(1716.)
he loyal Whig gentlemen had celebrated their king’s birthday on May 28th. The Tories were all the more alert on the following morning to celebrate the anniversary of King Charles’s Restoration, as they supposed their adversaries would be too seedy, after their riot and revel, to molest them. The Jacobites,—emphatically spoken of by the Whig papers as ‘rascals,’—came in from all the parishes, and also from the suburban country. They appeared in their best, with oaken boughs in their hats, the women wearing sprigs in their bosoms, and as the leaves were mostly covered with gold or silver leaf, the same was held (by the Whigs) to be a proof of malice prepense.
FESTIVE FIGHTING.
In great numbers, the Jacobites paraded the streets, or stood about in defiant groups, till church-time pealed out, and then the most of them filed off to various churches and chapels, where they knew sermons were prepared to their liking. The chief of the ‘High Church Faction’ went to St. Andrew’s, Holborn. Sacheverel, it is to be presumed, had returned from an excursion he was said to have taken with two ale-house men the day before, in order to avoid noticing the king’s birthday. The professed Jacobites, decked with all the insignia worn by the High-flyers, mostly favoured the chapel, in Scrope’s Court, nearly opposite. This place was especially crowded, and especial mention is made of the presence of ‘several men in a genteel habit, booted and spurred.’ After devotion, dinner; at and after dinner, drinking; and then a general mustering and marching in the streets, with, in addition to oaken boughs in their hats, oaken towels, or clubs in their hands. They were—so say the Whig authors—‘animated as they went along by Jacobite Trulls, and several Scaramouches, of whom one might be named not far from a Jacobite Conventicle, only,’ adds the Whig insinuator, with droll reasoning, ‘he was so much elevated with the spirit of Malt that he was “Non compos.”’ Of course, they shouted the usual Slogan; not only complimenting High Church and Ormond, but Sacheverel and Queen Anne, the latter in the words ‘the Doctor and the Queen!’ The Whigs describe them as ‘crews of tatterdemallions, blackguardly boys, wheelbarrow men and ballad-singers;’ but these could not be the same people who, in the morning, had crowded the churches. The genteel men in cloaks, boots and spurs, were not to be seen in the streets where now hell seemed to have broken loose. The ‘street’ Jacks knocked down all passengers who did not sympathise with them by voice or by carrying Jacobite tokens. They were furious in denouncing Presbyterians, and they were proceeding to carry on war against certain chapels, clubs, and mug-houses, when the ‘loyal societies’ from these houses, and the gallant Hanoverians from the Roebuck descended to the highway, met their foes in fair fight, and after an hour of it, scattered all save those who lay senseless, or who were in the hands of the police. If there had been any thought of rescuing the Jacobite prisoners that night, or furthering the Chevalier’s pretensions by the demonstration, the realisation was prevented by this sort of fiercely civil war, in which the Whigs took the law into their own hands, and quelled a sanguinary riot by a sanguinary fight, left the field of battle to be watched by soldiers who arrived after the victory, and then went home as modest and harmless as lambs!
JACOBITE BOYS.
It was very observable that among the noisiest and most violent of the Jacobite mob or army were the ‘Charity School Boys.’ Possibly, they thought that any change must be the better for them; but moralists ventured to believe that the benefactors of schools had not founded them for the furtherance of popery and slavery, which were put down as among the objects of the rioters. The real criminals were, it was said, the masters and mistresses of the schools, who ‘poysoned’ the children with principles which would surely conduct them to Bridewell or the gallows. However, the writers take courage in the conviction that the Pope has as little cause to sing Te Deum, for the success of the mobs of London, as for that of his armed rebels who appeared at Dunblane and Preston.
FLOGGING SOLDIERS.
The presence of the Charity Boys as active fighters and rioters with the Jacobite mobs, was accounted for naturally enough. They had been told that the Institute from which they derived so much advantage was about to be abolished. This tale had been invented by ‘Popish Priests or Jesuits, who, going in a genteel habit to apple stalls, oyster women, wheelbarrow folks, and peddling ale-houses, frequented by poor people, put base, erroneous notions into the heads of the populace, purely to raise animosities and divisions among the King’s subjects.’
Strong appliances were employed to repress all Tory audacity. It had been allowable, in former years, to wear oak apples, or sprigs of oak, in the hat on May 29th. Now the symbol of rejoicing for the Stuart was construed as being meant offensively to Hanover. This must have been strongly impressed upon the army, when two soldiers were whipt, in Hyde Park, almost to death, and were then turned out of the service for wearing oaken boughs in their hats on this 29th of May!