At the supreme moment, young Matthews, believing that the whole of his horrible sentence would be executed, said steadily to the hangman at his side, ‘Grant me one favour; do not burn my heart; a friend will come for it, I pray you, let him have it away with him.’ The fellow hurriedly replied that he need not fear, as he was only to be hanged; and with that grim comfort for the boy, he jumped down from the cart in which the three patients had been placed beneath the beam, and drew the vehicle from under them. Thief, highwayman, and young Jacobite were thus, in the yet new slang phrase of Poet Laureate Rowe, ‘launched into eternity.’
The sympathy of some of the news writers on this occasion took a curious turn. ‘The Gentlewoman,’ they said, ‘who tenanted the house near Tyburn, made ten guineas by letting her windows to spectators; but, how much more she would have made, but for the heavy rain!’
Truer sympathy was felt by the Jacobites, of course, for the cruelly fated Matthews. As in October a procession of six-and-twenty Nonjuring clergymen had gone in public procession from Orrery Street, Red Lion Square, to St. Andrew’s, Holborn, to bury the Rev. Mr. Maddison, their brother, so by the side of the grave of young Matthews, at night, there assembled a large body of sympathisers, by way of demonstration against those who had flung him to the hangman. ‘Sneaking Jacks,’ was the civil phrase applied to them; but it behoved them to be prudently demonstrative.
AN APOLOGETIC SERMON.
On the Sunday after the execution, a clergyman in the parish preached from 2 Corinthians i. 12, out of the simple words, ‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.’ Out of such simple text and of similar simple comment, the Whig zealots strove to weave a charge of treason. Text and comment, they said, justified young Matthews, on the ground that in what he did, he acted conscientiously.
AN INNOCENT VICTIM.
In what he did, a Government now would see small offence; but the young Jacobite knowingly ran the risk of death in the doing it. There was nothing in him of the murderer, but everything of true loyalty to the prince whom he looked upon as his king. From the time he was taken, there was no indulgence allowed him as there was to the rebel lords in 1716. What was necessary to make life even tolerable was denied to the brave lad who would not betray his Jacobite employer. Throughout the horrors of the Condemned Hole, horrors that Dante would not have dreamt of to heighten the terrors of his hell, Matthews never lost patience or self-control. He was like the young Spartan who is said to have let the fox eat out his heart rather than betray his agony by a cry. One hasty word alone fell from him, when the ruffian turnkey hammered off the convict’s double fetters, on the fatal morning. The fellow’s hammer fell as often on the Jacobite’s ankles as on the iron rivetted round them, and this cruelty brought a hasty word to Matthews’s lips, but he soon possessed his soul in patience again, and went the way to death in quiet submission. That death was more ignominious in its form than that suffered by more guilty and, socially, more noble, offenders. But the young Jacobite underwent his doom with all the dignity of Derwentwater, all the unostentatious and manly simplicity of Kenmure.
If you cannot, of your charity, as you pass St. Botolph’s, pray for the soul of young Matthews the Jacobite, you will not refuse, with knowledge of why and how he suffered, to give a tender thought to the memory of the most innocent of the victims of loyalty to the Stuarts.
POLITICAL PLAYS.
For putting partly in type a Jacobite pamphlet, Matthews was no sooner hanged than printed copies of the ‘Vox Populi’ were to be bought by those who knew how to go about it. As an example, the judicial murder of the young printer was useless. Messengers and constables, furnished with general warrants, sought for copies of the obnoxious work, and if any were discovered, the occupants of the houses where the discovery was made, appeared to be more astonished than the police. Even while Matthews was hanging, a Mrs. Powell boldly sent forth the pamphlet, from her own press. Everybody thought it delicious to buy what it was death to print. Mrs. Powell, however, on expressing contrition at the bar, was only warned to be upon her guard; and when the pamphlet lost its prestige of being mortal to the printer, it ceased to be cared for by the public. Persecution did not make the party more loyal. Party spirit was as bitter as ever. When the Prince of Wales went on the 7th of November to the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre to see young Beckingham’s ‘Henri IV. of France,’ the Jacobite papers quietly remarked that the Fleet Street linen-draper’s son showed, in his drama, how easily a king might be killed, as he passed on the highway, in his chariot. The Whig papers saw in the play a reflex of the times, and discerned Popish ecclesiastics putting their heads together in order to accomplish the sovereign’s murder.