“When some of the coaches got to Exeter Exchange, a hearse came out of Exeter Street, and preceded them, drawn by a black and white horse, the driver of which had on a rough coat, resembling a skin, with a large cap, one side black, the other white, whose whole figure was very grotesque. On one side of the hearse was painted on canvas a representation of the rioters killing Mr. Clarke at the Brentford election; and on the other side was a representation of the soldiers firing on young Allen in the cow-house.”
The Town and Country Magazine (1769) divulges that the driver of the decorated hearse was “a man of fortune;” moreover, another account avers—
“I have always understood that the late Lord Mountmorres, then a very young man, was the person, who on that occasion, personated the executioner [of Charles I. ?], holding an axe in his hands, and his face covered with crape.” (See Wraxall’s “Historical Memoirs;” also the “Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury,” etc.)
The hearse attended the cavalcade, making a short stop at Carlton House, where the Princess of Wales lived, also at the residence of the “Cumberland Butcher,” and at Lord Weymouth’s, in Pall Mall (as the author of the St. George’s Fields massacre); thence the hearse, with its “humiliating insignia, was driven into the court-yard of St. James’s, followed by the mob, after which it went off to Albemarle Street.” A copy of the address is given in the Political Register (iv. 1769).
The address and its supporters were in a sad plight when the levee-room was reached, after the foregoing vicissitudes. The Duke of Chandos wrote Mr. Grenville—
“Out of one hundred and thirty merchants who went up with the address, only twelve could get to the King, and they were covered in dirt, as indeed was almost the whole Court.”
The riotous crowd continued to create a disturbance at the palace gates, “accompanied with threats of a most dangerous kind” (as declared in the royal proclamation); while the Earl of Malmesbury wrote, “Many of the mob cried, ‘Wilkes and no King,’ which is shocking to think of.” At last, the proclamation against tumultuous assemblies was read, and—
“Several persons taken into custody by the soldiers; and two were taken by Lord Talbot, who was the only minister who had sufficient resolution to come down among the mob; his lordship had secured another, who was rescued, and his lordship received a violent blow on the head, by being thrown against a coach, and then thought it prudent to take shelter among the soldiers.”
A grand council at St. James’s was held on the afternoon of these events, and in the evening a Gazette Extraordinary was published, with a proclamation by the king—who had in person witnessed the disturbances attending the sham address,—“for suppressing riots,” etc., beginning—
“Whereas it has been represented to us that divers dissolute and disorderly persons have most riotously and unlawfully assembled themselves together, to the disturbance of the public peace, and have, in a most daring and audacious manner, assaulted several merchants and others, coming to our palace at St. James’s, and have committed many acts of violence and outrage before the gates of our palace,” etc.