No plant with brighter lustre grows,
Except the laurel on his brows.
FLATTERY.
Poetasters converted Horace’s laudation of Augustus into flattery of Cumberland. Fables were written in which sweet William served at once for subject and for moral. Epigrams from Martial, or from a worse source—the writers’ own brains—were fresh but bluntly pointed in his favour. Some of them compared him to the sun, at whose warmth ‘vermin cast off their coats and took wing.’ Others raised him far above great Julius; for Cumberland ‘conquers, coming; and before he sees.’ Sappho, under the name of Clarinda, told the world, on hearing a report of the duke’s illness, that if Heaven took him, it would be the death of her, and that the world would lose a Hero and a Maid together. Heroic writers, trying Homer’s strain, and not finding themselves equal to it, blamed poor Homer, and declared that the strings of his lyre were too weak to bear the strain of the modern warrior’s praise. Occasional prologues hailed him as ‘the martial boy,’ on the day he entered his twenty-sixth year. Pinchbeck struck a medal in his honour; punsters in coffee-houses rang the changes on metal and mettle, and Pinchbeck became almost as famous for the medal as he subsequently became for his invention of new candle-snuffers, when the poets besought him to ‘snuff the candle of the state, which burned a little blue.’ In fine, ballads, essays, apologues, prose and poetry, were exhausted in furnishing homage to the hero. The homage culminated when the duke’s portrait appeared in all the shops, bearing the inscription, ‘Ecce Homo!’
CHAPTER VIII.
(1746.)
n contrast with the triumph and the deification came the torture and the slaughter of the victims. The trials of the prisoners taken at Carlisle and in Scotland next monopolised the public mind. When the precept was issued by the judges, to the High Sheriff of Surrey, to summon a jury for the trial of the prisoners, at the Court House, in Southwark, a very equivocal compliment was paid to Richmond. The grand jury were selected from among the inhabitants of Addiscombe, Bermondsey, Camberwell, Clapham, Croydon, Kennington, Lambeth, Putney, Rotherhithe, Southwark,—but not from Richmond, or its immediate neighbourhood. The inhabitants of that courtly locality were spared. They were supposed to be thoroughly Hanoverian, and therefore to a certain degree biassed! The trials of those called ‘the Manchester officers’ divided the attention of London with those of the Jacobite peers. The former were brought to the Court House, St. Margaret’s Hill, Southwark, on July 3rd, for arraignment. The judges in commission were Chief Justice Lee, Justices Wright, Dennison, Foster, and Abney; Barons Clive and Reynolds, with two magistrates, Sir Thomas De Viel and Peter Theobald, Esqs. Eighteen prisoners were brought to the Court through an excited and insulting mob. Of these eighteen, five pleaded ‘guilty.’ The trials of the remaining thirteen were deferred to the 13th July. Of these, one was acquitted. COLONEL TOWNELEY. The first prisoner placed at the bar was Francis Towneley, Colonel of the Manchester regiment, and nephew of the Towneley who had such a narrow escape of the gallows for his share in the earlier outbreak. The trials so nearly resembled each other, that to narrate a few will afford a sample of the whole. The Attorney-General (Ryder), the Solicitor-General (Murray), Sir John Strange, Sir Richard Lloyd, and the Hon. Mr. Yorke were the prosecuting counsel. Towneley was defended by Sergeant Wynne and Mr. Clayton. The addresses of the king’s counsel altogether would make but a short speech, in the present day. One briefly explained the charge; and the others, among them, expressed their horror at the rebel idea of overturning so glorious a throne and so gracious a king. They laughed at the motto on the rebel flag: Liberty, Property, and King. Liberty was interpreted as meaning slavery; property meant plunder; and king, an usurper who was to sit in the place of a murdered and rightful monarch. Seven witnesses deposed against Towneley. The first two were ‘rebels’ who, to save their necks, turned traitors. The first, Macdonald, swore to his having seen Towneley acting as colonel of the Manchester regiment with a white cockade in his hat, a Highland dress, a plaid sash, sword and pistols. The cross-examination was as brief as that in chief. Out of it came that Macdonald expected his pardon for his testimony; that he was only a servant; was brought by sea and came ashore from the Thames in a destitute condition, and had nothing to subsist on.