of being the Pretender. Ambassadors from foreign Powers had endless trouble thrown upon their hands in protecting the rights of foreign hawkers of flash jewelry, suspected of designs upon the throne. POPULAR FEELING. The Whig writers seriously warned the London apprentices who had Tory proclivities that Heaven was certainly against them. At a feast in celebration of the expiration of a young fellow’s apprenticeship, the freedman, in an after-dinner speech, railed furiously at his late Whig master and at Whiggery generally. Before the speaker, with anti-Hanoverian expletives for fireworks, had come to an end, the young fellow’s excitement became too much for him. A fit laid him senseless, and he died in an hour or so. The Whig patriots protested that the Judgment of God was never so manifest as in this case.
[4] The authorship of this pamphlet, first published in 1713, for which Bedford was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 marks, and to be imprisoned three years, was subsequently assumed by another nonjuring clergyman—the Rev. George Harbin.
CHAPTER VI.
(1715.)
ext, the idea of a camp and mimic war in Hyde Park was viewed, by some ladies, with unconcealed delight. Pope wrote half sportively, half seriously, to one of those gay women of the period—most of them Jacobite at heart. ‘You may soon have your wish,’ he says, ‘to enjoy the gallant sights of armies, encampments, standards waving over your brother’s corn-fields, and the pretty windings of the Thames stained with the blood of men. Your barbarity, which I have heard so long exclaimed against, in town and country, may have its fill of destruction.’ The writer adds a notification of the perils that may environ lovely women who delight in war, and he thus proceeds:—‘Those eyes that care not how much mischief is done, or how great slaughter committed so they have but a fine show, those very female eyes will be infinitely delighted with the camp which is speedily to be formed in Hyde Park. The tents were carried thither this morning. New regiments with new clothes and furniture, far exceeding the late cloth and linen designed by his Grace for the soldiery—the sight of so many gallant fellows, with all the pomp and glare of war, yet undeformed by battles, those scenes which England has, for so many years, only beheld on stages, may possibly invite your curiosity to this place.’
CAMP AND PULPIT.