One of the tumultuous Jacobite incidents of the year was the passage of the Rev. Mr. Bisse, of Bristol, from the Western Road to the house of the messenger who had him in custody, at the cost of 6s. 8d. daily, for his keep. Bisse, in the spring of the year, had preached a sermon to an ultra-Jacobite congregation, from this suggestive text, Psalm xciv. 20-23: ‘Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law? They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood. But the Lord is my defence, and my God is the rock of my refuge. And He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness: yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.’ The sermon proved to be more directly audacious than the text was suggestive. Bisse impressed upon his hearers that God hated usurpations, although, as they knew, he permitted them. God had allowed an usurpation of now thirty years’ duration in England, where, he said, there had been neither laws nor parliament since James II.’s days. He is reported to have added: ‘The present possessor is obliged to unite with Turks, infidels, and heretics, to save his bacon!’ The treason was as malicious as the expression of it was vulgar. Messengers were sent down to arrest Bisse, on whom they laid hands on the following Sunday, in church. But the Jacobite congregation arose, they beat and repulsed the messengers, and they triumphantly rescued their pastor!
MORE TREASON.
The offender, however, was in a short time arrested. A crowd assembled, to cheer or hiss him, on his way to the messenger’s house, in Charles Street, Westminster. Between Bisse’s various examinations, he seems to have been a prisoner at large—but bound to return to custody, nightly. He abused the liberty, if there be truth in the charge, that at this period he preached in a Nonjuring chapel, to this text from Ezekiel xxi. 25-27: ‘And thou, profane wicked prince of Israel, whose day is come, when iniquity shall have an end, Thus saith the Lord God; Remove the diadem, and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high. I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him!’ Such was the ring of the Jacobite metal; and Bisse, in his defence, asserted that he was only a humble instrument in God’s hands, giving forth the sound which God impelled.
This Jacobite uttered those sounds in churches in three separate counties. He was found guilty in Somersetshire, Wiltshire, and Buckinghamshire; and the Court of King’s Bench condemned him to stand twice in the pillory; to be imprisoned for four years, to pay a fine of 500l., and to find sureties to the amount of 2,000l. for his good behaviour during life. Bisse stood in the pillory at the Royal Exchange and at Charing Cross. The Whigs complained that he was held so loosely, he could withdraw his head when he pleased. Favoured by the Jacobite hangman, Bisse was protected by a Jacobite mob. A collection was made for him on the spot; and people in carriages who did not contribute liberally were roughly handled. Women flung flowers on to the scaffold. A single individual who ventured to make an observation aloud, of a Whiggish quality, was compelled to ask Bisse’s pardon on his knees. For the rudely, out-spoken priest, the affair was an ovation, and Defoe remarked, in the ‘Whitehall Evening Post,’ that Mr. Bisse did not bear himself too modestly.
JACOBITES IN THE PILLORY.
Similar scenes took place when another Jacobite, Harrison, stood in the pillory, at Whitechapel, for sedition. He stood at ease, he was protected from all assault and insult, and, according to the Whig papers, ‘Non-resisting ladies supplied him with money or brandy.’ Other offenders, felonious and political, were summarily got rid of. A Mr. Forward, a London merchant, offered to transport all the convicts of England to the Transatlantic Plantations, at 4l. a head. The Government offered him 3l. for each; and, at that price, whole ship-loads of ruffians, but with some honest fellows among them, were cast into slavery, for indefinite periods.
The light penalty of the pillory had no deterring effect on some ministers. On the 5th of November, the Rev. Mr. Milborne preached at St. Ethelburg’s, London, and he traced all the present miseries of the Church to that abominable anniversary, but whether his conclusion was based on the fact that the gunpowder plot had failed, or William’s invasion of England had succeeded, Mr. Milborne did not say.
THE KING AT THE PLAY.
Although London Jacobitism was not wanting in malice and menace in this and the preceding year, the king and royal family maintained a dignified indifference. George I. was the most exposed to peril, but he met it like a man. He frequently went to the theatre, not in a bullet-proof carriage densely surrounded by cavalry, but in a sedan chair, some members of the Court being conveyed in similar vehicles. Such vehicles were easily assailed; an ‘ugly rush,’ pet phrase of the modern demagogue, might have overturned the king, and put him ‘out of the story,’ as the Sagas say, in a minute; but he encountered nothing worse than a distant word of chaff, which was perhaps not audible, or, if so, not understood. In this way, he was carried, in a November night, 1718, to see ‘The Orphan,’ unmolested; and he went in the same conveyance, and in equal comfort and security, in the same perilous month, to the ‘Little Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’, where he laughed over ‘Le Maître Etourdi,’ and fairly ‘roared’ at ‘Les Fourberies d’Arlequin,’ but he understood those farces better than he did Otway’s loftier tragedy.
DANIEL DEFOE.