Decorated bannerCHAPTERXV.(1761-1775.)
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STATE OF LONDON.
london, at the beginning of the reign of GeorgeIII., was, as it had been for many years, in a condition resembling the capital of Dahomey at the present time. It could not be entered by any suburb, including the Thames, without the nose and eyes being afflicted by the numerous rottening bodies of criminals gibbeted in chains. The heads of two rebels still looked ghastly from Temple Bar. The bodies on gibbets often created a pestilence. The inhabitants of the infected districts earnestly petitioned to be relieved from the horrible oppression. If their petition was unheeded they took means to relieve themselves. A most significant paragraph in the papers states that ‘Allthe gibbets in the Edgware Road were sawn down in one night.’ Not only the suburban roads, but the streets and squares were infested by highwaymen and footpads. Robberies (with violence) were not only committed by night, but by day. Murders wereperpetrated out of mere wantonness, and a monthly score of delinquents, of extremely wide apart offences, were strangled at Tyburn, without improvement to society. It was still a delight to the mob to kill some very filthy offender in the pillory, who generally was not more unclean than his assassins. Ladies going to or from Court in their chairs were often robbed of their diamonds, the chairmen feigning a defence which helped the robbers. A prince or princess returning to London from Hampton Court would now and then pick up a half-murdered wretch in a ditch, and drop him at the first apothecary’s in town. The brutal school boys of St. Bride’s, imitating their fathers, took to violence as a pastime. They could sweep into Fleet Street with clubs, knock down all whom they could reach, and retreat all the prouder if they left a dead victim on the field. There was anarchy in the streets and highways, but it is a comfort to find that at the Chapel Royal, there were none but ‘extreme polite audiences.’ Indeed, the sons of violence themselves were not without politeness. A batch of one hundred of those of whom the gallows had been disappointed, were marched from Newgate to the river side, to embark for the Plantations. A fife band preceded them, playing ‘Through the wood, laddie!’ The convicts roared out the song. ‘You are very joyous?’ said a spectator. ‘Joyous!’ cried one of the rascals, ‘you only come with us and you’ll find yourselftransported!’
GOOD FEELING.
There were no Jacobites at Oxford now, but therewas a new sect of Methodists there. Six of its members, students of Edmund Hall, were expelled for praying and expounding the Scripture in their own rooms! In another direction there was something like reconciliation. The Government at St. James’s allowed a Popish prelate to establish himself in Canada, on condition that France should entirely abandon the Jacobites; and now, for the first time, the king and royal family of the House of Hanover were prayed for in all the Roman Catholic chapels in Ireland, and in the Ambassadors’ chapels in London.
The king showed his respect for the principle of fidelity, on the part of the Jacobite leaders, by restoring some of the forfeited estates to the chiefs. He showed it also in another way. Having been told of a gentleman of family and fortune in Perthshire, who had not only refused to take the oath of allegiance to him, but had never permitted him to be named as king in his presence, ‘Carry my compliments to him,’ said the king, ‘but what?—stop!—no!—he may perhaps not receive my compliment as King of England; give him the Elector of Hanover’s compliments, and tell him that he respects the steadiness of his principles.’ Hogg, who tells this story in the introduction to the ‘Jacobite Relics,’ does not see that in this message there was an excess of condescension that hardly became the king, though the spirit of the messagedid. The story is told with some difference in the introduction to ‘Redgauntlet.’
A JACOBITE FUNERAL.
In October of the year 1761, there died a Jacobiteof some distinction, who had the honour to be permitted to lie in Westminster Abbey; but, the spectators who had been at the lying in state, observed, with some surprise, that his coffin-plate bore only the initials K. M. L. F. The ‘Funeral Book’ of the Abbey is not more communicative, save that the age of the defunct was forty-three. As the coffin sank to its resting place in the South Aisle, curious strangers were told that it contained the body of Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Fortrose—a dignity not sanctioned by the law; for, Kenneth was the only son of the fifth Earl of Seaforth, who suffered attainder and forfeiture for the part he played in the insurrection of 1715. But Kenneth left an only son, Kenneth (by Lady Mary Stewart, daughter of the Earl of Galloway). This son was not restored to his grandfather’s titles in the Scotch peerage, but he was created Viscount Fortrose and Earl of Seaforth in the peerage of Ireland. This transplantation was not fortunate. Lord Seaforth died, leaving no male heir, in 1781, when the old Jacobite title became extinct. The son of the attainted earl, restored as to his fortune, was in the army, and in Parliament in 1746, when he accompanied the Duke of Cumberland to Scotland, but his wife and clan, as Walpole remarks, went with the Rebels. The Irish peer but Scotch Earl of Seaforth well deserved his distinction, when in 1779, with seven hundred Mackenzies at his back, he repelled the invasion of Jersey by a French force.
DR. JOHNSON’S PENSION.
Other Jacobites were taken into favour, for whichloyal service was rendered. One of the first gracious acts of GeorgeIII.was to confer a pension on Dr. Johnson, of 300l.a year, equal now to twice that sum. Johnson had well earned it, and he was expressly told that it was conferred on him for what he had done, not for anything he was expected to do. He felt that he was not expected to be an apologist of the Stuarts, and the first act of the ex-Jacobite, after becoming a pensioner, was to write for the Rev. Dr. Kennedy’s ‘Complete System of Astronomical Chronology, unfolding the Scriptures,’ a dedication to the king who had pensioned him (and whom he had looked upon as the successor of two usurpers), which dedication is truly described as being in a strain of very courtly elegance. As to the granting of the pension by the king, Dr. Johnson, the once adherent to the Stuart, remarked, ‘The English language does not afford me terms adequate to my feelings on this occasion. I must have recourse to the French. I ampénétréwith his Majesty’s goodness.’ Johnson was quite sensible that it would be right to do something more for his reward. The something was done in another dedication to the Queen, of Hoole’s translation of Tasso, ‘which is so happily conceived,’ says Boswell, ‘and elegantly expressed, that I cannot but point it out to the peculiar notice of my readers.’ Johnson soon became a partisan of the Hanoverian family. Speaking of some one who with more than ordinary boldness attacked public measures and the royal family, he said, ‘I think he is safe from the law, but he is an abusive scoundrel; and insteadof applying to my Lord Chief Justice to punish him, I would send half-a-dozen footmen and have him well ducked.’ A semi-noyade was now thought fitting recompense for a Stuart apologist.
JOHNSON’S VIEW OF IT.
At a later period, when Johnson reviewed, in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine,’ Tyler’s Vindication of Mary Queen of Scots, the Jacobitism quite as much as the generosity of his principles led him to say, ‘It has now been fashionable for near half a century to defame and vilify the House of Stuart.... The Stuarts have found few apologists, for the dead cannot pay for praise, and who will without reward oppose the tide of popularity?’
Johnson being accused of tergiversation, has a right to be heard in his own case. Much censured for accepting a pension which many a censurer would have taken with the utmost alacrity, ‘Why, Sir,’ said he with a hearty laugh, ‘it is a mighty foolish noise that they make. I have accepted a pension as a reward which has been thought due to my literary merit; and now that I have the pension, I am the same man in every respect that I have ever been. I retain the same principles. It is true that I cannot now curse (smiling) the House of Hanover, nor would it be decent of me to drink King James’s health in the wine that King George gives me money to pay for. But, Sir, I think that the pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover and drinking King James’s health, are amply overbalanced by 300l.a year.’ To this may be added Boswell’s assurance that Johnson had littleconfidence in the rights claimed by the Stuarts, and that he felt, in course of time, much abatement of his own Toryism.HIS DEFINITION OF A JACOBITE.It was in his early days that he talkedfierceJacobitism, at Mr. Langton’s, to that gentleman’s niece, Miss Roberts. The Bishop of Salisbury (Douglas) and other eminent men were present. Johnson, taking the young lady by the hand, said, ‘My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite.’ Her uncle was a Tory without being a Jacobite, and he angrily asked why Johnson thus addressed his niece? ‘Why, Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘I meant no offence to your niece, I mean her a great compliment. A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the Divine Right of kings. He who believes in the Divine Right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the Divine Right of bishops. He that believes in the Divine Right of bishops believes in the Divine Authority of the Christian Religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig, for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.’
DEATH OF THE DUKE OF CUMBERLAND.
Be this as it may, Jacobitism was as surely dying out as he was who had crushed the hopes of Jacobites at Culloden. The victor on that field, and even now in the prime of life, died in 1765, of what Walpole called a ‘rot among princes.’ He was a ton of man, unwieldy, asthmatic, blind of one eye, nearly so of the other, lame through his old Dettingen wound, half breathless from asthma, half paralysed by an old attack, able to write a letter, yet not able to collect his senses sufficiently to play a game of piquet. On the 30th of October, he went to Court, and received LordAlbemarle to dine with him, at his house in Grosvenor Street. Unable to attend a Cabinet Council in the evening, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Northington called on him. As they entered the room, one of his valets was about to bleed him, at his own request. Before the operation could be performed, the duke murmured, ‘It is all over!’ and fell dead in Lord Albemarle’s arms.
Lord Albemarle remembered that when the duke’s brother, Frederick, Prince of Wales, died, his cautious widow immediately burned all his papers and letters. Lord Albemarle could not take upon himself to destroy the duke’s papers, but he sent the whole of them to the duke’s favourite sister, the Princess Amelia. She replied, from Gunnersbury, ‘You are always attentive and obliging, my good Lord Albemarle. I thank you for the letters, and I have burnt them.’ Many a secret perished with them. GeorgeIII.conferred on Lord Albemarle the duke’s garter.
The bitterness and pertinacity of the Jacobites against the duke cannot be better illustrated than by an incident recorded by Boswell. Johnson, Wedderburne, Murphy, and Foote, visited ‘Bedlam’ (in Moorfields) together. At that time idle people went to look at the ‘mad people in dens,’ as they now go to a menagerie, or ‘the Zoo.’ Boswell says that Foote gave a very entertaining account of Johnson having his attention arrested by a man who was very furious, and who, while beating his straw, supposed it was William Duke of Cumberland, whom he was punishing for hiscruelties in Scotland, in 1746. The entertainment was in the fact that Jacobite Johnson was amused by this sad spectacle.
The duke was soon followed on ‘the way to dusty death,’ by him whose life he had certainly helped to embitter.
DEATH OF THE OLD CHEVALIER.
The death of the Chevalier de St. George, at Rome, on New Year’s Night, 1766, was not known in London for nearly a fortnight. The only stir caused by it was at the Council Board at St. James’s, whence couriers rode away with despatches for foreign courts, which couriers speedily returned with satisfactory answers. The Chevalier might, like CharlesII., have apologised to those who attended his death-bed, on his being so long adying. What had come to be thought of him in London may be partly seen in Walpole’s ‘Memoirs of the reign of GeorgeIII.’ There the Chevalier is spoken of as one who had outlived his own hopes and the people who had ever given him any. ‘His party was dwindled to scarce any but Catholics.’ Of the church of the latter, Walpole calls him the most meritorious martyr, and yet Rome would not recognise the royalty of the heirs. ‘To such complete humiliation was reduced that ever unfortunate House of Stuart, now at last denied the empty sound of royalty by the Church and Court, for which they had sacrificed three kingdoms.’
FUNERAL RITES.
The newspapers and other periodicals of the time took less interest in the event than in a prize-fight. The feeling with trifling exception was one of indifference,but there was nowhere any expression of disrespect. The various accounts of the imperial ceremony with which the body of the unlucky prince lay in state, and was ultimately entombed, were no doubt read with avidity. The imagination of successive reporters grew with details of their subject. A figure of Death which appears among the ‘properties’ of the lying in state, in the earliest account, expands into ‘thirteen skeletons holding wax tapers’ in the later communications. To this state ceremony, the London papers assert, none were admitted but Italian princes and English—Jacobites of course,—several of whom left London for the purpose. At the transfer of the body to St. Peter’s, the royal corpse was surrounded by ‘the English college,’ and was followed by ‘four Cardinals on mules covered with purple velvet hangings.’ The Jacobites must have put down the London papers with a feeling that their king was dead, and a hope that his soul was at rest.
The death seems to have had a curious effect on at least one London Jacobite. In January, 1766, two heads remained on Temple Bar. The individual just referred to thought they had remained there long enough. For some nights he secretly discharged bullets at them from a cross-bow; and at last he was caught in the act. He was suspected of being a kinsman of one of the unhappy sufferers; but in presence of the magistrates he maintained that he was a loyal friend of the established government; ‘that he thought it was not sufficient that traitors should merely suffer death, and that consequently he had treated the heads with indignity bytrying to smash them.’ This offender, who affected a sort of silliness, was dismissed with a caution. There were found upon him fifty musket bullets, separately wrapped in paper, each envelope bearing the motto ‘Eripuit ille vitam,’ the application of which would have puzzled Œdipus himself.
GEORGEIII.AND DR. JOHNSON.
The next incident of the time connected with Jacobitism is the celebrated interview between the king and Dr. Johnson. In that celebrated audience which the old Tory had of the king, in February, 1767, in the library of Buckingham Palace, sovereign and subject acquitted themselves equally well. Mr. Barnard, the librarian, had settled Johnson, and left him, by the library fireside. The Doctor was deep in a volume when the king and Barnard entered quietly by a private door, and the librarian, going up to Johnson, whispered in his ear, ‘Sir, here is the king.’ GeorgeIII.was ‘courteously easy.’ Johnson was self-possessed and equally at his ease, as he stood in the king’s presence.
With little exception, the conversation was purely literary: the characteristics of the Oxford and Cambridge libraries; the publications of the University presses; the labours of Johnson himself; the controversy between Warburton and Lowth; Lord Lyttelton as a historian; the merits of the universal Dr. Hill; the quality of home and foreign periodicals; and so on. When Lyttelton was named, Johnson said he had blamed HenryII.over much. The king thought historians seldom did such things by halves. ‘No, Sir,’said Johnson, ‘not to kings;’ but he added: ‘That for those who spoke worse of kings than they deserved, he could find no excuse; but he could more easily conceive how some might speak better of them than they deserved, without any ill intention; for as kings had much in their power to give, those who were favoured by them would frequently, from gratitude, exaggerate their praises; and as this proceeded from a good motive, it was certainly excusable—as far as error was excusable.’
JOHNSON, ON GEORGEIII.
When Johnson submitted that he himself had done his part as a writer, ‘I should have thought so, too,’ said the king, ‘if you had not written so well.’ Johnson spoke of this to Boswell in these words: ‘No man could have paid a handsomer compliment, and it was fit for a king to pay: it was decisive.’ On another occasion, Johnson being asked if he made any reply to this high compliment, he answered: ‘No, Sir. When the king had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign.’ Later still he said, ‘I find it does a man good to be talked to by his sovereign;’ and for some time subsequently he continued to speak of the king as he had spoken of him to Mr. Barnard, after the interview: ‘Sir, they may talk of the king as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen;’ and later, ‘still harping on my daughter,’ he said at Langton’s: ‘Sir, his manners are those of as fine a gentleman as we may suppose LouisXIV.or CharlesII.’
Assuredly, the fine-gentleman manners of eitherking were not now to be found in the Charles Edward who aspired to the throne which CharlesII.had occupied. A passage in an autograph letter, addressed in May, 1767, by Cardinal York to a friend of the family in London (where it was offered for sale three or four years ago), shows the condition of the prince, and shadows forth the lingering hopes of the family. The Cardinal, after stating that the Pope had presented Charles Edward with ‘a pair of beads,’ adds: ‘They are of such a kind as areonly given to Sovrains, and could wee but gett the better of the nasty Bottle, which every now and then comes on by spurts, I would hope a greet deal of ouer gaining a good dealas to other things.’
JOHNSON’S PENSION OPPOSED.
Four years later (that is, in 1771), the pensioning of Jacobite Johnson was brought before the notice of the House of Commons. In parliament, his Jacobitism was made use of as a weapon against himself. Townshend’s charge against the Ministry was based on the alleged fact that Johnson was a pensioner, and was expected to earn his pension. ‘I consider him,’ said Townshend, ‘a man of some talent, but no temper. The principle he upholds I shall ever detest. This man, a Jacobite by principle, has been encouraged, fostered, pensioned, because heisa Jacobite.’ Wedderburn denied it, and aptly asked, ‘If a papist, or a theoretical admirer of a republican form of government, should be a great mathematician or a great poet, doing honour to his country and his age, and should fall into destitution, is he to be excluded from the royal bounty?’ Theanswer is patent; but it is not a matter for gratulation that Johnson wrote, as Lord Campbell remarks, ‘out of gratitude, “The False Alarm,” and “Taxation no Tyranny,” the proof sheets of which were revised at the Treasury.’ Johnson himself did not prove that his withers were unwrung by the vaunting remark to Davies: ‘I wish my pension, Sir, were twice as large, that they might make twice as much noise.’
A 30TH OF JANUARY SERMON.
In 1772, Jacobitism was again under parliamentary notice. At this time, although the Nonjurors kept true in their allegiance to the hereditary right of the Stuarts, the Tories were as opposite as could be to those of the old turbulent era of ‘High Church and Ormond!’ On the 30th of January, Dr. Nowell (Principal of St. Mary, Oxford) preached before the House of Commons a sermon that Sacheverel might have preached. That is to say, he vindicated CharlesI.; he also drew a parallel between him and GeorgeIII., and indulged in very high Tory sentiments. As usual, the preacher was thanked, and he was requested to print his discourse, which was done accordingly. At this juncture the younger Townshend moved in the House to have the sermon burnt by the common hangman; but, says Walpole (in his ‘Last Journals’), ‘as the Houses had, according to custom, thanked the parson for his sermon, without hearing or reading it, they could not censure it now without exposing themselves to great ridicule.’ They did censure it, nevertheless.DEBATE ON THE SERMON.Captain Walsingham Boyle, R.N., proposed, and Major-General Irwin seconded, the motion that the vote of thanks should beexpunged. This was opposed by Sir William Dolben and Sir Roger Newdegate, who had proposed the vote of thanks. ‘Sir Roger,’ says Walpole, as above, ‘was stupidly hot, and spoke with all the flame of stupid bigotry, declaring that he would maintain all the doctrines in the sermon were constitutional.’ T. Townshend,jun., showed how repugnant they were to the constitution, and it was carried by 152 to 41, to expunge the thanks. General Keppel, Colonel Fitzroy (Vice-Chamberlain to the king), and Charles Fox, all descendants of CharlesI., voted against the sermon, as did even Dyson and many courtiers. The 41 were rank Tories, all but Rigby, who had retired behind the chair; but, being made to vote, voted as he thought the king would like, to whom he paid the greatest court, expecting to be Chancellor of the Exchequer if Lord Guilford should die and Lord North go into the House of Lords. This proper severity on the sermon,’ as Walpole now calls it, ‘was a great blow to the Court, as clergymen would fear to be too forward with their servility, when the censure of Parliament might make it unadvisable for the king to prefer them.’ Boswell thought that ‘Dr. Nowell will ever have the honour which is due to a lofty friend of our monarchical constitution.’ ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘the Court will be very much to blame if he is not promoted.’ A dozen years later, Johnson, Boswell, and ‘very agreeable company at Dr. Nowell’s, drank Church and King after dinner with true Tory cordiality.’ The toast had a different personal application in former days.
MARRIAGE OF CHARLES EDWARD.
And there was something a-foot which might culminate in restoring that old personal application. London suddenly heard that Charles Edward had quite as suddenly disappeared from Florence. ‘I am sorry,’ Walpole wrote to our minister at Florence, in September, ‘that so watchful a cat should let its mouse slip at last, without knowing into what hole it is run.’ Walpole conjectured Spain, on his way to Ireland, with Spanish help. But the prince was bent on other things, and not on invasion and conquest by force of arms. Charles Edward had once declared (London gossip at least gave him the credit of the declaration) that he would never marry, in order that England might not be trammeled by new complications. When hedidmarry, the London papers made less ado about it than if the son of an alderman had married ‘an agreeable and pretty young lady with a considerable fortune.’ This single paragraph told the Londoners of the princely match: ‘April 1st, 1772. The Pretender was married the 28th of last month at St. Germain, in France, by proxy, to a Princess of Stolberg, who set off immediately to Italy to meet him.’
WALPOLE, ON THE MARRIAGE.
Walpole reflects, but exaggerates, the opinions of London fashionable society, on the marriage of Charles Edward. He knows little about the bride. ‘The new Pretendress is said to be but sixteen, and a Lutheran. I doubt the latter. If the former is true, I suppose they mean to carry on the breed in the way it began—by a spurious child. A Fitz-Pretender is an excellent continuation of the patriarchal line.’ At that time theRoyal Marriage Bill, which prohibited the princes and princesses of the Royal Family from marrying without the consent of the Sovereign, or, in certain cases, of Parliament, was being much discussed. ‘Thereupon,’ Mr. Chute says, ‘when the Royal Family are prevented from marrying, it is a right time for the Stuarts to marry. This event seems to explain the Pretender’s disappearance last autumn; and though they sent him back from Paris, they may not dislike the propagation of thorns in our side.’
In a subsequent letter, Walpole continues the subject. ‘I do not believe,’ he says, ‘that she is a Protestant, though I have heard from one who should know, General Redmond, an Irish officer in the French service, that the Pretender himself abjured the Roman Catholic religion at Liége, a few years ago, and that, on that account, the Irish Catholics no longer make him remittances. This would be some, and the only apology, but fear, for the Pope’s refusing him the title of king. What say you to this Protestantism? At Paris they call his income twenty-five thousand pound sterling a year. His bride has nothing but many quarters. The Cardinal of York’s answer last year to the question ofwhither his brother was gone? is now explained. “You told me,” he replied, “whitherhe should have gone a year sooner.”’
THE LAST HEADS ON TEMPLE BAR.
The London papers of the 1st of April contained other information not uninteresting to Jacobites. It was in this form:—‘Yesterday, one of the rebel heads on Temple Bar fell down. There is only one head nowremaining.’ The remaining head fell shortly after. They were popularly said to be those of Towneley and Fletcher; and, as before noticed, there is a legend that Towneley’s head is still preserved in London. The late Mr. Timbs, in his ‘London and Westminster,’ gives this account of ‘the rebel heads’ and their farewell to the Bar:—‘Mrs. Black, the wife of the editor of the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ when asked if she remembered any heads on Temple Bar, used to reply in her brusque, hearty way: “Boys, I recollect the scene well. I have seen on that Temple Bar, about which you ask, two human heads—real heads—traitors’ heads—spiked on iron poles. There were two. I saw one fall (March 31st, 1772). Women shrieked as it fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One woman near me fainted. Yes, boys, I recollect seeing human heads on Temple Bar.”’ The spikes were not removed till early in the present century.
DALRYMPLE’S ‘MEMOIRS.’
At this period merit in literature was allowed or denied, according to the writer’s politics. In 1773 Sir John Dalrymple published the famous second volume of his ‘Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, from the dissolution of the last Parliament until the Sea-Battle of La Hogue.’ The first volume had appeared two years previously. The third and concluding volume was not published till 1788. The second volume wasfamousfor its exposure of Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney as recipients of money fromLouisXIV.; money not personally applied, but used, or supposed to be used, for thepurpose of establishing a republic. Walpole was furious at a book which, while it treated both sides, generally, with little tenderness, absolved the last two Stuart kings from blame, and spoke of William with particular severity. Walpole says of Sir John: ‘He had been a hearty Jacobite; pretended to be converted; then paid his court when he found his old principles were no longer a disrecommendation at court. The great object of his work was to depreciate and calumniate all the friends of the Revolution.... The famous second volume was a direct charge of bribery from France, on the venerable hero, Algernon Sidney, pretended to be drawn from Barillon’s papers at Versailles, a source shut up to others, and actually opened to Sir John, by the intercession of even GeorgeIII.—a charge I would not make but on the best authority. Lord Nuneham, son of Lord Harcourt, then ambassador in Paris, told me his father obtained licence for Sir John to search those archives—amazing proof of all I have said on the designs of this reign; what must they be when GeorgeIII.encourages a Jacobite wretch to hunt in France for materials for blackening the heroes who withstood the enemies of Protestants and Liberty?... Men saw the Court could have no meaning but to sap all virtuous principles and to level the best men to the worst,—a plot more base and destructive than any harboured by the Stuarts.... Who could trust to evidence either furnished from Versailles or coined as if it came from thence? And who could trust to Sir John, who was accused, I know not how truly,of having attempted to get his own father hanged, and who had been turned out of a place, by Lord Rockingham, for having accepted a bribe?’
WALPOLE’S ANTI-JACOBITISM.
The above, from Walpole’s ‘Last Journals,’ is a curious burst of Anti-Jacobitism, on the part of a man who gave Sir John Dalrymple a letter of introduction to the French Minister, de Choiseul! Sir John in his preface names ‘Mr. Stanley, Lord Harcourt, and Mr. Walpole,’ as furnishing him with such introductions. All that the king did was to allow access to WilliamIII.’s private chest, at Kensington, and the ‘ex-Jacobite wretch’ to make what he could out of the contents. Walpole never forgave him. In 1774, when a Bill, to relieve booksellers who had bought property in copies, was before the Commons, ‘the impudent Sir John Dalrymple,’ as Walpole calls him, ‘pleaded at the bar of the House against the booksellers, who had paid him 2000l.for his book in support of the Stuarts. This was the wretch,’ cries Walpole, ‘who had traduced Virtue and Algernon Sidney!’
ANTI-ULTRAMONTANISM.
Walpole spared Lord Mansfield, the brother of Murray of Broughton (and almost as much of a Jacobite), as little as he did Dalrymple. In June, this year, there was a hotly-sustained battle in the Commons over the Quebec Bill. The Bill was denounced as an attempt to involve Protestants under a Roman Catholic jurisdiction. The Court was accused of preparing a Popish army to keep down the American colonies. Walpole charged Lord Mansfield with being the author of the Bill, and with disavowing the authorship. On the 9thof June, Lord North proposed to adjourn the debate till the 11th, as on the intervening day Lord Stanley was to give a grand entertainment at the Oaks, near Epsom, in honour of his intended bride, Lady Betty Hamilton. The opposition in the House did not let slip the palpable opportunity. They severely ridiculed the minister, and Tom Townshend told him,—the Pretender’s birthday, the 10th of June, was a proper festival for finishing a Bill of so Stuart-like a complexion! Camden said, in the Lords, that the king, by favouring such a measure, would commit a breach of his coronation oath. Walpole has recorded, in his ‘Last Journals,’ that the sovereign who was wearing the crown of England, to the prejudice of the Stuart family, was doing by the authority of a free parliament what JamesII.was expelled for doing. The City told the king, in a petition not to pass the Bill, that he had no right to the crown but as a protector of the Protestant religion. Walpole remarked, ‘The King has a Scotch Chief Justice, abler than Laud, though not so intrepid as Lord Strafford. Laud and Strafford lost their heads,—Lord Mansfield would not lose his, for he would die of fear, if he were in danger, of which, unfortunately, there is no prospect.’ The Bill was carried in both Houses. On the 22nd of June, the king went down to the Lords to pass the Bill, and prorogue the Parliament. The crowded streets wore quite the air of old Jacobite times. The feeling of dread and hatred, not against English Catholics, but against that form of Popery called Ultramontanism, whichwould, if it could, dash out the brains of Protestantism, and overthrow kings and thrones ‘ad majorem Dei gloriam,’ found bitter expression on that day. ‘His Majesty,’ according to the journals, ‘was much insulted on his way to the House of Peers yesterday. The cry ofNo Popery!was re-echoed from every quarter, and the noisy expressions of displeasure were greater than his Majesty ever yet heard.’ On the other hand, the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, rose suddenly into favour. He voted against the Bill. With reference to that step, the ‘Public Advertiser’ chronicled the following lines: ‘’Tis said that a great personage has taken an additional disgust at another great personage dividing with the minority on Friday last. This is the second heinous offence the latter has been guilty of; the first, committing matrimony; and now, professing himself a Protestant.’ Walpole thought it was judicious in him to let it be seen that at least one Prince of the House of Hanover had the Protestant cause at heart, and the preservation of the ‘happy establishment.’
‘THE HAPPY ESTABLISHMENT.’
As the study of the times is pursued, the student is no sooner disposed to believe that Jacobitism has ultimately evaporated, than he comes upon some remarkable proof to the contrary. The following is one of such proofs.
GARRICK’S MACBETH.
In the year 1775, some friend of the drama remonstrated with Garrick on the absurdity of the costume in which he and other actors of Macbeth played the hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The actor of the Thane generally dressed the character in a modern militaryuniform. As an improvement, it was suggested that a tartan dress was the proper costume to wear. Of course the real Macbeth was never seen in such a dress; but Garrick was not troubled atthat. He objected for another reason. ‘It is only thirty years ago,’ he said, ‘that the Pretender was in England. Party spirit runs so high that if I were to put on tartan, I should be hissed off the stage, and perhaps the house would be pulled down!’ It should be remembered that when Macklin changedhisMacbeth costume from that of an English general to a plaid coat and trousers, Quin said that Macklin had turned Macbeth into an old Scotch piper.
The party spirit to which Garrick alluded seems to have revived in the person of Dr. Johnson, whose principles led him still to sympathise with the Jacobite cause.
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