‘I shall mention one particular,’ he says, ‘which has been a matter of astonishment to me to find out a Falsehood so industriously reported. I hope it will be so with you when I assure you it was industriously reported that the Prince of Wales, who was represented to us under the greatest disadvantages, as to the Shape and Frame of his Person, is quite the Reverse of all Reflections, for he has really a comely Appearance, and a Liveliness in his Looks and Gesture, which is very taking, and speaks a great deal of Goodness. This I beheld with Admiration at Westminster Hall, when I was present at the Trial of the Earl of Wintoun.’
Among a batch of 180 Jacobite convicts sent to Maryland, there was one who was both malefactor and Jacobite. His name was Wriggelsden. He was such a hater of King George, that he tried to carry off his Majesty’s plate from the Chapel Royal in Whitehall. The Tory thief was transported, but the Whig papers in London soon abounded with complaints that this enemy of kings and men was better off than he had ever been before. ‘He had got,’ says the News Letter, ‘a cargo of cutlery ware, and a Mistress like a Woman of Fashion, in rich clothes and a gold striking watch, with other proper equipage, at Annapolis, where they live with great show of affluence.’ The Whigs complained that knaves and traitors should thus flourish. They also complained that the sentinels at St. James’s Palace neglected to safely guard the prince and princess; that Tory inn-keepers cursed the king, even on his coronation-day, and that Nonjurors were not to be trusted, even though they took the oath of fidelity, like the Rev. Nicholas Zintens, who, they sneeringly say, ‘took the oath by mere impulse of conscience in the absence of his wife.’
IN AND OUT OF NEWGATE.
Meanwhile, detachments of Horse Guards patrolled the suburbs, and delegations of Scotch Presbyterian ministers marched up, day after day, to St. James’s, to congratulate the king on being securely seated on his throne. Now and then one of the above guards, yielding to love of liquor, would drink the Pretender’s health, for a draught of ale, gratis; and would find himself next day, in Newgate, in the company of priests whose papers and persons had just been seized by Messengers, or in the place of rebel-prisoners who had just escaped, or who had died, as poor captives died, of that loathsome confinement. Captivity could not tame the bolder spirits. Sunderland, the coffee-house man, locked up for circulating that inflammatory pamphlet,—‘Robin’s Last Shift,’—talked more Jacobitism in prison than out of it; while Flint,—ultra-Jacobite author of the ‘Weekly Remarks,’—wrote more seditiously in his cell than in his own printing office;—till orders came down to keep pen, ink, and paper from a man who made such bad use of them.
POLITICS ON THE STAGE.
As Oxford and Cambridge represented, the first, Tory;—the second, Whig principles; so Drury Lane Theatre was popular with the Whigs, while the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields lay under the suspicion of being Jacobite. The suspicion probably arose from the fact that, in the days of Queen Anne, one of the company, the handsome actor, Scudamore, had often gone to St. Germain as an agent of the London Jacobites. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ players, however, repudiated all grounds for suspicion against their loyalty. Mrs. Knight, on the occasion of her benefit, published an address in which she told the Jacobites their money was as good as that of other people, but that their political principles were not so good. She told the Whigs that her ‘zeal for government had been expressed in the worst of times.’ At night, she delivered an epilogue, in the character she had been playing, ‘Widow Lockit,’ in which politics were thus introduced into the domain of the drama:—
Whatever t’other House may say to wrong us,
We have, as well as they, some honest Whigs among us,
Who do our Country’s Enemies disdain,
And hate disloyalty as much as Drury Lane.