How well do I remember the dreadful amazement and consternation which broke over this city when the news came that the Prince—I mean the Pretender—had utterly routed the King's troops commanded by Sir John Cope at Prestonpans; that the Misguided Young Man had entered Edinborough at the head of a furious mob of Highlandmen, whose preposterous style of dress I never could abide, and who in those days we Southrons held as being very little better than painted Savages; that the ladies of the Scottish capital had all mounted the white cockade, and were embroidering scarves for the Pretender and his officers, and that the Castle of Edinborough alone held out 'gainst this monstrous uprising to destroy authority! But how much greater was the Dismay in London when we learnt that the Rebels, not satisfied with their conquests in his Majesty's Scottish Dominions, had been so venturous as to invade England itself, and had actually advanced so far as the trading town of Derby! Then did those who had been long, albeit obscurely, suspected of Jacobitism, come forth from their lurking holes and corners, and almost openly avow their preference for the House of Stuart. Then did very many respectable persons, formerly thought to be excellently well affected towards King George's person and Government, become waverers, or prove themselves the Turncoats they had always, in secret, been, and seditiously prophesy that the days of the Hanoverian dynasty were numbered. Then did spies and traitors abound, together with numbers of alarming rumours, that the Chevalier had advanced as far as Barnet on the Great North Road; that his Majesty was about to convey himself away to Hanover; that the Duke of Cumberland was dead; that barrels of gunpowder had been discovered in the Crypt beneath Guildhall, and in the vaults of the Chapel Royal; that mutiny was rife among the troops; that the Bank of England was about to break, with sundry other distracting reports and noises.
Of course authority did all it could to reassure the public mind, tossed in a most tempestuous manner as it was by conflicting accounts. Authority bestirred itself to put down seditious meetings by proclamation, and to interdict residence in the capital to all known Papists; whereby several most estimable Catholic gentlemen (as many there be of that old Faith) were forced to leave their Town Houses, and betake themselves to mean and inconvenient dwellings in the country. The gates of Temple Bar were now shut, on sudden alarms, two or three times a week; as though the closing of these rotten portals could in any way impede the progress of rebellion, or do any thing more than further to hamper the already choked-up progress of the streets. The Lord Mayor was mighty busy calling out the Train-bands, and having them drilled in Moorfields, for the defence of the City; and a mighty fine show those citizen soldiers would have made no doubt to the bare-legged Highlandmen, had they come that way. The Guards at all the posts at the Court end of the town were doubled, and we at the Tower put ourselves into a perfect state of defence. Cannon were run out; matches kept lighted; whole battalions maintained under arms; munitions and provisions of war laid in, as though to withstand a regular siege; drawbridges pulled up and portcullises lowered, with great clanking of chains and gnashing of old iron teeth;—and rich sport it was to see those old rust-eaten engines once more brought into gear again.
But, as the Wise Man saith that a soft answer turneth away wrath, so do we often find that a merry word spoken in season will do more than all your Flaming Ordinances, and Terrific Denunciations of Fire and Sword. And although at this time (beginning of the year 1746) authority very properly exerted itself to procure obedience to the constitution, by instilling Awe into men's minds, and did breathe nothing in its official documents but heading, hanging, and quartering, with threats of bombardments, free quarters, drum-head courts-martial, chains, gags, fines, imprisonment, and sequestration,—yet I question whether so much good was done by these towards the stability of the cause of the Protestant Religion and King George, or so much harm to that of the Pretender, Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes, as by a little series of Pamphlets put forth by the witty Mr. Henry Fielding, a writer of plays and novels then much in vogue; but a sad loose fish, although he afterwards, as I am told, did good service to the State as one of the justices of peace for Middlesex, and helped to put down many notorious gangs of murderers, highwaymen, and footpads infesting the metropolis. This Mr. Fielding—whom his intimates used to call Harry, and whom I have often seen lounging in the Temple Gardens, or about the gaming-houses in St. James's Street, and whom I have often met, I grieve to say, in the very worst of company under the Piazzas in Covent Garden much overtaken in liquor, and his fine Lace clothes and curled periwig all besmirched and bewrayed after a carouse—took up the Hanoverian cause very hotly,—having perhaps weighty reasons for so doing—and, making the very best use of his natural gifts and natural weapons, namely, a very strong and caustic humour, with most keen and trenchant satire, did infinite harm to the Pretender's side by laughing at him and his adherents. He published, probably at the charges of authority,—for he was a needy gentleman, always in love, in liquor, or in debt,—a paper called the True Patriot, in which the Jacobites were most mercilessly treated. Notably do I recall a sort of sham diary or almanack, purporting to be written by an honest tradesman of the City during the predicted triumph of the Pretender, and in which such occurrences were noted down as London being at the mercy of Highlanders and Friars; Walbrook church and many others being razed to the ground; Father O'Blaze, a Dominican, exulting over it; Queen Anne's statue at Paul's taken away, and a large Crucifix erected in its place; the Bank, South-Sea, India Houses, &c. converted into convents; Father Macdagger, the Royal confessor, preaching at St. James's; three Anabaptists hung at Tyburn, attended by their ordinary, Mr. Machenly (a grotesque name for the ranting fellow who was wont to be known as Orator Henley); Father Poignardini, an Italian Jesuit, made Privy-Seal; four Heretics burnt in Smithfield; the French Ambassador made a Duke, with precedence; Cape Breton given back to the French, with Gibraltar and Port Mahon to the Spaniards; the Pope's nuncio entering London, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen kissing his feet; an office opened in Drury Lane for the sale of papistical Pardons and Indulgences; with the like prophecies calculated to arouse the bigotry of the lower and middle orders, and to lash them into a religious as well as a political frenzy. For a cry of "No Popery" has ever acted upon a true-born Englishman as a red rag does on a bull. Perhaps the thing that went best down of all Mr. Fielding's drolleries, and tickled the taste of the town most amazingly, was the passage where he made his honest London tradesman enter in his diary to this effect: "My little boy Jacky taken ill of the itch. He had been on the parade with his godfather the day before to see the Life Guards, and had just touched one of their plaids." One of the King's Ministers said long afterwards that this passage touching the itch was worth two regiments of horse to the cause of Government. At this distance of time one doesn't see much wit in a scurrilous lampoon, of which the gist was to taunt one's neighbours with being afflicted with a disease of the skin: and, indeed, the lower ranks of English were, in those days, anything but free from similar ailments, and, in London at least, were in their persons and manners inconceivably filthy. But 'tis astonishing what a mark you can make with a coarse jest, if you only go far enough, and forswear justice and decency.
Strange but true is it to remark that, in the midst of all such tremendous convulsions as wars, battles, sieges, rebellions, and other martial conflagrations, men and women and children do eat and drink, and love and marry, and beget other babes of humanity, and at last Die and turn to dust, precisely as though the world—or rather the concerns of that gross Orb—were all going on in their ordinary jog-trot manner. Although from day to day we people in London knew not whether before the sun set the dreaded pibroch of the Highland Clans might not be heard at Charing Cross, and the barbarian rout of Caterans that formed the Prince,—I mean the Chevalier,—I mean the Pretender's Army, scattered all about the City, plundering our Chattels, and ravaging our fair English homes; although, for aught men knew, another month, nay another week, might see King George the Second toppled from his Throne, and King James the Third installed, with his Royal Highness Charles Edward Prince of Wales as Regent; although it was but a toss-up whether the Archbishop of Canterbury should not be ousted from Lambeth by a Popish Prelate, and the whole country reduced to Slavery and Bankruptcy;—yet to those who lived quiet lives, and kept civil tongues in their heads, all things went on pretty much as usual: and each day had its evil, and sufficient for the day was the evil thereof. That the Highlandmen were at Derby did not prevent the Hostess of the Stone Kitchen—that famous Tavern in the Tower—from bringing in one's reckoning and insisting on payment. That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King meditating flight and the Royal Family in tears and swooning, did not save the little schoolboy a whipping if he knew not his lesson at morning call. It will be so, I suppose, until the end of the world. We must needs eat and drink, and feel heat and cold, and marry or be given in marriage, whatsoever party prevail, and whatsoever King carries crown and sceptre; and however dreadful the crisis, we must have our Dinners, and fleas will bite us, and corns pinch our Feet. So while all the Public were talking about the Rebellion, all the world went nevertheless to the Playhouses, where they played loyal Pieces and sang "God save great George our King" every night; as also to Balls, Ridottos, Clubs, Masquerades, Drums, Routs, Concerts, and Pharaoh parties. They read Novels and flirted their fans, and powdered and patched themselves, and distended their coats with hoops, just as though there were no such persons in the world as the Duke of Cumberland and Charles Edward Stuart. And in like manner we Warders in the Tower, though ready for any martial emergency that might turn up, were by no means unnecessarily afeard or distraught with anxiety; but ate and drank our fill, joked the pretty girls who came to see the shows in the Tower, and trailed our halberts in our usual jovial devil-me-care manner, as true Cavaliers, Warders in the service of his Majesty the King, should do.
By and by came the news of Stirling and Falkirk, after the disastrous retreat of the Highlandmen back into England. And then happened that short but tremendous fight of Drummossie Moor, commonly called the Battle of Culloden, where claymores and Lochaber axes clashed and glinted for the last time against English broadswords and bayonets. After this was what was called the pacification of the Highlands, meaning that the Duke and his dragoons devastated all before them with fire and sword; and then "retributive justice" had its turn, and the work of the Tower Warders began in earnest.
Poor creatures! theirs was a hard fate. At Carlisle, at Manchester, at Tyburn, and at Kennington Common, London, how many unhappy persons suffered death in its most frightful form, to say nothing of the unspeakable ignominy of being dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution, and mangled in the most horrible manner by the Hangman's butcherly knife, merely because they held that King James, and not King George, was the rightful sovereign of these realms! Is there in all History—at least insomuch as it touches our sentiments and feelings—a more lamentable and pathetic narration than the story of Jemmy Dawson? This young man, Mr. James Dawson by name,—for by the endearing aggravative of Jemmy he is only known in Mr. William Shenstone's charming ballad (the gentleman that lived at the Leasowes, and writ the Schoolmistress, among other pleasing pieces, and spent so much money upon Ornamental Gardening),—this Mr. James Dawson, I say, was the son of highly reputable parents, dwelling, by some, 'tis said, in the county of Lancashire, by others, in the county of Middlesex. At all events, his father was a Gentleman of good estate, who strove hard to bring up his son in the ways of piety and virtue. But the youth was wild and froward, and would not listen to the sage Counsels that were continually given him. After the ordinary grammar-school education, during which course he much angered his teachers,—less by his reckless and disobedient conduct than by his perverse flinging away of his opportunities, and manifest ignoring of the parts with which he had been gifted by Heaven,—he was sent to the University of Oxford to complete the curriculum of studies necessary to make him a complete gentleman. And I have heard, indeed, that he was singularly endowed with the properties requisite for the making of that very rare animal:—that he was quick, ready, generous, warm-hearted, skilful, and accomplished,—that he rode, and drove, and shot, and fenced, and swam, and fished in that marvellously finished manner only possible to those who seem to have been destined by a capricious Fate to do so well that which they have never learned to do. And at college, who but Jemmy Dawson—who but he? For a wicked prank, or a mad carouse; for a trick to be played on a proctor, or a kiss to be taken by stealth,—who such a Master of Arts as our young Undergraduate? But at his lectures and chapels and repetitions he was (although always with a vast natural capacity) an inveterate Idler; and he did besides so continually violate and outrage the college rules and discipline, that his Superiors, after repeated admonitions, gatings, impositions, and rustications (which are a kind of temporary banishment), were at last fain solemnly to expel him from the University. Upon which his father discarded him from his house, vowing that he would leave his broad acres (which were not entailed) to his Nephew, and bidding him go to the Devil; whither he accordingly proceeded, but by a very leisurely and circuitous route. But the young Rogue had already made a more perilous journey than this, for he had fallen in Love with a young Madam of exceeding Beauty, and of large Fortune in her own right, the daughter of a neighbouring Baronet. And she, to her sorrow, poor soul, became as desperately enamoured of this young Scapegrace, and would have run away with him, I have no doubt, had he asked her, but for a spark of honour which still remained in that reckless Heart, and forbade his linking the young girl, all good and pure as she was, to so desperate a life as his. And so he went wandering for a time up and down the country, swaggering with his boon companions, and pawning his Father's credit in whatsoever inns and pothouses he came unto, until, in the beginning of that fatal year '46, he must needs find himself at Manchester without a Shilling in his pocket, or the means of raising one. It was then the time that the town of Manchester had been captured, in the Pretender's interest, by a Scots Sergeant and a Wench; and the notorious Colonel Towneley was about raising the Manchester Regiment of Lancashire Lads to fight for Prince Charlie. Desperate Jemmy Dawson enlisted under Towneley; and soon, being a young fellow of good figure and shining talents, was made a Captain. But the ill-fated Manchester Regiment was ere long broken up; and Jemmy Dawson, with Colonel Towneley himself, and many other of the officers, were captured. They were all tried at the Assizes held after the Assizes at St. Margaret's Hill, Southwark; and James Dawson, being convicted of high treason, was sentenced to the usual horrible punishment for that offence. He was drawn on a hurdle to Kennington Common; he was hanged, disembowelled, and quartered; but the young Madam of whom I have spoken was true to him unto the last. For many days following the sentence she vainly solicited his pardon; but finding all useless, she on the fatal morning (having trimmed a shroud for him overnight, in which, poor Soul, his mangled remains were not to rest) followed him in a Mourning Coach to Kennington Common. She saw the Dreadful Tragedy played out to its very last Act; and then she just turned on her Side in the Coach, and with a soft Murmur, breathing Jemmy's Name, she Died. Surely a story so piteous as this needs no comment. And by Heaven it is True!