LONDON
IN
THE JACOBITE TIMES

VOL. I.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

LONDON
IN
THE JACOBITE TIMES
BY
Dᴿ DORAN, F.S.A.
AUTHOR OF ‘TABLE TRAITS’ ‘QUEENS OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER’
‘THEIR MAJESTIES’ SERVANTS’ ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.

LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1877
All rights reserved

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

TO MY SON
ALBAN HENRY G. DORAN, F.R.C.S.
WITH EQUAL RESPECT AND
AFFECTION

CONTENTS

OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER I.
(1714.)
PAGE
In the Churches—In the Streets—Steele’s Satire—In Parliament—PoliticalAmenities—Sacheverel: Marlborough—On Parade.First Blood—The ‘Peregrine Yatch’—The King at Greenwich—ScottishHomage—Claret Loyalty—The Artillery Company—TheRoyal Entry—The Players’ Homage—The Affairs of Scotland—ARoyal Proclamation [1]
CHAPTER II.
(1714.)
Carte, the Jacobite—An Old and New Lord Chancellor—Preparationsfor the Coronation—The Scene in the Abbey—Whigs and Jacobites—ToryMobs—The Royal Family in the Park—SeditiousPamphlets—Jacobite Clubs—Royalties—At St. James’s—ElectioneeringTactics—Royal Chaplains—The Chevalier in London [18]
CHAPTER III.
(1715.)
At the Play—Flight of Ormond—Sacheverel—Politics in the Pulpit—Calumnyagainst Sacheverel—Danger in the Distance—Flight ofBolingbroke—Bolingbroke Pamphlets—Bolingbroke’s Character—Politicsin Livery—Satire—Flying Reports—Decree in the ‘Gazette’—The Lash—The Pillory—A Harmless Jacobite [33]
CHAPTER IV.
(1715.)
Politics in the Army—Lieutenant Kynaston—Jacobite Plotters—FalseAccuser—The Military Board—The Lieutenant disposedof—Captain Paul—Arrest of Members of Parliament—Harvey,of Combe—Sir William Wyndham—Search for Papers—Wyndham’sEscape—Dramatic Courtesy—Uncourteous Interview—AGeneral Stir [50]
CHAPTER V.
(1715.)
Pamphleteering—General Confusion—Jacobite Mobs—Rioting—Ballad-Singers—PoliticalSongs—Arrests—In the Park—InvasionImminent—Sound of Shot—Afloat on the Thames—TheHorse Guards—The Chevalier de St. George—The King’s Speech—PreachersAwake—A Famous Sermon—Satirical Art—MischievousSermons—A Sound of Alarm—Jacobite Agents—Arrests—PopularFeeling [66]
CHAPTER VI.
(1715.)
Camp and Pulpit—Popular Slogan—Perilous Anniversaries—PopularDemonstrations—News from the North—Reports from Scotland—FurtherIntelligence—News from Preston—Jacobite Fury—StreetFighting—The Prisoners from Preston—Tyburn Tree—JacobiteCaptains—Drawing near London—Highgate to London—Arrivalin Town—The Jacobite Chaplain—Lady Cowper’sTestimony—Jacobite Reports [89]
CHAPTER VII.
(1715-16.)
The Chevalier in Scotland—The Chevalier out of Scotland—Cost ofliving in Newgate—Inside Newgate—Visitors to Newgate—Sortingthe Prisoners—Extortion—Dissensions—Jacobite Patten—HanoverianPatten—Addison’s Satire—Lack of Charity—WhigLiberality—Whig and Jacobite Ladies—Matthew Prior—Royaltyon the Ice—Impeachment of the Rebel Lords—Characterof King George—From the Tower to Westminster—TheDrum Ecclesiastic—Muscular Christians—Charles I., King andSaint—The Rebel Peers—Solemn Politeness—Derwentwater’sPlea—Widdrington’s Reply—Appeal for Mercy—Nithsdale’sApology—Carnwath and Kenmure—Nairn’s Explanation—TheLord High Steward—Conclusion—Lord Cowper’s Speech [109]
CHAPTER VIII.
(1716.)
Carnwath’s Confession—The King and Lady Nithsdale—The Kingand Lady Derwentwater—Scene at Court—The CondemnedLords—Lady Nithsdale—Changes of Dress—Escape of LordNithsdale—Lady Nithsdale—Visiting Friends—The Eve of Execution—ThePress, on the Trials—The King, on the Escape—LordDerwentwater—Lord Kenmure—Taking the Oaths—TheDerwentwater Lights—Scientific Explanations—Lady Cowperon the Aurora—Revelry—Addison, on the Princess of Wales—Nithsdalein Disguise—Lady Nithsdale in Drury Lane—Comicand Serio-Comic Incidents—To the Plantations [143]
CHAPTER IX.
(1716.)
State-Trial Ceremonies—Lord Wintoun in Court—Opening of theTrial—The Legal Assailants—The King’s Witnesses—The Rev.Mr. Patten—Patten’s Character of Wintoun—Military Witnesses—TheSurrender at Preston—A Prisoner at Bay—Incidentsof the Trial—Wintoun Baited by Cowper—The King’s Counsel—TheVerdict—Sir Constantine Phipps—A Fight for Life—TheFight grows Furious—The Sentence—Doom Borne Worthily—TheJacobite Lawyer [169]
CHAPTER X.
(1716.)
Edmund Curll—The New Poems—Princess of Wales and LadyKenmure—Luxury in Newgate—General Forster’s Escape—ARide for Life—The Prisoners in the Tower—Patten on thePrince of Wales—In and Out of Newgate—Politics on the Stage—SimonFraser, as a Whig—Dutch Service in Gravesend Church—Aidsto Escape—Shifting of Prisoners—Breaking out of Newgate—Pursuit—Hueand Cry—Domiciliary Visits—Talbot Recaptured—Escapeof Hepburn of Keith [190]
CHAPTER XI.
(1716.)
David Lindsay—Trials of Rebel Officers—Colonel Oxburgh—TheColonel at Tyburn—A Head on Temple Bar—More Trials—JacobiteJurymen—Towneley and Tildesley—Their Trials—TheirAcquittal—The Chaplain at Towneley Hall—Justice Hall andCaptain Talbot—Gascogne’s Trial—The Duchess of Ormond—Gascogne’sDefence—Christian Feeling—Fracas in a Coffee-House—Joyand Sorrow in Newgate—Chief Justice Parker—TheSwinburnes—Scott’s Newgate—Mob Ferocity [211]
CHAPTER XII.
(1716.)
Festive Fighting—Jacobite Boys—Flogging Soldiers—Hoadly inthe Pulpit—Flattery by Addison—On the Silver Thames—TwoPretty Fellows—Thanksgiving Day—Sherlock’s Sermon—Bishopof Ely’s Sermon—King George’s Right to the Throne—A NonjuringClergyman, to be Whipt—Saved by the Bishop of London—TheRose in June—More Bloodshed—Jacobite Ladies—Ladies’Anti-Jacobite Associations—Riot in a Church—Pope’sDouble Dealing—Addison, on Late and Present Times—PoliticalWomen [234]
CHAPTER XIII.
(1716.)
The Rev. Mr. Paul—A Cry for Life—Paul and Patten—Paul, aJacobite Again—The King in Fleet Street—A Reading at Court—SanguinaryStruggles—A Jacobite Jury—The Mug-Houses—TheStreet Whipping Post—Patten in Allendale—Scenes atHampton Court—Bigots on Both Sides—At Drury Lane Theatre—AfternoonCalls—Escape of Charles Radcliffe—The Stage andPlaygoers—Loyal Players—An Anti-Jacobite Pamphlet [256]
CHAPTER XIV.
(1717.)
Bishop Atterbury—Jacobite Congregations—Liberty Used, andAbused—Jacobites at Large—An Entry in a Cash Book—BishopAtterbury, the Chevalier’s Agent—More Prosecutions—Trial ofFrancia—Patten’s ‘History of the Late Rebellion’—SlanderAgainst the Jacobites—Patten’s Details—Downright Shippen—Shippen,on George I.—Cibber’s ‘Nonjuror’—Dedication to theKing—Significant Passages—Jacobite Outlay—Advantages ofClamour—Political Allusions—Incense for the King—A Lecturefrom the Stage—Public Feeling—Atterbury’s Opinion [276]
CHAPTER XV.
(1718.)
A Youthful Jacobite—A would-be Regicide—A Fight in Newgate—Upthe Hill to Tyburn—Scene at Tyburn—A Jacobite Toast—SatiricalPamphlet—Lovat already Suspected—Hearne on Echard’s‘England’—Atterbury Conspiring—The Bishop’s View of Things—TheRoyal Family on the Road—Military Difficulties—Scenesat Court—A Scene in ‘Bedlam’—A Whig Whipt—Treason in thePulpit—More Treason—Jacobites in the Pillory—The King atthe Play—Daniel Defoe—His Dirty Work—Mist’s Journal—JacobiteHopes—Art and Poetry [300]
CHAPTER XVI.
(1719.)
The Skirmish at Glenashiels—Judicial Caprice—Assault on thePrincess of Wales—The King and his Ladies—A SuspiciousCharity Sermon—Riot in Church—Riot Prolonged—Liberty ofthe Press—A Capital Conviction—Jacobite Fidelity—A PoliticalVictim—Three more to Tyburn—A Last Request—An ApologeticSermon—An Innocent Victim—Political Plays—Incidents—RoyalCondescension—The King’s Good Nature—Rob Roy andthe Duke of Montrose [326]
CHAPTER XVII.
(1720-’21-’22.)
Atterbury’s Hopes—Death of Laurence Howell—In Hyde Park—AtBartholomew Fair—Stopping the King’s Expresses—Cibber’s‘Refusal’—In State to the Pillory—Birth of the ‘Young Chevalier’—Governmentand the Jacobites—Treasonable Wit—Recruitingfor the Chevalier—Epigrammatic Epitaph—Arrest of Jacobites—Atterbury’sCorrespondence—Jacobite Trysting Places—TheOfficers in Camp—A Cavalry Bishop—The Ladies in Camp—WhigSusceptibility—More Arrests—Atterbury to Pope [347]
CHAPTER XVIII.
(1722.)
The Bishop in the Tower—Pope and Atterbury—The ‘Blackbird’—Treatmentof Atterbury—Scenes in Camp—Soldiers and Footpads—Discipline—ChristopherLayer—The Plot—Layer at Westminster—AntagonisticLawyers—The Trial—A False Witness—AConfederate—Layer’s Ladies—Layer’s ‘Scheme’—The Defence—StrangeWitnesses—The Verdict—Layer’s Dignity—TheJacobites in Mourning—A Jacobite Player—Suspension of the‘Habeas Corpus’—Arrest of Peers—Lord Chief Justice Pratt—LondonSights—Ambitious Thieves 369
CHAPTER XIX.
(1723.)
The Plot—Satire on the Plot—Decyphering—Proceedings againstAtterbury—Debate in the Commons—Debate in the Lords—Condemnationof Plunkett—Kelly’s Trial—Kelly’s Defence—Sentenceon Kelly—The King at Kensington—Arrests—Patten inPeril—A Strange Sermon—Treatment of Atterbury—Oglethorpeand Atterbury—In the House of Lords—The Whig Press andthe Bishop—Street Incidents—Opening of Letters—Sir ConstantinePhipps—The Defence—Special Pleading—Evidence for Atterbury—Pope,as a Witness—Atterbury’s Defence—Rejoinderfor the Crown—Wit of Lord Bathurst—Newspaper Comments—Atterburyand Layer—Layer on Holborn Hill—Layer at Tyburn—Lamentationfor Layer—Lamentation, continued—Bolingbroke,Atterbury—Atterbury Leaving the Tower—Atterbury on theThames—Pope and Atterbury—Layer’s Head—The Co-Conspirators—Atterburyserving the Chevalier—Letter from Atterbury [397]

LONDON
IN
THE JACOBITE TIMES.

CHAPTER I.

(1714.)

n the last morning of Queen Anne’s life, a man, deep in thought, was slowly crossing Smithfield. The eyes of a clergyman passing in a carriage were bent upon him. The carriage stopped, the wayfarer looked up, and the two men knew each other. The one on foot was the dissenting preacher, whom Queen Anne used to call ‘bold Bradbury.’ The other was Bishop Burnet.

‘On what were you so deeply thinking?’ asked the bishop.

‘On the men who died here at the stake,’ replied Bradbury. ‘Evil times, like theirs, are at hand. I am thinking whether I should be as brave as they were, if I were called upon to bear the fire as they bore it.’

IN THE CHURCHES.

Burnet gave him hope. A good time, he said, was coming. The queen was mortally ill. Burnet was then, he said, on his way from Clerkenwell to the Court, and he undertook to send a messenger to Bradbury, to let him know how it fared with Anne. If he were in his chapel, a token should tell him that the queen was dead.

A few hours later, Bradbury was half-way through his sermon, when he saw a handkerchief drop from the hand of a stranger in the gallery. This is said to have been the sign agreed upon. The preacher went quietly on to the end of his discourse; but, in the prayer which followed, he moved the pulses of his hearers’ hearts, by giving thanks to God for saving the kingdom from the doings of its enemies; and he asked for God’s blessing on the King of England, George I., Elector of Hanover.

About the same time Bishop Atterbury had offered to go down in front of St. James’s Palace, in full episcopal dress, and proclaim James III.—the late Queen’s brother. The Tory Ministry wavered, and Atterbury, with words unseemly for a bishop’s lips, deplored that they had let slip the finest opportunity that had ever been vouchsafed to mortal men.

IN THE STREETS.

The Regency knew better how to profit by it. George was proclaimed king. Dr. Owen of Warrington preached a Whig sermon, from 1 Kings xvi. 30, ‘And Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the Lord, above all that were before him.’ The text was as a club wherewith to assail the soil of James II. A little later, Bradbury was accused of having preached from the words, ‘Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.’ This was a calumny. Burnet’s sermon was on Acts xiii. 38-41, and defied objection. In those verses there was nothing to lay hold of. The most captious spirit could make little out of even these words, ‘Behold, ye despisers; and wonder and perish, for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you.’ The Jacobites could turn it to no purpose.

Queen Anne was dead, George was proclaimed. The fine gentlemen in coffee and chocolate houses, and the fine ladies who breakfasted at noon, in bed, read in their respective papers that ‘the late queen’s bowells were yesterday buryed in Henry the VII.’s Chappel.’ ‘If,’ wrote Chesterfield to Jouneau, ‘she had lived only three months longer, … she would have left us, at her death, for king, a bastard who is as great a fool as she was herself, and who, like her, would have been led by the nose by a band of rascals.’

STEELE’S SATIRE.

On the other hand, there were men who sincerely mourned the queen’s death. These men were troubled in their walks by the revels at Charing Cross. There Young Man’s Coffee-house echoed with sounds of rejoicing. Some of the revellers had been recipients of the most liberal bounty of the queen, and did not care to conceal their ecstacy. Men circulated the good news as they rode in carriages which the queen had purchased for them. At Young Man’s might be seen an officer sharing in the unseemly joy, whose laced coat, hat and feather, were bought with the pay of the sovereign, whose arms were on his gorget. People who had been raised from the lowest degree of gentlemen to riches and honours, could not hide their gladness. And now, men read with diverse feeling a reprint, freshly and opportunely issued, of Steele’s famous letter in the ‘Reader,’ addressed to that awful metropolitan official, the Sword-bearer of the City Corporation. The writer reminded the dignitary that, as the Mayor, Walworth, had despatched the rebel Wat Tyler with a stroke of his dagger, so ‘is it expected of you,’ said Steele, ‘to cut off the Pretender with that great sword which you bear with so much calmness, which is always a sign of courage.’ ‘Let me tell you, Sir,’ adds Steele, with exquisite mock gravity, ‘in the present posture of affairs I think it seems to be expected of you; and I cannot but advise you, if he should offer to land here (indeed if he should so much as come up the river), to take the Water Bailiff with you, and cut off his head. I would not so much, if I were you, as tell him who I was, till I had done it. He is outlawed, and I stand to it, if the Water Bailiff is with you, and concurs, you may do it on the Thames; but, if he offers to land, it is out of all question, you may do it by virtue of your post, without waiting for orders. It is from this comfort and support that, in spite of what all the malcontents in the world can say, I have no manner of fear of the Pretender.’

IN PARLIAMENT.

There were, however, some who had hopes of that luckless prince, and who looked upon any other who should take the crown which they considered to be his, by divine right, as a wicked usurper. Accordingly, the Nonjuring Jacobites and High Church congregations sang their hymns, in their respective places of worship, to words which had a harmless ring, but which were really full of treason. One sample is as good as twenty,—and here it is!—

Confounded be those rebels all

That to usurpers bow,

And make what Gods and Kings they please,

And worship them below!

On the day the queen died, Parliament met to vote addresses to her successor. The Jacobite spirit was not entirely extinguished in either House. In spite of an attempt to obtain an adjournment in the Upper Chamber, the Lords carried an address, in which they said: ‘With faithful hearts we beseech your Majesty to give us your royal presence.’ In the Commons, Mr. Secretary Bromley moved an address so made up of grief expressed for Anne’s death, that Walpole demanded ‘something more substantial;’ and loyal members insisted that congratulations rather than condolence should abound in the address from the Commons. To both Houses the king intimated that he was hastening to satisfy their ‘affectionate urgences.’

POLITICAL AMENITIES.

Meanwhile rival papers watched each other as jealously as adversaries in churches and the streets. Abel, in the ‘Post Boy,’ happened to say, ‘We patiently await the arrival of the king!’ The ‘Flying Post’ flew at him immediately. ‘Villain,’ ‘vile wretch,’ and ‘monster,’ were among the amenities flung at Abel. Here was a ‘fellow’ who dared to say he ‘patiently waited’ for an event for which the ‘faithful Commons’ had declared they ‘waited impatiently.’ In his next number, Abel said he meant ‘impatiently.’ He was called a liar now, as he had been traitor before. Others said, ‘Hang this odious beast!—he dares to say he waits impatiently the arrival of the king! What king, Bezonian? We guess it is his Bar-le-ducish Majesty!’ Such was the nick-name given to the Chevalier de St. George, who was then residing at Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine.

SACHEVEREL: MARLBOROUGH.

People in streets and taverns next became anxious about the wind. The Whigs were desirous that it should blow so as to bring the new king speedily from Holland. If a gentleman in a coffee-house ventured to remark that ‘it was strange the wind should have turned against his Majesty just as he had reached the Hague,’ the speaker was set upon as a Jacobite who took that way to insinuate that God was ruling the elements in the Tory interest. Swords were whipt out, and he had to fight, beg pardon, or run for it. In the street if an old basket-woman lamented that the wind was bad, and a thoughtless porter rejoined that the wind was well enough, the loyal woman raised a cry which hounded on a hundred blackguards to hunt the porter down, and beat him to the very point of death. An indifferent man could not express, in any circle of hearers, a word or two of respect for Queen Anne without being accused of disrespect for King George. While Tories bought from the street-criers the broadsheet ‘Fair and softly, or, don’t drive Jehu-like,’ the Hanoverian papers called for the imprisonment of the criers, and confiscation of the broadsheet. The latter, they said, implied that the established Government was acting fraudulently, and was likely to upset the State-chariot. ‘Stand fast to the Church; no Presbyterian Government!’ was the title of another sheet, published by word of mouth, in the City. Down swooped the constables on the criers,—audacious fellows, it was said, who dared to insinuate that the Government was abandoning the Church. Of course, the sight of Dr. Sacheverel on the causeway was provocative of hostile demonstration. As he once came from St. Andrew’s Church into Holborn, a Whig, anxious for a row, shouted, ‘There goes Sacheverel, with a footman at his back. It ought to be a horsewhip!’ On the other hand, Tories entrapped Whigs into drinking ‘his Majesty’s health,’—meaning the health of King James. In a Smithfield tavern a gentleman said to an Essex farmer, ‘I will give you half-a-crown to drink “His Majesty’s health.”’ The farmer ‘smoked’ the Jacobite speaker, took the money, gave him a couple of kicks as equivalent to two shillings change, and then walked off, uttering the slang word ‘bite!’ by way of triumph.

ON PARADE. FIRST BLOOD.

There was one individual whose coming was as anxiously looked for as that of the king; namely, the Duke of Marlborough, who had been for some time in voluntary exile. England at last was informed that the duke had condescended to return to this ungrateful nation. On his arrival in London, after passing triumphantly through provincial towns, he was addressed by officials, the spokesmen of mounted gentlemen and of commonalty afoot. He is said, not without some sarcasm in the words, to have replied to these addresses ‘with that humble and modest air which is so peculiar to himself.’ At Temple Bar his state carriage broke down. Tories jeered him as he emerged from it. A humbler sort of coach was procured, and Whigs saluted him with huzzas! as he entered it.

Loyal captains were spirited up by the news of the coming of their old leader. On the parade in the Park, Captain Holland addressed his company. He congratulated them on having acquired such a king as George the First after such a sovereign as Queen Anne! The captain swore that he would sustain the Hanoverian Protestant Succession. ‘If,’ he added, ‘If there’s any person among you that’s a Roman Catholic, or not resolved to act on the same principles with me, I desire him to march out!’

Pretty well the first blood drawn in the growing antagonism of Stuart and Brunswick was in a coffee-house dispute as to the merits of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Sir Constantine Phipps. A Cornet Custine, who shared Captain Holland’s opinion, spoke contemptuously of the Jacobite Chancellor. A Mr. Moore, described as a ‘worthy gentleman’ by the papers with Stuart proclivities, left the room in apparent displeasure. Custine followed him into the street, compelled him to defend himself, and ran him through the heart with the energetic Hanoverian thrust. Young Moore died of it, and the Cornet was imprisoned. ‘We wish Mr. Custine, on this occasion’ (killing a Jacobite), say some of the papers, ‘all the favour the law can allow him.’ The alleged grounds for favour were that the duel was fairly fought, swords having been simultaneously drawn on both sides. At a later period, Chancellor Phipps was dismissed. He returned to England. Oxford immediately made him a D.C.L., and, as he resumed practice at the English Bar, the Jacobites confided to him the conduct of their cases, and Sir Constantine became the great Tory lawyer of Westminster Hall.

THE ‘PEREGRINE YATCH.’

At length news arrived that the king and the prince had left the Hague, where, in their impatience to reach England, they had tarried eleven days, and laid all the blame upon the wind. Next, London was a-stir with the intelligence that the ‘Peregrine Yatch,’ bearing Cæsar and his fortunes, with a convoy of men of war, was off the buoy at the Nore. The new sovereign was to land at Greenwich, whither every sort of vehicle, carrying every sort of persons, now repaired. The loyal excursionists hoped to have a good view of their new sovereign as he went processionally through the Park. Pedestrians passed the gates without difficulty, but not even to the ‘Quality’ indiscriminately was it given to enter within the enclosure. Carriages bearing friends to the royal family were turned back full of malcontents, when they did not carry the great officers of the crown, privy-counsellors, judges, peers, or peers’ sons. The Duke of Ormond’s splendid equipage drove up to the palace, but the great Tory duke had to retire without alighting. The king would not receive him. His Majesty was barely more gracious to the Earl of Oxford. The ex-Lord Treasurer kissed the king’s hand, amid a crowd of other homage-payers, but the sovereign took no more notice of Harley than of the most insignificant unit in that zealous mob. The other mob outside were discussing the reported changes in the Administration, when a sovereign homage was rendered to that would-be sovereign people.

THE KING AT GREENWICH.

‘At Greenwich,’ say the London papers, ‘the king and prince were pleased to expose themselves some time at the windows of their palace, to satisfy the impatient curiosity of all loving subjects.’ Among those who were ready to be so were Scottish chiefs with historical names. There had been no lack of homage to Queen Anne on the part of Scottish peers. The Master of Sinclair was a Jacobite, who had been in trouble in Queen Anne’s time. His neck was in peril, but the queen pardoned him. His history of the insurrection of ’15, in which he took part, is severely condemnatory of all the leaders, and especially of Mar. In the introductory portion of it, the Master sketches in equally censuring terms the Scottish peers in London, a little before Queen Anne’s death. ‘While at SCOTTISH HOMAGE. London,’ he says, ‘I had occasion to see the meanness of some of our Scots nobilitie who were of the sixteen, and who I heard complain grievously of the Treasurer’s cheating them, because he had gone out of town without letting them know, or giving them money as he had promised. I was told they wanted a hundred pound, or some such matter, to pay their debts, and carry them down to Scotland, and that they used to hang on at his levee like so many footmen. My God! how concerned I was to see those who pretended to be of the ancient Scots nobilitie reduced to beg at an English Court! And some of those, of which number was my Lord Kilsyth, were they who gave themselves the greatest airs in our affair,—so useful is impudence to impose on mankind!’—See ‘Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715,’ by John, Master of Sinclair, published by the Abbotsford Club, 1858, and reviewed in the ‘Athenæum,’ 31st December, 1859, by the able hand of the late Mr. Dilke.

In reference to the king’s arrival at Greenwich, Mr. Dilke says: ‘Queen Anne’s ministers had taken the chiefs into the direct pay of Government, at the rate of about 350l. a year each. The Highlanders were then as quiet as Lowlanders, and when King George landed at Greenwich, an address was ready for him, signed with all the great names that so soon after figured in the rebellion, by Macdonel of Glengarrie, Macdonald of the Isles, Mackenzie, Macklean, Macleod, Cameron of Lochiel, Mackintosh, Macpherson of Cluny, Chisholm, and others, offering loyal and faithful service to ‘a prince so highly adorned with all royal virtues, and expressing a hope that his Majesty’s royal and kindly influence would reach them even in their distant homes.’ His Majesty was not so advised; his kindly influence, that is, his money, did not reach them, and these poor people were driven to follow the standard of a little Mogul like Mar. Mar knew what would be influential, and in his Proclamation, though he called on them ‘by their faith, honour, allegiance, by their devotion and love, to join the standard of their king, he wisely concluded with the promise of a gratuity and regular pay.’

CLARET LOYALTY.

After the king and prince had set out on their journey from Greenwich to London, the impatient curiosity of all loving subjects in Greenwich was directed to another object. At eight o’clock precisely they were in crowds about the Ship, calling on the landlord, Thomas Sweetapple, to make good his promise, namely, that he would broach a hogshead of the finest French claret behind his house, and give thereof to all true loyalists, to drink his Majesty’s health. Mine host kept his word; but the liquor was out long before all true loyalists could taste of it. The unsatisfied drinkers were made as loyal to the Establishment as to the throne. One zealous Whig exclaimed, in proof of his zeal for the Protestant succession, ‘It’s true I never go to church, but d—n me if I don’t always stand up for her!’

THE ARTILLERY COMPANY.

For the royal entry into and through London every preparation had been made. Occasionally little difficulties presented themselves. For example, Captain Silk, whose office and principles may be guessed by his being described as ‘Muster Master, with others of his kidney,’ ventured to assert that the London Artillery Company had no right to appear officially at the royal passage through the City. The cannoneers, descendants of primitive heroic Cockneys, appealed to the proper authorities, and the appeal was allowed. Further, the Artillery Company had their little revenge. Captain Silk was prevented from even seeing the spectacle. The warlike company charged him with having drunk the health of the pretended James III. on his knees, while the song was sung of ‘The king shall have his own again!’ The captain was laid by the heels, and the artillery of London rejoiced at it. But ‘Captain Silk’s Jacobite Militia tune’ became a favourite with Tory musicians.

Among the advertisements which offered places to spectators along the whole line, from Greenwich to St. James’s, there was one which announced that ‘several senior gentlemen, with their own gray hairs,’ had resolved to ride before the king ‘in white camblet cloaks, on white horses.’ They advertised for volunteers, old and gray enough, who were assured that they ‘would be led up in the procession by persons of eminence and figure.’ It was subsequently reported that these ‘senior gentlemen, in their own gray hairs,’ applied too late to the Earl Marshal to have a place appointed for them in the procession, but that they would have seats in a gallery of their own at the east end of St. Paul’s. They would be presented, it was said, with lovely nosegays, to revive their spirits and refresh their memories, ‘which will be a fine orange stuck round with laurel—the former to put them in mind of the happy Revolution; the latter, of the glorious victories gained under the Duke of Marlborough in the late wars.’ The above is a specimen of the mild political wit of the day. Curious eyes looked at the gallery at the east end of St. Paul’s. They saw nothing of the seniors and their emblems, but others swore they were there, nevertheless, or why was the heroic Marlborough factiously hissed as he passed? At other points, the Church and King party had their revenge. The king and prince in their state coach might have been excused for wearing an air of surprise at the unusual huzzaing and clapping of hands of the gentlemen, and the ecstacy of the ladies in the balconies of the Three Tuns and Rummer tavern in the City. The applause was not for Great Brunswick but for the Earl of Sutherland. The people in the balcony remembered that in King William’s days, Lord Sutherland had been insulted in that very tavern. He had drunk King William’s health on his birthday, and the Jacobites present flourished their swords and vapoured about the Earl as if they would slay him and all Protestantism with him.

THE ROYAL ENTRY.

The stately line—and it was a right pompous affair—was a little cumbrous, but it was well kept together, from the kettle-drums and trumpeters, followed by hosts of officials, troops, coaches, &c., to the dragoons who snatched a drink from the people, as they brought up the rear. Perhaps the road about the east end of Pall Mall was the most joyous; for there the balconies and galleries were filled with people who had something to satisfy besides curiosity or loyalty, and who had been attracted thither by the promise that all the fronts of the balconies and galleries should have ‘broad flat tops large enough to hold plates and bottles.’ The spectators there were primed to any pitch of loyalty as his Majesty passed.

THE PLAYERS’ HOMAGE.

At night, the stage paid its first homage to the new sovereign. Graceful Wilks spoke an ‘occasional prologue’ at the theatre in Drury Lane; and loyal and dramatic people bought it in the house or at Jacob Tonson’s over against Catherine Street, Strand, for twopence. But while Wilks was loyal, he had an Irish Roman Catholic servant, who was so outspokenly Jacobite, that the player discharged him, lest evil might follow to himself. The fellow, however, had what the French call ‘the courage of his opinions,’ but not the discretion which many had who shared them. He went down to the colour-yard at St. James’s, drew his sword upon the flag, abused the new king, gave a tipsy hurrah for his ‘lawful sovereign,’ and knew little more till he found himself next morning aroused from the straw to answer a charge of treason. He pleaded ‘liquor,’ and was allowed the benefit of his hard-drinking.

THE AFFAIRS OF SCOTLAND.

The press at this moment burst into unusual activity. There was especially great activity in and about the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row. It was from under that well-known literary emblem that Baker, the publisher, issued the popular edition of a work that all the world was soon reading, for exactly opposite reasons. Baker had, somehow, got possession of the Jacobite Lockhart’s manuscript of his ‘Memoirs concerning the Affairs of Scotland, from Queen Anne’s Accession to the Throne to the commencement of the Union of the two kingdoms of Scotland and England, in May, 1707. With an Account of the Origin and Progress of the designed Invasion from France, in March, 1708. And some Reflections on the Ancient State of Scotland.’ On the same title-page, notice was made of ‘an Introduction, showing the reason for publishing these Memoirs at this juncture.’

These Memoirs treat with immense severity all the leading Whig noblemen and gentlemen of Scotland. The book was therefore read with avidity, by the Tories, or Jacobites. But many Tories who had rallied from the Whig or Hanoverian side were handled quite as roughly, to the great delight of their former colleagues, and to a certain satisfaction on the part of present confederates. The volume showed both Whigs and Tories where their enemies were to be found, and it was accordingly read by both to the same end. But, it also recognised no other king than James the Third of England, and Eighth of Scotland, and, therefore, crafty Baker had an introduction written for the Whig party; that is to say, it warned all loyal people to put no trust now in men who had pretended to reconcile a sham fidelity to Queen Anne with a real one to her brother; men who, in 1708, had hoped to set aside the Protestant succession. ‘And if,’ says the last paragraph of the Introduction, ‘a rebellion of that Black Dye was carried on against a Queen of the greatest Indulgence to their Follies, and who was wickedly represented by them as having concealed Inclinations to serve their Interest, and keep the Crown in trust for their King, what Rancour, what Hellish Malice, may not King George expect from a Faction who put their Country in a Flame to oppose his Succession, and were reducing it to a Heap of Ruins to prevent his being Sovereign of the Soil!’

A ROYAL PROCLAMATION.

One of King George’s first acts was to issue a proclamation against the ‘Pretender,’ in which the reward of 100,000l. was promised to any person who should apprehend him, if he attempted to land in the British dominions.

CHAPTER II.

(1714.)

he king’s proclamation against the Pretender, in which 100,000l. was offered for the capturing him alive, caused angry discussion in the Commons. Pulteney said, in his lofty way, that if the Pretender did not come over, the money would be saved; and, if he did, the sum would be well laid out in the catching of him! Campion and Shippen denounced the outlay, and Sir William Wyndham, casting blame on the king’s words, was called upon to assign a reason for his censure. Wyndham would not condescend to explain. By a vote of 208 to 129 he was subjected to be reprimanded by the Speaker. The minority withdrew from the House, and when the Speaker reproved the Jacobite member, and extolled his own lenity in the words and spirit of the reproof, Wyndham would neither admit the justice of the censure, nor acknowledge any obligation to him who administered it.

CARTE, THE JACOBITE.

‘What will King Lewis do for the Chevalier?’ was the next query of the Londoners. The King of France and Navarre soon showed his indisposition to do anything for the substantial good of the Stuarts. Quidnuncs in the Cheapside taverns made light of ‘your James III.’ They advised him to learn to get his bread by tile-making, by cutting corns, by selling Geneva, or by turning horse-doctor. They cocked their hats as they swaggered home on the causeway, but the low whistling of a Jacobite air, by some hopeful person on the opposite side of the street, showed them that the White Rose was not so withered as they thought it to be. Men’s minds were anxious as to coming struggles, though the Hanoverians affected much, and well-founded, confidence. Little else was thought of. The newspapers seemed to wake up from absorbing contemplation when they announced, as if they scarcely had time for the doing of it, that ‘about a fortnight ago died Mr. William Pen, the famous Quaker.’ One man, at least, as grave as Pen, stooped to make a joke, in order to show his principles. He walked abroad in a lay habit, but there were many people who passed by, or met him in the street, who very well knew Mr. Carte, the ex-reader of the Abbey Church, at Bath. He had avoided taking the oaths which were supposed to secure the allegiance of the swearer to the Hanoverian king. Mr. Carte, happening to be overtaken in the streets by a shower of rain, was accosted by a coachman with the cry of ‘Coach, your reverence?’ ‘No, honest friend,’ replied the nonjuring parson, ‘this is no reign for me to take a coach in!’ Smaller jokes cost some men their lives. A nod or a shrug was a perilous luxury. At the first court held at St. James’s, Colonel Chudleigh, a zealous Whig, marked some jocular vivacity on the part of Mr. Aldworth, M.P. for New Windsor. The Colonel took it in an offensive light, and when exchange of words had heated him, he cast the most offensive epithet he could think of at Aldworth, by calling him ‘Jacobite!’ Almost at the foot of the king’s throne, it was nearly equivalent to calling Aldworth ‘Liar!’ The two disputants descended the stairs, entered a coach together, and drove to Mary-le-Bone fields. In a few minutes after the two angry men had alighted, the Colonel stretched Aldworth dead upon the grass, and returned alone to the levee. This was the second bloodshed in the old Jacobite and Hanoverian quarrel.

AN OLD AND NEW LORD CHANCELLOR.

Shortly after this duel, Lord Townshend was seen to enter Lord Chancellor Harcourt’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from which he soon after issued, carrying with him the Purse and Great Seal. These symbols of power he had obtained by warrant signed by the king’s hand. On his way from Lord Harcourt’s house to the palace, Townshend left word with Lord Cowper to wait on the king at St. James’s at one o’clock,—and men who saw my Lord on his way made, probably, as shrewd guess as himself as to the result of his visit.

The king received him in the closet. Cowper’s acute eye recognised the Purse and Seal lying in the window. His Majesty, in a few words in French, shortly committed them to his keeping, ‘having,’ says Cowper in his Diary, ‘been well satisfied with the character he had heard of me.’ Cowper replied in English, saying, among things less noteworthy, ‘that he had surrendered the Great Seal to the late Queen, believing she was going into measures which would raise France again, and ruin the common cause.’

After the new Chancellor had taken his leave, the following little dramatic scene occurred. ‘The Prince was in the outer room,’ says Cowper, ‘and made me a very handsome and hearty compliment both in French and English, and entered very kindly into talk with me. Among other things, speaking of the Princess’s coming, I wished she was here while the weather was good, lest she should be in danger in her passage; he said Providence had hitherto so wonderfully prospered his family’s succeeding to the Crown in every respect, by some instances, that he hoped it would perfect it, and believed they should prosper in every circumstance that remained.’

PREPARATIONS FOR THE CORONATION.

The next circumstance was the spectacle of the coronation, which soon followed that of the public entry. Among the advertisements offering accommodation to see the show, there was one of a house, near the Abbey, ‘with an excellent prospect, and also with a back door out of Thieving Lane into the house. There will be a good fire,’ it is added, ‘and a person to attend with all manner of conveniences.’ Meanwhile, Mr. Noble’s shop in the New Exchange, Strand, was beset by ladies, or their servants, eager to buy the Coronation favour with the Union Arms, which had been sanctioned by the Earl Marshal, who had also (it is to be hoped, with reluctance) approved of the poetical motto without which the favour was not to be sold:

King George, our Defender

From Pope and Pretender.

—There was a great pinning of them on as breast knots and shoulder knots, and a good deal of gallantry and flirtation went on between young ladies and gentlemen helping to adorn each other.

THE SCENE IN THE ABBEY.

The ceremony was of the usual sort. King George was crowned King of France, as well as of Great Britain and Ireland. In proof of his right, ‘two persons, representing the Dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy,’ consorted with peers of more sterling coinage. These ‘persons’ were, on this occasion, a couple of players. They wore crimson velvet mantles, lined with white sarcenet, furred with miniver, and powdered with ermine. Each of them held in his hand a ‘cap of cloth of gold, also furred and powdered with ermine.’ They did homage to the king, as the English peers did, and when these put on their coronets in the royal presence, the sham Dukes clapped their caps jauntily on their heads. This part of the spectacle was the only part that afforded merriment to the Jacobite nobility, all of whom were present, from Bolingbroke, with his three bows bringing his head to the ground, to James II.’s old mistress, the Countess of Dorchester, who made saucy remarks on all that passed.

WHIGS AND JACOBITES.

The Whig Lady Cowper says in her Memoirs that the Jacobites looked as cheerful as they could, but were very peevish with every one that spoke to them. There was no remedy for them, remarks my Lady in her Diary, but patience. ‘So everybody was pleased, or pretended to be so.’ Lady Dorchester is an exception to the rule. When Archbishop Tenison went round the throne, formally asking the consent of the people at large to the making of the new king, the lively Jacobite countess remarked to Lady Cowper, ‘Does the old fool think anybody here will say no! to him, when there are so many drawn swords?’ The will was there, but the expression of it was kept down. Lady Dorchester was not the only saucily-disposed lady present. The Tory Lady Nottingham rudely shoved the ex-Tory Lady Cowper from her place. The latter found refuge on the pulpit stairs. ‘Her ill-breeding,’ says Lady Cowper, in her Diary, ‘got me the best place in the Abbey, for I saw all the ceremony, which few besides did. The lords that were over against me, seeing me thus mounted, said to my lord that they hoped I would preach. To which, my lord laughing, answered, he believed that I had zeal enough for it, but that he did not know I could preach.’ To which my Lord Nottingham answered, ‘Oh, my lord, indeed you must pardon me, she can and has preached for the last four years such doctrines as, had she been prosecuted in any court for them, your lordship yourself could not defend!’ After this little passage, when the scene was changed to Westminster Hall, the usual challenge was fruitlessly made by the hereditary champion. The banquet was held and came to an end. The king and guests departed. The weary waiting-men took their refreshment, and when they came to collect the ‘properties’ of the scene—plate, knives, forks, viands, table cloths—nearly all had disappeared. Great outcry arose, and the rogues were commanded in advertisements to make restitution, or dreadful penalty was to follow; but they seem to have kept all they took that day, and to have escaped detection.

TORY MOBS.

The day did not pass off decorously in the streets. Some unwelcome cries reached the king’s ears as he walked along the platform between the Abbey and the Hall. At night, Tory mobs, on pretence that the Whigs, by the motto on their ‘favours,’ showed a disposition to ‘burn the Pope and the Pretender, with Dr. Sacheverel to boot,’ lit up bonfires, danced round them to rebel airs, and while some of the celebrants shouted for Sacheverel, others uttered blasphemy and ill-wishes against King George. In country places, similar incidents occurred; but messengers were despatched thither, and they soon returned, bringing the worst of the offenders with them through London to its various prisons. York, Norwich, and Bedford; Reading, Taunton, Bristol, and Worcester, yielded the greatest number of seditious rioters. A boy, twelve years of age, was brought up as leader of the Taunton mob! The most notable person bagged by the messengers was Alderman Perks of Worcester. The Jacobites in London witnessed his passage to Newgate with manifestations that showed they looked on him as a martyr. On the other hand, the Irish Protestants in London made a manifestation in favour of Church and Government. In commemoration of the delivery of their fathers from the massacre in Ireland of so many of their contemporaries, in October 1641, by the Papists, these Whig loyalists marched in procession at 10 A.M. to St. Dunstan’s, where they heard a sermon from Dr. Storey, Dean of Limerick. At noon, they again marched in procession to the Old King’s Head, Holborn, where they dined, drank, and cheerfully celebrated the massacre in which so many innocent persons had perished.

THE ROYAL FAMILY IN THE PARK.

Serious as the times were, the king and royal family manifested no fear. They were unostentatiously brave. The most bitter Tory could not but admire them, walking round St. James’s Park, in a November afternoon, almost unattended; not guarded at all. This too was at the time when the Attorney-General was ‘prosecuting authors,’ as the journals have it, ‘for reflecting expressions in their writings against the king.’ The Government were at that very moment complaining of seditious meetings being held, by the encouragement of some whose duty it was to suppress them; meetings which were accompanied by rioting, and often followed by murder or attempts at such crime. It was a time when almost all the lords in office are said to have received the Pretender’s ‘Declaration’ and his other manifestoes by ‘foreign post’ or the ambassadors’ bags. In November 1714, a pamphlet was published with this significant title: ‘The sentiments of our Forefathers relative to Succession to the Crown, Hereditary Right, and Non-Resistance. Dedicated to all those who prefer Hereditary Right to a Parliamentary one, notwithstanding the latter is likely to take place. By a Lover of Right.’ SEDITIOUS PAMPHLETS. Every night were significant works like this, and even more scandalous pamphlets, cried through the streets. As yet, however, no vindictive measures were adopted. It was thought politic to give the Tories good words, but not to put any trust in them. Their audacity sometimes challenged prosecution. Mr. Pottes was arrested for a ‘provoking’ pamphlet: ‘Reasons for Declaring a War against France;’ and messengers were busy in looking after the author of a ‘Test offered to the Consideration of Electors of Great Britain, which at one view discovers those Members of Parliament, who were for or against the Hanoverian Succession.’ A thousand pounds was the sum offered to anyone who could and would discover the author of the ‘Test,’ and half that sum was offered for the discovery of the printer. The Government dreaded the effects of these writings on the elections to the first new parliament under King George. When the matter was happily over, the ‘squibs’ did not die out. The Whigs, to show how Tories had triumphed, published a (supposed) list of expenses of a Tory election in the West. Among the numerous items were: ‘For roarers of the word, Church! 40l.’ ‘For several gallons of Tory Punch drank on the tombstones, 30l.’ ‘For Dissenter Damners, 40l.’ The Tory journal writers laughed, and expressed a hope that at the forthcoming anniversary of the birthday of glorious Queen Anne, there would be more enthusiastic jollity than on the natal anniversaries of Queen Elizabeth and King William, which were still annually kept. The public were requested to remember that Anne as much excelled every English sovereign since Elizabeth, as Elizabeth had excelled every one before her. Whigs looked at one another in taverns and asked, ‘Does the fellow mean that Brandy Nan was better than King George?’

JACOBITE CLUBS.

In the Tory pamphlet, ‘Hannibal not at our gates,’ the writer sought to persuade the people that there was no danger a-foot. In the Whig pamphlet ‘Hannibal at our gates, or the progress of Jacobitism, with the present danger of the Pretender,’ &c., Londoners were especially warned of the reality of the peril. The Jacobite clubs, it was said, had ceased to toast the Jacobite king, or ‘impostor,’ under feigned names. They were described as ‘so many publick training schools where the youth of the nation were disciplined into an opinion of the justice of his title,’ and into various other opinions which were strongly denounced. The writer has an especial grievance in the fact that an honest Englishman cannot show respect to King William by keeping his birthday, without running the chance of being in the Counter as a rioter, if he only happens to fall into the hands of a Tory magistrate. Respect for princes, according to this Whig, is a courteous duty, and, forthwith, he speaks of the Chevalier as a ‘notorious bastard,’ and of his mother, Mary of Modena, as a ‘woman of a bloody and revengeful temper.’

ROYALTIES.

Rash deeds followed harsh words. Among the persons assaulted in the streets, on political grounds, was the Duke of Richmond, who was roughly treated one dark night. Such an attack on a Duke who was an illegitimate son of the Stuart King Charles II., by a Popish mistress, Louise de Querouaille, was taken by the Government as a certain evidence of a perhaps too exuberant loyalty. Nevertheless, the king continued to go about without fear. He drove almost unattended to dine or sup with various gentlemen and noblemen. We hear that ‘His Majesty honoured Sir Henry St. John, father of Viscount Bolingbroke, with his royal presence at dinner.’ The king thus sat at table with a man whose son he would unreluctantly have hanged! As for the Prince and Princess of Wales, they were as often at the play in times of personal danger, as princes and princesses are in times of no peril whatever. Perhaps they trusted a little in the proclamation against Papists and Nonjurors, whereby the former were disarmed, and were (or could be) confined to their houses, or be kept to a limit within five miles of their residences. The oath of allegiance was to be taken by all disaffected persons, and among the drollest street scenes of the day was that of some Dogberry stopping a man on the causeway and testing his loyalty by putting him on his affidavit!

AT ST. JAMES’S.

There was zeal enough and to spare among the clergy of all parties. Not very long after the Princess of Wales was established at St. James’s, Robinson, bishop of London, sent in a message to her by Mrs. Howard, to the effect that, being Dean of the Chapel, he thought it his duty to offer to satisfy any doubts or scruples the Princess might entertain with respect to the Protestant religion, and to explain what she might not yet understand. The Princess was naturally ‘a little nettled.’—‘Send him away civilly,’ she said, ‘though he is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refused to be Empress for the Protestant religion, do not understand it fully.’ The Bishop thought that the august lady did not understand it at all, for the Princess had declared among her ladies ‘Dr. Clarke shall be one of my favourites. His writings are the finest things in the world.’ Now Dr. Clarke was looked upon as a heretic by Robinson, for Clarke was not a Trinitarian according to the creed so-called of Athanasius. Lady Nottingham, High Church to the tips of her fingers, denounced the Doctor as a heretic. Lady Cowper gently asked her to quote any heretical passage from Dr. Clarke’s books. Clarke’s books! The lady declared she never had and never would look into them. Cowper mildly rebuked her. Cowper’s royal mistress laughed, and the ‘Duchess of St. Alban’s,’ says Lady Cowper, ‘put on the Princess’s shift, according to Court Rules, when I was by, she being Groom of the Stole.’

ELECTIONEERING TACTICS.

The first election of Members of Parliament which was about to take place excited the liveliest and most serious interest throughout the kingdom, but especially in London. Mighty consequences depended on the returns. To influence these, Popping issued from under his sign of the Black Raven, in Paternoster Row, a pamphlet entitled, ‘Black and White Lists of all Gentlemen who voted in Person, for or against the Protestant Religion, the Hanoverian Succession, the Trade and the Liberties of our Country, from the Glorious Revolution to the Happy Accession of King George.’ These lists, like others previously published, were as useful to the Jacobites as to the Hanoverians, and perhaps were intended to be so. A phrase in the Preface, which seems thorough Whig, was understood in every Jacobite coffee-house. ‘French Bankers, Friends of the Faction, are continually negotiating great Sums for Bills of Exchange upon London,—to support the Pretender’s party, and bribe Voters.’ The various questions to which these division lists refer are very numerous. Among them may be noted the names of those who voted for or against the Crown being given to the Prince of Orange,—of members who, in 1706, voted for tacking the Bill for preventing occasional Conformity, to a Money Bill, to secure its passing in the House of Lords; finally,—of those members ‘who are not numbered among Tackers or Sneakers.’ On the other hand, a decidedly Tory pamphlet was circulated, in which the Londoners, and, through them, Englishmen generally, were implored not to vote for men who wanted war, whatever might be the motive. It bids each elector bless the present peace, ‘while his sons are not pressed into the war nor his daughters made the followers of camps.’ This was bringing the subject thoroughly home to the bosoms of the Athenians.

ROYAL CHAPLAINS.

There were people who were to be more easily got at than the pamphleteers. Dr. Bramston, for a sermon preached in the Temple Church, was struck out of the list of Royal Chaplains. He published the discourse, for his justification. The most rabid Whig in the kingdom could find no hostility in it, nor the most rabid Tory any support. The Court found offence enough. Dr. Bramston and his fellow chaplains, who had read prayers to Queen Anne,—Dr. Browne, Dr. Brady, the Rev. Mr. Reeves of Reading, and the Rev. Mr. Whitfield, were informed that they were not only struck out of the list of her late Majesty’s chaplains, but that ‘they would not be continued when his Majesty is pleased to make a new choice.’ Compassion is not aroused for Dr. Brady, he being half of that compound author Tate and Brady, of whom many persons have had such unpleasant experience on recurring Sundays at church. Tate helped Brady to ‘improve’ the Psalms, after the fashion in which he had ‘improved’ Shakespeare; and it is hard to say which king suffered most at his hands—King Lear or King David!

On the other hand, the feeling on the Jacobite side very much resembled that which is recorded in the ‘Memoirs of P. P., clerk of this Parish,’—in which parish, Jenkins, the farrier, ‘never shoed a horse of a Whig or fanatic, but he lamed him sorely.’ Turner, the collar-maker, was held to have been honoured by being clapt in the stocks for wearing an oaken bough on the 29th of May;—Pilcocks, the exciseman, was valued for the laudable freedom of speech which had lost him his office;—and White, the wheelwright, was accounted of good descent, his uncle having formerly been servitor at Maudlin College, where the glorious Sacheverel was educated!

THE CHEVALIER IN LONDON.

At a somewhat later period, a pamphlet was published, in which the Chevalier de St. George is introduced, saying:—‘Old Lewis assur’d me he would never desert my Interest, and he kept his Bona fide till he was drub’d into the humble Condition of su’ing for Peace, and I was seemingly to be sacrificed to the Resentment of my Enemies; but our dear Sister and the Tories concerted privately to elude the force of the Treaty, and kept me at Bar-le-Duc, from whence I made a Trip to Somerset House, but was soon Frighten’d away again by the sound of a Proclamation, at which Sir Patrick and I scour’d off. Soon after, dear Sister departed this mortal Life, but the Schemes being yet not entirely finish’d, and my good Friends not having the Spirit of Greece, Hanover whipt over before me.’ This passage will recall an incident in Mr. Thackeray’s ‘Esmond.’

CHAPTER III.

(1715.)

he second homage paid by the stage to the royal family was, in 1715, rendered in person by Tom Durfey. Tom had been occasionally a thorough Tory. Charles II. had leant on his shoulder. Great Nassau, nevertheless, enjoyed his singing. Queen Anne laughed loudly at his songs in ridicule of the Electress Sophia; and yet here was the Electress’s son, George I., allowing the Heir Apparent to be present at Tom’s benefit. This took place on January 3rd, 1715. On this occasion, Tom turned thorough Whig. After the play, he delivered an extraordinary speech to the audience on the blessings of the new system, the condition and merits of the royal family, and on the state of the nation as regarded foreign and domestic relations! At the other play-house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a piece was acted called the ‘Cobler of Preston,’ in which Kit Sly and his story were ‘lifted’ from the ‘Taming of the Shrew.’ Kit was played by Pinkethman. When he said, ‘Are you sure now that I’m your natural Lord and Master? I am devilishly afraid I am but a Pretender!’—the Whigs clapped till their hands were sore, and the Tories ‘pished’ at the poorness of the joke.

AT THE PLAY.

If more taste had been shown in those who catered for the royal family when they went to the play, it would have been as well. At an evening drawing room, in February, the Duchess of Roxburgh, hearing that the Princess of Wales was going to Drury Lane the following day, told the Countess of Lippe and Buckinberg that the play which was to be acted on that occasion ‘was such a one as nobody could see with a good reputation.’ ‘It was “The Wanton Wife,”’ says the Countess Cowper in her Diary, and the Princess’s irreproachable lady-in-waiting adds of Betterton’s play, which is better known by its second title, ‘The Amorous Widow,’—‘I had seen it once, and I believe there are few in town who had seen it so seldom; for it used to be a favourite play, and often bespoke by the ladies. I told this to the Princess, who resolved to venture going, upon my character of it.’ The result is admirably illustrative of the morals of the time.—‘Went to the play with my mistress; and to my great satisfaction she liked it as well as any play she had seen; and it certainly is not more obscene than all comedies are.’ ‘It were to be wished,’ adds the lady, ‘our stage was chaster, and I cannot but hope, now it is under Mr. Steele’s direction, that it will mend.’

FLIGHT OF ORMOND.

While Princesses and their ladies were amusing themselves in this way, the public found amusement in watching the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was to be seen looking, half the day long, through his windows into the street. They knew therefrom that he had been turned out of his Lord Chamberlainship. Whigs who rejoiced at this disgrace were almost as glad at seeing the Earl of Cardigan leisurely riding down Piccadilly. He had nothing more to do, they said, with the Buckhounds. It was reported in the coffee-houses that Dean Swift had been arrested. This was not correct. It was quite true, however, that Lord Oxford was not only in the Tower, but was kept in closer restraint than ever. While Tories were buying Ormond’s portrait, ‘engraved by Grebelin,’ for 1s. 6d., as the portrait of a leader who had not fled, and was not under ward in the Tower, there was one morning partly a cry, partly a whisper running through the town,—‘Ormond’s away!’ It was time. Secretary Stanhope had impeached him and other, but less noble, peers, of High Treason; and the tender-hearted Whig, Sir Joseph Jekyll, had said in the Commons, ‘If there is room for mercy, he hoped it would be shown to the noble Duke.’ When the warrant reached Richmond, the nest was warm but the bird had flown.

On Sundays, the general excitement nowhere abated. At church, political rather than religious spirit rendered congregations attentive. They listened with all their ears to a clergyman, when he referred to the king’s supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and when he had to enumerate the royal titles in the prayer before the sermon. If he omitted to note the supremacy, and the congregation were Whiggish, there was a loyal murmur of disapproval. If he happened to speak of his Majesty, not as ‘King by the Grace of God,’ but as ‘King by Divine Permission,’ the more sensitive loyalists would make a stir, withdraw from the church; and certain of the papers would be full of a holy horror at such proceedings on the part of the minister.

SACHEVEREL.

In the sermon preached at St. Andrew’s, on the 20th of January—the Thanksgiving day for the accession of George I.—Sacheverel (while the king was being almost deified at St. Paul’s) reflected severely on the Government, and obliquely on the king himself and his family. Court, city, and army were alike charged with degrading vices. With still greater boldness did he attack the ministry for appointing as a Thanksgiving time the anniversary of the day on which Charles I. was brought to trial. Finally, Sacheverel denounced the Crown’s interference with the clergy. They who advised that course, he said, might any day counsel the king to commit acts hostile to both Law and Gospel. During the delivery of this political harangue, the Doctor’s friends were disturbed by an individual who took notes of the sermon. They said ‘it was more criminal to steal the Doctor’s words out of his mouth in the church than to pick a man’s pocket in the market, or to rob him on the highway.’ This sermon, which fired London, seems now to be but a poor thing. The text was from Matthew xxiii. 24-26. The discourse affirmed that national sins brought national punishment, especially ‘the sin of that day,’ which, it was inferred, had for its penalty—the present sad condition of England. The Jacobite spirit manifested itself most sharply in a passage referring to the regicides ‘who were concerned in the bloody actions of that bloody tragedy of that glorious martyr, King Charles the First, who was next of all to the Son of God himself.’ After murdering the king, the greatest sin, said Sacheverel, was to usurp the place of the heir. Every hearer felt that George I. was here hinted at as the usurper of the seat which by right belonged to James III. The putting to death of Charles, Sacheverel declared to be ‘the greatest sin that ever was.’ The ‘rebellion of the creature against the Sovereign’ was censured almost as heavily. The censure appeared to point against those who dethroned James II., but every hearer felt that it was directed against those who kept the throne—against James II.’s son and heir.

POLITICS IN THE PULPIT.

When the discourse was ended, the congregation fell upon the note-taker. They demanded his papers, and were not enlightened by his exclamation:—‘Ah! you’ve spoilt my design!’ Each party took him for an adversary, and the man would have been murdered had not Sacheverel ordered his clerk and servant to go to his rescue. When it was discovered that the victim was ‘one Mologni (sic), an Irish Papist,’ the Whigs were probably sorry that they had not rolled him in the gutter that then ran down the centre of Holborn Hill.

CALUMNY AGAINST SACHEVEREL.

Every possible (and impossible) sin was charged upon Sacheverel for this sermon, especially by the notorious bookseller and pamphleteer, John Dunton. This worthy ally of Hanover, in his ‘Bungay, or the false brother proved his own executioner,’ which was circulating in London, immediately after the sermon of January 20th, roundly accused Sacheverel of being ‘a man of the bottle that can sit up whole nights drinking until High Church is drunk down, and laid low or flat under the table, as you were at Sir J. N——rs in Oxfordshire, which occasioned that sarcasm, There lies the pillar of our Church.’ Sacheverel was accused of being guilty of the most profligate gallantry. His own clerk, it was said, had to rouse him up from cards, on a Sunday, when service time was at hand! and as for blasphemy, Sacheverel, it was affirmed, could never make reference to Dissenters without damning them for Hanoverians, and consigning them to their master, the Devil! The list of crimes would have been incomplete if it had not closed with the assertion that Sacheverel was at heart really an Atheist!

Tavern Whigs waxed religiously wrathful against Sacheverel. One Dunne, in a Southwark tavern, after roaring over his drink against the Tory parson, reeled forth on a dark and stormy night, and happened to come on a funeral by torch-light, on its way to St. Saviour’s. A clergyman walked with it, as was then the custom. ‘D—— me!’ exclaimed Dunne, ‘here’s the Doctor of Divinity! I’ll have a bout with him.’ The clergyman was not Dr. Sacheverel, but his curate, Mr. Pocock. It was all one to Dunne, who assaulted the curate, pulled off his hat, tore off his peruke, and finally knocked him down. Dunne was conveyed away by the watch. The Tory ‘Post Boy’ was sarcastic on the incident, ‘The clergy,’ it said, ‘within the bills of mortality, who are about six feet high and wear black wigs, are desired to meet at Child’s coffee-house, St. Paul’s Churchyard, next Thursday, in order to consider proper methods to distinguish themselves from Dr. Sacheverel, that they may not be murthered by way of proxy instead of the said Doctor.’ The other side remarked, that there would be no safety for tall men with flaxen wigs till Sacheverel was hanged out of the way.

DANGER IN THE DISTANCE.

On similar occasions in London there were similar manifestations in an opposite sense. ‘On the eve of the Pretender’s birthday (10th of June), they make great boasts of what they will do to-morrow,’ said the Whig papers, ‘which, they say, is the anniversary of his birth. But it is believed that the High Church wardens, who pretend a right to the bells, will not be very fond of hanging in the ropes. A serenade of warming pans will be more suitable for the occasion, and brickbats may serve instead of clappers for a brickmaking brat.’

FLIGHT OF BOLINGBROKE.

In March, London had been called from personal to national considerations. There was a phrase in the king’s speech, on opening Parliament in this month, which sounded like a trumpet-call to battle. ‘The Pretender,’ said the Prince who had leapt into his place, ‘who still resides in Lorraine, threatens to disturb us, and boasts of the assistance he still expects here, to repair his former disappointments.’ The national prosperity was said to be obstructed by his pretensions and intrigues. In reply to this, the faithful Parliament expressed all becoming indignation; and Jacobites who felt unsafe in London began to take measures for securing a refuge. On the 18th of March, or as some reports say, the 5th of April, a nobleman seemed to court notice at Drury Lane Theatre. He was now with one friend, now with another, among the audience. He was quite as much among the actors, having a word with Booth (who had experienced his liberality on the night that ‘Cato’ was first played) anon, gossiping smartly with Wilks, and exchanging merry passages of speech with delicious Mrs. Oldfield. All who saw him felt persuaded that the Viscount Bolingbroke had reason to be above all fear, or he would not have been there, and in such bright humour, too. Bolingbroke ordered a play for the next night, left the house, and half an hour after, having darkened his eyebrows, clapped on a black wig, and otherwise disguised himself, was posting down to Dover under the name of La Vigne, without a servant, but having a Frenchman with him who acted as courier. The fugitive reached Dover at six in the morning, but he was detained by tempestuous weather till two, when, despite the gale, the wind being fair, the master of a Dover hoy agreed to carry him over to Calais, where Bolingbroke landed at six in the evening. An hour later, he was laughing over the adventure with the governor of the town, who had invited him to dinner. At the same hour the next night, all London was in a ferment with the news of this flight of Bolingbroke. The Privy Council was immediately summoned. They were alarmed, but powerless; and finding themselves helpless, they had nothing better to do than to commit to Newgate the honest man who had brought the intelligence to London!

BOLINGBROKE PAMPHLETS.

Bolingbroke’s enemies and friends were alike busy, the first to injure, the latter to defend him. His foes issued, at the price of 4d., ‘A merry letter from Lord Bol——ke to a certain favourite mistress near Bloomsbury Square.’ It was ‘printed and sold by the pamphlet sellers of London and Westminster.’ It was in doggrel rhyme, not witty but, emphatically, ‘beastly.’ Towards the conclusion, the following mischievous lines occur, foreshadowing invasion and his own return:—

In the meantime, I hope

The mist will clear up,

That the thunder you’ll hear

May soon purge the air,

And then that the coast

May be clear at the last.

BOLINGBROKE’S CHARACTER.

This unclean and menacing pamphlet offended Tories who were not altogether Jacobites. It was not answered, no one could stoop to do that, but it was followed by a sixpenny pamphlet, from More’s, ‘near Fleet Street,’ in which Bolingbroke was rather ill-defended by one of those friends whose precious balsam aggravates rather than heals. The writer, however, was earnest. With regard to Bolingbroke’s idle talk at table over his wine, the anonymous advocate observed:—‘My Lord, everybody knows, drank deep enough of those Draughts which generally produce Secrets, and had Enemies enough to give Air to the least unguarded Expressions in favour of the Pretender.’ To the not unnatural query of the Whigs,—‘Why did he fly?’ Bolingbroke’s champion loftily replies:—‘My Lord had too elegant a Taste of Life to part with it, to gratify only the Resentments of his Enemies! If he was a Rake, it was his nature that was to be blamed; if he was a Villain, no one could charge him with hypocritically attempting to hide it.’ ‘As to personal Frailties, his Lordship had his Share, and never strove to hide them by the sanctified cover which Men of high Stations generally affect; whose private Intrigues are carried on with as much Gravity as the Mysteries of State. His Faults and Levities were owing to his Complexion, and that Life and Humour with which he enlivened them, made them so pleasing that those who condemned the Action could not but approve the Person. A vein of Mirth and Gaiety were as inseparable from his Conversation, as an Air of Love and Dignity from his Personage, and a Greatness of Spirit from his Soul.’

Meanwhile, Lady St. John, Bolingbroke’s mother, was showing to everybody at Court a letter from her son to his father, in which he protested that he was perfectly innocent of carrying on any intrigue with the Pretender. Of which letter, says Lady Cowper, ‘I have taken a copy, but I believe it won’t serve his turn.’

POLITICS IN LIVERY.

Court and parliament being agitated, the lackeys imitated their betters. The footmen, in waiting for their masters, who were members of Parliament, had free access to Westminster Hall. For six and thirty years they had imitated their masters, by electing a ‘Speaker’ among themselves, whenever the members made a more exalted choice within their own House. The Whig lackeys were for Mr. Strickland’s man. The Tory liveried gentry resolved to elect Sir Thomas Morgan’s fellow. A battle-royal ensued in place of an election. The combatants were hard at it, when the House broke up, and the members wanted their coaches. Wounds were then hastily bandaged, but their pain nursed wrath. On the next night, the hostile parties, duly assembled, attacked each other with fury. The issue was long uncertain, but finally the Tory footmen gained a costly victory, in celebration of which Sir Thomas Morgan’s servant, terribly battered, was carried three times triumphantly round the Hall. There was no malice. The lackeys clubbed together for drink at a neighbouring ale-house, where the host gave them a dinner gratis. The dinner was made expressly to create insatiable thirst, and before the banquet came to a close, every man was as drunk as his master.

SATIRE.

In March, 1715, Bishop Burnet, the man more hated by the Jacobites than any other, died. These perhaps further indulged their hatred of the very name, by attributing to his youngest son, Thomas Burnet, the authorship of a famous Tory ballad, which was long praised, condemned, quoted or sung in London coffee-houses,—it was named

BISHOP BURNET’S DESCENT INTO HELL.

The devils were brawling at Burnet’s descending,

But at his arrival they left off contending;

Old Lucifer ran his dear Bishop to meet,

And thus the Archdevil, th’ Apostate did greet:—

‘My dear Bishop Burnet I’m glad beyond measure,

This visit, unlook’d for, gives infinite pleasure.

And, oh! my dear Sarum, how go things above?

Does George hate the Tories, and Whigs only love?’

‘Was your Highness in propriâ personâ to reign,

You could not more justly your empire maintain.’

‘And how does Ben Moadley?’—‘Oh! he’s very well,

A truer blue Whig you have not in hell.’

‘Hugh Peters is making a sneaker within

For Luther, Buchanan, John Knox, and Calvin;

And when they have toss’d off a brace of full bowls,

You’ll swear you ne’er met with much honester souls.

‘This night we’ll carouse in spite of all pain.

Go, Cromwell, you dog, and King William unchain,

And tell him his Gilly is lately come down,

Who has just left his mitre, as he left his crown.

Whose lives till they died, in our service were spent;

They only come hither who never repent.

Let Heralds aloud then our victories tell;

Let George reign for ever!’—‘Amen!’ cried all hell.

Court-life was certainly not particularly exemplary. A Stuart Princess would not have dared to seek reception at St. James’s, but the mistress of a Stuart King was welcomed there. The old Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, chief of the royal Husseydom in the apartments of Charles II., was presented to the Princess of Wales by the Duchess’s granddaughter, the Countess of Berkeley, Lady of the Bedchamber, then in waiting! According to the records of the time, the Duchess was ‘most graciously received.’ Next evening (it was in March, 1715) this painted abomination of a woman sat at the king’s side, at a supper given by the Duke of Richmond, in Priory Gardens. The royal harridan’s granddaughter sat on the other hand of George I.! Her husband, the Earl of Berkeley, and the Earl of Halifax made up this highly respectable party of six.

FLYING REPORTS.

This laxity of moral practice, at Court, was made capital of by the Jacobites. Throughout April and May, they proclaimed that there was not a man about St. James’s who was not noted for disaffection or lukewarmness to Church principles. There was a report that a ‘new Academy was to be erected at Hampstead, for instructing youths in principles agreeable to the present times.’ The existing Parliament was declared to be as capable of burning Articles, Homilies, and Liturgies, as ‘Sacheverel’s Parliament’ was of burning the Oxford decree. Episcopalian clergymen were said to be looked on with such small favour by the Government, that a prelatic military chaplain in Scotland was removed by the authorities in London on the sole ground of his being an Episcopalian. This, the Duke of Montrose told the Archbishop of York, ‘could not be got over.’ Presbytery would be more perilous to England than Popery; but both menaces would disappear, if George and his hopeful family were ‘sent back to their own German dominions, for which Nature seems to have much better fitted them.’[1] This was said to be the opinion of the most sensible Whigs, as well as of all the Tories in England.

DECREE IN THE ‘GAZETTE.’

There is little doubt that the Tories in London were exasperated to the utmost by the disregard which the Whig and the Dissenting preachers manifested for the decree in the ‘Gazette’ which forbade the meddling with State affairs in the pulpit. Bradbury made his chapel echo again with demands for justice against traitors. Tories called him the ‘preaching Incendiary.’ They had previously treated Bishop Burnet as ‘a lay preacher who takes upon him, after a series of lewdness and debauchery, in his former life, to set up for an instructor of Ministry, and impudently tells the Ministers of State, the King’s Majesty, and all, that he expects the last Ministry should be sacrificed to his resentments, and their heads be given to him in a charger, as that Lewd Dancer did to John the Baptist.’[2]

Humble Jacobites, on the other hand, were often mercilessly treated. Ill words spoken of the king brought the hangman’s lash round the loins of the speaker. Half the Whig roguery of London went down to Brentford in May, to see a well-to-do Tory butcher whipped at the cart’s tail from Brentford Bridge round the Market Place. That roguery was very much shocked to see wicked Tory influence at work in favour of the High Church butcher; for, he not only was allowed refreshment, but the cart went so fast and the lash so slowly, that the Hanoverian cockneys swore it was not worth while going so far to see so little.

THE LASH.

To their loyal souls, ample compensation was afforded soon after. There was a Jacobite cobler of Highgate who, on the king’s birthday, was seen in the street in a suit of mourning. On the Chevalier’s natal day, he boldly honoured it by putting on his state dress, as holder of some humble official dignity. Jacobites who, on the same occasion, wore an oaken sprig or a white rose, well-known symbols, could easily hide them on the approach of the authorities, but a beadle who came out in his Sunday livery, to glorify the ‘Pretender,’ was courting penalties by defying authority. The magnanimous cobler went through a sharp process of law, and he was then whipped up Highgate Hill and down again. To fulfil the next part of his punishment, the cobler was taken to Newgate, to which locality he was condemned for a year. People in those days went to see the prisoners in Newgate as they did the lions in the Tower, or the lunatics in Bedlam, and parties went to look at the cobler. If they were Tories, they were satisfied with what they saw, but Whigs turned away in disgust. ‘Why,’ said they, ‘the villain lives in the press-yard like a prince, and lies in lodgings at ten or twelve shillings a week!’ The disgusted Whig papers remarked that ‘he was not whipped half as badly as he deserved.’ They were not always thus dissatisfied. A too outspoken French schoolmaster, one Boulnois, was so effectually scourged for his outspokenness, from Stocks Market to Aldgate, that he died of it. The poor wretch was simply flogged to death. The Stuart party cried shame on the cruelty. The Hanoverians protested that there was nothing to cry at. The man was said to be not even a Frenchman, only an Irish Father Confessor in disguise! What else could he have been, since the Jacobites, before Boulnois was tied up, gave him wine and money. Such gifts to suffering political criminals were very common. THE PILLORY. An offender was placed in the pillory in Holborn, for having cursed the Duke of Marlborough and the ministry. He must have been well surrounded by sympathisers. Not a popular Whig missile reached him; and when, with his head and arms fixed in the uprights, his body being made to turn slowly round to the mob, he deliberately and loudly cursed Duke and ministry, as he turned, the delight of that mob, thoroughly Tory, knew no bounds. They even mounted the platform and stuffed his pockets with money.

A HARMLESS JACOBITE.

The author of ‘George III., his Court and family,’ in the introductory part illustrates the gentler side of George I.’s character, by quoting his remark when entrapped by a lady into drinking the Pretender’s health,—‘With all my heart! I drink to the health of all unfortunate princes.’ And again, when paying one of his numerous visits to private individuals in London, the king marked the embarrassment of his host as his Majesty looked on a portrait of the Chevalier de St. George, which the host had forgotten to remove. ‘It is a remarkable likeness,’ said the king, ‘a good family resemblance.’ Nor was he insensible to humour, if the following story, told in the above-named work, may be taken for a true one. ‘There was a gentleman who lived in the City, in the beginning of the reign of this Monarch, and was so shrewdly suspected of Jacobitism that he was taken up two or three times before the Council, but yet defended himself so dextrously, that they could fasten nothing on him. On the breaking out of the Rebellion in 1715, this person, who mixed some humour with his politics, wrote to the Secretary of State, that as he took it for granted that at a time like the present he should be taken up as usual for a Jacobite, he had only one favour to beg, that if the administration meant any such thing, they would do it in the course of next week; for, the week after, he was going down to Devonshire on his own business, which, without this explanation, would no doubt be construed as transacting the business of the Pretender. Lord Townshend, who was Secretary of State at that time, in one of his convivial moments with the king, showed him this letter, and asked him what his Majesty would direct to be done with such a fellow. “Pooh! pooh!” says the king, “there can be little harm in a man who writes so pleasantly!”’

[1] ‘Letter, from Perth to a gentleman in Stirling.’

[2] ‘Confederacy of the Press and the Pulpit for the blood of the last Ministry.’

CHAPTER IV.

(1715.)

he popular demonstrations troubled the authorities less than the expressed discontent of some of the soldiery. The Foot Guards especially had become clamorous at having to wear shirts that would not hold together, and uniforms that would go into holes, while the wearers were liable to punishment for what they could not prevent. On the anniversary of the king’s birthday (20th May), crowds of soldiers of the regiments of Guards paraded the streets, exhibited their linen garments on poles, and shouted, ‘Look at our Hanover shirts!’ Others stript off shirts and jackets, and flung them over the garden walls of St. James’s Palace and Marlborough House. Some of the men made a bonfire in front of Whitehall, and cast their shoddy garments into the flames! The soldiers were treated with peculiar consideration. Marlborough reviewed them in the Park, and then addressed them in a deprecatory speech which began with ‘Gentlemen!’ He acknowledged that they had grievances, promised that these should be redressed, informed them that he himself had ordered new clothes for them, and he almost begged that they would be so good as to wear the old ones till the new (including the shirts) were ready! The whole address showed that the soldiers were considered as worth the flattering. It ended with a ‘tag’ about ‘the best of kings,’ and as the tag was cheered, it was, doubtless, supposed that the flattery had not been administered in vain. Fears connected with the soldiery were certainly not groundless. A reward of 50l. was offered for the apprehension of Captain Wright, of Lord Wimbledon’s Horse. The Captain had written a letter to a friend in Ireland, which letter had probably fallen into the hands of ‘the king’s decypherer.’ The Government had, at all events, got at the contents. The offensive portion was to the effect that the Duke of Ormond would overcome all his enemies, and the writer expressed a hope that they should soon send George home again! The ‘loyal’ papers were not afraid to accuse the bishops of so far tampering with the soldiery as to encourage them in thinking, or even in saying, how much better off they were in Ormond’s days than now!

POLITICS IN THE ARMY.

The papers proved both the watchfulness and uneasiness which existed with respect to the army. One day it is recorded that a Colonel of the Guards was dismissed. As danger seemed to increase, a camp was formed in Hyde Park, whither a strong force of artillery was brought from the Tower. A sweep was made at the Horse Guards of suspected men, on some of whom commissions were said to have been found signed by the ‘Pretender!’ All absent officers were ordered to return at once to their posts in the three kingdoms. An important capture was supposed to have been made of a certain Captain Campbell. London was full of the news that Mr. Palmer, the messenger, was bringing the Captain to town; but the messenger arrived alone. He had let the Captain escape, and people who expected that Palmer would be hanged were disappointed that he was only turned out of his place.

LIEUTENANT KYNASTON.

At this period, Fountain Court, in the Strand, was a quiet spot, with good houses well-inhabited. In one of these lodged two Captains, Livings and Spencer, and a Lieutenant, John Kynaston. The last had got his appointment through sending ‘information,’ under the pseudonym of ‘Philo-Brittannus’ to the Secretary of War. The Lieutenant looked for further promotion if he could only discover something that the Government might think worth a valuable consideration. Kynaston lounged in coffee-houses, listened to gossip on the parade, and was very much at home among the Captains of all services, and especially of some who assembled in the little room behind the kitchen at the ‘Blew Postes,’ in Duke’s Court. But his well-regulated mind was so shocked at what he heard there that he unbosomed himself to the two Captains, his fellow-lodgers in Fountain Court. Loyalty prompted Kynaston to let King George know that his Majesty had dangerous enemies within his own capital. The Captains approved. But then, the idea of being an informer was hateful to Kynaston’s noble soul! The Captains thought it might be. On the other hand, to be silent would be to share the crime. His sacred Majesty’s life might be in peril. It was not acting the part of a base informer to put his Majesty on his guard. The Captains endorsed those sentiments as their own; and when Lieut. Kynaston went to make an alarming revelation to Mr. Secretary Pulteney, he carried in his pocket the certificates of the Captains that the bearer was a loyal and disinterested person, and that it gave them particular pleasure in being able to say so. Pulteney heard what the gallant gentleman, the principal in the affair, had to say, and he, forthwith, called together a Board of General Officers, with General Lumley for president, before which Kynaston and the naughty people whom he accused were brought face to face.

JACOBITE PLOTTERS.

The latter bore it very well. Among the first whom Kynaston charged as pestilent Jacobite traitors were a Cornhill draper and a peruque-maker from Bishopsgate Street. The Lieutenant declared that when he was present they had drunk the Pretender’s health. The honest tradesmen swore that they did not drink that toast, but that Kynaston had proposed it. They were set aside, while a lawyer and a doctor were brought before the Board for a similar offence. They pleaded their well-known principles. ‘Aye, aye,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘your principles are better known than your practice.’ This faint joke did not elicit a smile; and in the next accused individual, a ‘Captain D——,’ Kynaston caught a Tartar. The Lieutenant deposed mere ‘hearsay’ matter as to the accused being a Jacobite, but the Captain claimed to be sworn, and he then testified that Kynaston had said in the Captain’s hearing: ‘If I’m not provided for, I shall go into France,’ which was as much as to say he would go over to ‘the Pretender.’ FALSE ACCUSER. This pestilent Captain was then allowed to withdraw. ‘As he was departing the Court,’ says Kynaston, in a weak but amusing pamphlet he subsequently published, ‘he gave me a gracious nod with his reverend head, and swore, “By God, I’ve done your business!”’ The Lieutenant felt that he had. The best testimony he could produce,—that is, the least damaging to himself,—was in the case of the free-spoken roysterers of the little room behind the kitchen at the ‘Blew Postes.’ Ormond’s health, Bolingbroke’s health, and similar significant toasts, were given there—so he alleged. ‘Yes,’ answered the accused, ‘but they were given by you, and were not drunk!’ They called the kitchen wench in support of their defence. The loyal Lieutenant summoned rebutting testimony, but his cautious witnesses alleged that no such healths were proposed, and, therefore, could not be drunk by Kynaston or anybody else. The military Board of Enquiry thereupon separated, leaving informer and accused in ignorance of what further steps were likely to be taken. Kynaston went away for change of air, but such severe things were publicly said of him, by friends as well as foes, that he thought the best course he could take would be to show himself in the Mall.

THE MILITARY BOARD.

There, then, is the next scene in this illustrative comedy. Kynaston, with his hat fiercely cocked, is seen at a distance by a ruffling major, named Oneby. The Major says, loud enough for the general audience,—‘As soon as I see Kynaston, I’ll make him eat his words and deny his Christ! I’ll path him, and send him quick to hell!’ The Lieutenant, leaning on the arm of one of his captains, blandly remarks to him as both draw near to the fire-eating major, ‘Gentlemen give themselves airs in my absence.’ And then looking Oneby sternly in the face, exclaims, ‘I value not a Jacobite rogue in the kingdom!’ According to Kynaston’s pamphlet, this had such an effect on Oneby, that the Major came daintily up to him and in the most lamb-like voice asked, ‘What news from the country, Lieutenant?’ To which the latter replied, ‘News, sir? that his Majesty has enemies there as well as here.’ And therewith, they cross the stage and exeunt at opposite sides.

This was not the ordinary style of Major John Oneby’s acting. He was an accomplished and too successful duellist. A few years after the above scene in the Park, he killed Mr. Gower in a duel fought in a room of a Drury Lane tavern—the result of a drunken quarrel—over a dice-board. The Major was found guilty of wilful murder, and condemned to be hanged; but he opened a vein with a penknife, as he lay in bed in Newgate, and so ‘cheated the hangman.’

THE LIEUTENANT DISPOSED OF.

The Military Board, meanwhile, went quietly and steadily about its work. What it thought of the disinterested Lieutenant and those whom he charged with treason, he learned in a very unexpected way. He was ill at ease in bed, reading the ‘Post Boy,’ when his much astonished eyes fell upon the following paragraph:—‘Lieutenant John Kynaston has been broke, and rendered incapable of serving for the future.’ This was the first intimation he had had of any return made to him by way of acknowledgment for his information. He accounted it a lie, inserted by ‘that infamous and seditious Bell-wether of their party, Abel Roper!’ In quite a Bobadil strain, Kynaston afterwards registered a vow in print that he ‘should, by way of gratitude, take the very first opportunity of promoting a close correspondence between Abel Roper and his brother Cain.’ Before that consummation was achieved, Kynaston—it was a fortnight after the announcement appeared in the ‘Post Boy’—received a document, ‘On his Majesty’s Service,’ which convinced the ex-Lieutenant that he no longer formed part of it. He rushed to the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Marlborough. ‘It’s a hard case,’ said the Duke, ‘but I am going into my chair!’ and so he got rid of the appellant. Kynaston hired a chair and was carried over to General Lumley, the President of the Military Board. ‘You had better keep quiet,’ said the General, ‘you might get insulted!’ Insulted meant beaten or pointed out in the streets. Kynaston at once went to bed with a fever which conveniently kept him there for seven weeks. ‘The Lieutenant is sneaking,’ cried his enemies; but he appeared in the guise of a pamphlet, in which he said that he should never recover the surprise into which he had been thrown by discovering that the people whom he had accused had found readier belief than he—the accuser. Never again did John Kynaston ride with Colonel Newton’s Regiment of Dragoons.[3]

CAPTAIN PAUL.

Other informers were more profitable to listen to than Kynaston. Marlborough, who dismissed the ex-Lieutenant so cavalierly, was one day giving ear, with deep interest, to a sergeant in the Foot Guards. The staple of the fellow’s news was, that his captain, Paul, had in his desk a commission as Colonel of a regiment of cavalry, from the Pretender; and that he had promised a lieutenant’s commission to the sergeant, who had accepted the same, and now, out of remorse or fear, or hopes of getting a commission in a safer way, came and told the whole story to the great Duke. Marlborough dismissed him, bade him be of good cheer, and keep silent. An hour or two afterwards, Captain Paul was at the Duke’s levee. The Commander-in-Chief greeted him with a cordial ‘Good morning, Colonel!’ (Captains in the Guards were so addressed), ‘I am very glad to see you!’—and then, as if it had just occurred to him—‘By-the-by, my Lord Townshend desires to speak with you; you had better wait on him at the office.’ Paul, unsuspecting, rather hoping that some good chance was about to turn up for him, took his leave, ran down-stairs, jumped into a chair, and cried, ‘To the Cock-pit!’ When his name was announced to the Secretary of State, Lord Townshend sent a message of welcome, and a request that Paul would wait in the anteroom, till some important business with some of the Ministers should be concluded. Paul was still waiting when the Duke of Marlborough arrived, and passed through the room to the more private apartment. As he passed, the Colonel rather familiarly greeted him, but Marlborough confined his recognition to a very grave military salute, and disappeared through the doors. Paul looked the way that the Commander-in-Chief had gone, felt perplexed, and then, addressing the door-keeper who was within the room, said, ‘I think I need not wait longer. I shall go now, and wait on my Lord another time.’ The door-keeper, however, at once took all the courage out of him by civilly intimating that the gallant officer must be content to stay where he was, as Lord Townshend had given stringent orders that he was not to be permitted to depart on any account. The sequel was rapidly arrived at. Paul was taken before the Council, where he found that the knaves’ policy was best—to avow all. He alleged that he got his commission at Powis House, Ormond Street, and it was found in his desk. He purchased comparative impunity by betraying all his confederates.

ARREST OF MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT.

Conspirators who betrayed their confederates, like Colonel Paul, yielded such information that Parliament readily granted power to the king to seize suspected persons. His Majesty had grounds for getting within safe-keeping half a-dozen members of the Lower House. The suspected persons were, Sir William Wyndham, Sir John Packington, Edward Harvey of Combe, Thomas Forster, and Corbet Kynaston. King George, however, would not put a finger on them, without going through the form of asking leave. The Commons gave consent, with alacrity, thanking his Majesty, at the same time, for the tender regard he had manifested for the privileges of the House. Before five o’clock the next morning, Mr. Wilcox, a messenger, knocked at the door of Mr. Barnes, the bookseller in Pall Mall. The sight of the silver greyhound on his arm was as sufficient as if he had displayed his warrant in the face of the Bibliopole, himself. HARVEY, OF COMBE. Wilcox was in search of Harvey, who lodged there, when in town, but he was not there on that morning. The messenger looked over his papers, sealed them up, and then went post-haste down to Combe, in Surrey. He arrived just in time to meet Mr. Harvey going out hawking. Harvey welcomed Wilcox as if he had been a favoured guest, and went up to London with him, as if it were a pleasure-excursion. Taken immediately before the Council, he was good-humouredly bold, till he was shown what he did not expect to see, a damaging treasonable letter in his own handwriting. He faltered, turned pale, complained of sudden illness, and asked for permission to withdraw, which was granted. Harvey, shut up in his room, stabbed himself with a pruning knife, and when he was found by his servant, almost unconscious from loss of blood, the unlucky Jacobite refused to have medical aid. He only consented, at the urgent prayer of his kinsman, the Earl of Nottingham, Lord President of the Council, to at least see those who had been sent for. Mead, Harris, and Bussiere restored him to a condition of capability to take the sacrament. A Whig Lecturer, the Rev. Mr. Broughton, was at hand, but that worthy man declined to administer, even after Mr. Harvey had made a general confession of his sins. When the Jacobite had expressed some measure of sorrow for his latest iniquities, the Whig clergyman performed the rite, but not till he had fortified himself with a warrant from the Council to give Harvey the comfort he desired.

SIR WILLIAM WYNDHAM.

Meanwhile, Sir William Wyndham had secretly fled from London, as soon as he knew the peril he would incur by tarrying there. Sir William’s flight took him to Orchard Wyndham, his house in Somersetshire, where, surrounded by partisans, he deemed himself safe at least till he could devise means for putting a greater distance between himself and the Tower. One morning, in September, at five o’clock, before it was yet full daylight, two gentlemen arrived at the house, express from London, with letters for him, which were of the utmost importance. Sir William himself admitted them, in his night gear. They had scarcely crossed the threshold, when one of the visitors informed the Baronet that the two gentlemen he had admitted were Colonel Huske and a messenger, bearing a warrant to arrest and carry him up to town. ‘That being the case,’ said Sir William, ‘make no noise to awake Lady Wyndham, who is in a delicate condition of health.’ The Colonel had received orders that Lady Wyndham, being the Duke of Somerset’s daughter, was ‘on that account to be put in as little disorder as possible.’ SEARCH FOR PAPERS. Accordingly, Colonel and messenger quietly followed Sir William to his dressing-room, where the Colonel told him that he was ordered to search his papers, and seize all that might be suspicious. Wyndham produced his keys, readily; and he expressed such alacrity in recommending a thorough search of drawers, desks, chests, &c., that the wary Colonel, thought it might be as well to look elsewhere, first. His eye fell on the Baronets garments, as they lay carefully flung over a chair, and the astute agent, judging that the unlikeliest place was the likeliest for treasonable matter to be stowed away in, took up Sir William’s coat, with a ‘what may we have here?’ thrust his hands into one of the capacious pockets, and drew thence a bundle of papers. The emotion of Sir William was warrant of their importance. The Colonel read it all in his confusion and disorder, and urged the instant departure of his prisoner. ‘Only wait,’ said Sir William, ‘till seven o’clock, and I will have my carriage and six horses at the door. The coach will accommodate us all.’ Huske made no objection. Sir William proceeded to dress; and, finally, he remarked, ‘I will only go into my bed-room to take leave of my lady, and will shortly wait on you again.’ The Colonel allowed Sir William to enter the bed-room, and quietly waited till the leave-taking should be accomplished. As the farewell, however, seemed unusually long in coming to an end, the Colonel and messenger began to look at each other with some distrust. They had supposed that Wyndham was on his honour to return to them, but Sir William had supposed otherwise. Whether he stopped to kiss his sleeping wife or not, he never told, but he made no secret of what the Colonel discovered for himself, on entering the room, namely, that Wyndham had escaped by a private door, and perhaps his lady was not half so much asleep as she seemed to be. Her husband, at all events, lacked no aids to flight, the incidents leading to which were the common talk of the town, soon after the Colonel had come back to Secretary Stanhope. A reward of one thousand pounds was offered for the recapture of the Jacobite whom the Colonel had been expected to take, keep, and deliver up, in the ordinary discharge of his duty.

WYNDHAM’S ESCAPE.

On the morrow of Wyndham’s escape, Lord William Paulet and Paul Burrard were seated at a window in Winton market-place. From an inn-window opposite a parson was seen staring at them rather boldly, and both the gentlemen agreed that they had seen that face before, but could not well tell where. It was Wyndham in disguise; and in that clerical garb he contrived to get into Surrey, a serving-man riding with him. There, at an inn, his servant wrote, in Sir William’s name, to a clerical friend of the fugitive, asking for an asylum in his house. If the friend’s fears were too great to allow him to grant such perilous hospitality, he was urged to procure a resting place for the fugitive in the residence of the rector of the parish, who might receive an inmate in clerical costume without exciting suspicion. This letter chanced to reach the house of the person to whom it was addressed, during his absence. His wife had no scruples as to opening the missive; perhaps she suspected there was mischief in it. Having read its contents, and being anxious to serve and save her husband before all the Sir Williams in the world, she promptly sent the letter to the Earl of Aylesford, who as promptly submitted it to the Ministry. Meanwhile Wyndham felt that the delay in answering his request was the consequence of a discovery of his whereabouts. He at once set forth again, and the magistrates being too late to seize the master, laid hands upon the servant. There was found upon him a cypher ring containing a lock of hair, at sight of which a Whig magistrate exclaimed, ‘It’s the Pretender’s hair. Lord! I know the man and his principles. It cannot be nobody’s else!’ On examination, however, it was seen that the ring bore the cypher and carried the hair of Queen Anne. While the other magistrates were jeering their too confident colleague, Wyndham was quietly escaping from them.

DRAMATIC COURTESY.

Passing on his way to London, Sir William encountered Sir Denzil Onslow on horseback, escorted by two grooms. ‘Hereupon,’ says a pamphlet of the period, ‘the knight, as it is customary for those of the black robe (whose habit he had taken upon him) to do to Men of Figure, very courteously gave him the salute of his hat and the right hand of the road, which the said Mr. Onslow, being some time after apprised of, acknowledged to be true, with this circumstance, that he well remembered that he met a smock-faced, trim parson on such an occasion, but that his eyes were so taken up, and his attention wholly employed, with the beauties of the fine horse he rode upon, that he had no time to make a true discovery of his person at that juncture.’

UNCOURTEOUS INTERVIEW.

Wyndham, finding the pursuit grow too hot for him, rode to Sion House, Isleworth, one of the seats of his father-in-law, the Duke of Somerset. The two went up to the Duke’s town residence, Northumberland House, whence Wyndham’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Hertford, sent notice of the presence of such a guest to Secretary Stanhope. That official dispatched a messenger, by whom Wyndham was carried before the Council Board. It was said in London that he there denied all knowledge of a plot; but the Council, nevertheless, committed him to the Tower. The next day all London was astir with reporting the news that the Duke of Somerset, having been refused as bail for his son-in-law, had at once resigned his office of Master of the Horse.

Before Wyndham surrendered, the carriage of the Duke of Somerset, his father-in-law, was seen standing at the door of the famous lawyer, Sir Edward Northey. After the surrender, Government suspected that this interview was for the purpose of a consultation as to whether the proofs against Sir William could convict him of treason. Ministers resolved that the Duke should be deprived of his places, and Lord Townshend called upon him, with a sorrowful air, and a message from the king that his Majesty had no further occasion for the Duke’s services. ‘Pray, my Lord,’ said Somerset, ‘what is the reason of it?’ Lord Townshend answered, ‘I do not know!’ ‘Then,’ said the Duke, ‘by G—, my Lord, you lie!’ ‘You know that the king puts me out for no other cause, but for the lies which you, and such as you, have invented and told of me!’ Such were the amenities which passed between noblemen in those stirring Jacobite times. The duke asked leave to wait upon the king, but he was curtly told to wait till he was sent for.

A GENERAL STIR.

Still the plotters at large plotted on. The reiteration on the part of the Whigs that they were powerless and on the road to destruction, betrayed more fear than confidence. ‘If the (Tory) Party were not under a judicial infatuation,’ says one paper, ‘they might plainly see that Heaven has declared against them, by depriving them of their Chief Supporters, and discovering their treasonable plots, which, when set in a true light, will appear so treacherous and barbarous against their lawful sovereign, King George, and so bloody against their fellow subjects, as must make the memory of the Party execrable to latest Posterity.’ This seemed to have little influence on the Jacobites. The plot became so serious, there was so much uncertainty as to where it might break out, that officers were hurrying from London to assume command, in various directions, to Chester and to Dover, to Newcastle and to Portsmouth, to Berwick and to Plymouth, to Hull, to Carlisle, to York, to Edinburgh—east, west, north, south—there was a general hurrying from London to whatever point seemed likely to prove dangerous.

[3] Case of Lieut. John Kynaston.

CHAPTER V.

(1715).

ightly or wrongly, the Tory mob in London were in no wise daunted. They listened to street preachers of sedition. The listeners were generally called ‘scum,’ and the orator was often designated ‘as a Tory cobler.’ Powder and arms were discovered on board ships in the Thames, and persons, accused of giving information to the Government, posted bills in the City affirming their innocence. Often the information was intended to mislead. Mr. Harvey, of Combe, was said to be expressing his contrition to a divine. The police messengers could not believe he was either so sick or so sorry as his friends affirmed. Their opinion was justified when they found him attempting to escape from his house through the tiles—an attempt which they frustrated.

Towards the end of the month, more of the lofty heads among the Jacobites were struck at. Sir John Pakington and Sir Windsor Hunlake were added to the list of prisoners, and the Whigs were elated by a display made in London by a delegation from Hanoverian Cambridge. The king had rewarded the loyalty of that University by purchasing, for 6,000l., the library of the Bishop of Ely, which he presented to the Whig seat of learning. Cambridge, by delegation, came up to St. James’s. The king declared that his present was only an earnest of future favour.

PAMPHLETEERING.

Both the Whig and the Tory press exasperated the Government. From the former was issued a pamphlet, called ‘The necessity of impeaching the late ministry.’ The pamphlet took the form of a letter to the Earl of Halifax, and was written by Thomas Burnet. The amiable author, after such vituperation as was then much enjoyed by those who admired the flinger of it and were out of reach of the missiles, mildly remarks that,—‘having commenced an enemy to the late ministry even from their first entrance into power, he cannot forbear from pursuing them with his resentment even to their graves, the only place, indeed, where their crimes can be forgotten!’ This was a Whig cry for blood. ‘“England expects it,” as the saying is,’ rang out from the throats of the ultra Whigs.

GENERAL CONFUSION.

A still more perplexing pamphlet was sold in the streets, despite the constables, namely, ‘The Soldiers’ humble address for the impeachment of the late ministry.’ Political soldiers were felt to be as out of place as militant parsons. It rained pamphlets; and the embarrassment caused thereby was increased by the circumstance that some of them bore on the title-page the names of eminent men as authors, whose sentiments were directly opposed to those set forth in the pamphlet. Great confusion ensued, and a fear of impending calamity fell upon many. So marked was this fear, that two months before the eclipse of April, the astronomers, Dr. Halley and Mr. Whiston, ‘thought it necessary to caution people against being surprised or interpreting it as any ill omen, wherein there is nothing but what is natural, or than the necessary result of Sun and Moon.’ ‘It is all very well,’ said the Tories, ‘but there has been no such eclipse in England, since the days of Stephen the Usurper.’

The eclipse and the Pretender were subjects that gravely occupied men’s minds. From the coffee-houses where ‘Captains’ more or less genuine used to congregate and talk loudly, those swaggerers began to disappear, and their acquaintances felt quite sure that mischief was afoot. The Secretaries of State knew all about those ‘Captains.’ They were followed whithersoever they went, till all of them, nearly two dozen, were pounced upon in Dublin, after spies had discovered that they were enlisting men for the Chevalier. Two-thirds of these Jacobite recruiters were, upon brief trial and conviction, hanged, drawn, and quartered. In England, a poor Jacobite who had drunk ‘Damnation to King George,’ was only fined 50l.; but as he was to lie in prison till he paid that sum, he probably slowly rotted away instead of being promptly hung. When the Tories had the opportunity to express hostile opinions with impunity, they never failed to avail themselves of it. They had this opportunity at the theatre. Whig papers remarked that ‘the Tory faction hissed as much like serpents from the galleries as their leaders, the High Church faction, did from the pulpits.’ Any allusion to desertion of allies or to a separate peace was sure to be greeted with volleys of hisses.

JACOBITE MOBS.

In the Mug Houses bets began to be laid as to the length of time King George was likely to be on the throne. Daring men, with their thoughts over the water, wagered a hundred guineas he would not be king a month longer. The next day, on the information of some of the company, they would find themselves in peril of going to Tyburn in half that time. The Tory mob had a way of their own to show their sentiments. They kept the anniversary of Queen Anne’s coronation-day, and made the most of their opportunity. They assembled at the Conduit on Snow Hill, with flag and hoop, and drum and trumpet. They hoisted the queen’s picture over the Conduit, and a citizen having flung to them a portrait of King William, they made a bonfire and burnt it. They displayed a legend, the contribution of a Mob Muse, which ran thus, alluding to the queen:—

Imitate her who was so just and good,

Both in her actions and her royal word!

RIOTING.

They smashed the windows that were not illuminated, and they pelted with flints the people who were lighting the candles intended to propitiate them. They stopped coaches, robbed those who rode in them, even of their wigs, and if the victims would not shout for Queen Anne, the rascalry stript them nearly naked. Right into a Sunday morning in April, this orthodox crew of incendiaries went about plundering, while they shouted God bless the Queen and High Church! They drank horribly the whole time, and toasted Bolingbroke frequently, but never King George. High Churchmen would not blame riot when it took the shape of burning down dissenters’ chapels, and the pious villains danced to the accompaniment of ‘High Church and Ormond.’ At Oxford, town and gown overstepped limits observed in London. In one of the many tumults there, before they burnt in the street the furniture of one of the dissenting ‘meeting houses,’ they fastened a Whig Beadle in the pulpit and rolled him about the town till he was bruised in every limb. The Whig papers, thereupon, significantly pointed out to their friends, that there was a nonjuring congregation who met over a coffee-house in Aldersgate Street. These people, it was said, prayed for ‘the rightful king,’ and such wretches, of course, merited all that a Whig mob could inflict on them. One of the most dangerous symptoms of the time occurred on the arrest of some strapping young ballad wenches, who were taken into custody, opposite Somerset House, for singing ballads of a licentious nature against King George. The soldiers on guard rescued the fair prisoners; and when much indignation was expressed at this fact, the officers excused the men on the ground that they did not interfere on political grounds, but out of gallantry to the ladies.

BALLAD-SINGERS.

The street ballad-singers were irrepressible. They were the more audacious as they often sang words which were innocent in their expression, but mischievous by right application. The Jacobites were ever apt at fitting old words and tunes to new circumstances. There was a song which was originally written in praise of the Duke of Monmouth. That song which lauded the unhappy nephew of James II. was now revived in honour of that king’s son. ‘Young Jemmy’ was to be heard at the corner of many a street. Groups of listeners and sympathisers gathered round the minstrel who metrically proclaimed that

Young Jemmy is a lad that’s royally descended,

With ev’ry virtue clad, by ev’ry tongue commended.

A German gentleman, who subsequently published his experiences, was astonished at the remissness or lenity of the magistrates generally, but especially towards one arch-offender who, by song, furthered the Pretender’s interests at the corner of Cranbourne Alley. ‘There a fellow stands eternally bawling out his Pye Corner pastorals in behalf of dear Jemmy, lovely Jemmy,’ &c.

POLITICAL SONGS.

The writer adds, in sarcastic allusion to nobler personages who were said to have the Chevalier’s commission in some secret drawer—‘I have been credibly informed this man has actually in his pocket a commission under the Pretender’s Great Seal, constituting him his Ballad-Singer in Ordinary in Great Britain; and that his ditties are so well-worded that they often poison the minds of many well-meaning people; that this person is not more industrious with his tongue in behalf of his master, than others are at the same time busy with their fingers among the audience; and the monies collected in this manner are among those mighty remittances the Post Boy so frequently boasts of being made to the Chevalier.’

The ballad, however, of ‘Young Jemmy’ did not mar the popularity of ‘The king shall enjoy his own again.’ The Jacobites knew no king but James III. It was he who was referred to when the singers vociferated

The man in the moon may wear out his shoon

By running after Charles’s wain;

But all to no end, for the times will not mend

Till the king enjoys his own again.

Although songs in support of the house of Hanover were sung to the same tune by Whig ballad-singers, this tune was thorough Tory, and was profitable only to the Jacobites. Ritson compares it with Lillibulero, by which air James II. was whistled off his throne. ‘This very air,’ he says, alluding to ‘The king shall enjoy his own again,’ ‘upon two memorable occasions was very near being equally instrumental in placing the crown on the head of his son. It is believed to be a fact that nothing fed the enthusiasm of the Jacobites down almost to the present reign (George III.), in every corner of Great Britain, more than “The king shall enjoy his own again.”’

ARRESTS.

Among the gentlemen of the laity whose fortunes were seriously affected by the times and their changes was Colonel Granville. His brother George, Lord Lansdowne, was shut up in the Tower, with Lord Oxford and other noblemen. The colonel simply wished to get quietly away, and live quietly in the country. He ordered horses for two carriages to be at his door, in Poland Street, at six in the morning. The horse-dealer, finding that the colonel was making a secret of his movements, lodged an information against him with the Secretary of State. The spy accused him of being about to leave the kingdom, privately. Early in the morning, the two young ladies of the family, Mary and Anne Granville, were awoke in their beds, by the rough voices of a couple of soldiers with guns in their hands, crying out, ‘Come, Misses, make haste and get up, for you are going to Lord Townshend’s’ (the Secretary of State). Hastily dressed, by their maid, the young ladies were conducted below, where the colonel and his wife were in the custody of two officers and two messengers, supported by sixteen soldiers. Colonel Granville devoted himself to consoling his wife, who went off into a succession of hysterical fits, which could not have been cheering to the daughters, the elder of whom was fifteen, the younger nine years of age.

Colonel Granville did not come to harm, but there was a general scattering of high-class Tories. Some fled in disguise; some were ordered, others had leave, to depart. The Earl of Mar found his offer to serve King George promptly rejected. Whereupon he galloped through Aldersgate Street, and went northward, to serve King James.

IN THE PARK.

Occasionally we meet with a Catholic Jacobite who preferred his ease to his principles. In one of Pope’s letters he refers to a gentleman in Duke Street, Westminster, who, having declined to take the oath of abjuration, had consequently forfeited his chariot and his fashionable Flanders mares. Supported by spiritual consolation, he bore his loss like a patient martyr. Unable to take a drive, he watched from his window those who could exhibit themselves in their carriages. The sight was too much for his principles. These were maintained for the greater part of one day, till about the hour of seven or eight, the coaches and horses of several of the nobility, passing by his window towards Hyde Park, he could no longer endure the disappointment, but instantly went out, took the oath of abjuration, and recovered his dear horses, which carried him in triumph to the Ring. ‘The poor distressed Roman Catholics,’ it is added, ‘now unhorsed and uncharioted, cry out with the Psalmist, “Some in chariots and some on horses, but we will invocate the name of the Lord.”’

There were other people, who met events with a philosophical indifference. Sir Samuel Garth was to be seen squeezing Gay’s forefinger, as Gay set Sir Samuel down at the Opera. The coffee-houses were debating the merits of Pope’s ‘Homer,’ and of Tickell’s. The wits at Button’s were mostly in favour of the former, but they made free with Pope’s character as to morals, and some few thought that Tickell stood above Pope. ‘They are both very well done, sir,’ said Addison, ‘but Mr. Tickell’s has more of Homer in it.’ Whereat, Pope told James Craggs that ‘Button’s was no longer Button’s,’ indeed, that England was no longer England, and that political dissensions had taken the place of the old refinement, hospitality, and good humour. Politics superseded poetry, yet all the world of London, in spite of politics, was, according to Pope, discussing the merits of his translation. ‘I,’ wrote Pope in July, ‘like the Tories, have the town in general, that is, the mob, on my side; ‘and to show the Secretary of State how little politics affected him, he gaily notes that ‘L—— is dead, and soups are no more.’

INVASION IMMINENT.

In that same July, however, there was a withdrawal of well-to-do Roman Catholics, especially from London. Their opponents gave them credit for having been warned of an approaching invasion, and of being desirous to escape imprisonment. Popish disloyalty might be cruelly tested by any constable who chose to administer the oath against Transubstantiation. Towards the end of the month the king’s proclamation was first posted in London. It announced that invasion was imminent, and it ordered all Papists and reputed Papists to withdraw to at least ten miles from London before the 8th of August. One hundred thousand pounds was the reward again offered for the body of ‘the Pretender,’ dead or alive, if taken within the British dominions. Meanwhile, at the Tory coffee-house in Warwick Lane, the portrait of the Chevalier was passed from hand to hand; while, to confirm waverers and encourage the converted, great stress was laid upon the heroic look, the graceful carriage, and the beautiful expression of clemency which belonged to the original! Whig London was scandalised at the circumstance of a ‘priest in an episcopal meeting-house’ in Edinburgh having prayed and asked the prayers of the congregation for a young gentleman that either was, or would soon be, at sea, on a dangerous enterprise. The London Whigs, moreover, complained that the importation of arms and ammunition for the service of the Pretender was favoured by Tory Custom-House officers who had been appointed by the late ministry. Among the king’s own foot-guards, enlisting for the Pretender was again said to be going on. A strong recruiting party for the English army which went from London to Oxford, and entered the latter city with its band playing, was attacked by the Tory mob, by some of whom the big drum was cut to pieces. The mob in various places attacked the houses of the Whigs. SOUND OF SHOT. Shots were exchanged, and if a Whig happened in defence of his life and property to slay a Tory, and the case occurred where a jury of Jacobites could be summoned on the inquest, the verdict was sure to be one of ‘wilful murder,’ whereat the ‘loyal’ London press waxed greatly indignant. It was with a sort of horror that the Whig papers announced that eight-and-forty dozen swords had been discovered in the north in the house of a tenant of Lord Widdrington. Some of the papers ridiculed all idea of real danger. The Duke of Ormond and Lord Rolle, the Duke of Leeds and Viscount Hatton, might be dining with French ministers, but some papers thought little would come of it. France objected to the English armaments going on, as uncalled for. ‘Uncalled for!’ cried the Whig papers, ‘why, bloody riot is rife in half-a-dozen large towns! One of the rebels shot in Bromwicham had a fine lace shirt under his common frock!’

AFLOAT ON THE THAMES.

Unpopular as the king and royal family may have been, there was never the slightest show of fear or uneasiness about them. Even in August, when an invasion was imminent, they went abroad among the people quite unprotected. One Saturday evening in that month we hear of them embarking in barges attended by many of the nobility afloat, and going down the river ‘through bridge as far as Limus, to divert themselves with music, which was most excellently performed on a great number of trumpets, hautboys, and double curtails.’ On the return, the boats on the river became so closely packed that the king ordered his watermen to ship their oars and drift up with the flowing tide, as there was no room left for rowing. The whole mass thus moved up together. The king and royal family had perfect confidence in the people, and this trust was not abused. The enthusiasm was unbounded. As twilight came down upon them, the shipping and also the houses ashore illuminated with lanterns and fired salutes. George I. was as safe as if he had been at Windsor; and when, on landing at Privy Garden Stairs, he turned round to salute the people, he must have felt that they were a noble people, and they must have acknowledged that he was a stout-hearted king.

THE HORSE GUARDS.

This was putting a bold face in front of peril. French emissaries were in London, and there was no knowing for what desperate ends they had been employed. Proclamations were despatched to Ireland for the arrest of all Tories, robbers, and raparees, of whom there were already too many concentrating for treasonable work about Dublin. The army itself was not free from the most audacious treason. One morning as the fourth troop of Horse Guards were about to turn out, an officer of the troop, named Smith, was arrested in Whitehall. He affected to be indignant, but the messengers produced the Secretary of State’s warrant for his capture on a charge of high treason. Smith was shocked, and certainly did not recover his coolness when the messengers took from his pockets a commission signed by the Chevalier. The popular report as Smith passed on his way to Newgate was, that on that very day he was to have sold his post at the Horse Guards!

The king had no fear of assassination, but the ‘faction,’ as the Jacobites were called, did their best to render his life uncomfortable. There was natural indignation on the part of all moderate men when a reprint appeared of the nonjuring Rev. Dr. Bedford’s work, ‘The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England Asserted.’[4] This reprint was denounced as being equivalent to the Pretender’s declaration, in folio. The burthen of the book was, that to attempt the life of an usurper in aid of the rightful prince was not murder. ‘As the rightful prince’ was not the same personage in the eyes of Whigs and of Tories, those who put forth the book thought that neither party would be angry at the justification of the murder of the chief of the opposite party.

While such publications were being printed, the metropolitan authorities narrowly watched the temper of the people. The Lord Mayor and Common Council were against the holding of Bartholomew Fair. One newspaper, nevertheless, announced that the festival would be held as usual. This step so smelt of sedition that the ‘author’ (as an editor was then called) was only too glad to be let off by an abject apology. It ended with:—‘We humbly beg his Lordship’s pardon for such an affront.’

THE CHEVALIER DE ST. GEORGE.

On September 13th news reached London that the Chevalier de St. George had at last set out from Lorraine ‘in a Post Calash,’ in order to travel incognito and so the more easily reach a seaport where he could embark unobserved for some point in Great Britain. The Calash, it was said, had not gone far before it was overturned. The august traveller was reported as being generally hurt and bruised, but particularly about the neck. This last was especially pointed out, as if it were very significant. James was, at all events, so shaken that his attendants had to carry him back. The Whigs eagerly longed for confirmation of this news. ‘If it only proved true to the letter, then,’ cried the Whigs, ‘it will give his party a further occasion to remember the month of August, and furnish them with an opportunity to drink as liberally to the Confusion of some other horses as they drank to the “health of Sorrel,” the name of the horse that stumbled with King William, and gave him the fall of which he died.’

THE KING’S SPEECH.

There was growing uneasiness in London, despite the general confidence. When the king prorogued Parliament in September, he was described in the papers as being ‘pleased to take notice of the rebellion in Scotland.’ He roundly laid that rebellion and the intended invasion to the tumults and riots which had prevailed in the capital and in various parts of the kingdom. Protestants, he said, had been deluded into seditiously joining with Papists by false reports of the Church of England being in danger under his administration. The king thought this step was both unjust and ungrateful, considering what he had done and what he had undertaken to do for her. The king naturally sneered at the idea that a Popish Pretender was likely to be a better head of the Church of England than a Protestant king. That informers were not lacking may be perceived in a curious advertisement for a minister to have put into the papers. It was to this effect:—‘Whereas a letter was directed to the Right Hon. Robert Walpole, Esq., proposing to discover matters of great importance, signed G. D., Notice is hereby given that the said letter is received, and that if the person who wrote it will come to Mr. Walpole’s lodgings at Chelsea any morning before nine o’clock and make out what he therein proposes, he shall receive all due encouragement and protection.’

On September 20th the ‘Daily Courant’ made no allusion whatever to the troubled and anxious state of the nation, but it gave the satisfactory intelligence that ‘All is in tranquility in France.’ On the same day, however, a proclamation in the king’s name was issued, wherein it was stated that ‘a most horrid and treacherous conspiracy’ was afoot, and ‘an invasion’ intended for the establishing of the Pretender.

PREACHERS AWAKE.

The pulpits thereupon began to ring, but the Government made a commendable attempt to muzzle the preachers, whether the latter were blind adversaries or blinder advocates. The employment of violent and malevolent terms against any persons whatsoever was prohibited. The ‘intermeddling,’ in sermons, with affairs of state, was strictly forbidden. The authorities, in fact, enjoined Christian ministers to observe the charity which is the leading feature in Christianity. The ministers, for the most part, claimed and exercised a rather unchristian liberty. Foremost among the blaring trumpeters who sounded on the Hanoverian side was White Kennett, Dean of Peterborough. Kennett was a man who, in his early days, had offended the Whigs, by his political publications; and, something later, had gratified the Tories by putting forth an English translation of Pliny’s panegyric upon Trajan, which was supposed to apply to James II.; while, at the same time, he displeased the Jacobites by declaiming against popery and by refusing to read the royal declaration of indulgence. The Whigs whom he had offended, he appeased by his fierce opposition to Sacheverel. Kennett was a man of great parts, as it is called, and was particularly qualified for maintaining his opinions in a controversy. Scholar, gentleman, priest and politician, he steadily went up the ladder of preferment, till his merits and patronage had now brought him to the deanery of Peterborough and the rectory of St. Mary, Aldermanbury. A FAMOUS SERMON. It was in the church so named that Kennett, on September 25th, 1715, preached his famous sermon on witchcraft. The text was taken from 1 Samuel, xv. 23:—‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from being king.’ The sermon, a long one, and full of an invective that almost reaches ferocity, is stuffed with inflammatory politics from beginning to end, incendiary matter which then made men half-mad with joy or indignation, but which seems now a poor thing save in weight of mischievous words. The preacher, of course, proved to his own satisfaction that all concerned in promoting the imminent rebellion were bewitched by the devil; that stubbornness in opposing the royal authority was the iniquity and idolatry alluded to in the text; and that the Pretender, like his father, had lost the crown because he did not care to be of the true community of faith. The sermon was ‘inspired,’ according to the Whig papers;—but by the devil, according to the Tories and Tory critics in the clubs. Art took a curious revenge for this discourse. SATIRICAL ART. An altarpiece was painted for St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, by order of Welton, the Jacobite rector. The subject was The Last Supper. It gained a certain modest amount of admiration, till some spectator remarked that Judas Iscariot not only seemed a more than usually prominent figure in the group, but that the face was wonderfully like Dr. White Kennett’s. It was, in fact, Kennett’s portrait, and when this became known, all London, but especially Jacobite London, was crowding to Whitechapel to behold this novel pillorying of the modern Iscariot. If any spectator had a doubt on the matter, it was removed by the black patch on Judas’s head. Kennett, in William’s days, used to go out with his dog and his gun, and with companions in his shooting excursions. On one of these ‘outings,’ an awkward companion let part of the charge of his gun go into the head of the divine. The consequences were grave, but Kennett was saved by undergoing the operation of trepanning. Ever afterwards he wore a black patch over the place. The artist had not forgotten the fact. Delighted Jacobites gazed at the figure in jeering crowds; and when the picture had been seen and re-seen by all the Tories in town, the Bishop of London interfered, and ordered it to be put away. Kennett could afford to laugh. His sermon on the witchcraft of the rebellion carried him to the episcopal throne at Peterborough.

MISCHIEVOUS SERMONS.

The pulpits were not silenced. As what was considered the supreme moment of peril became imminent, they shook again with the trumpet-like roar of the preachers. The High Church lecturers inculcated obedience to the rightful king, without naming him. The thorough Whig Hanoverian clergy spared no epithets that they could fling, winged with fire and tipped with poison, at the Jacobites’ sovereign, ‘a boy sworn to destroy this kingdom,’ said one. Others were both foul and ferocious in dealing with the Chevalier who desired to get possession of his inheritance. The more eagerly they pelted him with unsavoury missiles, the more lavish they were in terms which amounted to worshipping the god-like monarch whom Heaven had sent for the advantage of England and the wonder of the world. On October 16th, 1715, one of these sermons was preached in St. Katherine Cree Church, London, by the minister, the Rev. Charles Lambe. The text was taken from Proverbs, xxiv. 21, ‘My son, fear thou the Lord and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change.’ Such a text foreshadows its comment in such hands as those of Lambe. But he went out of his way to assail the Chevalier, into the circumstances of whose birth—to show he was not the born son of Mary of Modena and James II.—Lambe entered in the gossiping manner of such matronly midwives as his bishop was then in the habit of licensing. ‘That was done in a corner,’ he said, with an air of mystery, ‘which should have been done openly to the utmost extent of decency.’ Had Lambe’s congregation been disposed to sleep, he had matter prepared for the awakening of them in a passage which was certain to touch them nearly. He knew that distant danger was unheeded, but he brought this suggestive picture of London to the attention of Londoners, and it could not have done otherwise than make their souls uneasy, and rouse their spirits to be up and doing. ‘Have you any notion of a civil war, your Treasury exhausted, your Banks plundered, your Trade decayed, your Companies bankrupt, your Shops rifled, and the various species of Stocks sunk, run down, and lost? Have you any idea of Fields flow’d with blood, your Streets pav’d with the carcasses of fellow citizens, your Wives and your Daughters torn from your Sides, and made a Prey to enrag’d undistinguishing Soldiers. Think that you see this beautiful and spacious City burnt, destroy’d, made a ruinous Heap, attended with all the dismal Horrors of Fire and Sword even from Fellow Countrymen, Fellow Subjects, and Fellow Protestants!’

A SOUND OF ALARM.

Citizens and fathers must have stared in a sort of dismay. Lambe might well say that if any disloyal man was present, he hoped such person had been cured of his malady. Jones, probably, went home thinking of a pavement made out of the carcasses of Brown and Robinson; and the ladies of citizen families walked behind them in a flutter of speculation as to what part of the force those undistinguishing soldiers belonged.

JACOBITE AGENTS.

London may be called the head-quarters of the rebels, before actual war broke out. Captain John Shafto (on half-pay), an ex-Captain John Hunter, and an Irish Papist who had served in the brigade in France, were among the more active and daring agents. The leaders of the party kept their secret tolerably well. They met, debated, provided all things needful for their success, and carried on a correspondence with friends at a distance. While agents moved quietly away from London to teach the ‘Rurals’ the sacred duty of rebellion, more trusty messengers, still, rode or walked through and away from town, bearing letters and despatches which, if discovered, might cost a dozen lives. These trusty gentlemen were sent into various parts of the kingdom. They rode from place to place as travellers, pretending a curiosity to view the country; and they performed their dangerous duty with a success which perplexed the king’s messengers. The most dexterous of these agents were Colonel Oxburgh, Nicholas and Charles Wogan, and James Talbot, all Irish and Papists. There were others, men of quality too, and occasionally a clergyman, who were entrusted with important but still dangerous duties. ‘All these,’ says Patten in his ‘History,’ ‘rid like Gentlemen, with Servants and Attendants, and were armed with swords and pistols. They kept always moving, and travelled from place to place, till things ripened for action.’

Meanwhile, the otherwise curious part of the public might be seen wandering in troops to Duke Street, Westminster, to gaze at the house, the master of which, the Earl of Scarsdale, was there put under confinement. There was, elsewhere, a good look-out kept for perils ahead; there was no indulgence of any mean spite. His Majesty’s ship ‘Ormond’ was then lying at Spithead. The Government did not stoop to the little vindictiveness of painting out the name of the great rebel who was then aiding and fostering rebellion, abroad. Sedition at home was hottest very close to the Royal Palace. There was quite a commotion at the bottom of St. James’s Street, at seeing messengers and guards enter Mr. Ozinda’s chocolate-house, next door to the palace. Ozinda himself was brought out captive, and when the mob saw him followed by Sir Richard Vivyan and Captain Forde, also captives, they began to smell a new gunpowder plot, and to surmise that the blowing up of the royal family was to be one of the means for restoring the Stuarts.

ARRESTS.

Much of the safety of London was entrusted to the Westminster Cavalry Militia, who were now very active. Record is made of their rendezvousing in Covent Garden, going thence to Tuttle Fields, where, says the sarcastic ‘Weekly Packet,’ ‘they exercised without so much as one Man falling from the saddle.’ At the same time, captures were being effected in every direction. Now, a whole club might be seen, properly secured, and passing on their way to Newgate, amid the jeers of most spectators, and with the sympathy of a few. Country gentlemen of many thousands a year were not held sacred even in the middle of their dinner at an ordinary. It was a regular frolic to carry off half the guests in eating-houses, before they had finished their repast, for which perhaps they had little appetite left. Then, unlucky Italians or demonstrative Frenchmen were ever and anon being handcuffed in country places and hurried through London on suspicion of being the Pretender. Ambassadors from foreign Powers had endless trouble thrown upon their hands in protecting the rights of foreign hawkers of flash jewelry, suspected of designs upon the throne. POPULAR FEELING. The Whig writers seriously warned the London apprentices who had Tory proclivities that Heaven was certainly against them. At a feast in celebration of the expiration of a young fellow’s apprenticeship, the freedman, in an after-dinner speech, railed furiously at his late Whig master and at Whiggery generally. Before the speaker, with anti-Hanoverian expletives for fireworks, had come to an end, the young fellow’s excitement became too much for him. A fit laid him senseless, and he died in an hour or so. The Whig patriots protested that the Judgment of God was never so manifest as in this case.

[4] The authorship of this pamphlet, first published in 1713, for which Bedford was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 marks, and to be imprisoned three years, was subsequently assumed by another nonjuring clergyman—the Rev. George Harbin.

CHAPTER VI.

(1715.)

ext, the idea of a camp and mimic war in Hyde Park was viewed, by some ladies, with unconcealed delight. Pope wrote half sportively, half seriously, to one of those gay women of the period—most of them Jacobite at heart. ‘You may soon have your wish,’ he says, ‘to enjoy the gallant sights of armies, encampments, standards waving over your brother’s corn-fields, and the pretty windings of the Thames stained with the blood of men. Your barbarity, which I have heard so long exclaimed against, in town and country, may have its fill of destruction.’ The writer adds a notification of the perils that may environ lovely women who delight in war, and he thus proceeds:—‘Those eyes that care not how much mischief is done, or how great slaughter committed so they have but a fine show, those very female eyes will be infinitely delighted with the camp which is speedily to be formed in Hyde Park. The tents were carried thither this morning. New regiments with new clothes and furniture, far exceeding the late cloth and linen designed by his Grace for the soldiery—the sight of so many gallant fellows, with all the pomp and glare of war, yet undeformed by battles, those scenes which England has, for so many years, only beheld on stages, may possibly invite your curiosity to this place.’

CAMP AND PULPIT.

The Guards, while encamped in Hyde Park, were preached to, on Sundays, with an earnestness which stood for an apology. It seemed necessary to persuade them, as the preachers did, that the happiness of Great Britain, in having a wise and just Protestant king, was beyond all conception.

The ‘Friends,’ too, lifted their voice. In November the Quaker spirit was moved to uplift a shout against the Jacobites. A Ministering Friend of the people so called gave a blast through the press of ‘a trumpet blown in the North and sounded in the ears of John Ereskine, called by the Men of the World Duke of Mar.’ At the Cheshire coffee-house, in King’s Arms Court, Ludgate Hill, this pamphlet might be bought, or read over the aromatic cup which was sold in that locality.

Pamphleteers came out with ‘bold advice,’—that Jacobitism should be stamped out by vigorous laws. Everywhere the clerical Jacobites, who prayed for the Pretender, by innuendo, were denounced. In Holland, it was said, when a clergyman meddles with affairs of State, the magistrates send him a staff and a pair of shoes, and that significant course was recommended for Tory parsons. Another Dutch custom was highly approved of. It was gravely proposed for adoption here, that the clergy, generally, should preach only from texts prescribed for them by the civil authorities!

POPULAR SLOGAN.

Throughout this year, on days popular with either party, the streets resounded with different cries, according to the anniversary. Now, it was ‘a Stuart!’ ‘an Ormond!’ ‘No Hanoverians!’ or ‘High Church and Ormond!’ which last cry was interpreted by the opposite party to mean ‘Pope and Pretender!’ Tory mobs of patriots went about asking High Churchmen for money, to drink ‘Damnation to Whigs and Dissenters.’ The same men went to the other side to ask drinking money for damning the Pope; and when the Tories accused the Whigs of burning down their own meeting houses, it was perhaps because the leading incendiaries were recognised by Tories as having been active in supporting with their sweet voices what they were then destroying torch in hand! The same men would, the next day, burn the Pretender in effigy, in Cheapside, and get drunk on the wages of their infamy. On the king’s birthday, it was observed that loyalty prevailed among the lower orders, wherever wine was to be had for nothing. Some made a demonstration. ‘In the Marshalsea,’ said the papers, ‘after the king’s birthday, our prisoners, wherever able, had select companies to drink King George’s health.’ As some keepers of prisons distributed punch at the prison gates, nobody refused to drink ‘The king’s health,’ as long as the liquor lasted.

PERILOUS ANNIVERSARIES.

The London Jacobites showed their characteristic spirit on the night of Friday, November 4th, the anniversary of King William’s birthday. They built up a huge bonfire in Old Jewry, and prepared to hang over it an effigy of that monarch. The Williamite Club, assembled at the Roebuck in Cheapside, hearing of the insult, rushed out with ‘oaken plants’ in their hands, and made furious and effective onslaught on the ‘Jacks,’ They scattered the faggots, broke the heads of all opponents, and ultimately carried off the effigy in triumph. Some Jacks pleaded that it was only an effigy of Oliver, but they were kicked for gratuitously lying. The Whigs installed the captured figure in their club room, where it was preserved as an ‘undeniable proof of that villainous Design which the Faction had not then the courage to own and now have the Impudence to deny.’

On the following day, loyal Londoners had their revenge. They celebrated the national deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot, and, through William III., from popery, slavery, and wooden shoes. With bands of music, flaunting of flags, and continued hurrahs from loyal and thirsty throats, the procession moved or stumbled through the city. The effigies borne along with them in derision were those of the Pope, the Pretender, the Duke of Ormond, Lord Bolingbroke, and the Earl of Mar. There were men who carried warming pans, in allusion to the legend that the Pretender had been brought in one into the palace on the day that the queen, his mother, believed she had borne him. There were men who represented the prince’s nurses, and others who carried nursery emblems. The music played ‘Lillibulero,’ and tunes of similar quality. The effigies of Ormond and Mar rode together in the same cart. POPULAR DEMONSTRATIONS. The former wore an extravaganza sort of uniform, with an emblematic padlock on his sword. Ormond was in scarlet and gold. Mar was in blue and silver, with a paper pinned to his staff. It bore this inscription: ‘I have sworn sixteen times to the Protestant religion, and I ne’er deceived you but once.’ Pope and Pretender followed, cheek by jowl, in another cart. They were pontifically and royally decked out, in caricature. Bolingbroke, in absurd court dress, sat at the tail of the cart, as in dutiful attendance on both masters; and a paper above him bore the words, ‘Perjury is no crime!’ All these personages rode backwards like traitors. The lengthy procession passed westward, from the Roebuck in Cheapside by Holborn to St. James’s Palace, returning by Pall Mall and the Strand. For the time being they were in full possession of the streets. They paused at the houses of celebrated personages, to hail them with blessings or curses equally highly-pitched. ‘Sometime before their arrival at the Roebuck, on their return, a sneaking Jacobite mob, perceiving the pile for the bonfire unguarded, came up with a shout of “King George for ever!” the better to deceive the people, and scower’d off with the faggots into bye-lanes and corners.’

Eastward, the procession went as far as Grace-church Street, amid vast multitudes of people. The trumpets and hautboys now played none but Protestant tunes. A double set of effigies were burnt on gibbets over two huge bonfires, one in front of the Roebuck, the other before the Royal Exchange,—the devil being added to the rest as a bonne bouche for the loyal and pious people. The mob at last separated in pursuit of liquor, and over their cups they talked of how an Irish priest had just been clapped into Newgate for attempting to blow up the powder magazine at Greenwich; and how Governor Gibson had saved Portsmouth Castle from being seized and the fleet in the harbour burnt by rascally Jacks who had conspired for the purpose. Before the next day had dawned, expresses were galloping into London with news from the North.

NEWS FROM THE NORTH.

Letters of November 3rd, sent express from Edinburgh, were printed in the London papers of the 8th. They brought news of London to the Londoners themselves, namely, that, according to a proclamation made by Lord Mar, the Pretender’s friends had risen in such numbers in and about London, that ‘King George had made a shift to retire.’ Fortified in Perth, and awaiting communications from James, Mar ‘affects to seem merry, diverts himself with balls, and has a press, with which he prints and disperses false news, to keep up the spirit of his party.’ Among the reports sent to London was one that Mar’s detachments had crossed the Forth, and swept the country clear as far as Newcastle. Other chiefs, Lord Ogilvy, the Earl of Seaforth and Glengarry, were said to be in occupation of the most important roads, bridges, and passes.

Letters from Stirling assured the Londoners that the Duke of Argyle was fully prepared to meet and defeat any movement that could be made by the rebels. Great comfort was it to the Whigs in the metropolis to hear that in some places those rebels were met on their march by members of synods, who urged on the insurgents the duty of loyalty to King George. Jacobite Foot and Horse were said to be in extremely bad condition. The newspapers then say:—

REPORTS FROM SCOTLAND.

‘Before they went into Kalso, they plundered the house of the Right Hon. George Baillie of Jerviswood, and broke open everything that was locked. They did the like to Sir John Pringle’s house at Stitchel. When they went from Hawick, the Highlanders being unwilling to march, they gave them a crown a-piece to go with ’em to Langham, where, being alarm’d in the night, the Horse mounted, abandoned the Foot at two o’clock in the morning, and marched towards Lancashire, upon which the Foot marched to Ecclefechan, where they were divided about the course they should take. Some of them were for going to Moffat and some to Dumfries, but hearing that there were four thousand of the king’s friends at the latter, seven hundred of them marched to Moffat, where they dispersed to make the best of their way. Two hundred of them got as far as Lamington in Clydesdale, where they were made prisoners in the churchyard. The rest are picked up in parties of fifty or sixty, as they march. The Lord Kenmure, with the Scots horse, is gone along with the English; and Mackintosh of Borland with him. Mr. Forster commands the (rebel) English Horse. The Lords Derwentwater and Widdrington be with him, but they decline command because they are Papists. Borland left his nephew sick at Kelso, under the care of Dr. Abernethy.’

FURTHER INTELLIGENCE.

London laughed at the simplicity of Mar, who sent a trumpet to Argyle, soliciting him to spare Mar’s plantations at Alloway. Mar also hoped Argyle would ‘treat his prisoners civilly.’ The report that ‘Cameron of Lochiel had been prevailed upon by some means or other from Inverary to stay at home,’ made curses ring against him in the Tory coffee-houses of London. The loungers and politicians in the Whig coffee-houses laughed as they read or heard read that ‘Mar wrote to Captain Robertson, offering him great Incouragement if he would come over to him and bring others with him. The letter was delivered to the captain by a lady, but he was so honest that he carried both the lady and the letter to the Duke of Argyle.’—From Tiviotdale, under date of October 31st, the London papers of November 8th gave accounts of dissensions among the rebels. ‘The Highlanders were unwilling to cross into England in support of the rebel English Horse; and although they offered the Highlanders 12d. a day, could not prevail with them.’

Then there is report of irresolute tarrying here, and of equally irresolute wending elsewhere—of scares and scurries, of hurried saddling of horses, leaving mangers full of corn, and of panics—which sent crowds of rebels pell mell into rivers, which they forded at great peril,—all to avoid General Carpenter, who was supposed to be at their heels. In various ways they were said to have helped themselves. ‘Kelso has lost 7,000 marks by them, and Selkirk in the article of shoes 100l. sterling.’ Numbers of the gentry and common people were said to have joined Carpenter. This day’s news must have been discouraging to the Tories. It had such a depressing effect on Dr. Sacheverel, that he gave up the Jacobite cause. On the following day, November 9th, the reverend gentleman, with another or two of less note, quietly slipped into the Court of Exchequer, and took the oaths of allegiance to King George!!!

NEWS FROM PRESTON.

The news of the battle of Sheriff Muir and of the crowning affair at Preston reached London only four or five days after the events. The St. James’s ‘Running Post’ was the first in the field with anything like details. The public were told that Major-General Wills, being informed that the Popish Lords Derwentwater and Widdrington, with the Scotch and Northumberland rebels, in all between 4,000 and 5,000 men, were in Preston, Wills marched upon that town on Saturday, November 12th. He had with him regiments of horse and dragoons, known as Pitt’s, Wynne’s, Honeywood’s, Dormer’s, Munden’s, Stanhope’s, and Preston’s. Other dragoons held Manchester, and prevented the Jacobites there from rising in arms as they had promised.

On arriving at the bridge over the Ribble, about a mile from Preston, Wills saw about 300 of the insurgent horse and foot precipitately retreating towards Preston, which they entered and barricaded. The bridge was at once crossed, the town was reached, and a hot engagement took place at the first barricade. The assailants suffered severely from the shots fired by men from windows and in cellars. The infantry, however, got a lodgment. When night came on, all the avenues of the town were blockaded by Wills’s cavalry, the men keeping by the horses’ heads throughout the night. At nine on Sunday morning General Carpenter joined Wills with three additional regiments of cavalry.