THANKSGIVING DAY.
This Thanksgiving Day, being a holiday, the streets were made lively by the onslaughts of contending factions. The Whigs wore orange-coloured ribbon cockades, and a bit of laurel in their hats. The Jacobites sported a scrap of rue or thyme, symbols of their sorrow and of their hopes as to what Time might bring round to them. The Jacobite women wore the same emblems, and they were foremost in the fights which invariably took place when the antagonistic mobs met on the highway. The Whig papers report the total defeat of their adversaries. ‘They were thrashed, cut, and wounded to that degree,’ says the facetious ‘Weekly Journal,’ ‘that many of them will have reason to Rue the Time that ever they met the Whigs, on the 7th of June.’
SHERLOCK’S SERMON.
While they were fighting, Sherlock, Dean of Chichester, was preaching his Thanksgiving sermon before the House of Commons, in St, Margaret’s, Westminster. His text was from Psalm cxxii. 6, ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.’ The most remarkable passage in the discourse was one which quietly reasserted the Sacheverel maxim that resistance to constituted authority is unrighteous. Sherlock did not mean to tell the senators that the opposition to James II. was unrighteous. Nevertheless, he says of those who would rebel on grounds real or imaginary, ‘Where did they learn that Rebellion is the proper remedy in such cases? The Church of England has no such doctrine; and if they cannot govern their own passions, yet in justice to her, they ought not to use her name in a cause which she ever has and ever will disclaim.’ The dean drew no ill picture of the public feeling just before the revolution. ‘Oh, that I had words to represent to the present generation the miseries which their fathers underwent; that I could describe their fears and anxieties, their restless nights and uneasy days, when every morning threatened to usher in the last day of England’s liberty, when men stood mute for want of counsel, and every eye was watching with impatience for the happy gale that should save the kingdom, whose fortunes were reduced so low as to depend upon the chance of wind and weather.’ After this poor compliment to Providence, Sherlock hinted at the possible occurrence of another attempt of the Jacobite Prince to overthrow the established Church and Throne. Private and party selfishness facilitated such an attempt, but ‘it is as absurd,’ he said, ‘for a man, under any resentment whatever, to enter into measures destructive of his country’s peace, as it would be for him to burn the Title to his Estate, because the Tenant was behind in his rent.’ There were few of the listeners to this passage who did not feel that if the words condemned revolution against George I., they equally condemned (to Jacobite thinking, at least), that which overthrew James II.
The dean was not afraid to say a word in favour of the Nonjurors. The rashness of some of these persons had involved the whole body in obloquy. He observed:—‘The principles on which the legality of the present Establishment is maintained, are, I think, but improperly, made a part of the present quarrel which divides the nation. There are but few who have not precluded themselves on this point, those, I mean, who have had courage and plainness enough to own their sense and forego the advantages, either of birth or education, rather than give a false security to the government, which under their present persuasion they could not make good. To these, I have nothing more to say, than to wish them what I think they well deserve, a better cause.’
BISHOP OF ELY’S SERMON.
A large concourse of people flocked on this day to Ely House Chapel, to hear the Bishop’s Thanksgiving sermon; which was preached from the text,—‘Let them give thanks whom the Lord hath redeemed and delivered from the hand of the enemy,’ Psalm cvii. 2. The ‘Holbourn’ congregation had to listen to a highly-spiced discourse. Indeed, the prevailing taste of all the discourses was a sharp attack on Popery, its ends, and its cruelty in establishing and maintaining them. The Bishop, Fleetwood, stated that, had the rebellion been successful, London would have seen the slaughter of the whole of the royal family, in order to have no other but a Popish succession possible. The most mischievous and calumnious party cry that he had heard was ‘The Church in danger!’ ‘I have lived myself,’ he said, ‘in and about this city, six or seven and twenty years, and been as careful and diligent an observer how things went with relation to the Church, as I could.’ The prelate declared that neither in William’s nor Queen Anne’s reign, nor in the existing one, had there been the slightest foundation for the cry. There was no such cry during the last three or four years of Queen Anne’s reign, because there were men then in power at Saint James’s ‘some of the greatest of whom are now actually in the service of the Pretender.’ When the bishop alluded to the unhappy persons who had suffered for their active Jacobitism, he let drop words which, somewhat strange, perhaps, as coming from a Christian prelate, enable us to see into some of the practice of London hitherto unknown. ‘The marvellous compassion, the strange and hitherto unpractised charity of public prayers and tears bestowed upon the few State Criminals that have fallen of late, by the hands of Law and Justice, this new and unusual tenderness, I say, was shown rather for their sufferings than their sins, by such as approve their cause.’
KING GEORGE’S RIGHT TO THE THRONE.
Nothing was more clear than the king’s statement, published soon after his accession,—that he had succeeded to the crown of his ancestors. His hereditary right was there proclaimed. The bishop, in his sermon, told his hearers of many ways in which the king did not ascend the throne. Among them is this: ‘Nor did he come by what they call Hereditary Right.’ The king was called, according to the prelate, by the Nation represented in a free Parliament, ‘not,’ he quaintly remarked, ‘not by gratitude for any benefits or service past.… He was called to the Throne by all the Nation, King and Parliament; and also afterwards by Queen and Parliament, if that will please some people better.’ When the congregation dispersed, Ely Place was resonant with the diverse comments such passages were calculated to elicit.
The press was as active as the pulpit, but not exactly in the same way.