In justice, Blood for Blood demands.
At the same time a print was selling which represented ‘Temple Bar, the City Golgotha,’ with three heads on the spikes,—allegorical devils, rebel flags, &c.,—and more ‘blood for blood’ doggrel intimating that the naughty sons of Britain might there see ‘what is rebellion’s due.’
FRENCH IDEA.
The idea of altogether sacrificing Charles Edward was as distasteful to his numberless friends in France, as it was to the English Jacobites. One of the most singular of the French suggestions for a definite arrangement was made to this effect, in some of the French papers, namely:—that George II. should withdraw to his electorate of Hanover, taking his eldest son and heir with him; renouncing the English crown for himself and successors, of the elder line, for ever;—that the Chevalier de St. George should remain as he was;—that the Prince Charles Edward should be made King of Scotland and Ireland;—and that the Duke of Cumberland should, as King of England, reign in London. It was a thoroughly French idea,—making a partition of the United Kingdom, and establishing the duke in the metropolis to reign over a powerless fragment of it,—a Roi de Cocagne! Both political parties laughed at it in their several houses of entertainment.
The Prince of Wales, himself, was something of a Jacobite; but he was a Jacobite for no other reason, probably, than because his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, had crushed the Jacobite cause. It is due to the Prince, however, to notice that he once solemnly expressed his sympathy when the Princess, his wife, had just mentioned, ‘with some appearance of censure,’ the conduct of Lady Margaret Macdonald, who harboured and concealed Prince Charles when, in the extremity of peril, he threw himself on her protection. ‘And would not you, Madam,’ enquired Prince Frederick, ‘have done the same, in the same circumstances? I am sure,—I hope in God,—you would.’ Hogg relates this incident in the introduction to his ‘Jacobite Relics,’ and it does honour to the prince, himself,—who used at least to profess fraternal affection, if not political sympathy, by standing at an open window at St. James’s overlooking the Park, with his arm round the Duke of Cumberland’s neck.
A LONDON ELECTOR’S WIT.
Frederick, however, was not a jot more acceptable to the Jacobites, because he was on bad terms with the king, and that he refrained from paying any other compliment than the above-named one to the Duke of Cumberland, on his victory at Culloden. The prince invariably came off, more or less hurt, whenever he engaged personally in politics. When his sedan-chair maker refused to vote for the prince’s friend, Lord Trentham, a messenger from his royal highness’s household looked in upon the elector, and bluntly said, ‘I am going to bid another person make his royal highness a chair!’ ‘With all my heart!’ replied the chair maker, ‘I don’t care what they make him, so they don’t make him a throne!’ Again, on that day which all Tories kept as an anniversary of crime and sorrow, the 30th of January,—‘the martyrdom of King Charles,’ the prince entered a room where his sister Amelia was being tended by her waiting woman, Miss Russell, who was a great grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell. Frederick said to this lady, sportively, ‘Shame, Miss Russell, why have you not been to Church, humbling yourself, for the sins on this day committed by your ancestors?’ To which she replied, ‘Sir: I am a descendant of the great Oliver Cromwell. It is humiliation sufficient to be employed, as I am, in pinning up your sister’s tail!’
TRIAL OF LOVAT.
During the early months of 1747, the Londoners waited with impatience for the trial of Lord Lovat. The old rebel had exhausted every means of delay. The time of trial came at last. On the 9th of March, Lovat was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall. An immense crowd lined the whole way, and the people were the reverse of sympathetic. One woman looked into his coach, and said: ‘You ugly old dog, don’t you think you will have that frightful head cut off?’ He replied, ‘You ugly old ——, I believe I shall!’ Lovat was carried through the hall in a sedan-chair, and to a private room, in men’s arms. Mr. Thomas Harris, writing of the trial next day, from Lincoln’s Inn, says:—‘It was the largest and finest assembly I ever saw: the House of Commons on one side; ladies of quality on the other, and inferior spectators without number, at both ends.’—After much pantomimic ceremony on the part of officials, Lovat, having been brought in, knelt (as he is described to have done on each of the nine days of the trial). On each occasion Lord Hardwicke solemnly said to him, ‘My Lord Lovat, your Lordship may rise.’ On the opening day, the prosecuting managers of the impeachment sent up by the Commons, ‘went at him,’ at dreary, merciless, length. After them, the prosecuting counsel opened savagely upon him, especially Murray, the Solicitor-General, whose chief witness was his own Jacobite brother, and who was himself suspected of having drunk the Pretender’s health on his knees. Lovat lost no opportunity of saving his life. SCENE IN WESTMINSTER HALL. He pitifully alluded to his having to rise by 4 o’clock, in order to be at Westminster by 9. He spoke of his frequent fainting fits; he often asked leave to retire, and, in short, he so exasperated the Lord High Steward as to make that official grow peevish, and to wrathfully advise Lord Lovat to keep his temper. When the Attorney-General called his first witness, Chevis of Murtoun, the lawyer described him, with solemn facetiousness, as being as near a neighbour as man could be to Lovat, but as far apart from him as was possible in thought and action. Lovat protested against the legal competency of the witness, he being Lovat’s tenant and vassal. Hours were spent over this objection, and the old lord wearied the clerk, whom he called upon to read ancient Acts of Parliament, from beginning to end. The protest was disallowed; and the witness having been asked if he owed Lovat money, and if a verdict of guilty might help him not to pay it, emphatically declared that he owed Lovat nothing. He then went into a long array of evidence, sufficient to have beheaded Lovat many times over, as a traitor to the reigning family, and indeed no faithful servant of the family desiring to reign. The traitor himself laughed when this witness quoted a ballad in English, which Lovat had composed, ‘in Erse’:—
When young Charley does come over,