Decorative bannerCHAPTERIII.(1715.)
Decorative banner
thesecond 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. CharlesII.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, GeorgeI., 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 whichKit Slyand his story were ‘lifted’ from the ‘Taming of the Shrew.’Kitwas 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 aPretender!’—the Whigs clapped till their handswere 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 intothe 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 happenedto 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 atSt.Andrew’s, on the 20th of January—the Thanksgiving day for the accession of GeorgeI.—Sacheverel (while the king was being almost deified atSt.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 CharlesI.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 Matthewxxiii.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 conditionof 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 GeorgeI.was here hinted at as the usurper of the seat which by right belonged to JamesIII.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 JamesII., but every hearer felt that it was directed against those who kept the throne—against JamesII.’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 thenotorious 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 toSt.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, andfinally 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.’ Thenational 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 ofthis 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 ownreturn:—
In the meantime, I hopeThe mist will clear up,That the thunder you’ll hearMay soon purge the air,And then that the coastMay be clear at the last.
In the meantime, I hopeThe mist will clear up,That the thunder you’ll hearMay soon purge the air,And then that the coastMay be clear at the last.
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 dothat, 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 deepenough 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, LadySt.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 lackeysimitated 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 Highnessin propriâ personâto 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 withinFor 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.
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 Highnessin propriâ personâto 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 withinFor 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.
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 Highnessin propriâ personâto 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 withinFor 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.
‘Was your Highnessin propriâ personâto 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.
‘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 atSt.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 CharlesII., 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 recordsof 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 GeorgeI.! 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 aboutSt.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 theopinion 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 Hanoveriancockneys 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 ‘GeorgeIII., his Court and family,’ in the introductory part illustrates the gentler side of GeorgeI.’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 deSt.George, which the host had forgotten toremove. ‘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 aJacobite, 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.’
[1]‘Letter, from Perth to a gentleman in Stirling.’
[2]‘Confederacy of the Press and the Pulpit for the blood of the last Ministry.’
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