We sav’d men’s lives and lost our own.
After further doggerel and the usual infusion of coarseness, the Grub Street bard concludes by singing:—
Three hours beaten and none die,
Yet no man knows the reason why,
’Tis very strange ’tween you and I!
JUDICIAL CAPRICE.
London, generally, had contemplated this new rebellion with indifference. The Government was by turns lenient and severe. It was thought expedient, one day, to pardon mutinous dragoons; on another, to be savagely cruel to a soldier who had, in his cups, sworn, sung, or said, hasty words in favour of King James. Under the windows of King George’s palace men were thus punished. In Hyde Park, a soldier named Devenish, was tied nearly naked to a tree, and flogged by fourteen companies of his own regiment of foot-guards. This torture he underwent four times, and then he was flung into a hospital to die. A more guilty offender, Captain Lennard, who had enlisted men for the Chevalier’s service, for which he might have been hanged, was allowed to transport himself out of the kingdom, on the promise never to return; and a too zealous Jacobite gentleman, who expressed to the soldiers at the Tower his astonishment at their serving an usurper, seems to have got off with a mere nominal penalty. On the other hand, printers, publishers, and vendors of papers that exaggerated the numbers of the rebels in Scotland, were sternly dealt with.
ASSAULT ON THE PRINCESS OF WALES.
The Jacobites failed to keep their temper, even before their hopes were disappointed. In their eyes it was almost sacrilege for the Prince of Wales to occupy, even by purchase, the Duke of Ormond’s forfeited White House at Richmond. When the duke’s confiscated town house in St. James’s Square was for sale, they went to it like pilgrims to a shrine, and saw it pass away, for 7,500l., to an Irish gentleman, named Hackett, with unconcealed regret. ‘The Duke of Ormond is in good health,’ said the Jacobite papers vauntingly. The ‘Post’ scorned the idea that the duke had died at sea of fear or fever, as was reported by Whig writers of known veracity. The Jacobite press exasperated the Jacobites themselves into dangerous speech, and, in one instance, to dastardly action. On an afternoon in April, the Princess of Wales was being conveyed in her chair from Leicester Fields to St. James’s. She was unprotected. A chairman of one of the foreign ambassadors, named Moor, took advantage of the opportunity, and, like the beast that he was, he spat three times in the lady’s face before he could be seized. At his trial the ruffian tried to justify the act for which he ultimately suffered. Through a dense mass of people, Moor was whipt from Somerset House to the Haymarket. The mob encouraged the sufficiently active hangman, as cart, victim, and executioner passed along, by cries of ‘Whip him!’ ‘Whip him!’ Moor, wearing a cross from his neck, suffered stolidly; but at the bottom of the Haymarket the hangman continued to ply his whip till Moor was compelled to cry, ‘God bless King George!’ for which result the Whig mob hugged and caressed the hangman as if he had been a public benefactor.
THE KING AND HIS LADIES.