Decorative bannerCHAPTERXVI.(1719.)
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THE SKIRMISH AT GLENASHIELS.
theyear 1719 opened with hopes on the part of the Jacobites which were doomed to be disappointed. The Chevalier had entered into the schemes of the Spanish Minister, Cardinal Alberoni, for overturning the English settlement. A landing in Scotland and an invasion of England were to be the means for re-establishing the Stuarts. Early in March, groups of Londoners were to be seen reading the proclamation which offered a reward of 5,000l.for the apprehension of the Duke of Ormond, the destined leader of the expedition that was to invade England. For catching and delivering attainted peers of less mark, 1,000l.was the sum offered; and rebel gentlemen beneath the dignity of a peer, were valued at 500l.each. The fleet destined to carry out the object of the invaders was so disabled by tempests, that after struggling from Cadiz to Cape Finisterre, most of the vessels returned to the former port, and no one in England enjoyed his anticipated chance of getting 5,000l.by capturing Ormond, ‘Captain-Generalof the King of Spain;’ or smaller prize for less important men. The Marquis of Tullibardine (the Jacobite son of the Whig Duke of Athol who came to London) and the Earls Marischal and Seaforth, did, however, land in Scotland in April, with about 400 followers, chiefly Spaniards. They were joined by 1,000 Highlanders. On the 10th of June, the Chevalier’s birthday, the three leaders above named were defeated by General Wightman, at Glenashiels, but they contrived to escape. The Highlanders dispersed; the Spaniards surrendered; and therewith the first half of the year ended pleasantly for King George and his friends.
London lit her bonfires and otherwise illuminated. From Thomas’s press behind the Royal Exchange was issued a satirical ‘Hymn to the Victory in Scotland,’ lines from which long hung on the popular tongue. The Scots and Spaniards were described in doggerel as being thoroughly beaten, yet escaping, ‘Lost in a fog in sunshine weather.’ The battle lasted from five a.m. till night, but when the field was won, there were neither wounded nor slain upon it. ‘Dead and Living fled together, without the loss of man or gun!’
Such mercy in this fight was shown,We sav’d men’s lives and lost our own.
Such mercy in this fight was shown,We sav’d men’s lives and lost our own.
Such mercy in this fight was shown,
We sav’d men’s lives and lost our own.
After further doggerel and the usual infusion of coarseness, the Grub Street bard concludes bysinging:—
Three hours beaten and none die,Yet no man knows the reason why,’Tis very strange ’tween you and I!
Three hours beaten and none die,Yet no man knows the reason why,’Tis very strange ’tween you and I!
Three hours beaten and none die,
Yet no man knows the reason why,
’Tis very strange ’tween you and I!
JUDICIAL CAPRICE.
London, generally, had contemplated this new rebellion with indifference. The Government was by turns lenient and severe. It was thought expedient, one day, to pardon mutinous dragoons; on another, to be savagely cruel to a soldier who had, in his cups, sworn, sung, or said, hasty words in favour of King James. Under the windows of King George’s palace men were thus punished. In Hyde Park, a soldier named Devenish, was tied nearly naked to a tree, and flogged by fourteen companies of his own regiment of foot-guards. This torture he underwent four times, and then he was flung into a hospital to die. A more guilty offender, Captain Lennard, who had enlisted men for the Chevalier’s service, for which he might have been hanged, was allowed to transport himself out of the kingdom, on the promise never to return; and a too zealous Jacobite gentleman, who expressed to the soldiers at the Tower his astonishment at their serving an usurper, seems to have got off with a mere nominal penalty. On the other hand, printers, publishers, and vendors of papers that exaggerated the numbers of the rebels in Scotland, were sternly dealt with.
ASSAULT ON THE PRINCESS OF WALES.
The Jacobites failed to keep their temper, even before their hopes were disappointed. In their eyes it was almost sacrilege for the Prince of Wales to occupy, even by purchase, the Duke of Ormond’s forfeited White House at Richmond. When the duke’s confiscated town house inSt.James’s Square was for sale, they went to it like pilgrims to a shrine, and sawit pass away, for 7,500l., to an Irish gentleman, named Hackett, with unconcealed regret. ‘The Duke of Ormond is in good health,’ said the Jacobite papers vauntingly. The ‘Post’ scorned the idea that the duke had died at sea of fear or fever, as was reported by Whig writers of known veracity. The Jacobite press exasperated the Jacobites themselves into dangerous speech, and, in one instance, to dastardly action. On an afternoon in April, the Princess of Wales was being conveyed in her chair from Leicester Fields toSt.James’s. She was unprotected. A chairman of one of the foreign ambassadors, named Moor, took advantage of the opportunity, and, like the beast that he was, he spat three times in the lady’s face before he could be seized. At his trial the ruffian tried to justify the act for which he ultimately suffered. Through a dense mass of people, Moor was whipt from Somerset House to the Haymarket. The mob encouraged the sufficiently active hangman, as cart, victim, and executioner passed along, by cries of ‘Whip him!’ ‘Whip him!’ Moor, wearing a cross from his neck, suffered stolidly; but at the bottom of the Haymarket the hangman continued to ply his whip till Moor was compelled to cry, ‘God bless King George!’ for which result the Whig mob hugged and caressed the hangman as if he had been a public benefactor.
THE KING AND HIS LADIES.
At the palace there was so little alarm at the ‘little rebellion’ in progress, that the king resolved to leave his kingdom to the care of Lords Justices, and to go abroad, and to take with him the ungraceful and disreputableGerman women, who seldom appeared in the public highways without feeling the sting of a London epigram. In May, Lord Howe married Mary Sophia, reputed eldest daughter of the King’s Master of the Horse, Baron Kielmansegge. But the bride was the daughter of that Master’s master. The papers, however, only name the young lady’s mother, and her fortune, 1,500l.a year, and 5,000l.in cash. On the day following the wedding, the king, whose interest in the matter was easily accounted for, wore a favour on the occasion, and had the newly-married couple to sup with him in the evening. A few days after, early in the morning, his Majesty was to be seen in a common hackney chair, being carried to Privy Garden stairs; thence a barge conveyed him over to Lambeth, where he took coach for Gravesend. Here, the king and suite went on board a boat, in which he was rowed to the buoy at the Nore, where the ‘Caroline’ yacht and an escort of men-of-war awaited him. A few minutes after he had set his foot on the deck of the yacht, he gave orders that all the nobility who had assembled there in his honour, should clear out of the ship. Thereupon the Majesty of England sailed away for Holland, having in attendance or company Mesdames von der Schulenburg and Kielmansegge, and the ‘Duchess of Munster,aliasKendal,’ as the papers register that lady, with quite an Old Bailey air.
A SUSPICIOUS CHARITY SERMON.
Just before the king’s departure, the trustees of the forfeited estates delivered in an account of Papists’ registered estates, which amounted to nearly 380,000l.The Lords Justices left in charge of the capital and kingdom were the Archbishop of Canterbury (Wake), and a dozen of the chief officers of the Crown. They did their office mildly, at a time when invasion was threatened on one side, but so little-feared on the other that the king went abroad in May, in perfect confidence that all would go well at home with 2,500 Dutch auxiliaries to help his own troops in London. County Magistrates were far more fussy in acts and suspicions than the Lords Justices. So jealous were Whig justices at this period, they detected, or suspected, treasonable purposes even in a charity sermon for a parish school! One Saturday in this year, 1719, a clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Hendley, and a friend or two arrived at Chislehurst, Kent, to make preparations for delivering a sermon in the church there on behalf of the schools ofSt.Anne’s, Aldersgate. The intended preacher had the consent of the rector and the license of the Diocesan, Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester. The churchwardens and constables ‘smelt a rat.’ Their Jacobite bishop was credited with hoping to raise money for the Pretender under guise of alms for charity-children. They swept the whole of the intruders into the presence of a bench of local magistrates, and charged them as suspected persons. The Rev. Mr. Hendley pleaded episcopal license and the rector’s sanction for preaching. ‘We don’t care,’ said one of the justices, ‘either for bishops, archbishops, or anybody else.’ The parties were dismissed with a caution not to commit vagrancy in that parish.
RIOT IN CHURCH.
On the following morning groups of men and women were assembled in front ofSt.Ann’s schools, Aldersgate, to see the sample children off. The best looking and best behaved were carried down to Chislehurst as warrant that all aids to bring up more of such children would be well-bestowed. They went off, with masters and friends, joyously, and they arrived, full of fresh air and gladness, at Chislehurst while the bells for church were cheerily ringing. The service was conducted by the rector and curate. The sermon was delivered by Mr. Hendley. The collection then commenced. Gentlemen began to unbutton their pockets. The ladies quietly sank back on their cushions, for it was not the custom, in those days, to ask or to expect them to contribute at church collections. The eleemosynary cash rattled freely into the plates, till one of the collectors reached the pew wherein the local magistrates then sat. When the ‘paten’ was presented to the nearest of those potentialities, he seized the bearer, overturned the money, and denounced the whole proceedings as contrary to law. ‘It is only on behalf of the poor charity children!’ gasped the collector. ‘They are all vagrants!’ cried one from the magistrates’ pew. ‘They are all begging for the Pretender!’ cried another. ‘You must stop this!’ said a third. ‘Proceed with the collection!’ was the command of the rector from within the communion rails. ‘Go on with your business!’ was the injunction of the preacher from the pulpit. ‘Do it at your peril!’ shouted the magistrate who had laid hold of the collectorand upset the cash.RIOT PROLONGED.‘I will come and do it myself!’ remarked the rector. ‘Do so,’ called the preacher to him, ‘and someone bring me a prayer-book!’ While the rector was collecting, Mr. Hendley read the Rubric which authorised the proceeding; after which he turned to the justices, and, rebuking them for brawling in church, announced that he should make complaint to the bishop. ‘We care nothing at all for bishops nor for you,’ was the reply from the magisterial pew,—‘this matter must and shall be stopped!’ The congregation, Whigs or Tories, were in favour of contributing. They crowded round the collector, and some who could not get near enough threw their money into the plate. Farrington, a magistrate, made a dash at the latter, but the bearer safely delivered it to the rector within the rails; and Mr. Hendley having delivered another, both were placed upon the communion table. Farrington charged fiercely to get within the rails, but Mr. Hendley warned him that his place was not there, and kept him back, forbidding him to persist in entering. Thereupon Sir Edward Bettison and Captain Farrington beckoned to a constable to approach, and after whispering to him certain instructions, sent him up to the rails, where, staff in hand, he ordered all present to disperse on pain of being ‘guilty of riot.’ ‘Gentlemen,’ said the rector to the justices, ‘the congregation is not dismissed: service is not over; the prayer for the Church Militant has not been read; the Blessing has not been given.’ The magistrates murmured ‘Riot.’ The rector rejoined, ‘There is no riot but of your ownmaking!’ Ladies began to grow frightened as the gentlemen waxed angry; and it was not till after much more unseemliness of word and action that the money was secured and the congregation lawfully dismissed. The charity children were conveyed back to London, delighted with the spectacle and its attendant sensations. The justices went to dinner, combining business with the banquet.
LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.
While the rector, preacher, and two or three of the gentlemen who had brought the Aldersgate children to Chislehurst, were at tea in the evening, they were all arrested, and brought before the justices, by whom they were all bound over to appear at the next Maidstone Quarter Sessions as rioters and vagrants. They duly appeared, the Grand Jury found ‘no bill,’ and the accused moved to be discharged. The justices looked on the Grand Jury as pestilent Jacobites, indicted the parties afresh, and bound them over to appear at the Assizes on the more serious charge of extortion, conspiracy, fraud, and ‘sedition,’—the alleged alms being nothing more, as they professed to believe, than a subscription for the Pretender.
The real interests of the Pretender were being furthered in another quarter, namely, in some of the London printing-offices, and with an audacity that was very offensive to the authorities.
A CAPITAL CONVICTION.
The liberty of the press was not for a moment tolerated, although the last words spoken or written of the hottest-headed Jacobites, who were hanged, were freely circulated without hindrance. Political pamphletswere sharply looked after. There was in Aldersgate a widow, Matthews, with her two sons. The latter carried on for her the business of printing. All the family were Nonjurors, and the sons were members of a Jacobite club. The younger son, John Matthews, was then in his nineteenth year, and he recognised no king but James Stuart. A Nonjuring family of printers were sure to be subjects of suspicion. The widow and elder son were themselves fearful of what the indiscretion of John might bring upon them. Their fear was well founded, for the young Jacobite, at night, was privately putting in type a treasonable pamphlet, by a friend, entitled, ‘Out of thy Mouth will I judge thee; or, the Voice of the People, the Voice of God.’ The elder brother, on learning this fact, scattered the type, locked up the printing-office, and gave the key to Lawrence Vozey, the foreman, with the order to keep young Matthews locked out of the office after the usual working hours. Lawrence Vozey, however, was a rascal. He allowed the youthful Nonjuror to go back to his case at night, where he began again to print the dangerous pamphlet. When the young zealot was well advanced in his work, Vozey privately laid an information against him, and down came the police upon the office, smashing and destroying all in their way by virtue of a general warrant. The obnoxious sheets were found, and carried off as testimony against the offender. On Matthews’s trial the law was as severely pressed against him as if he had killed the king with all the royal family, and he was foundguilty.
JACOBITE FIDELITY.
The verdict was partly the result of the evidence of his elder brother George. The Jacobites never forgave this witness; George, however, was readily forgiven by John, who acknowledged the reluctant but inevitable truthfulness by which he suffered. When the horrible sentence—half-hanging, disembowelling, quartering, and burning of entrails was pronounced, the young lad never blenched. He bowed to the judges and left the bar. On the following Sunday, all the emotional and fashionable part of London crowded into the chapel of Newgate, to hear the Rev. Mr. Skerrit preach the young Jacobite’s condemned sermon. At the end of the service, Matthews was double ironed and cast into the ‘Condemned Hole.’ Language has not terms to adequately describe the horrors, which indeed are unutterable, of that worse than Hell. Nothing at which nature is abhorrent was ever wanting there, to aggravate the sufferings of the condemned.
It is certain that this Jacobite youth might at least have saved his life if he would have given up the name of the writer of the pamphlet, which was known to himself alone. He did, indeed, name two persons who were beyond reach of capture. One of these was Lewis, the active but prudent Jacobite agent, the Roman Catholic bookseller in Covent Garden. The police broke into the house, which was empty. Its owner was in safe asylum, in Wales, and his whereabout was not known until after his death. While Lewis was seeking refuge in Wales, a barrister namedBrowster died. Matthews is supposed to have named him as connected with the ‘Vox Populi;’ but there was no dealing with a dead man. The youth had done what a youth so circumstanced might be pardoned for doing, as the thought came upon him that life was a sweet thing, especially to the young, but he refused to give any real information to the Government; and it was resolved that he should die, and that the intervening period of life should be made as intolerable as possible.
A POLITICAL VICTIM.
Order was given, by ‘brief authority,’ that he should not be allowed to see his mother, even for a minute’s leave-taking before death. The brave boy was, however, too much for ‘brief authority.’ That he might live to be hanged, it was necessary to take him up from the bottom of the fetid pit in which he lay, to breathe the less putrid air of the press-yard. On one of these occasions, when he knew the heartbroken widow was lingering about the prison-walls, he got to a window which looked into the street, saw her waiting in hope and anguish, and called to her, his arms extended through the bars, to come near. They had but a minute, each to look in the face of the other, yet it was long enough for him to bid the speechless gazing mother to take comfort, to be of good cheer, for that her son was fearless and happy. He was then pulled down by the turnkeys, who had probably been bribed to allow the short interview whichhadtaken place.
On the night before execution, the prisoners whowere to suffer the next day generally held frightful revelry with friends and other prisoners, whose lease of life was longer by a week or two. The young Jacobite captive spent that last night alone with his brother George, the Rev. Mr. Skerrit, the ordinarypro tem.(Paul Lorraine being dead) occasionally looking in upon them. The two brothers prayed and comforted each other, and when the morning came, the younger, who was to suffer death, was the calmer of the two.
THREE MORE TO TYBURN.
Three men traversed that morning the painful way from Newgate to Tyburn. It was a dreary, wet, November morning, but the streets were crowded, and from the windows were thrust faces of sympathisers with one of those three doomed men. The young printer was ignominiously drawn on a sledge, as one guilty of High Treason. A petty larceny rascal, a blind man named Moore, who had stolen some mean coverlet from his shabby lodgings, followed in a cart. A saucy highwayman, named Constable, went to be hanged in prouder state: he rode in a coach, as became a gentleman of the road. The sauciness, however, had left him. The blind thief rolled his sightless orbs, as if he would fain see if the horrid reality was in truth before him. The young Jacobite was calm and composed. One account of them quaintly states that ‘they were all as sorrowful as the circumstances warranted.’
A LAST REQUEST.
When the condemned three had been transferred into the cart beneath the gallows, Matthews placed awritten paper in the hands of someone near him. The Sheriff, supposing it to be a speech, forbade it to be read, and snatched it away, that it might not be printed. It proved to be merely some directions by the young Christian Jacobite, that such remains as there might be of him after the sentence was executed, might be buried inSt.Botolph’s, Aldersgate.
At the supreme moment, young Matthews, believing that the whole of his horrible sentence would be executed, said steadily to the hangman at his side, ‘Grant me one favour; do not burn my heart; a friend will come for it, I pray you, let him have it away with him.’ The fellow hurriedly replied that he need not fear, as he was only to be hanged; and with that grim comfort for the boy, he jumped down from the cart in which the three patients had been placed beneath the beam, and drew the vehicle from under them. Thief, highwayman, and young Jacobite were thus, in the yet new slang phrase of Poet Laureate Rowe, ‘launched into eternity.’
The sympathy of some of the news writers on this occasion took a curious turn. ‘The Gentlewoman,’ they said, ‘who tenanted the house near Tyburn, made ten guineas by letting her windows to spectators; but, how much more she would have made, but for the heavy rain!’
Truer sympathy was felt by the Jacobites, of course, for the cruelly fated Matthews. As in October a procession of six-and-twenty Nonjuring clergymen had gone in public procession from Orrery Street, RedLion Square, toSt.Andrew’s, Holborn, to bury the Rev. Mr. Maddison, their brother, so by the side of the grave of young Matthews, at night, there assembled a large body of sympathisers, by way of demonstration against those who had flung him to the hangman. ‘Sneaking Jacks,’ was the civil phrase applied to them; but it behoved them to be prudently demonstrative.
AN APOLOGETIC SERMON.
On the Sunday after the execution, a clergyman in the parish preached from 2 Corinthiansi.12, out of the simple words, ‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.’ Out of such simple text and of similar simple comment, the Whig zealots strove to weave a charge of treason. Text and comment, they said, justified young Matthews, on the ground that in what he did, he acted conscientiously.
AN INNOCENT VICTIM.
In what he did, a Government now would see small offence; but the young Jacobite knowingly ran the risk of death in the doing it. There was nothing in him of the murderer, but everything of true loyalty to the prince whom he looked upon as his king. From the time he was taken, there was no indulgence allowed him as there was to the rebel lords in 1716. What was necessary to make life even tolerable was denied to the brave lad who would not betray his Jacobite employer. Throughout the horrors of the Condemned Hole, horrors that Dante would not havedreamt of to heighten the terrors of his hell, Matthews never lost patience or self-control. He was like the young Spartan who is said to have let the fox eat out his heart rather than betray his agony by a cry. One hasty word alone fell from him, when the ruffian turnkey hammered off the convict’s double fetters, on the fatal morning. The fellow’s hammer fell as often on the Jacobite’s ankles as on the iron rivetted round them, and this cruelty brought a hasty word to Matthews’s lips, but he soon possessed his soul in patience again, and went the way to death in quiet submission. That death was more ignominious in its form than that suffered by more guilty and, socially, more noble, offenders. But the young Jacobite underwent his doom with all the dignity of Derwentwater, all the unostentatious and manly simplicity of Kenmure.
If you cannot, of your charity, as you passSt.Botolph’s, pray for the soul of young Matthews the Jacobite, you will not refuse, with knowledge of why and how he suffered, to give a tender thought to the memory of the most innocent of the victims of loyalty to the Stuarts.
POLITICAL PLAYS.
For putting partly in type a Jacobite pamphlet, Matthews was no sooner hanged than printed copies of the ‘Vox Populi’ were to be bought by those who knew how to go about it. As an example, the judicial murder of the young printer was useless. Messengers and constables, furnished with general warrants, sought for copies of the obnoxious work, and if any werediscovered, the occupants of the houses where the discovery was made, appeared to be more astonished than the police. Even while Matthews was hanging, a Mrs. Powell boldly sent forth the pamphlet, from her own press. Everybody thought it delicious to buy what it was death to print. Mrs. Powell, however, on expressing contrition at the bar, was only warned to be upon her guard; and when the pamphlet lost its prestige of being mortal to the printer, it ceased to be cared for by the public. Persecution did not make the party more loyal. Party spirit was as bitter as ever. When the Prince of Wales went on the 7th of November to the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre to see young Beckingham’s ‘HenriIV.of France,’ the Jacobite papers quietly remarked that the Fleet Street linen-draper’s son showed, in his drama, how easily a king might be killed, as he passed on the highway, in his chariot. The Whig papers saw in the play a reflex of the times, and discerned Popish ecclesiastics putting their heads together in order to accomplish the sovereign’s murder.
There was, of course, no offence in the play; and if there had been, penalty was not certain to follow. Law and justice ‘danced the hays’ in the wildest fashion.
INCIDENTS.
Beckingham’s tragedy at Lincoln’s Inn Fields really had no political element in it. This was not the case with a tragedy produced four days later (Nov. 11) at Drury Lane, namely, Dennis’s ‘Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment.’ It was a mutilation ofShakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus,’ and Booth was the hero. There is significance in the fact that neither party made any application of its speeches or incidents. After three nights the play was shelved, and Dennis swore in print that Cibber and other actors were ignorant, incapable, and destitute of all love of country; for the sake of which and for that of the king, Dennis declared he had constructed the piece. A sore point with Dennis was that his benefit was fixed for a night, when a hundred persons who designed to be at the theatre, ‘were either gone to meet the king, or preparing in town to do their duty to him on his arrival from abroad.’ When the king, on his arrival, passed throughSt.James’s Park, a Nonjuring minister indiscreetly gave uncourteous expression to his Jacobite thoughts, and found his liberty curtailed, in consequence.
ROYAL CONDESCENSION.
The latter half of the year was not a cheerful one in London. An epidemic distemper carried off hundreds, especially young persons. Women who ventured in the streets in calico gowns had them torn from their backs by the weavers, who hung the shreds on the gibbets in the suburbs. For many weeks the Jacobites were busy in collecting subscriptions for the Spaniards who had surrendered at Glenashiel, and the Whigs went day after day to the northern road to see the foreign captives led in to the Savoy, but they were disappointed. There was something wrong about Lord Forrester’s troop of Horse Guards, the gentlemen of which were ordered to dispose of their places. Eventhe jollity of the time had a demoniacal quality about it; and it was not edifying to see young gentlemen of large fortunes and ‘coaches and six,’ distributing gin and brandy to the basket-women in Covent Garden, and dancing country dances with them ‘under the piazza.’ One young gentleman, to show his joy at the Jacobite defeat, dressed as a baker and cried pies and tarts through the whole length of Long Acre, followed by two of his footmen in laced liveries. This sort of affability was perhaps the result of example given in higher quarters; example which set on the same level royal princesses and vendors of pipkins. On one night in this popularity-hunting year, the Prince of Wales went to a masquerade in the Haymarket; and the Princess was carried in a sedan chair into the City, where, as the papers said: ‘Her royal Highness supped with Mrs. Toomes who keeps a great china-warehouse in Leadenhall Street.’ The Prince of Wales had so upheld his popularity by visiting Bartholomew Fair, without ceremony, seeing the best of the shows, that when he made the first bid for the Duke of Ormond’s confiscated house at Richmond—6,000l.—nobody bid against him. One Jacobite Surrey magistrate had the pluck, however, to withstand him. The prince announced that, on a certain day, he would have a bull baited on Kew Green. The justice publicly announced that he would order the arrest of the chief persons present—on the ground that the meeting put in peril the public peace; and the Lord Chancellor (Macclesfield) turned the justice out of the commission!Jacobitism turned up in various directions, and the pluck of the prince at going among the populace at ‘Bartlemy Fair’ was to be admired, since, at Epsom, a Jack lad came close to him, and shouted ‘Ormond and Seaforth for ever!’—to be sure, the gentlemen near the prince caned the fellow till their arms grew weary of the work!
THE KING’S GOOD NATURE.
As the year waned through the autumn quarter, the Jacobites upheld the divinity, as it were, of their king, James, by referring to his having touched, and healed, by the touching, a score of diseased persons. The Whigs laughed at the story as fabulous. One Whig lady, following the example of a predecessor, asserted the divinity in the touch of her own sovereign, King George, in a singular way. She made known to the Secretary of State that she was in a condition of health which would make no progress to any issue, till she had kissed the king’s hand. The secretary informed the sovereign of this womanish caprice, and the good-natured monarch laughingly said, she might meet him in the gallery ofSt.James’s, and have her wish gratified. She hung two minutes with her lips to the royal hand, King George looking down on her, the while, in the greatest good humour. But what the issue was is not noted in contemporary history.
ROB ROY AND THE DUKE OF MONTROSE.
In this year, the ultra-Whig Duke of Montrose (the first of that degree), one of the king’s principal Secretaries of State, pleaded hotly at the Privy Council, atSt.James’s, for suppressing the Jacobite Rob Roy. A halo of romance has been thrown roundthis Robert Campbell Macgregor, by which he has acquired a measure of respect and admiration of which his memory is totally undeserving. He was a semi-savage, without any principle of honour or honesty; his courage was that of the wolf; and his sense of loyalty was so unstable that he was traitor to his own supposed side—the Jacobites—without being intentionally serviceable to the Hanoverians. Montrose was charged by the outlaw as having had (at the London Council Board) ‘the impudence to clamour at Court for multitudes to hunt me like a fox, under pretence that I am not to be found above ground.’ For this insult to dignity, Rob circulated a mock challenge, from Argyle to the Duke in London. It was simply intended to bring him to whom it was addressed, ‘ane High and Mightie Prince, James, Duke of Montrose,’ into contempt. It was composed in a flow of coarse and vulgar bluster.
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