But who Pretender is, or who is King,
God bless us all—that’s quite another thing.
The period was one of great political excitement. The men of Manchester, who a century previously had barricaded their town and defied the soldiers of Charles the First, became jubilant on the restoration of monarchy in the person of his son, and, to prove their loyalty, caused the conduit in the market place to flow with claret and the gutters to swell with strong beer; their sons were noted for their Jacobite proclivities, and nowhere did the young Pretender receive a heartier welcome than in the old Puritan town where, as has been said by a popular writer (Dr. Halley), “the orange plumes seemed to have grown pale and faded into white feathers before the bright colours of the Stuart tartan.” The barbarous severities with which the rebellion of 1715 was crushed had only served to perpetuate and increase the feeling of bitterness against the Whig Government, and this feeling was intensified by the religious feuds that sprang up in the town. The Tories and High Churchmen, though they had taken the oath to King George and desired to maintain the Protestant succession, were for the most part Jacobites, while the Low Churchmen and Nonconformists were staunch partisans of the house of Brunswick—the one proclaimed the divine right of kings, and the other was equally zealous in upholding the “Glorious Revolution.”
Byrom’s intimate friend, Dr. Deacon, a nonjuring minister, who had incurred the suspicions of the Government through his supposed connection with the former rebellion, and on that account had removed to Manchester, where he combined the profession of theology with the practice of physic, assembled a congregation of nonjurors at his house in Fennel Street, adjoining the present “Dog and Partridge”—the “Schism Shop,” as it was irreverently called—while Joseph Owen, a fierce Presbyterian polemic, declaimed with angry invective against the clergy of the “Old Church” for their alleged sympathy with the nonjuring divine. The quarrel became fiercer than ever, and the coarse sermons of Owen were answered by the satire and clever epigrams of Byrom:—
Leave to the low-bred Owens of the age
Sense to belye and loyalty to rage,
Wit to make treason of each cry and chat,
And eyes to see false worship in a hat.
Meetings of the rival factions were regularly held at the different taverns in the town, the “Angel” in Market Street Lane being the head-quarters of the Whigs, and the “Bull’s Head,” opposite Phœbe Byrom’s in the Market Place, the resort of those disaffected to the reigning family; “John Shaw’s,” too, a “public” in the Old Shambles, kept by a veteran trooper, who in his campaigns abroad had acquired the art of brewing punch of unrivalled quality, and who was as famed for the discipline and the autocratic rule he maintained as for the excellence of the beverage he brewed, received under its hospitable roof the more thorough-going Church and King men and supporters of the Stuart cause.[45] Byrom was a frequent attender at the convivial gatherings at “John Shaw’s,” and the only portrait of him in the later years of his life that has been preserved, was one taken by stealth by his friend Dorning Rasbotham, “after spending an evening at Shawe’s Coffee House,” prefixed to the Leeds edition of his poems, and reproduced in Gregson’s “Fragments.”
Byrom’s pen was ever at the service of his political friends, and the “Laureate of the Jacobites,” the “Master Tool of the Faction,” as he was indifferently styled, was more than a match for his Whig antagonists. Imbued, however, with strong religious feelings, there was little of bitterness in his compositions; the shaft of ridicule was never envenomed, his playful wit and genial good-humoured satire telling with far greater effect than the coarse and angry invectives with which he was at times assailed. If he was ready to lampoon a foe, he never lacked the courage to rebuke a friend. This is evidenced by his well-timed admonition against swearing, “addressed to an officer in the army,” Colonel Townley, the commander of the regiment raised in Manchester in the service of the Pretender:—