For a few days, the noblest of the prisoners were lightly held. Their going to and fro between prison and the Secretary of State’s office, in order to be questioned, kept the streets lined with gazers. Soon, however, the various cases assumed more gravity. In the Tower the captives were put under closer restraint, and the privilege of visiting them was abolished. The wives and other relatives of the chief prisoners endeavoured to present petitions on their behalf to the king, but mostly in vain. The guards kept them at a distance from the royal person. The Whigs were now thinking less of the prisoners than of their estates. The St. James’s ‘Evening Post’ was delighted to inform the public that all the estates and property, forfeited by rebellion, would be ‘strictly applied to public uses.’ In some of the papers the Jacobite ladies who were petitioning for their husbands’ or kinsmen’s lives, were denounced as barbarous women who had driven their husbands and relatives into rebellion. They were stigmatised as ‘tigresses,’ and it was pointed out to them that, to find themselves compelled to seek mercy at the foot of that throne which they had sought to overturn by fire and sword, was a retribution which they had justly incurred. London was told to be glad at having escaped the tax which the chiefs of the rebellion in Scotland were levying upon gentlemen who voluntarily failed to join them, namely, 50 per cent. of their property. WHIG LIBERALITY. Whig liberality was praised in the person of Lord Strathnaver, the Earl of Sutherland’s son. He had promised his vassals to make good all their losses; and if the married men fell in battle for King George, Lord Strathnaver undertook to transfer their leases, if they held any, to their widows—gratis, and for their lives. Many a Scottish wife in London sighed when she thought of the pleasant alternative here suggested. With regard to the rank and file of the Preston prisoners, who were not thought worth the expense of bringing to London, judges left the capital to dispose of them in a singular way. Every twentieth man taken by lot was to stand a trial, all the rest were to be transported! This was the sternest of jokes that the Whigs had ever had to laugh at, between the capture and trial of the Jacobite prisoners of war in London. In the meantime, the law myrmidons kept sharp eye and ear on London sympathisers. With respect to these, it must be allowed that justice was very capricious. While men were put to death for little more than wishing King George back in Hanover, others were fined only a few marks for much worse offence. For instance, one Thomas Smout was fined five marks ‘for speaking traiterous and devilish words of his most excellent Majesty, namely, devoting that sacred Majesty to the nethermost hell and protesting that he would sooner fight for t’other King than for him.’
WHIG AND JACOBITE LADIES.
In illustration of these times, nothing more strongly proves the influence which women exercised in politics, especially on the Jacobite side, than the persistence with which Addison addressed himself to them in jest or in earnest. He insisted on the superiority of the charms of Whig ladies, and he assured those on the Tory side that they might improve their attractions by changing their politics. He counselled the former to turn their fans into banners, and to make them convey a declaration of principles by a display of loyal and significant portraits. Such display, he thought, would lessen the Tory interest much more than the Jacobite figures in the Oxford Almanack would advance it. He characterised the Whig ladies as gentle creatures, but the Jacobite women, he said, were shrews in their families and scolds in politics. The vulgarity of the latter is offensively assumed, and never more so than in the passage where Addison affects to counsel the Jacobite ladies to be as gentle in their utterances as Cordelia. If they were loud-tongued they would be taken for harlots, all of whom (he said) were notorious Jacobites.
While Addison’s papers were being read at private breakfast tables and in the coffee and chocolate-houses, the High Church mobs, less loyal than the Drury Lane players, went about breaking the windows of the meeting houses, where prayers were put up for the welfare of King George. A diabolical attempt was made by a High Church ruffian to blow up the people in the meeting houses in the Old Jewry, during divine worship. Perhaps it was intended to suffocate them. Gunpowder and other combustibles are mentioned in the reports. Their ignition filled the place with flames, attended by a smoke and stench which nearly killed those exposed to them. In the tumultuous rush to escape many persons were grievously maimed; but no one was killed on the spot. The building suffered much damage, and those who staggered from it helplessly into the street, were speedily set upon by thieves, who carried off a great booty in wigs, watches, and scarves.
MATTHEW PRIOR.
About this time Mr. Matthew Prior shocked his old Jacobite friends by taking the oaths at Hicks’s Hall, in order to prove that he was a good Whig. Trimming Tory gentlemen who took the same oaths, on the first day of Sessions, excused themselves for doing so, by writing pointless epigrams to prove they had committed perjury. Jacobites, on the other hand, greeted with hurrahs Swan, the Mayor of Newcastle-under-Line, and two other Magistrates of that place, as they passed to Newgate in custody, for having shown kindness to some of the destitute Preston prisoners, as they were being escorted through that midland town. Tories, in coffee-house debates, held Cuthbert Kynaston, M.P. for Salop, to be a fool for having surrendered himself a prisoner. Soon they had other things to think of. There was the fair on the hard frozen Thames. That grand festival of the time was got up by the Whigs. They roasted an ox whole on the ice near Whitehall, in honour of the ninth anniversary of the birthday of Prince Frederick, and they made night hideous with their toasts and drunken revelry.
ROYALTY ON THE ICE.
Roasting oxen whole soon became an ordinary occurrence. The frozen-out watermen were made glad by contributions of joints; to which were added liberal donations from the royal family. While the ice was still in solid block, a little procession of sedan-chairs was seen, one bracing morning, going rapidly from St. James’s to Westminster. The hard-trotting bearers set down their honourable load in Old Palace Yard. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of Marlborough issued from their respective chairs. Noblemen and gentlemen had come by similar and by other conveyances. When all were afoot they went down to the river which they crossed on the ice to Lambeth, and then returned, seeing ‘all the fun of the fair,’ as they walked, or sometimes, as they tarried. The prince was unguarded, though well accompanied, and the enthusiasm gave extraordinary warmth to the occasion. When the king went publicly, a few days after, to stand as godfather to the second son of the Earl of Portland, Jacobites admired his fearlessness, and Whig ladies began to call their new-born sons by the monarch’s Christian name.
IMPEACHMENT OF THE REBEL LORDS.
The king’s words which announced the Chevalier’s arrival in Scotland were still vibrating in the ears of Parliament, when Mr. Lechmere rose in the House of Commons to take the preliminary steps for the condemnation of ‘the seven lords.’ In other words, he moved that the House should impeach them. The motion was grounded, not on evidence, but on common report. The speech was an able speech, with a craftily seeming fairness in it. The speaker maintained that the existing rebellion was the natural consequence of long preparation, and that those most forward in it, here, were the guilty tools of equally guilty men who were withdrawn from the public eye, or who conspired in greater personal safety, abroad. A portion of the press, at home, by denouncing the old Revolution, had knowingly made way for the new. The lenity extended to writers who encouraged treason against King George by denying the legality of the dethronement of King James, only inspired more venomous authors to write down the Hanoverian dynasty and the Protestant succession.