In this procession to excel,
The droll sir William acted well;
And when they came to Garrett green,
Sure what laughing there was seen!
No Wilkes, but liberty, was there;
And every thing honest and fair,
For surely Garrett is the place,
Where pleasure is, and no disgrace!
Sir William Swallowtail was one William Cock, a whimsical basket-maker of Brentford, who deeming it proper to have an equipage every way suitable to the honour he aspired to, built his own carriage, with his own hands, to his own taste. It was made of wicker, and drawn by four high hollow-backed horses; whereon were seated dwarfish boys, whimsically dressed for postilions. In allusion to the American war, two footmen rode before the carriage tarred and feathered, the coachman wore a wicker hat, and sir William himself, from the seat of his vehicle, maintained his mock dignity in grotesque array, amidst unbounded applause.
The song says, that sir William Swallowtail came “with hand-bells playing all the way,” and “old John Jones,” after he “rehearsed” the song, gave some account of the player on the hand-bells.
The hand-bell player was Thomas Cracknell, who, at that time, was a publican at Brentford, and kept the “Wilkes’s Head.” He had been a cow-boy in the service of lady Holderness; and after he took that public-house, he so raised its custom that it was a place of the first resort in Brentford “for man and horse.” With an eye to business, as well as a disposition to waggery, he played the hand-bells in support of sir William Swallowtail, as much for the good of the “Wilkes’s Head” as in honour of his neighbour Cock, the basket-maker, who, with his followers, had opened Cracknell’s house. Soon after the election he let the “Wilkes’s Head,” and receiving a handsome sum for good-will and coming-in, bound himself in a penalty of 20l. not to set up within ten miles of the spot. In the afternoon of the day he gave up possession, he went to his successor with the 20l. penalty, and informed him he had taken another house in the neighbourhood. It was the sign of the “Aaron and Driver,” two race-horses, of as great celebrity as the most favoured of the then Garrett candidates. Cracknell afterwards became a rectifier or distiller at Brentford.
Sir John Harper was by trade a weaver, and qualified, by power of face and speech, and infinite humour, to sustain the burlesque character he assumed. His chief pretensions to represent Garrett were grounded on his reputation, circulated in printed hand-bills, which described him as a “rectifier of mistakes and blunders.” He made his grand entry through Wandsworth, into Garrett, in a phaeton and six bays, with postilions in scarlet and silver, surrounded by thousands of supporters, huzzaing, and declaring him to be “able to give any man an answer.”