ANTI-ULTRAMONTANISM.
Walpole spared Lord Mansfield, the brother of Murray of Broughton (and almost as much of a Jacobite), as little as he did Dalrymple. In June, this year, there was a hotly-sustained battle in the Commons over the Quebec Bill. The Bill was denounced as an attempt to involve Protestants under a Roman Catholic jurisdiction. The Court was accused of preparing a Popish army to keep down the American colonies. Walpole charged Lord Mansfield with being the author of the Bill, and with disavowing the authorship. On the 9th of June, Lord North proposed to adjourn the debate till the 11th, as on the intervening day Lord Stanley was to give a grand entertainment at the Oaks, near Epsom, in honour of his intended bride, Lady Betty Hamilton. The opposition in the House did not let slip the palpable opportunity. They severely ridiculed the minister, and Tom Townshend told him,—the Pretender’s birthday, the 10th of June, was a proper festival for finishing a Bill of so Stuart-like a complexion! Camden said, in the Lords, that the king, by favouring such a measure, would commit a breach of his coronation oath. Walpole has recorded, in his ‘Last Journals,’ that the sovereign who was wearing the crown of England, to the prejudice of the Stuart family, was doing by the authority of a free parliament what James II. was expelled for doing. The City told the king, in a petition not to pass the Bill, that he had no right to the crown but as a protector of the Protestant religion. Walpole remarked, ‘The King has a Scotch Chief Justice, abler than Laud, though not so intrepid as Lord Strafford. Laud and Strafford lost their heads,—Lord Mansfield would not lose his, for he would die of fear, if he were in danger, of which, unfortunately, there is no prospect.’ The Bill was carried in both Houses. On the 22nd of June, the king went down to the Lords to pass the Bill, and prorogue the Parliament. The crowded streets wore quite the air of old Jacobite times. The feeling of dread and hatred, not against English Catholics, but against that form of Popery called Ultramontanism, which would, if it could, dash out the brains of Protestantism, and overthrow kings and thrones ‘ad majorem Dei gloriam,’ found bitter expression on that day. ‘His Majesty,’ according to the journals, ‘was much insulted on his way to the House of Peers yesterday. The cry of No Popery! was re-echoed from every quarter, and the noisy expressions of displeasure were greater than his Majesty ever yet heard.’ On the other hand, the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, rose suddenly into favour. He voted against the Bill. With reference to that step, the ‘Public Advertiser’ chronicled the following lines: ‘’Tis said that a great personage has taken an additional disgust at another great personage dividing with the minority on Friday last. This is the second heinous offence the latter has been guilty of; the first, committing matrimony; and now, professing himself a Protestant.’ Walpole thought it was judicious in him to let it be seen that at least one Prince of the House of Hanover had the Protestant cause at heart, and the preservation of the ‘happy establishment.’
‘THE HAPPY ESTABLISHMENT.’
As the study of the times is pursued, the student is no sooner disposed to believe that Jacobitism has ultimately evaporated, than he comes upon some remarkable proof to the contrary. The following is one of such proofs.
GARRICK’S MACBETH.
In the year 1775, some friend of the drama remonstrated with Garrick on the absurdity of the costume in which he and other actors of Macbeth played the hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The actor of the Thane generally dressed the character in a modern military uniform. As an improvement, it was suggested that a tartan dress was the proper costume to wear. Of course the real Macbeth was never seen in such a dress; but Garrick was not troubled at that. He objected for another reason. ‘It is only thirty years ago,’ he said, ‘that the Pretender was in England. Party spirit runs so high that if I were to put on tartan, I should be hissed off the stage, and perhaps the house would be pulled down!’ It should be remembered that when Macklin changed his Macbeth costume from that of an English general to a plaid coat and trousers, Quin said that Macklin had turned Macbeth into an old Scotch piper.
The party spirit to which Garrick alluded seems to have revived in the person of Dr. Johnson, whose principles led him still to sympathise with the Jacobite cause.
