CARTE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Carte, the biographer of Ormond, and the ex-secretary of Atterbury, was a man who had twice fled abroad when accounted a rebel, and who was allowed to return when he was thought to be harmless. He, this year, issued a prospectus of his intended History of England. The London municipality met the overture in a liberal spirit which did it honour, but which brought upon it the bitterest sarcasm of Horace Walpole. ‘I wish to God,’ he wrote in his anger to Mann, from Arlington Street, in July, 1744, ‘I wish to God Boccalini was living! Never was such an opportunity for Apollo’s playing off a set of fools as there is now! The good City of London, who, from long dictating to the Government, are now come to preside over taste and letters, having given one Carte, a Jacobite parson, fifty pounds a year, for seven years, to write the History of England; and four aldermen and six common-councilmen are to inspect his materials and the progress of the work. Surveyors of common-sewers turned supervisors of literature! To be sure, they think a History of England is no more than Stowe’s survey of the parishes! Instead of having books printed with the imprimatur of an university, they will be printed, as churches are whitewashed, John Smith and Thomas Johnson, Churchwardens!’ Such was the light spirit with which the fine gentleman of Strawberry visited the first step taken by the London Corporation, in imitation of the ancient foreign guilds, to do honour to literature and literary men. In Carte’s case, politics were not considered. The Jacobite had given proof of his ability, and the Whigs trusted to his honesty. If his discretion had been equal to both, his History would have been more acceptable to the City companies. This Nonjuror died in 1754.
VARIOUS INCIDENTS.
Walpole had looked for a landing of the French and the Pretender, in Essex or Suffolk. He thought the English crown would be fought for, not on the seas but on land, and he declared that he never knew how little he was a Jacobite till it was almost his interest to be one. The interest changed as London was secured and our preparations were more successfully made than those of France. In March, he was sure, ‘if they still attempt the invasion, there will be a bloody war.’ The spirit of the nation was sound. As troops marched towards London, they were fed and cherished on the way as the defenders of England from Popery and the French. The London merchants were equally spirited. The name of the French was injurious to the Chevalier’s cause; and the fear of Popery was not abolished by the assurances of the Jacobites that the young Chevalier was a Lutheran. One of the curious features of the time was connected with the Swiss servants in London, who formed themselves into a volunteer regiment, and placed themselves at the disposal of the Government. The warlike appearances subsided a little when tempests broke up the naval preparations at Dunkirk, and drove the Brest squadron from the Channel. The Jacobite interest, however, was maintained in some of the counties. Walpole, in allusion to the changes in the Ministry at the end of the year (when Carteret and Lord Granville withdrew), says that several Tories refused to accept proffered posts from an impossibility of being re-chosen for their Jacobite counties. One at least may be excepted. Sir John Cotton was forced upon the king as Treasurer of the Chambers. The king was naturally displeased that an adherent of the Stuarts should be thrust into an office in the royal household at St. James’s. The matter was illustrated by a caricature, in which the Falstaffian Sir John was being thrust down his majesty’s throat by the united endeavours of the Ministry—the ‘Broad-bottom,’—a coalition of men of opposite parties, which therefore gave a tameness to most of the debates.
LADY NITHSDALE.
In the spring of this year died, in Rome, the only contemptible Jacobite peer who had been condemned to death; and he had had the good luck to escape,—the Earl of Nithsdale. He was taken into the Chevalier’s service, but for more than a quarter of a century, he looked to his heroic wife for money; and was neither satisfied nor grateful. He was unreasonably querulous, never had brains enough to be conscious of what his wife had risked and had done for him; was mean and untruthful; ever and utterly unworthy of this brave, noble, and true-hearted woman. Even after her husband’s death she saved his honour by paying his debts, as she had before saved his life. When she too passed away, in 1749, there could not have been a Jacobite who read the record of her death in the London papers, nor any man, however he might have hated the Stuarts and their church, but would have acknowledged that no truer martyr ever died at Rome than this angelic daughter of the house of Herbert.
