Well for themselves, and well employ’d their pain,
Could they secure him,—not to rise again!
The printsellers reaped a harvest by selling the Bishop’s portrait. The most popular was sold by Cholmondely in Holborn, but he was had up before the Secretary of State, and was terrified by that official into suppressing the sale.
AT SCARBOROUGH.
All London, that is, what Chesterfield called ‘the Quality,’ went seaward in August. The cream of them settled on the Scarborough sands. ‘Bathing in the sea,’ says Chesterfield, ‘is become the general practice of both sexes.’ He gives an amusing account of how ‘the Quality’ from London looked, at Scarborough, and he jokes, in his peculiar fashion, upon plots, Jacobites, and ministers. He writes to the Countess of Suffolk: ‘The ladies here are innumerable, and I really believe they all come for their healths, for they look very ill. The men of pleasure are Lord Carmichael, Colonel Ligonier, and the celebrated Tom Paget, who attend upon the Duke of Argyle all day, and dance with the pretty ladies at night. Here are, besides, hundreds of Yorkshire beaux, who play the inferior parts and, as it were, only tumble, while those three dance upon the high ropes of gallantry. The grave people are mostly malignants or, in ministerial language, “notorious Jacobites,” such as Lord Stair, Marchmont, Anglesea, and myself, not to mention many of the House of Commons of equal disaffection. Moreover, Pulteney and Lord Cartaret are expected here soon; so that if the Ministry do not make a plot of this meeting, it is plain they do not want one for this year.’
NOTORIOUS JACOBITES.
Chesterfield was branded as a ‘notorious Jacobite,’ because he had opposed Walpole’s famous Excise Bill, this year. As a consequence, he was deprived of his staff of office as Lord Steward of the Household. While Chesterfield was writing so airily to Lady Suffolk, the king was laying out 3,000l. in repairing the Palace of Holyrood. A dozen years later, when ‘news frae Moidart’ reached the London Jacobites, they laughed at the idea of the ‘Duke of Brunswick’ having made Holyrood suitable for the reception of Charles Edward, Prince of Wales.
In the meantime a voice here and there from the metropolitan pulpits ventured to hope the king would be kept by divine guidance, in a safe groove. The future hero of Culloden was taking lessons in philosophy from Whiston, and in mathematics from Hawksbee; and, at a funeral more public than Atterbury’s, the Jacobites assembled in Poland Street, to pay a last mark of respect to the ‘Earl of Derwentwater,’ the patient whom great Cheselden could not save, and whose
THE EARL OF DERWENTWATER.
corpse was carried to Brussels to be deposited by the side of that of his mother, Anne Webb. The so-called ‘Earl’ John, son of the attainted and beheaded peer, as a sick man, was left unmolested, though he called himself by a title unrecognised by the Government.