Decorated bannerCHAPTERXII.(1751 to 1761.)
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fromthe year 1751 to the coronation of GeorgeIII.(1761), the London Parliament and the London newspapers were the sole sources from which the metropolitan Jacobites, who were not ‘in the secret,’ could obtain any information. There were two events in the earlier year which in some degree interested the Jacobite party. The first was the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales. His way of life has been mercilessly censured, but, considering the standard of morals of his time, it was not worse than that of contemporary princes. It was quite as pure as that of Charles Edward (the Jacobite ‘Prince of Wales’), with whom ultra-Tories disparagingly compared him. Many lies were told of him, cowardly defamers knowing that a prince cannot stoop to defend himself from calumny. It was assumed that he was of the bad quality of the worthless, scampish men who were among his friends. The assumption was not altogether unjustifiable. ‘He possessed many amiable qualities,’ said Mrs. Delany, speaking for the aristocracy. ‘His condescension was such that he kept very bad company,’ said a May Fairparson on the part of the church. The well-known Jacobite epigram not only refused to be sorry at his death, but declared that had it been the whole royal generation, it would have been so much the better for the nation. The press chronicled the event without comment. On ‘Change, the Jacobites openly said, ‘Oh, had it only been the butcher!’ A few weeks later everybody was drinking ‘the Prince of Wales’—George or Charles Edward.
DEATH OF GREAT PERSONAGES.
The other death was that of Viscount Bolingbroke, which occurred in the last month of the year 1751. Bubb Dodington reflected the general indifference, by the simple entry in his Diary, ‘Dec.12. This day died Lord Bolingbroke.’ The newspapers said little more of the pseudo-Jacobite than they had said of the prince. It amounted to the sum of Mrs. Delany’s testimony, and ‘sheremembered Lord Bolingbroke’s person; that he was handsome, had a fine address, but that he was a great drinker, and swore terribly.’ His own treachery to the Chevalier de St. George caused more than one honest Jacobite to be suspected of treason to his lawful king. He made the name odious, and almost warranted the assertion of Burgess (an old divine, a familiar friend of the St. John family), who declared in all good faith, that God ever hated Jacobites, and therefore He called Jacob’s sons by the name of Israelites!
THE NEW HEIR TO THE THRONE.
The references to modern Jacobites in the Parliament at Westminster began, however, now to be fewer and far between. There was not, on the other hand,much additional respect expressed for ‘the happy establishment.’ On an occasion in 1752, when 22,000l.were about to be voted as a subsidy to the Elector of Saxony, some of ‘the electoral family’ seem to have been present in the House. Beckford, as outspoken as Shippen of old, saw his opportunity and remarked: ‘I am here as an English gentleman; as such, I have the right to talk freely of the greatest subject of the King, and much more of the greatest subject of any foreign state. If there be any persons in the House, belonging to any Princes of Germany, they ought not to be here; and, if they are, they must take it for their pains;—for, their presence, I hope, will not keep any member in such an awe as to prevent him from freely speaking.’ The subsidy, however, was granted.
The principles of the men who surrounded the young Prince of Wales became of absorbing interest,—for pure, as well as party, reasons. Bubb Dodington, in December, 1752, speaks in his Diary of an anonymous manifesto, which was in fact a remonstrance to the king from the Whig nobility and gentry, against the method according to which the heir to the throne was being educated; and also against the arbitrary principles of the men then in power; but especially that ‘there was a permanency of power placed in three men whom they looked upon as dangerous; and that these three men entirely trusted and were governed by two others, one of whom had the absolute direction of the Prince, and was of a Tory family, and bred in arbitrary principles; and the other, who wasbred a professed Jacobite, of a declared Jacobite family, and whose brother, now at Rome, was a favourite of the Pretender, and even his Secretary of State. In short, the corollary was, that Murray, Solicitor-General, and Stone, governed the country.’ A copy of this anti-Jacobite declaration reached the king’s hands. ‘What was the effect,’ says the diarist, ‘I can’t tell; but I know they were very much intrigued to find out whence it came, and who was the author.’
LORD EGMONT ON JACOBITES.
In 1753, in the debate in the Commons on the number of land forces to be raised and paid for during that year, Lord Egmont made a speech, the immediate report of which must have raised surprise and anger in St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. That Lord Egmont should denounce increase in the number of men was to be expected, but the Jacobites hardly expected from him such a blow as was dealt in the following words:—‘I am sure the old pretence of Jacobitism can now furnish no argument for keeping up a numerous army in time of peace, for they met with such a rebuff in their last attempt that I am convinced they will never make another, whatever sovereign possesses, as his Majesty does, the hearts and affections ofall the restof his subjects, especially as they must now be convinced, however much France may encourage them to rebel, she will never give them any effectual assistance.’
IN BOTH HOUSES.
It is observable that the Jacobites began to be spoken of in less unworthy tones by their antagoniststhan before. The Pope and ‘Papists’ were referred to in no unbecoming phrases. Indeed, theEnglish‘Catholics’ were never rancorously assailed. The popular spirit was (and is) against that Ultramontanism which would stop at no crime to secure its own triumph; which recognises no law, no king, no country, but Roman, and which, asserting licence for itself, is the bitter and treacherous enemy of every civil and religious liberty. The Earl of Bath reflected the better spirit that prevailed when, in 1753, in the debate on the Bill for annexing the forfeited estates in Scotland to the Crown (which ultimately passed), he said, ‘I wish national prejudices were utterly extinguished. We ought to live like brothers, for we have long lived under the same sovereign, and are now firmly united not only into one kingdom, but into one and the same general interest; therefore, the question ought never to be, who are English? or, who are Scots? but, who are most capable and most diligent in the service of their King and Country.’
One reference to the rebellion was made in the House of Commons, in 1754, in the debate on the propriety of extending the action of the Mutiny Bill to the East Indies. Murray, the Solicitor- (soon after the Attorney-) General, observed, ‘His present Majesty will not attempt it’ (proclaim martial law, under any circumstance, independently of parliament), ‘as no such thing was thought of during the late Rebellion, notwithstanding the immense danger we should have been in, had His Royal Highness and troops fromFlanders been detained but a few weeks by contrary winds.’
JACOBITE HEALTHS.
Although there was plotting in 1753, and mischief was a-foot, and Government spies were far from having an idle time of it, the royal family lived in comparative quiet, save one passing episode connected with a charge laid, in the month of March, against Bishop Johnson, of Gloucester, Murray (Solicitor-General), and Stone (one of the sub-preceptors to the Princes George and Edward)—as Jacobites—of having had, as Walpole puts it, ‘an odd custom of toasting the Chevalier and my Lord Dunbar (Murray’s brother and one of the Chevalier’s peers) at one Vernon’s, a merchant, about twenty years ago.The Pretender’s counterpart(the King) ordered the Council to examine into it.’ The accuser, Fawcett, a lawyer, prevaricated. ‘Stone and Murray,’ says Walpole, ‘took the Bible, on their innocence. Bishop Johnson scrambled out of the scrape at the very beginning; and the Council have reported to the King that the accusation was false and malicious.’
Vernon was in reality a linen-draper. Few people doubted the alleged drinking of Jacobite healths at his house. The dowager Princess of Wales told Bubb Dodington that her late husband had told her that Stone was a Jacobite,—the prince was convinced of it, and when affairs went ill abroad, he used to say to her in a passion: How could better be expected when such a Jacobite as Stone could be trusted?
THE ROYAL FAMILY.
Lord Harcourt, Prince George’s governor, was apedantic man, having no sympathies with the young. My lord was not much of a Mentor for a young Telemachus. He bored the prince by enjoining him to hold up his head, and, ‘for God’s sake,’ to turn out his toes. The tutors of Prince George, after his father’s death, were in fact divided among themselves. Bishop Hayter, of Norwich, and Lord Harcourt were openly at war with Stone and Scott (the last put in by Bolingbroke), who were countenanced by the dowager princess and Murray, ‘so my Lord Bolingbroke dead, will govern, which he never could living.’ Murray, and Stone, and Cresset were Jacobites. Cresset called Lord Harcourt a groom, and the bishop an atheist. The princess accused the latter of teaching her sons, George and Edward, nothing. The bishop retorted by declaring that he was never allowed to teach them anything. His chief complaint was that Jacobite Stone had lent Prince George (or the Prince of Wales) a highly Jacobite book to read, namely, ‘The Revolutions of England,’ by Father D’Orléans; but the objectionable work had really been lent by ‘Lady Augusta’ to Prince Edward, and by him to his elder brother.
PARLIAMENTARY ANECDOTES.
Tindal, the historian, remarks that about this very year (1753) ‘a wonderful spirit of loyalty began to take place all over the kingdom.’ The debates in the two Houses at Westminster confirm this. The old anxious tone was no longer heard. Not a single reference to Jacobites and their designs can be found in the reports of the proceedings in the Legislature. ‘High Church,’ which was once a disloyal menace, became asubject of ridicule. Horace Walpole thus playfully illustrated the ignorance of the High Church party in a debate on the proposal to repeal the Jews’ Naturalization Bill. ‘I remember,’ he said ‘to have heard a story of a gentleman, a High Churchman, who was a member of this House, when it was the custom that candles could not be brought in without a motion regularly made and seconded for that purpose, and an order of the House pursuant thereto, so that it often became a question whether candles should be brought in or no, and this question was sometimes debated until the members could hardly see one another, for those who were against, or for putting off the affair before the House, were always against the question for candles. Now it happened, upon one of those occasions, that the High Church party were against the affair then depending, and therefore against the question for candles; but this gentleman, by mistake, divided for it, and when he was challenged by one of his party for being against them, “Oh Lord!” says he, “I’m sorry for it, but I thought that candles were for the church!”’
ATTEMPT TO MAKE ‘PERVERTS.’
Admiral Vernon, ‘the people’s man,’ supporting the popular prejudice against the emancipation of the Jews, said that if the Bill passed, rich Jews would insist upon the conversion of everyone employed by them, ‘and should they once get the majority of common people on their side, we should soon be all obliged to be circumcised. That this is no chimerical danger, Sir, I am convinced from what lately happened in my county. There was there a great and a richPopish lady lived in it, who, by connivance, had publicly a chapel in her own house, where mass was celebrated every Sunday and Holiday. The lady, out of zeal for her religion, had every such day a great number of buttocks and sirloins of beef roasted or boiled, with plenty of roots and greens from her own garden, and every poor person who came to hear mass at her chapel was sure of a good dinner. What was the consequence? The neighbouring parish churches were all deserted, and the lady’s chapel was crowded, for as the common people have not learning enough, no more than some of their betters, to understand or judge of abstruse speculative points of divinity, they thought that mass, with a good dinner, was better than the church service without one, and probably they would judge in the same manner of a Jewish synagogue.’
DR. ARCHIBALD CAMERON.
In one sense Tindal’s view of the general increase of loyalty was not ill-founded. There was, however, an increase of Jacobite audacity also; but the Government were as well aware of it as they were that the Chevalier was hiding at Bouillon, and that the people there were heartily sick of him. One proof of their vigilance was made manifest in the spring of 1753. On the 16th of April, at 6 o’clock in the evening, a coach, with an escort of dragoons about it, and a captive gentleman within, was driven rapidly through the City towards the Tower. The day was the anniversary of Culloden. The time of day was that when the friends of the happy establishment were at the tipsiest of their tipsy delight in drunken honour of the victory.It was soon known who the prisoner was. He was Dr. Archibald Cameron, brother ofDuncan Cameron, of Lochiel. Duncan had joined Charles Edward, in obedience to his sentimental prince, but with the conviction that the insurrection would be a failure. Archibald had followed his elder brother as in duty bound, and the prince from a principle of allegiance. After Culloden and much misery, they and others escaped to France by the skin of their teeth. The King of France gave Duncan the command of a regiment of Scots; Archibald was appointed doctor to it, and each pretty well starved on his appointment. Both were under attainder, and subject to death, not having surrendered before a certain date, or offered to do so after it.
Had Archibald remained quietly in France, his life at least would have been in no danger; but in the early part of 1753, he crossed to Scotland in the utmost secrecy, and when he landed he had not the remotest idea that the eye of Sam Cameron, a Government spy, was upon him, by whom his movements were made known to the Ministry at the Cockpit in Downing Street. There can be no doubt that the doctor went to his native land on a political mission. ‘He certainly,’ says Walpole, ‘came over with commission to feel the ground.’ He always protested that he was there on private business connected with the estate of Lochiel. His enemies declared that the private business referred to a deposit of money for the Jacobite cause, the secret of the hiding-place of which was known to Archibald, and that he intended to appropriate the cash to his ownuse. Had Cameron’s mission not been hostile to the established government, he probably would have asked permission to visit Scotland; and, more than probably, he would have been permitted to do so. Be this as it may, his namesake, the spy, betrayed him; and the Justice Clerk of Edinburgh, washing his hands of the business, sent the trapped captive to London, where he arrived on the seventh anniversary of the decisive overthrow of the Stuart cause, and while the ‘joyous and loyal spirits’ were getting preciously hysterical in memory thereof. The ‘quality,’ however, were supremely indifferent ‘Nobody,’ writes Walpole, ‘troubled their head about him, or anything else but Newmarket, where the Duke of Cumberland is at present making a campaign, with half the nobility, and half the money of England, attending him.’
BEFORE THE COUNCIL.
In the Tower Dr. Cameron was allowed to rest some eight and forty hours, and then a multitude saw him carried from the fortress to where the Privy Council were sitting. The illustrious members of that body were in an angry mood. They were blustering in their manner, but they stooped to flattering promises if he would only make a revelation. When he declined to gratify them, they fell into loud tumultuous threatenings. They could neither frighten nor cajole him; and accordingly they flung him to the law, and to the expounders and the executants of it.
TRIAL OF CAMERON.
Very short work did the latter make with the poor gentleman. It is said that when he was first captured he denied being the man they took him for. Now, on the17th of May, he made no such denial, nor did he deny having been in arms against the ‘present happy establishment.’ He declared that circumstances, over which he had no control, prevented him from clearing his attainder by a surrender on or before a stated day. But he neither concealed his principles nor asked for mercy. There was no intention of according him any. Sir William Lee and his brother judges, the identity of the prisoner being undisputed, agreed that he must be put to death under the old attainder, and Lee delivered the sentence with a sort of solemn alacrity. It was the old, horrible sentence of partial hanging, disembowelling, and so forth. When Lee had reached the declaration as to hanging, he looked the doctor steadily in the face, said with diabolical emphasis, ‘butNOTtill you are dead;’ and added all the horrible indignities to which the poor body, externally and internally, was to be subjected. The judge was probably vexed at finding no symptom that he had scared the helpless victim, who was carried back to the Tower amid the sympathies of Jacobites and the decorous curiosity of ladies and gentlemen who gazed at him, and the gay dragoons escorting him, as they passed.
THE DOCTOR’S JACOBITISM.
Next day, and for several days, Jean Cameron, the doctor’s wife, was seen going to St. James’s Palace, to Leicester House, and to Kensington. She was admitted, by proper introduction to majesty, to the dowager Princess of Wales and to the Princess Amelia. The sunshine of such High Mightinesses should ever bear with it grace and mercy; but poor and pretty Jean Cameronfound nothing but civility, and an expression of regret that the law must be left to take its course. She went back to cheer, if she could, her doomed, but not daunted, husband. He was not allowed pen and ink and paper, but under rigid restrictions. What he wrote was read. If it was not to the taste of the warders, they tore up the manuscript, and deprived the doctor of the means of writing. Nevertheless, he contrived to get slips of paper and a pencil, and therewith to record certain opinions, all of which he made over to his wife.
It cannot be said that the record showed any respect whatever for the kingde facto, or for his family. These were referred to as ‘the Usurper and his Faction.’ The Duke of Cumberland was ‘the inhuman son of the Elector of Hanover.’ Not that Cameron wished any harm to them hereafter. He hoped God would forgive, as he put it, ‘all my enemies, murderers, and false accusers, from the Elector of Hanover (the present possessor of the throne of our injured sovereign) and his bloody son down to Sam Cameron, the basest of their spies,as I freely do!’ He himself, he said, had done many a good turn to English prisoners in Scotland, had also prevented the Highlanders from burning the houses and other property of Whigs, ‘for all which,’ he added, ‘I am like to meet with a Hanover reward.’
CHARLES EDWARD, A PROTESTANT.
On the other hand, the doomed man wrote in terms of the highest praise of the old and young Chevalier, or the King and Prince of Wales. There wouldbe neither peace nor prosperity till the Stuarts were restored. The prince was as tenderly affectioned as he was brave, and Dr. Cameron knew of no order issued at Culloden to give no quarter to the Elector’s troops. As aide-de-camp to the prince, he must (he said) have known if such an order was issued. On another subject, the condemned Jacobite wrote: ‘On the word of a dying man, the last time I had the honour of seeing His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, he told me from his own mouth, and bid me assure his friends from him, that he was a member of the Church of England.’ It is to be regretted that no date fixes ‘the last time.’ As to the assurance, it proves the folly of the speaker; also, that Cameron himself was not a Roman Catholic, as he was reported to be.
From Walpole’s Letters and the daily and weekly papers, ample details of the last moments of this unfortunate man may be collected. They were marked by a calm, unaffected heroism. ‘The parting with his wife (writes Walpole) the night before (his execution) was heroic and tender. He let her stay till the last moment, when being aware that the gates of the Tower would be locked, he told her so; she fell at his feet in agonies: he said, “Madam, this is not what you promised me,” and embracing her, forced her to retire; then, with the same coolness, looked at the window till her coach was out of sight, after which, he turned about and wept.’
CAMERON’S CREED.
On the following morning, the 7th of June, Dr. Cameron expressed a strong desire to see his wife oncemore, to take a final leave, but this was explained to him to be impossible. With a singular carefulness as to his own appearance, which carefulness indeed distinguished all who suffered in the same cause, he was dressed in a new suit, a light coloured coat, red waistcoat and breeches, and even a new bagwig! The hangman chained him to the hurdle on which he was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn. ‘He looked much at the Spectators in the Houses and Balconies,’ say the papers, ‘as well as at those in the Street, and he bowed to several persons.’ He seemed relieved by his arrival at the fatal tree. Rising readily from the straw in the hurdle, he ascended the steps into the cart, the hangman slightly supporting him under one arm. Cameron, with a sort of cheerfulness, welcomed a reverend gentleman who followed him,—‘a Gentleman in a lay habit,’ says the ‘Daily Advertiser,’ ‘who prayed with him and then left him to his private devotions, by which ’twas imagined the Doctor was a Roman Catholic, and the Gentleman who prayed with him, a Priest.’ This imagining was wrong. On one of the slips, pencilled in the Tower, and delivered to his wife, the Doctor had written: ‘I die a member of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, as by law established before that most unnatural Rebellion began in 1688, which, for the sins of this nation, hath continued till this day.’ At Tyburn, moreover, Cameron made a statement to the sheriff, that he had always been a member of the Church of England. There was no discrepancy in this, he was simply an active JacobiteNonjuror.THE LAST VICTIM.As the reverend gentleman who attended him, hurriedly descended the steps, he slipped. Cameron was quite concerned for him, and called to him from the cart, ‘I think you do not know the way so well as I do.’ Walpole says: ‘His only concern seemed to be at the ignominy of Tyburn. He was not disturbed at the dresser for his body, nor for the fire to burn his bowels;’ but he remembered the emphatic remark of his Judge, that the burning was to take place while he was yet alive; and he asked the sheriff to order things so that he might be quite dead before the more brutal part of the sentence was carried out. The sheriff was a remarkably polite person. He had begged Cameron, after he had mounted into the cart, not to hurry himself, but to take his own time: they would wait his pleasure and convenience, and so on. The courteous official now promised he would see the Doctor effectually strangled out of life, before knife or fire touched him. On which, Cameron declared himself to be ready. It was at this juncture, the chaplain hurriedly slipt down the steps. ‘The wretch,’ says Walpole, who in doubt as to his Church, calls him ‘minister or priest,’ ‘after taking leave, went into a landau, where, not content with seeing the Doctor hanged, he let down the top of the landau, for the better convenience of seeing him embowelled.’
IN THE SAVOY.
Even such brutes as then found a sensual delight in witnessing the Tyburn horrors were touched by the unpretentious heroism of this unhappy victim. Some of them recovered their spirits a day or two after, whena man was pilloried at Charing Cross. They repaired to the spot with a supply of bricks and flung them with such savage dexterity as soon to break a couple of the patient’s ribs. On the 9th of June at midnight, there was a spectacle to which they were not invited. The Government (wisely enough) were resolved that Cameron’s funeral should be private. The body lay where Lovat’s had lain, at Stephenson’s the undertaker, in the Strand, opposite Exeter Change. A few Jacobite friends attended and saw the body quietly deposited in what the papers styled, ‘the great vault in the precincts of the Savoy.’
It was in this month a report was spread that an attempt had been made to blow up the Tower, from which, perhaps, the legend has arisen that the young Chevalier and a friend in disguise had been there to see if it could not be done! ‘The Report,’ according to the ‘Weekly Journal,’ ‘of a lighted match being found at the door of the Powder Magazine in the Tower was not true.’ A bit of burnt paper lying on the ground within the Tower gave rise to a story which agitated all London for a day or two;—and which will be presently referred to.
A SCENE AT RICHARDSON’S.
How Dr. Cameron’s death affected both parties, in London, is best illustrated by a well-known and picturesque incident recorded by Boswell. Soon after the execution, Hogarth was visiting Richardson, the author of ‘Clarissa Harlowe.’ ‘And being a warm partisan of GeorgeII., he observed to Richardson that certainly there must have been some very unfavourablecircumstances lately discovered in this particular case which had induced the King to approve of an execution for rebellion so long after the time when it was committed, as this had the appearance of putting a man to death in cold blood, and was very unlike his Majesty’s usual clemency. While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window of the room shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forward to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against GeorgeII., as one who, upon all occasions, was unrelenting and barbarous, mentioning many instances. In short, he displayed such a power of eloquence that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that the idiot had been at the moment inspired. Hogarth and Johnson were not made known to each other at this interview.’
CAMERON’S CASE.
Neither Hogarth nor Johnson knew the real facts of this case. Cameron played a desperate game and lost his stake. Scott, in the Introduction to Redgauntlet,’ declares that whether the execution of Cameron was political or otherwise, it might have been justified upon reasons of a public nature had the king’s Ministry thought proper to do so. Cameron had not visited Scotland solely on private affairs. ‘It was not considered prudent by the English Ministry to let it begenerally known that he came to inquire about a considerable sum of money which had been remitted from France to the friends of the exiled family.’ He had also, as Scott points out, a commission to confer with Macpherson of Cluny who, from 1746 to 1756, was the representative or chief agent of the ‘rightful King,’ an office which he carried on under circumstances of personal misery and peril. Cameron and Macpherson were to gather together the scattered embers of disaffection. The former, being captured, paid the forfeit which was legally due. ‘The ministers, however,’ says Scott, ‘thought it proper to leave Dr. Cameron’s new schemes in concealment, lest, by divulging them, they had indicated the channel of communication which, as is now well known, they possessed to all the plots of Charles Edward. But it was equally ill-advised and ungenerous to sacrifice the character of the King to the policy of the administration. Both points might have been gained by sparing the life of Dr. Cameron, after conviction, and limiting his punishment to perpetual exile.’ As it was, Jacobite plots continued to ‘rise and burst like bubbles on a fountain.’ An affectionate memory of Cameron was also transmitted through the hearts of his descendants. In the reign of Victoria, his grandson restored honour to a name which, in a political point of view, had never been dishonoured.
In the royal chapel of the Savoy, the following inscription is to be read on the wall beneath a painted glass window:—In memory of Archibald Cameron, brotherof Donald Cameron of Lochiel, who having been attainted after the battle of Culloden in 1746, escaped to France, but returning to Scotland in 1753, was apprehended and executed. He was buried beneath the Altar of this Chapel. This window is inserted by Her Majesty’s permission in place of a sculptured tablet which was erected by his grandson, Charles Hay Cameron, in 1846, and consumed by the fire which partially destroyed the Chapel in 1864.
The window above referred to has six lights, and each light now contains figures representingSt.Peter,St.Philip,St.Paul,St.John,St.James, andSt.Andrew.
A MINOR OFFENDER.
As a sample of how minor offences on the part of unquiet Jacobites were punished, the case may be cited of the Rev. James Taylor, who was not allowed to indulge his Jacobitism even in a compassionate form. A beggar was arrested in his progress from house to house. He was found to be the bearer of a recommendatory letter from the Nonjuror Taylor, in which it was stated that the bearer had fought on the right side at Preston Pans and Culloden. For this offence Mr. Taylor was tried, convicted, and heavily sentenced;—namely, to two years’ imprisonment, a fine of 300l., and to find sureties for his good behaviour during the next seven years, himself in 1000l., and two others in 500l.each.
All this time, Parliament was perfectly tranquil. There was no flash of anti-Jacobitism. There was nothing in the debates but what partook of the lightestof summer-lightning. In the whole session of 1755, there is but one allusion to Jacobites, and that took the form of a wish that, ten years before, Scotland had been as heavily oppressed as England was,—in that and many a succeeding year,—in one special respect. Mr. Robert Dundas, in the Commons’ debate on speedily manning the Navy, insisted on the legality and propriety of pressing seamen, and remarked: ‘How happy it would have been for Scotland, in 1745, if all her seamen had been pressed into the public service, in order to man a few guard-ships, to prevent the landing of those who, at that time, raised such a flame in the country; and yet I believe that a press could not then have been carried on without the aid of the military.’
SUSPICION AGAINST THE DUKE.
At this time there was one especial trouble in the royal family. The dowager Princess of Wales had as much dread of the conqueror at Culloden, as if he had been the Jacobite prince himself. Her dominant idea was that the really good-natured and now corpulent duke would act RichardIII.towards the prince, her son, if opportunity should offer. Bubb Dodington says, in his Diary, May, 1755: ‘On my commending the Prince’s figure, and saying he was much taller than the King, she replied, yes; he was taller than his uncle. I said, in height it might be so, but if they measured round, the Duke had the advantage of him. She answered, it was true; but she hoped it was the only advantage that he ever would have of him.’
THE ANTI-JACOBITE PRESS.
In the following year, 1756, electioneering politics found violent suggestion and expression. Walpole,referring to the clamour raised by the Jacobites, speaks of ‘Instructions from counties, cities, boroughs, especially from the City of London, in the style of 1641, and really in the spirit of 1715 and 1745, (which) have raised a great flame.’ On the other hand, Jacobites and their manifestations were treated by the Whig press with boundless contempt. For example, the ‘Contest,’ in 1757, flung this paragraph at the supposed fewJacksnow left in London to read it:—‘The wordJacobiteisvox et prœterea nihil. The Name survives after the Party is extinct. There may be a few enthusiastic Bigots who deem Obstinacy a Merit, and who appear to be ungrateful for the Liberty and Security they enjoy under the present Government, and insensible of the Calamity and Oppression of the Government they would be willing to restore. But their Power is as inconsiderable as their Principles are detestable. And many of them, had they an Opportunity of accomplishing their proposed desires, would be the last to put them in Execution; for they are mostly influenced by an idle Affectation of Singularity, and the ridiculous Pride of opposing the Common Sense of their Fellow Citizens.’
In the same year, the ‘Independent Freeholder’ turned the question to party account, and divided the people of England into three classes. It admitted the diminished numbers of Jacobites, recorded their disaffection, and also accounted for it. The three classes were—Place Hunters, Jacobites, and English Protestants, whether Whig or Tory. The ‘Freeholder’ describedthe Jacobites as:—‘An Offspring of Zealots, early trained to support the divine hereditary Right of Men, who forfeited all Right by persisting to do every Wrong. They are not considerable in Number; and had probably mixed with the Mass of rational Men, had not the continued Abuses of the Administration furnished cause of Clamour, enabling secret Enemies of the Constitution to cherish a groundless Enmity to the Succession.’
THE CITY GATES.
As the reign of GeorgeII.drew to a close, in the autumn of 1760, a change came over the City of London, which, to many, indicated a new era; namely, the destruction of those City gates in the preservation of which timid Whigs saw safety from the assaults of Jacobites.Readannounced the fate of those imaginary defences, in the ‘Journal’ of August 2nd:—‘On Wednesday, the materials of the three following City Gates were sold before the Committee of Lands, to Mr. Blagden, a carpenter, in Coleman Street; namely, Aldgate, for 157l.10s.; Cripplegate, for 91l.; and Ludgate, for 148l.The purchaser is to begin to pull down the two first, on the first day of September; and Ludgate on the 4th of August, and is to clear away all the rubbish, &c., in two months from these days.’ In two months, a new reign had begun, and the old gates had disappeared.
But before proceeding to the new reign, there remains to be chronicled how the ordinary London Jacobites obtained news oftheirKing, James, andtheirPrince of Wales, Charles Edward.