In December 1747, a new paper was started, called the ‘Jacobite’s Journal.’ It was eminently anti-Jacobite, and was adorned with a head-piece representing a shouting Highlander and his wife on a donkey, to whose tail is tied the shield and arms of France; and from whose mouth hangs a label ‘Daily Post;’ the animal is led by a monk with one finger significantly laid to the side of his nose. The journal joked savagely at the idea of the above-named Sergeant Smith, being compelled to listen to his own funeral sermon in the Savoy Chapel, and hoped there was no flattery in it. As to the gay rosettes of tartan ribbons which he wore, the journal was disgusted with such a display on the part of a traitor.
CARTE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
There remains to be noticed the appearance this year of the first volume of the Jacobite Carte’s History of England. It was received with a universal welcome which was soon exchanged for wrath on the part of the Hanoverians. Although Carte was a non-juring clergyman, had been in ’15 and again in ’22 ‘wanted’ by the Secretary of State, and had been secretary to Atterbury, he was permitted to live unmolested in England, after 1729, at the request, it is said, of Queen Caroline. Belonging to both Universities, the two antagonistic parties in politics were disposed to receive him on friendly terms. His ‘Life of James, Duke of Ormond,’ published in 1736, was such a well-merited success, that when Carte subsequently circulated his proposals for putting forth a general History of England, the proposal was received with the greatest favour. All parties recognised his ability. The Tories expected from him freedom of expression; the Whigs trusted in his discretion. In the collecting of materials, Carte was assisted by subscriptions from the two Universities, the Common Council, and several of the Civic Companies of London, and from other public bodies. These subscriptions are said to have amounted to 600l. a year. The sum was honestly laid out. Carte spared no pains nor expense, at home or abroad, in collecting materials. We may add that England still possesses the collections, including much of great interest, which Carte had not occasion to use. At length, in 1747, the first volume appeared. Almost immediately afterwards, the London Corporation and the City Companies withdrew their subscriptions. All public support from the Whigs fell away from the author. The Jacobite author offended the Hanoverians by unnecessarily thrusting in his Jacobitism. The offence which shocked the Hanoverian sensibilities was conveyed in a note which was, to say the least, indiscreet. Therein, speaking of the power, supposed to be reserved to kings, of curing ‘the evil,’ Carte betrayed his own belief in the right divine of the Stuart family, by ascribing to the Pretender the preternatural cure of one Lovel, at Avignon, in 1716, ‘by the touch of a descendant of a long line of kings.’ The consequences of this indiscretion, which London was the first to resent, materially crippled Carte’s means of proceeding; but he lived to see three volumes through the press, and to leave one more in manuscript, which brought the history down to the year 1654, and which was published in 1755, the year after that in which Carte died. Carte was dying when the loyal feelings of London were stirred with an emotion which spread to such Whig readers as were to be found in the country. HUME’S ‘HISTORY.’ The feeling was aroused by the publication of Hume’s ‘History of the Reigns of James the First and Charles the First,’ the first instalment of the general History of England which Hume wrote, so to speak, backwards. Such opposition was shown by the Hanoverians, to what was looked upon as a defence of the proscribed family, that Hume was disposed to give up his assumed office of a writer of English history. Fortunately, he thought better of it, and completed a great work which is as unjustly abused as Carte’s is undeservedly forgotten.
In this year, the first taste of the quality of Johnson’s political feelings is furnished by Boswell. At this period, Johnson was a thorough Jacobite.
JACOBITE JOHNSON.
The highest praise which he could give to Dr. Panting, the Master of Pembroke (Johnson’s College), was to call him ‘a fine Jacobite fellow.’ The worst he could say of the Gilbert Walmsley, of Lichfield, whom he loved and honoured, was that ‘he was a Whig, with all the virulence and malevolence of his party.’ Boswell’s father pelted Johnson with the term which Johnson applied to Panting, as one of laudation, and spoke of him contemptuously as ‘that Jacobite fellow.’
The truth is, that if Johnson felt the principle of allegiance due to the Stuarts, he felt no love for the system which prevailed where the Stuarts found their best friends: ‘A Highland Chief, Sir, has no more the soul of a chief, than an attorney who has twenty houses in a street, and considers how much he can make by them.’ Johnson had but scant eulogy for a convert from Whiggery. To join the Tories was to ‘keep better company.’ In an honest Whig, the learned Jacobite had no belief; ‘Pulteney,’ he remarked, ‘was as paltry a fellow as could be. He was a Whig who pretended to be honest, and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out.’ It would be difficult to say whether Cibber or George II. was the more hateful object to Johnson. He gibbeted both in the epigram he took care not to publish:—
Augustus still survives in Maro’s strain,
And Spenser’s verse prolongs Eliza’s reign;
Great George’s acts let tuneful Cibber sing;