The knowledge of such regicidal designs may have led to a discussion at Court on the killing of Cæsar, where his slayer, Brutus, found partisans. One morning, in July 1716, Lady Cowper was reading aloud to the princess and the ladies, from the works of Madame Deshouillières, the French ‘tenth muse.’ The reader came upon a passage referring to Brutus. ‘As much a Whig as I am,’ she says, ‘I cannot come up to it.’—‘I think Brutus should either have been faithful to Cæsar, or he should have refused his favours, the baseness of his ingratitude blackening, in my opinion, all that could be said for his zeal for his country.’ She evidently had in her mind the people about Court who, while accepting favour from George, were often serving James. ‘This,’ she says, ‘occasioned a great dispute among us.’
SANGUINARY STRUGGLES.
Turning from Court to Newgate it will be seen that the zeal of some of the servants of certain of the condemned Jacobite gentlemen sadly outran their discretion. Mr. Cassidy and a Mr. Carnegie were sentenced to death. Their valet, Thomas Beau, immediately headed a Jacobite mob, out of a mere spirit of revenge. After trying their strength in assaulting Mr. Gosling’s tavern, the Blue Boar’s Head, near Water Lane, and mercilessly treating the Whig gentlemen there, by whom they were ultimately repulsed, after much blood was shed on both sides, the Jacks rushed in a body to that most hateful of all mug-houses, Mr. Read’s, in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street. Various previous attempts to demolish this stronghold of thirsty loyalty had been valiantly frustrated, with much damage to limb, and at serious risk to life. On the last assault, the ‘Papists and Jacks’ carried their ‘hellish design’ to ultimate but costly triumph. They smashed the windows, forced an entry into the lower rooms, and burst open the cellar. They broke up the furniture, broached the casks, and, filled to the throat with strong liquors, began to set fire to the premises. The loyal Whig guests discharged their pieces into the seething crowd. They fought in the passages, and on the stairs, but they unfortunately lost their standard. The sign of the house was also triumphantly captured. It was carried at the head of the besiegers, as they marched away, by Tom Beau. In the mêlée which occurred at the hottest part of the struggle, many of the rioters were terribly wounded. One of them, Vaughan, a seditious weaver, to whom the inside of Bridewell was not unfamiliar, was stretched dead on the threshold by a shot from the end of the passage of Read’s house. The Jacks declared that Read was the murderer. The coroner’s jury were as much divided as the mob and the gentlemen who met at Read’s mug-house, ‘only to drink prosperity to the Church of England, as by law Establisht.’ Half were for a verdict of wilful murder against Read. The other half stuck out for justifiable homicide. An adjournment ensued, to enable each side to sleep, think, and drink over it.
Meanwhile, the husseydom of Fleet Street, a sisterhood rough and readily named in another way by the papers, sustained the riot in the Jacobite interest. These nymphs were described quaintly as ‘walking the streets a nights without impunity by constables.’
A JACOBITE JURY.
At the judicial enquiry, the evidence was against Read, despite his loyalty. Witnesses swore to the attack, repulse, devastation, robbery of till and liquor, and also to the fact that Read had deliberately shot Vaughan as the former stood at his door, and the latter, an unarmed and innocent victim, as the witnesses with Jacobite bias described him, was standing doing no harm and thinking no evil, in front of the attacking force. The coroner’s jury, on reassembling, proved more Jacobite than ever. They would agree to no other verdict but that of wilful murder against Read. The coroner refused to receive this verdict, and while the dispute was pending, private individuals with Hanoverian sentiments subscribed handsome sums, and awarded liberal compensation to the owners of mug-houses who had suffered so much for their integrity and loyalty, and who met only to drink health to the royal family and ‘good luck to the Church of England by law establisht.’
THE MUG-HOUSES.
Then arose an individual, the proto-special correspondent. He made a tour of the mug-houses, chiefly because the Jacobites had accused the guests of drinking ‘damnation to the Church,’ and similar consummation to the prelates. This early original correspondent gives testimony to the contrary. ‘He was struck into an amazement,’ he tells us, ‘at the piety, charity, courtesy, and good liquor which abounded in all the Mug houses in London.’ We hear too that some baser sort of Tory would go to mug-houses to decoy Whig gentlemen by ‘damning and cursing Queen Anne.’ One Adams, a medical student or apprentice, in Lothbury, tried this game, but he had to ask pardon for it on his knees, and was afterwards sent to the Compter to digest his humiliation.
At length, the coroner’s jury, again suffering political changes, declared themselves, seven for wilful murder; five for manslaughter. The perplexed coroner washed his hands of it, and sent the matter for decision to the judges at the Old Bailey; when Read narrowly escaped the gallows; but Beau, and a few others, swung at Tyburn.
THE STREET WHIPPING POST.