London in the Jacobite times, Volume II

by Dr. Doran

A SON OF ROB ROY.

A personage of some note was in London this year, the eldest son of Rob Roy,—James Drummond Macgregor. He seems to have previously petitioned Charles Edward for pecuniary help, on the ground of suffering from the persecution of the Hanoverian government, and to have been willing to serve that government on his own terms. In the introduction to ‘Rob Roy,’ Sir Walter Scott says that James Drummond Macgregor made use of a license he held to come to London, and had an interview, as he avers, with Lord Holdernesse. ‘His lordship and the Under-Secretary put many puzzling questions to him, and, as he says, offered him a situation, which would bring him bread, in the government’s service. This office was advantageous as to emolument, but in the opinion of James Drummond, his acceptance of it would have been a disgrace to his birth, and have rendered him a scourge to his country. If such a tempting offer and sturdy rejection had any foundation in fact, it probably related to some plan of espionage on the Jacobites, which the government might hope to carry on by means of a man who, in the matter of Allan Breck Stewart, had shown no great nicety of feeling. Drummond Macgregor was so far accommodating as to intimate his willingness to act in any station in which other gentlemen of honour served, but not otherwise; an answer which, compared with some passages of his past life, may remind the reader of Ancient Pistol standing upon his reputation. Having thus proved intractable, as he tells the story, to the proposals of Lord Holdernesse, James Drummond was ordered instantly to quit England.’

JACOBITE PARAGRAPHS.

The son of Rob Roy, hated and suspected by the Jacobites, got over to Dunkirk, but he was hunted thence as a spy. He succeeded in reaching Paris, ‘with only the sum of thirteen livres for immediate subsistence, and with absolute beggary staring him in the face.’

The hopes of the friends of the Stuarts were encouraged by a paragraph in the London sheets of 1754 stating, that though the Chevalier was suffering from sciatica, he was well enough to receive a stranger (in June), ‘who, by the reception he met with, was supposed to be a person of distinction. Two days later, the banker, Belloni, had a long private conference with the Chevalier. What passed was not known, but what followed was; namely, a large sum of money was advanced by the banker.’ It is easy to imagine how paragraphs like the above stirred the pulses at the Cocoa Tree and at St. Alban’s coffee-house.

The Jacobite interest was kept up in 1755 by paragraphs which showed that the family were well with such a civil potentate as the King of Spain, and with such a religious one as the Pope. The King of Spain, it was said, had conferred a benefice on Cardinal York, worth 6,000 piastres yearly. In the autumn the London papers announced that ‘The Chevalier de St. George, who enjoyed the Grand Priory of England, of the Religion of Malta, which gave him an active and passive voice in the election of Grand Master, had resigned it, and conferred it on a Commander Altieri. The collation has been confirmed by the Pope.’

HUME’S ‘HISTORY.’

In the same year London was stirred by the publication of Hume’s ‘History of England,’ which was denounced as a Jacobite history by the Whigs, and it was not warmly received by the Jacobites, as it did not sufficiently laud their historical favourites. ‘It is called Jacobite,’ wrote Walpole to Bentley, ‘but in my opinion it is only not George-abite. Where others abuse the Stuarts, he laughs at them. I am sure he does not spare their ministers.’

But it was still to the news sent from Rome that the Jacobites looked most eagerly for indications of what might be doing there, and the significance of it. Under date of January 3, 1756, the paragraph of news from Rome, the Eternal City, in the ‘Weekly Journal,’ informed all who were interested, that an Irish officer had arrived there with letters for the Chevalier de St. George, had received a large sum of money, on a bill of exchange, from Belloni, and had set out again with the answers to those letters. Again, on January 17th, the Chevalier’s friends in London were told that two foreigners had called on him with letters, but that he refused to receive either. ‘He refused to yield to their most earnest entreaties for an interview.’ ‘Read’ communicates a no less remarkable circumstance to the Jacobite coffee-houses. ‘Tho’ people have talked to him very much within the last two months of an expedition on Scotland or Ireland, he has declared that those kind of subjects are no longer agreeable to him, and that he should be better pleased to hear nothing said about them.’ Then came news of the Chevalier being sick, and the Pope, not only sending his own physician, but stopping his coach to enquire after the exile’s health. Occasionally, the paragraph of news is communicated by a ‘Papist,’ as, for instance, in an account of the reception into the Church of Rome of the young son of the Pasha of Scutari, where it is said that Cardinal York performed the ceremony of receiving the dusky convert, who had abandoned a splendid position ‘to come,’ says the writer, at Rome, ‘and embrace our holy religion.’

AT ROME.