And there was something a-foot which might culminate in restoring that old personal application. London suddenly heard that Charles Edward had quite as suddenly disappeared from Florence. ‘I am sorry,’ Walpole wrote to our minister at Florence, in September, ‘that so watchful a cat should let its mouse slip at last, without knowing into what hole it is run.’ Walpole conjectured Spain, on his way to Ireland, with Spanish help. But the prince was bent on other things, and not on invasion and conquest by force of arms. Charles Edward had once declared (London gossip at least gave him the credit of the declaration) that he would never marry, in order that England might not be trammeled by new complications. When he did marry, the London papers made less ado about it than if the son of an alderman had married ‘an agreeable and pretty young lady with a considerable fortune.’ This single paragraph told the Londoners of the princely match: ‘April 1st, 1772. The Pretender was married the 28th of last month at St. Germain, in France, by proxy, to a Princess of Stolberg, who set off immediately to Italy to meet him.’
WALPOLE, ON THE MARRIAGE.
Walpole reflects, but exaggerates, the opinions of London fashionable society, on the marriage of Charles Edward. He knows little about the bride. ‘The new Pretendress is said to be but sixteen, and a Lutheran. I doubt the latter. If the former is true, I suppose they mean to carry on the breed in the way it began—by a spurious child. A Fitz-Pretender is an excellent continuation of the patriarchal line.’ At that time the Royal Marriage Bill, which prohibited the princes and princesses of the Royal Family from marrying without the consent of the Sovereign, or, in certain cases, of Parliament, was being much discussed. ‘Thereupon,’ Mr. Chute says, ‘when the Royal Family are prevented from marrying, it is a right time for the Stuarts to marry. This event seems to explain the Pretender’s disappearance last autumn; and though they sent him back from Paris, they may not dislike the propagation of thorns in our side.’
In a subsequent letter, Walpole continues the subject. ‘I do not believe,’ he says, ‘that she is a Protestant, though I have heard from one who should know, General Redmond, an Irish officer in the French service, that the Pretender himself abjured the Roman Catholic religion at Liége, a few years ago, and that, on that account, the Irish Catholics no longer make him remittances. This would be some, and the only apology, but fear, for the Pope’s refusing him the title of king. What say you to this Protestantism? At Paris they call his income twenty-five thousand pound sterling a year. His bride has nothing but many quarters. The Cardinal of York’s answer last year to the question of whither his brother was gone? is now explained. “You told me,” he replied, “whither he should have gone a year sooner.”’
THE LAST HEADS ON TEMPLE BAR.
The London papers of the 1st of April contained other information not uninteresting to Jacobites. It was in this form:—‘Yesterday, one of the rebel heads on Temple Bar fell down. There is only one head now remaining.’ The remaining head fell shortly after. They were popularly said to be those of Towneley and Fletcher; and, as before noticed, there is a legend that Towneley’s head is still preserved in London. The late Mr. Timbs, in his ‘London and Westminster,’ gives this account of ‘the rebel heads’ and their farewell to the Bar:—‘Mrs. Black, the wife of the editor of the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ when asked if she remembered any heads on Temple Bar, used to reply in her brusque, hearty way: “Boys, I recollect the scene well. I have seen on that Temple Bar, about which you ask, two human heads—real heads—traitors’ heads—spiked on iron poles. There were two. I saw one fall (March 31st, 1772). Women shrieked as it fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One woman near me fainted. Yes, boys, I recollect seeing human heads on Temple Bar.”’ The spikes were not removed till early in the present century.
DALRYMPLE’S ‘MEMOIRS.’
At this period merit in literature was allowed or denied, according to the writer’s politics. In 1773 Sir John Dalrymple published the famous second volume of his ‘Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, from the dissolution of the last Parliament until the Sea-Battle of La Hogue.’ The first volume had appeared two years previously. The third and concluding volume was not published till 1788. The second volume was famous for its exposure of Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney as recipients of money from Louis XIV.; money not personally applied, but used, or supposed to be used, for the purpose of establishing a republic. Walpole was furious at a book which, while it treated both sides, generally, with little tenderness, absolved the last two Stuart kings from blame, and spoke of William with particular severity. Walpole says of Sir John: ‘He had been a hearty Jacobite; pretended to be converted; then paid his court when he found his old principles were no longer a disrecommendation at court. The great object of his work was to depreciate and calumniate all the friends of the Revolution.... The famous second volume was a direct charge of bribery from France, on the venerable hero, Algernon Sidney, pretended to be drawn from Barillon’s papers at Versailles, a source shut up to others, and actually opened to Sir John, by the intercession of even George III.—a charge I would not make but on the best authority. Lord Nuneham, son of Lord Harcourt, then ambassador in Paris, told me his father obtained licence for Sir John to search those archives—amazing proof of all I have said on the designs of this reign; what must they be when George III. encourages a Jacobite wretch to hunt in France for materials for blackening the heroes who withstood the enemies of Protestants and Liberty?... Men saw the Court could have no meaning but to sap all virtuous principles and to level the best men to the worst,—a plot more base and destructive than any harboured by the Stuarts.... Who could trust to evidence either furnished from Versailles or coined as if it came from thence? And who could trust to Sir John, who was accused, I know not how truly, of having attempted to get his own father hanged, and who had been turned out of a place, by Lord Rockingham, for having accepted a bribe?’
WALPOLE’S ANTI-JACOBITISM.
The above, from Walpole’s ‘Last Journals,’ is a curious burst of Anti-Jacobitism, on the part of a man who gave Sir John Dalrymple a letter of introduction to the French Minister, de Choiseul! Sir John in his preface names ‘Mr. Stanley, Lord Harcourt, and Mr. Walpole,’ as furnishing him with such introductions. All that the king did was to allow access to William III.’s private chest, at Kensington, and the ‘ex-Jacobite wretch’ to make what he could out of the contents. Walpole never forgave him. In 1774, when a Bill, to relieve booksellers who had bought property in copies, was before the Commons, ‘the impudent Sir John Dalrymple,’ as Walpole calls him, ‘pleaded at the bar of the House against the booksellers, who had paid him 2000l. for his book in support of the Stuarts. This was the wretch,’ cries Walpole, ‘who had traduced Virtue and Algernon Sidney!’