THE STATUE IN LEICESTER SQUARE.
In 1742, the Prince of Wales had promised the mob greeting him on his birthday, with roaring cheers, from the front of Leicester House, that he would put up a statue of his father in the centre of the square. Since that promise was made and forgotten, the famous ducal mansion of the Duke of Chandos had been knocked to pieces by the auctioneer’s hammer. On the princess’s birthday, 19th November, 1748, there was again a mob in front of the prince’s ‘palace’ in Leicester Square, not only to congratulate him, but to witness the uncovering of an equestrian statue of George I. This statue was one of the many which had adorned the duke’s house, Canons, near Edgeware. Nobody seems to know now at whose cost it was purchased and put up. It is suggested that the prince, or his semi-Jacobite friends, bought it, with the thought that, irritated as George II. might be by having a statue erected to him by his son, he would be still more irate at having one erected of his father. The fact is that the statue was bought and set up by subscriptions of the inhabitants of the square. The unveiling of the ‘Golden Horse and Man’ was witnessed by a brilliant company at the windows of Leicester House, among whom was the Duke of Chandos himself, Groom of the Stole to the Prince. Hogarth and other celebrities, doubtless, looked on, from other windows of houses in the square. This was the statue which in later days so ignominiously perished; which dropt its arms, lost its limbs, fell from its horse; and which ultimately was swept away, horse and rider, in 1874, under a storm of sarcasm and contempt.
AN ECCENTRIC JACOBITE.
From this record of London in the Jacobite times must not be omitted the death of a most remarkable Jacobite, of whom little is remembered. This was Mr. John Painter, of St. John’s, Oxford. This Jacobite scholar made three several attempts, by letter, to induce the Government to allow him to be beheaded in place of Lord Lovat! Mr. Painter asked it as a particular favour. The ministers were not amiable enough to grant his prayer, and he was never happy afterwards. Just previous to his death, he forbade his executors to bury him near any of his relations. He urged them to obtain permission for his corpse to hang in chains over the spot where Lovat’s head was struck off. On being questioned as to his reasons, he replied vaguely, that he had not been guilty of any baseness, but he had committed a fatal error in judgment which had led to Lovat’s destruction. He did not define it; he left complimentary farewells to Lord Chesterfield and Mr. Pelham, and an expression of pity for Lovat’s son. ‘That unfortunate gentleman,’ said Painter, ‘suffers not only through his father’s folly, but through mine.’
GLOOMY REPORTS.
As the year drew to an end, adverse parties quarrelled over the terms of the peace of Aix la Chapelle; but this matter was forgotten in the news which reached London that the young Chevalier had been literally seized ‘neck and heels’ at the Paris Opera house, and deposited at Vincennes, as a preliminary to turning him out of France. About the same time his conqueror, the Duke of Cumberland, quietly returned to London from the continent. He came post from the coast to Lambeth, where he took a boat from which he landed at Whitehall; and thence he quietly walked across the park, to St. James’s. He was warmly greeted on his way, especially by that part of the garrison from Carlisle which had reached the metropolis before their fellows.
Rumours of fresh outbreaks by the Jacobites had been freely circulated in London from the moment of the suppression of the last. The sight of the Duke of Newcastle, entering Leicester House, one November day, gave rise to a report with which London was speedily busied. ‘It was owing,’ writes the Countess of Shaftesbury, in the ‘Malmesbury Correspondence,’ ‘to a message from the Prince of Wales, that he had something of importance to communicate; and he accordingly laid before him the intelligence he had received of a new rebellion forming, and almost ready to break out in the Highlands. The Duke assured His Royal Highness that his Majesty would take very kindly this information, which he observed to concur exactly with the accounts sent to the Government above a month ago. I heartily wish this may produce a union between the King and people which, sure, can never be more necessary than at this crisis, when new dangers threaten us from the untamable bigotry of the Scotch Jacobites, encouraged, perhaps, by the insolence of their friends in many parts of England.’
THE HAYMARKET THEATRE.
‘The great Duke’ seems to have been among the very simple people who, in February, 1749, were drawn to the Haymarket Theatre by the promise of ‘the Bottle Conjuror,’ to jump into a quart bottle in presence of the audience. When the matter proved to be a hoax, and the audience were further insulted by a loud announcement from behind the curtain that, if they would sit quiet till the following night, the conjuror would jump into a pint bottle, a riot ensued in which the interior of the house was absolutely destroyed. In the confusion, the duke was seen looking for his sword; and it is said that an audacious Jacobite called out, ‘Billy the Butcher has lost his knife!’ The alleged loss was certainly made known by a satirical Jacobite, in the following advertisement:—‘Lost on Monday night, at the Little Play House in the Haymarket, a Sword, with a gold Hilt and a cutting Blade, with a crimson and gold Sword-knot tied round the Hilt. Whoever brings it to Mrs. Chenevix’s Toy-shop, over-against Great Suffolk Street, near Chearing Cross, shall receive thirty Guineas reward, and no Questions asked.’ This advertisement, with its reference to the Court toy-woman, offered fair opportunity for further Jacobite wit or venom to show itself; and the demonstration was made in the following manner:—‘Found entangled in the Slit of a Lady’s Smock Petticoat, a gold-hilted Sword of martial length and temper, nothing the worse for wear;—with the Spey curiously wrought on one side of the blade, and the Scheldt on the other;—supposed to have been stolen from the plump side of a great General, in his precipitate retreat from the Battle of Bottle Noodles, at Station Foote. Enquire at the Quart Bottle and Musical Cave, Potter’s Row.’
TREASONABLE PAMPHLETS.