On 19 Feb. the Queen had a monster cheese presented to her, “on which occasion, she was pleased to express her satisfaction.” It was made from the morning’s milking of 737 cows, prepared by the labour of 50 dairy women, at West Pennard, Somersetshire, and it weighed 11 cwt. It was octagon in shape, and its upper surface was decorated with the Royal Arms, surmounted with a wreath of roses, thistles and shamrocks. Unfortunately, although it had been made over two years, it was not considered to be fit to eat for another eighteen months.
Ecce iterum the irrepressible Boy Jones! Prison evidently had no terrors for him; for, no sooner was he liberated from Tothill Fields, on 2 Mar., than he, almost immediately, set to work to repeat his former escapades. On the day previous to his liberation, he was visited by Mr. Hall, a magistrate, who tried to persuade him to go to sea; but Jones made certain conditions which could not be acceded to, and he did not go. This gave an opportunity for the Satirist to come out with the following appropriate lines:
“The impudent urchin, whom sure the devil owns,
And Government wants to send into the Navy;
Will not go to sea—and ’tis cunning of Jones,
Who, thus, may avoid his relation, Old Davey.”
He was then delivered into the care of his parents, with strict injunctions to them to watch his actions; and, for some days, his conduct was unexceptionable; he frequently attended a Methodist chapel, and expressed his intention of joining a teetotal society. But the charms of notoriety were too strong for him; and, again, he was drawn, as it were by a magnet, to Buckingham Palace. Indeed, it possessed such attractions for him, that, when required to pledge himself, before leaving prison, not to visit the Palace again, he said he would not promise, as his curiosity was so great.
On 15 March, shortly after 1 a.m., the sergeant of police on duty at the Palace imagined, as he was going along the Grand Hall, that he saw someone peeping through the glass door, and this turned out to be the case; for, on his approach, Jones ran up against him, and was, of course, immediately secured. In consequence of his previous visits, two extra policemen had been appointed, whose duty it was, on alternate nights, to watch all the staircases and interior of the building, and it was owing to this arrangement that Master Jones was stopped early in his career, on this last occasion.
Like most boys, Jones had a keen appreciation of a feast, all the more enjoyable because irregularly come by; and, when he was arrested, he was found to have been sitting at his ease in one of the royal apartments, regaling himself with some cold meat and potatoes, which he had conveyed upstairs in his handkerchief. On being questioned how he obtained an entrance, his reply was, “the same way as before”; and he boasted, moreover, that he could, at any time he pleased, get into the palace; but he was extremely taciturn, and refused to satisfy curiosity, more particularly on this point.
What he confessed at his examination by the Privy Council is not known, as the proceedings were in private, reporters being excluded, and the public were left in possession of only the above bare facts. He persisted that the only motive for his intrusion was to hear the conversation at Court, and to write an account of it; but this plea of simplicity did not save him from a repetition of his old sentence of three months
imprisonment in the House of Correction, with the uncomfortable addition, this time, of hard labour. Perhaps the best punishment for this juvenile addition of Paul Pry would have been that suggested by the Satirist, in the following paragraph: “As the urchin Jones, in a letter to his father, stated that his reason for entering the Queen’s house was to ‘seek for noose, in order to rite a book,’ it is a matter of general regret that, instead of magnifying the affair into Home Office importance, the young rogue was not accommodated with a rope’s end.” His visit, however, necessitated the appointment of three additional sentries at the palace.
What became of him afterwards, nobody knows and nobody cares, but, one thing is certain, he was persuaded to go to sea, and Punch (born 17 July) devotes a page (vol. i., p. 46) to “The Boy Jones’s Log,” a portion of which is as follows:
“This mellancholly reflexion threw me into a poeticle fitte, and though I was werry uneasy in my stommik, and had nothing to rite on but my chest, I threw off as follows in a few 2nds, and arterards sung it to the well-none hair of ‘Willy Reilly’:—
“Oakum to me, [156] ye sailors bold,
Wot plows upon the sea;
To you I mean for to unfold
My mournful historie.
So pay attention to my song,
And quick-el-ly shall appear,
How innocently, all along,
I was in-weigle-ed here.“One night, returnin home to bed,
I walk’d through Pim-li-co,
And, twigging of the Palass, sed,
‘I’m Jones and In-i-go.’
But afore I could get out, my boys,
Pollise-man 20A,
He caught me by the corderoys,
And lugged me right a-way.“My cuss upon Lord Melbun, and
On Jonny Russ-all-so,
That forc’d me from my native land,
Across the waves to go-o-oh!
But all their spiteful arts is wain,
My spirit down to keep;
I hopes I’ll soon git back again,
To take another peep.”