Addison, in the ‘Freeholder,’ satirised them without mercy. He ascribed to the Jacobite ladies a want of grace, resulting from their country life; whereas the Whig ladies, daily in attendance at Court, possessed a courtly air to which the Jacobite ladies could never attain! The latter were as raw militia-men compared with the accomplished soldier in all his glory. Addison accuses the Jacobite ladies of having a tone of vulgarity and mendacity in the expression of their disloyal prejudices. Before the ‘beautiful part of creation’ became antagonistic in politics, they were perfect as mistresses of households, or as maidens worthy of becoming such. But in the present disturbed times, he describes wives and maidens as mere ‘stateswomen.’ ‘Several women of this turn are so earnest in contending for hereditary right, that they wholly neglect the education of their own sons and heirs; and are so taken up with their zeal for the Church that they cannot find time to teach their children the Catechism,’ A ‘pretty bosom heaving with party rage’ is moved by wrong impulses. ‘We sometimes,’ writes Addison, ‘see a pair of stays ready to burst with sedition; and hear the most masculine passions expressed in the sweetest voices. I have lately been told of a country gentlewoman, pretty much famed for this virility of behaviour in party disputes, who, upon venting her notions very freely in a strange place, was carried before an honest Justice of the peace. This prudent magistrate, observing her to be a large black woman, and finding by her discourse that she was no better than a rebel in her riding-hood, began to suspect her for my Lord Nithsdale, till a stranger came to her rescue, who assured him, with tears in his eyes, that he was her husband!’
LADIES’ ANTI-JACOBITE ASSOCIATIONS.
Addison further told the ladies that they must by nature be Whigs, as were a Jacobite Popish Government to be established, it would be the vocation of women to be nuns, while all the beaux, officers, and pretty fellows generally, would be priests or monks, and then celibacy would be almost universal. The great Essayist approves of various Ladies’ Associations for the suppression of Jacobitism. At one, there was an open tea-table, accessible only to Whig gentlemen. At a second, there was a Basset table, where none but the loyal were admitted to punt. Young ladies are praised who recognise the doctrine of passive obedience only in lovers to their mistresses. One Whig nymph hit upon a way of wearing her commode so seductively, that Tory lovers were converted at her feet, and Tory damsels imitated the fashion. Another nymph went abroad in a pearl necklace which, according to the Essayist, manifested her abhorrence of the Popish fashion of beads. Maids, wives, and widows, are reviewed at this crisis, and such counsel is given them as a writer at the beginning of the last century could give without any imputation of audacity.
A publisher, with a name that bespeaks his being baptized before the Puritan fire was extinguished—Bezaleel Creak—now sent forth, from the Bible and Ink-Bottle, in ‘Germain Street, St. James’s,’ a poem, ‘occasioned by the many Lies and Scandals Dispersed against the Government, Since the late Rebellion.’ The piece was entitled ‘Rebellious Fame,’ as that allegorical personage was just then given to report wonders and miracles on land, in the sea, in rivers, and in the skies, all which—by ‘the Members of the British Society and the Mugg-Houses about the City of London,’ to whom the book was satirically dedicated—were said to portend the speedy restoration of the king over the water to his own again. The doggrel is of the worst sort. The most descriptive bit in it refers to Lorraine, the Newgate Ordinary, whose Calendar is called a history which
with pious dread
Is ev’ry Morn by pious Porters read.
Lorraine is told that the greatest rascal in his record is Paul, who affected piety in Newgate, was having his speech penn’d by non-juring parsons, and would be turned off, singing.
How decently the Caitiff ends his days,
With Howell’s Rhetorick and Sternhold’s lays.
RIOT IN A CHURCH.