Decorated bannerCHAPTERVI.(1746.)
Decorated banner
onthe first day of the year 1746, the parole given at the Duke of Cumberland’s headquarters, at Carlisle, was ‘London.’ He well knew the joy the metropolis would soon receive. Part of the general orders then issued was thus expressed: ‘The Rebels that have or shall be taken, either concealed or attempting their escape, or in any ways evading the Capitulation, to be immediately put in Irons, in order to be hanged.’ After publishing this order, the duke, leaving Hawley to cross the border in pursuit of the young Chevalier, returned to London. There was great fear of a French invasion; and the duke was to have the command of a southern army to repel it. The invaders were expected in Suffolk, and the Jacobites hoped that the expectation would be realised. They often reported it as an established fact. Fielding’s Jacobite squire in ‘Tom Jones’ is made to exclaim to the landlord of the inn at Upton: ‘All’s our own, boy! ten thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Suffolk. Old England for ever! Ten thousand French, my brave lad! I am going to tap away directly!’
WAR CRITICISM.
Carlisle being recaptured, London breathed again, and considered its past perils and future prospects. The fire-side critics of the war concluded, as the Earl of Shaftesbury did with his friends in London, ‘thateminus, we exceeded the ancients, butcominuswe fell below them; and this was the result of our having, it was said, learnt the art of war from the Spaniards. We never used bayonets in our service till after the battle of Steinkirk, in King William’s time. Now the Highlanders by their way of attacking (new to our troops) make a quick impression and throw our men into confusion. This I imagine to be the principal reason of the Highlanders gaining such repeated advantages.’ Walpole wrote from Arlington Street: ‘With many other glories, the English courage seems gone too.’ Yet the old spirit was not extinct. When the Ministry tried to prevent Mr. Conway going as aide-de-camp with the Duke of Cumberland, on the ground of his being in Parliament, the duke informed the young soldier of the fact. ‘He burst into tears,’ says Walpole, ‘and protested that nothing should hinder his going—and he is gone.’
BREAKING AN OFFICER.
Without being uneasy at the idea of invasion the Government took precautions in case of emergency. It was announced that at the firing of seven guns at the Tower, answered by the same number in St. James’s Park, soldiers and officers should repair to previously named places of rendez-vous. No crowds were allowed to assemble. A race between two pairs of chairmen, carrying their chairs, round the Park, having caused alarge mob to gather within hail of the palace, was stopped in mid career by a file of musqueteers, who drove competitors and spectators into the neighbouring streets. When the park was pretty well cleared, Captain Stradwick was brought out and ‘broke,’ for desertion. Why he was not shot, as the king said he deserved to be, was owing to some influence which seemed to be stronger than the king himself. Perhaps, as a consequence, the common rank and file who had deserted were allowed their lives, but at dear cost. They got a thousand lashes, administered half at a time, in Hyde Park; and on the off days the mob were regaled with the sight of soldiers getting their five hundred stripes for speaking evil of his Majesty in their drink.
REBEL PRISONERS.
Meanwhile, the river one day suddenly swarmed with galleys, which picked up numbers of ‘useful fellows to serve the king.’ Even the City taverns were broken into, and there similar seizure was made, but not without occasional mortal frays, in which there was much promiscuous shooting, and a forcible carrying off of other ‘useful fellows,’ who were hurried on board tenders, and thence sent to sea. There was hardly time for sympathy. A few women in the streets and by the river side filled the air with shrieks and clamour, but they were not much heeded. London became full of expectancy of the renewal of an old and a rare spectacle. The Carlisle prisoners were on their road to town. There were nearly four hundred of them, including about threescore officers. Those who were able to march were tied in couples, and two dragoonshad charge of ten prisoners, one leading them by a rope from his saddle, the other ‘driving them up.’ The captured officers were mounted, but their arms and legs were tied. Batches of other captive men were sent by sea; some seem to have been exceptionally treated. The papers announced the arrival of ‘six coaches and six,’ filled with rebel prisoners, under an escort of horse and foot. The London gaols were emptied of felons, who were transferred to distant prisons, in order to ‘accommodate’ the captives till they were otherwise disposed of. But the most important arrival was that of the hero himself. The Duke of Cumberland, fresh from Carlisle, reached London on a dark January morning, at seven o’clock. Much was made of his having passed only ‘one night in bed,’ in that now easy day’s journey. The duke came with modesty and great becomingness. Shortly after reaching St. James’s he went straight to the little Chapel Royal. At the subsequent usual Sunday drawing-room, there was brilliancy with the utmost gaiety, such as had not been witnessed for many a year. After a few days the duke returned northward, departing with the same modesty that had marked his arrival. He left at one in the morning, but even at that ghostly hour, and in that inclement season, he was done honour to by a crowd which he could scarcely penetrate, whose torches were flashed to their brightest, and whose voices were pitched to the loudest, as their last ‘God speed!’ The temper of London may be seen in one of Walpole’s letters, in which he alludes to the too great favourwhich had been always shown towards Scotland since the last rebellion; and he expresses a hope that the duke will make an end of it.
LONDON MOBS.
In the meantime, old rancour against the Jacobites was embittered by the publication of various ‘provocating pamphlets;’ and the month came to a conclusion with the preachings of the 30th of January, and the comments made on the sermons next day. Bishop Mawson, of Chichester, preached before the Lords at St. Peter’s, Westminster; Dr. Rutherford before the Commons at St. Margaret’s; while a reverend gentleman, who is variously called ‘Pursack’ and ‘Persover,’ aroused the echoes of St. Paul’s in the ears of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. Finally, an anonymous poet swept the lyre in laudation of the duke. How he made the chords ring may be gathered from a singleline:—
Blast, gracious God, th’ assassins’ hell-bred scheme!
Blast, gracious God, th’ assassins’ hell-bred scheme!
Blast, gracious God, th’ assassins’ hell-bred scheme!
The London mob, on the Whig side of politics, cannot be said to have been more civilised than the same mob of thirty years earlier. One of its favourite sights was to see Jacobite prisoners brought into London. The captives were invariably ill-used; but there was a much more humane feeling manifested for such of them as might end their career by the axe or the halter. One day in February upwards of forty officers (including a French colonel of Engineers and four Frenchmen of lower grade) were brought into London in four waggons and a coach. The more dignified vehicle carried the French colonel. They were guardedby a strongly-armed escort. Some were taken to the New Prison in Southwark, some to Newgate. The French colonel in the coach, and his four countrymen in a cart, were driven to the Marshalsea. ‘They were very rudely treated by the populace,’ say the newspapers, ‘who pelted them with dirt, and showed all other marks of abhorrence of their black designs.’ Foreigners were just then looked upon with great suspicion.AMBASSADORS’ CHAPELS.Two servants of the Portuguese and Sardinian envoys, respectively, having let their tongues wag too saucily at a tavern, under the shield, as they thought, of ambassadorial protection, had been seized by the constables and clapped into irons. The envoys demanded their release; and much correspondence ensued between the Home Office and the envoys. It was settled that the legation could not shelter an offender against the law, even though the offender were a fellow-countryman of the legate. Some attempt was made to compel the foreign representatives to abstain from employing Popish priests of English birth in the chapels annexed to the ambassadors’ private residences. The answer was reasonable enough. As their Excellencies could bring no foreign priests of the Romish Church with them, they were obliged to employ English ecclesiastics who were priests of that Church, in the chapels of the respective embassies. These were the only ‘mass houses’ to which English Papists, it was said, could resort, and the Whigs denounced them as the smithies where red hot conspiracywas beaten into shape between foreign hammers and a British anvil.
THE HAVOC OF WAR.
London Whig temper was irritated in another direction. There was not only a reckless assertion of Jacobitism on the part of the prisoners from the north, but there was abundance of sympathy manifested for them. Moreover, full permission was given to the practical application of this sympathy. Jacobite visitors poured into the prisons, and the captives ate, drank, and were merry with them, regardless of what the morrow might bring. Many of the prisoners had pockets well furnished with gold; and where this was wanting it was supplied by Jacobite outsiders. Scarcely a day passed without waggoners or porters depositing in the first lodge hampers of the richest wines and of the finest delicacies. The warders rejoiced, for they took toll of all; and the prison chaplains had some idea that this good time was the beginning of the Millennium.
On the other hand, there was much more misery in the loyal than in the Jacobite army. The Londoners saw nothing for the encouragement of loyalty in such a sight as the landing at the Tower wharf of some of the troops that had been with Cope at Preston Pans. ‘The poor men,’ say all the papers, ‘were in a most miserable shocking condition. Some without arms or legs, others their noses cut off and their eyes put out; besides being hacked and mauled in many parts of their bodies, after a most terrible and cruel manner.’ This ‘atrocity’ was forgotten in the news that roused London in April.
FLYING REPORTS.
The course of war in Scotland, from the beginningof the year to the 16th of April, was in this wise. On the 17th of January Hawley was defeated at Falkirk. On the 30th, the Duke of Cumberland arrived in Edinburgh. March 14th, news came that the Highland army had taken Fort Augustus and had blown up Fort George. The Ladies Seaforth and Mackintosh headed two rebel clans on the hills; but their husbands were with the duke’s army! About the same time old Lord Lovat stimulated the rebel resistance by proclaiming that it was the intention of the Duke of Cumberland to transport the Highlanders to America. On April 3rd, the rebels captured Blair Castle, and on the 16th the duke’s victory at Culloden proved decisive of the fate of the Stuarts.
Exactly a week after the Duke of Cumberland gained the victory, areportto that effect reached London, but there was no news from the duke himself till the 25th. His business-like account of the battle appeared in the ‘London Gazette’ next day. In the interim the London Jacobites in their places of resort asserted loudly that the duke was in full retreat; and it was whispered that if he washopelesslybeaten, the ‘Papists would rise all over the kingdom.’ Butnow‘hope’ herself was beaten out of the souls of Papists and Jacobites. The military in London were in a vein of swaggering delight. They talked of the young duke’s briefly heroic address to a cavalry regiment on the point of charging. He patted the nearest man to him on the back, and cried aloud, ‘One brush, my lads, for the honour of old Cobham!’NEWS OF CULLODEN.Then was curiosity stirred in London barracks as to which regiments were to get the prize for bravery, subscribed by the Corporation of London—namely 5,000l.The duke so wisely distributed it as to rebuke nobody. Veterans at Chelsea were looking at the vacant spaces where they should hang the captured flags, and were disappointed when they heard at the Horse Guards that the duke, considering that it was said how little honour was connected with such trophies, had sent the flags to Edinburgh to be burnt by the common hangman. The Chelsea veterans, however, envied the capturers of the (four) flags; for to each man the duke gave sixteen guineas. Medals and crosses were not yet thought of. His generosity was lauded as enthusiastically as his valour.
While the Jacobites were overwhelming him with charges of cruelty and meanness, the friends of ‘the present happy establishment’ were circulating stories in and about London of his humanity and liberality. Soldiers of the young Chevalier’s army had wreaked their vengeance upon Mr. Rose, the minister at Nairn—on himself and his house. He was a Whig and anti-Romanist, who had favoured the escape of some prisoners taken by the Jacobite army. The Highlanders burnt his house, and, tying the minister up, they gave him 500 lashes. The duke, on hearing of this outrage, fell into uncontrollable fury, and swore he would avenge it. If there was some savagery at and after Culloden, no wonder! Such, at least, was the London feeling among the duke’s friends. But the feeling generally was one of ecstacy at the decisive victory.Lord Bury, who had arrived on the 25th with the news direct from the duke to the king, could hardly walk along the then terraced St. James’s Street for the congratulations of the crowd. Nobody thought such a halcyon messenger was too highly rewarded with a purse of a thousand guineas, and with being nominated own aide-de-camp to King George.
A POPULAR HOLIDAY.
That 25th of April was indeed a gala day for the London mob. They had ample time for breakfast before they gathered at the ‘end of New Bond Street, in Tyburn Road’ (as Oxford Street was then called), to see the young footman, Henderson, hanged for the murder of his mistress, Lady Dalrymple. The culprit did not die ‘game,’ and the brutes were disappointed, but they found consolation in the fall of a scaffolding with all its occupants. Then they had time to pour into the Park and see four or five sergeants shot for trying to desert from King George’s service to King James’s. Moreover there was a man to be whipt somewhere in the City, and a pretty group of sight-seers assembled at Charing Cross in expectation of ‘a fellow in the pillory.’ What with these delights, and the pursuing Lord Bury with vociferations of sanguinary congratulation, the day was a thorough popular holiday.
The anxiety that had been felt in London before Culloden may be measured by the wild joy which prevailed when the news of the victory arrived. Walpole, in Arlington Street, on the evening of the 25th April, writes: ‘The town is all blazing around me as I write with fireworks and illuminations.I have some inclination to wrap up half a dozen sky-rockets to make you drink the duke’s health. Mr. Dodington, on the first report, came out with a very pretty illumination, so pretty that I believe he had it by him, ready for any occasion.’
On the same evening the Rev. Mr. Harris wrote from London to the mother of the future first Earl of Malmesbury, just born: ‘You cannot imagine the prodigious rejoicings that have been made this evening in every part of the town; and indeed it is a proper time for people to express their joy when the enemies of their country are thus cut off.’
CARLYLE AND SMOLLETT.
On that evening Alexander Carlyle was with Smollett in the Golden Ball coffee-house, Cockspur Street. ‘London,’ he says, ‘was in a perfect uproar of joy. About nine o’clock I asked Smollett if he was ready to go, as he lived at May Fair’ (Carlyle was bound for New Bond Street on a supper engagement). ‘He said he was, and would conduct me. The mob were so riotous and the squibs so numerous and incessant that we were glad to go into a narrow entry to put our wigs into our pockets, and to take our swords from our belts and walk with them in our hands, as everybody then wore swords; and after cautioning me against speaking a word lest the mob should discover my country and become insolent, “John Bull,” says he, “is as haughty and valiant to-night, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday (Friday?) when the Highlanders were at Derby.” After we got to the head of the Haymarket through incessant fire,the doctor led me by narrow lanes where we met nobody but a few boys at a pitiful bonfire, who very civilly asked us for sixpence, which I gave them. I saw not Smollett again for some time after, when he showed Smith and me the manuscript of his “Tears of Scotland,” which was published not long after, and had such a run of approbation.’
‘TEARS OF SCOTLAND.’
Smollett was one of those Tories who, like many of the Nonjurors, were not necessarily or consequently Jacobites. They were more willing to make the best of a foreign king than to risk their liberties under an incapable bigot like James Stuart, who, save for the accident of birth, was less of an Englishman and knew less of England (in which, throughout his life, he had only spent a few months) than either of the Georges. But Smollett felt keenly the sufferings of his country, and out of the feeling sprung his verses so full of a tenderly expressed grief,—‘The Tears of Scotland!’ How that mournful ode was written in London in this year of mournful memories for the Jacobites, no one can tell better than Walter Scott. ‘Some gentlemen having met at a tavern, were amusing themselves before supper with a game of cards, while Smollett, not choosing to play, sat down to write. One of the company (Graham of Gartmoor), observing his earnestness and supposing he was writing verses, asked him if it was not so. He accordingly read them the first sketch of the “Tears of Scotland,” consisting only of six stanzas, and on their remarking that the termination of the poem being too strongly expressed might give offenceto persons whose political opinions were different, he sat down without reply and, with an air of great indignation, subjoined the concludingstanza:—
INDIGNATION VERSES.
While the warm blood bedews my veinsAnd unimpair’d remembrance reigns,Resentment of my country’s fateWithin my filial breast shall beat.Yes! spite of thine insulting foe,My sympathising verse shall flow;Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mournThy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn!’
While the warm blood bedews my veinsAnd unimpair’d remembrance reigns,Resentment of my country’s fateWithin my filial breast shall beat.Yes! spite of thine insulting foe,My sympathising verse shall flow;Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mournThy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn!’
While the warm blood bedews my veins
And unimpair’d remembrance reigns,
Resentment of my country’s fate
Within my filial breast shall beat.
Yes! spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow;
Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn
Thy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn!’
The following were the lines which were supposed to be likely to offend the friends of the hero of Culloden; but the sentiment was shared by many who were not friends of the Stuartcause:—
Yet, when the rage of battle ceased,The victor’s rage was not appeased;The naked and forlorn must feelDevouring flames and murd’ring steel.The pious mother, doom’d to death,Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath, &c., &c.
Yet, when the rage of battle ceased,The victor’s rage was not appeased;The naked and forlorn must feelDevouring flames and murd’ring steel.The pious mother, doom’d to death,Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath, &c., &c.
Yet, when the rage of battle ceased,
The victor’s rage was not appeased;
The naked and forlorn must feel
Devouring flames and murd’ring steel.
The pious mother, doom’d to death,
Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath, &c., &c.
The picture was somewhat over-drawn, but there were thousands who believed it to be true to the very letter.
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