Derwentwater and Kenmure were not so fortunate. They were led out to execution on Tower Hill early on the morning of February 24th—the morning after Nithisdale’s escape. An immense concourse of people had assembled, and the scaffold was covered in black. The young and gallant Derwentwater died first. As he was a Roman Catholic he was refused even a priest to attend his last moments, and he ascended the scaffold alone. When he had knelt some minutes in prayer, he rose and read a paper in a clear voice, in which he declared that he deeply repented having pleaded guilty, and he acknowledged no King but James the Third as his lawful Sovereign. He concluded: “I intended to wrong nobody, but to serve my King and country, and that without self-interest, hoping by the example I gave, to induce others to do their duty, and God, who knows the secrets of my heart, knows that I speak the truth”. As he laid his head down on the block he noticed a rough place, and he bade the executioner chip it off, lest it should hurt his neck. Then he exclaimed, “Lord Jesus, receive my soul,” the appointed signal, and the executioner severed his head with one blow. Kenmure was executed immediately after. His demeanour was firm, like that of Derwentwater, and he also said that he repented of his plea of guilty, and died a loyal subject of King James. As Kenmure was a Protestant, he was attended by two clergymen in his last moments, as well as by his son and some friends.
Of the impeached peers there remained now only Lord Wintoun, who had refused to plead guilty, and his trial did not come off until March (1716). He was said to be of unsound mind, and a plea for mercy was put forward by his friends on that ground, but he showed great cunning at his trial. He was condemned and sent back to the Tower, but he found a means of making his escape some time afterwards, and there is little doubt that his flight was winked at by the Government. The reprieves of Carnwath and Nairn were followed by their pardon; Forster also escaped from Newgate, walking out in daylight. The executions of Derwentwater and Kenmure had shocked the public conscience. The Tories were loud in their condemnation of the violence and severity of the Government. “They have dyed the royal ermines in blood,” wrote Bolingbroke. Nor did the King escape odium, but rather drew it upon himself by having the bad taste to appear at the theatre on the evening of the very day of the execution of the condemned lords. It is difficult to say whether he endeavoured to exert his royal prerogative of mercy, or how far he was able to do so, when the most powerful of his Ministers were crying for blood. On a subsequent occasion, when urged by Walpole to extreme measures against the Jacobites, he stoutly refused, saying, “I will have no more blood or forfeitures”. He would have strengthened his position if he had refused before. The penalty of treason in those days was death, but it could hardly be maintained that Derwentwater and Kenmure had been guilty of ordinary treason, since it was founded on a loyal attachment to the undoubted heir of the ancient Kings of Scotland and England.
The Government had put down the rising with an iron hand. They had driven James from the country; they had imprisoned, shot and beheaded his adherents, and now the time was drawing nigh when, according to the Constitution, they would have to appeal to the country, and obtain the country’s verdict upon their work. In accordance with the Triennial Bill of 1694, Parliament having sat for almost three years would have soon to be dissolved, and the judgment of the nation passed upon the rival claims of James and the Hanoverian dynasty. The omens were not propitious. The country was seething with discontent, and eager to revenge the severities of the Government. On the anniversary of Charles the Second’s restoration green boughs were everywhere to be seen, white roses were worn openly in the streets, and Jacobite demonstrations were held, more or less openly, all over the country.
The Princess of Wales was the only member of the Royal Family who kept her popularity. She had won goodwill by having been on the side of mercy, and she maintained it by many little acts of grace. The winter that had passed was the coldest known for years. The Thames was frozen over from December 3rd to January 21st,[68] and oxen were roasted and fairs held upon the ice. The long-continued frost occasioned much distress among the watermen and owners of wherries and boats. The Princess, who often used the Thames as a waterway, ordered a sum of money to be distributed among them, and got up a subscription. Her birthday was made the occasion of some rejoicing. We read that the Society of Ancient Britons was established in her honour, and the stewards of the society and many Welshmen met at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, where a service was held in the Welsh tongue. My Lord Lumley also, one of the young beaux attached to the Court, “had a load of faggots burned before his father’s (Lord Scarborough’s) door in Gerard Street, and gave three barrels of ale and beer, and a guinea to his servants, to drink the health of the Princess”.[69] The Prince shared his consort’s popularity, in a lesser degree, chiefly because he was known to be hated by the King. But one night at Drury Lane he was shot at by a half-witted man. The bullet missed the Prince, but hit one of the guards, who in those days used to stand sentinel at the back of the royal box. There was great confusion and uproar. Some one shouted “Fire!” the ladies shrieked and climbed over the boxes, the actors came down from the stage, and there was an ugly rush in the pit. Only the Prince remained unmoved, and kept his seat. His example had the effect of reassuring the audience; the man was arrested, and the play proceeded. The Prince and Princess did not allow this unpleasant incident to make any difference to them, and they went about as freely among the people as before, though they might well have been afraid in the excited state of public feeling.
Indignation was especially directed against the King and his mistresses, and the flood of scurrilous pamphlets and abusive ballads grew greater and greater. So hostile became the crowd that a society, called “Ye Guild of Ye Loyall Mug Houses,” was formed to protect the King from personal violence and insult. It was composed mostly of young bloods from the coffee-houses who used to fight the Jacobites when they used expressions detrimental to the Royal Family, and as both sides were spoiling for a fight, street rows were frequent. Even women were not safe from violence, and it is noteworthy that nearly all the women who took part in politics were on the side of the exiled James. Addison was hired to write against these “she-Jacobites,” as he called them in the Freeholder—poor stuff most of it was, too, and justified Swift’s sneer about Addison “fair-sexing” it. “A man,” writes Addison, “is startled when he sees a pretty bosom heaving with such party rage as is disagreeable even in that sex which is of a more coarse and rugged make. And yet, such is our misfortune, that we sometimes see a pair of stays ready to burst with sedition, and hear the most masculine passions expressed in the sweetest voices.” It will hardly be believed that these effusions were highly inflammatory. Yet on one occasion, while the Freeholder was running its brief-lived course, a Whig, seeing a young lady walking down St. James’s Street with a bunch of white roses on her bosom, sprang out of his coach, tore off the roses and trampled them in the mud, and lashed the young lady with his whip. She was rescued by the timely appearance of some Jacobite gentry, who carried her home in safety, but a street fight, assuming almost the proportions of a riot, was the consequence.
These things, it may be urged, were merely straws, yet straws show the way the wind blows, and Ministers saw enough to be sure that it was not blowing in their favour. They were afraid to face the country. They therefore brought forward the Septennial Act, which repealed the Triennial Act, and enacted that Parliament should sit, if the Government thought fit, for the space of seven years. The Bill was carried through both Houses and became the law of the land. The action of the Government in thus shirking an appeal to the country certainly lent colour to the Jacobite contention, that the nation, as a whole, was in favour of the return of the Stuarts, and that it desired nothing so much as to send George and the Hanoverian family back to Hanover at the earliest opportunity. Allowing for Jacobite exaggeration, it seems probable that the people who, less than three years before, had voted in favour of the Hanoverian succession, would now, had an opportunity been given them, have voted against it. These violent vacillations of public opinion may be used as an argument against popular government. But the Whigs posed as the party of popular government, and if it be admitted, as they declared, that the people have a right to choose their King, it is difficult to see how the Whigs could logically have been justified in maintaining upon the throne a prince who was not supported by the suffrages of the people. But such speculation is merely academic. For good or evil the Septennial Act was passed, and its passing, far more than the failure of James’s expedition, fixed the House of Hanover upon the throne. That was one result, and perhaps the most important. Another was that it gave an impetus to the bribery and corruption by which Walpole, and those who succeeded him, were able to buy majorities in the House of Commons and the constituencies, and thus for more than a century prevented the voice of the nation making itself effectively heard. It led to the establishment, not of government by the people, for the people, but of a Whig oligarchy, who were able to hold place and power in spite of the people.
The immediate result of the Septennial Act was one which Ministers had hardly reckoned with. The rising being quelled, and this Act, which seemed to make his occupation of the throne certain for the next few years, safely passed, the King announced his intention of revisiting his beloved Hanover, from which he had now been exiled long. It was in vain that Ministers pointed out to George the unpopularity which would attend such a step, and the dangers that might ensue. The King’s impatience was not to be stemmed, and he told them frankly that, whether they could get on without him or not, to Hanover he would go. To enable him to go, therefore, the restraining clause of the Act of Settlement had to be repealed, and a Regent or a Council of Regency appointed. The first was easily managed by the docile House of Commons; the second was more difficult. It was naturally assumed that the Prince of Wales would be appointed by the King to act as Regent in his absence. But to this the King objected. It was already an open secret about the Court that the King and the Prince hated one another thoroughly, and the King was especially jealous of the efforts which the Prince and Princess of Wales were making to gain popularity. The Prince looked forward with eagerness to the regency, and he and the Princess already reckoned on the increased importance it would give them. The King, who did not trust his son, refused to entrust him with the nominal government of the kingdom unless other persons, whom he could trust, were associated with him in the regency, and limited his power by a number of petty restrictions. The Prime Minister, Townshend, however, declared that he could find no instance of persons being joined in commission with the Prince of Wales, or of any restrictions on the regency, and that the “constant tenor of ancient practice could not conveniently be receded from”.
The King, therefore, had grudgingly to yield his son the first place in his absence, but instead of giving him the title of Regent, he named him “Guardian of the Realm and Lieutenant,” an office unknown in England since the days of the Black Prince. He also insisted that the Duke of Argyll, the Prince of Wales’s trusted friend and adviser, whom he suspected of aiding and abetting him in his opposition to the royal will, should be dismissed from all his appointments about the Prince. The Prince bitterly resented this, and Townshend supported the Prince, thereby incurring the disfavour of the King. The Princess of Wales also threw herself into the quarrel, and the bitterness became intensified. “The Princess is all in a flame, the Prince in an agony,” writes Lady Cowper, and she adds, “I wish to give them advice. They are all mad, and for their own private ends will destroy all.” But resistance was of no avail, the King was obdurate, and in the end the Prince declared himself “resolved to sacrifice everything to please and live well with the King, so will part with the Duke of Argyll”.
The King, having gained his point, and made matters generally unpleasant for his son and his Ministers, relented sufficiently to pay a farewell visit to the Princess of Wales. She told him that he looked ill, and he laughed and said, “I may well look ill, for I have had a world of blood drawn from me to-day,” and then he explained that he had given audience to more than fifty people, and every one of them had asked him for something, except the Lord Chancellor. He held a drawing-room on the evening of his departure. “The King in mighty good humour,” writes Lady Cowper. “When I wished him a good journey and a quick return, he looked as if the last part of my speech was needless, and that he did not think of it.”
George set out for Hanover on July 9th, 1716, accompanied by Stanhope, as Minister in attendance, Bernstorff, who was to help him in certain schemes for the benefit of Hanover and the detriment of England, and a numerous retinue, chiefly Hanoverian, which included Schulemburg, Kielmansegge and the Turks.