Decorative bannerCHAPTERXVII.(1720-’21-’22.)
Decorative banner
inthe year 1720 a grave Jacobite game was a-playing, but it was all below the surface. London street partisanship seemed to have nearly died out. There was some joyful stir in the coffee-houses where Jacobites most did congregate, when they read that the Government at Geneva, by whose order the Earl of Mar had been seized in that city, had set him free. It was the great South-Sea Stock bubble-year, when the first of the race of rascal ‘promoters’ on an ultra-gigantic scale of swindling arose, to the utter ruin of the victims whom they plundered. When the king sailed from Greenwich, early in the year, on his way to Hanover, and it was discovered that the lords who went with him, and who were ‘proprietors,’ hadsoldtheir stock, there was a ruinous panic. When he returned, in November, he made a gift to Cambridge of 2,000l., towards building a library. In 1715, he had, at a cost of 6,000l., presented that University with the books of Moore, Bishop of Ely. Dr. Trap’s epigram said, the king had sent books to Cambridge and cavalry to Oxford,because the former lacked learning, and the latter failed in loyalty. The answer to this epigram (by Sir William Brown) was that the gifts were so disposed because the Tories owned no argument but force; and that Whigs admitted no force but argument. Jacobite Johnson (who, as Lord Marchmont said, ‘was the first to bringWhigandToryinto a Dictionary), once remarked, that the reply was the happiest extemporary production he had ever heard; he, however, confessed that he hated to repeat the wit of a Whig, urged in support of Whiggism!
ATTERBURY’S HOPES.
The prelatic conspirator at the Deanery in Westminster addressed a letter to the Chevalier deSt.George, in May, which was stuffed with treason and exultation. Atterbury makes this allusion in it to the Chevalier’s marriage with the Princess Sobieska.
‘’Tis the most acceptable news,’ he says, ‘that can reach the ear of agoodEnglishman. May it be followed every day by such other accounts as may convince the world that Heaven has at last undertaken your cause, and is resolved to put an end to your sufferings!’
In another letter of this year, addressed to the King, James III, Atterbury expresses disappointment that James’s agents in London were not of noble rank. While measures however were being pursued, ‘I thought it my part to lie still and expect the Event.’ But he despairs of the Event occurring speedily: ‘Disaffection and uneasiness will continue everywhere, and probably increase; the bulk of the nation will be stillin the true interest, and on the side of justice; and the present settlement will perhaps be detested every day more than it is already, and yet no effectual step will, or can, be taken here to shake it.’
DEATH OF LAURENCE HOWELL.
A little later, he ‘is afraid the time is lost for any attempt that shall not be of force sufficient to encourage people to come in to it.’ He did not fail to encourage people who were ready to come into it. When Sacheverel preached a Charity Sermon at Bromley, Atterbury and a numerous body of High Tory clergy attended, with, as the Jacobite papers say, ‘A handsome appearance of Nobility and Gentry.’ On the other hand, if a quiet Nonjuror ventured to open a school, hostile papers denounced him as the evil genius of young people. The coffee-houses frequented by Nonjurors were pointed out for the rough attention of the Whig mob. There was grief, with indignation, in those coffee-houses when news came there of the death of the Rev. Laurence Howell. He was thrown into Newgate for publishing an explanatory book on the Nonjurors: ‘The Case of Schism truly stated;’ and in Newgate he was slowly murdered by the intolerable horrors of the place; intolerable, at least, to a sensitive and refined nature.IN HYDE PARK.For the general mob there was a new pleasure, apart from politics, to be had in Hyde Park. These censors of the time resorted there to pelt and hiss the ‘South-Sea Bubblers’ who had made enormous fortunes, and who came to the Ring in offensively magnificent equipages. The occupants were called by their names, and were told who their fathersand what their mothers were. The vociferators and pelters received the Nobility and Quality with cheers, and the Nobility and Quality sanctioned the ruffianism by laughter, and received the homage with familiar nods. To abuse any of these great ones was ‘Scan-Mag,’ and brought highly painful consequences. While these scenes were one day being enacted in the Ring, a soldier of ‘the Duke of Marlborough’s company’ was being cruelly whipt in another part of the park, ‘for abusing Persons of Quality.’
AT BARTHOLOMEW FAIR.
The only public profession of an insurrectionary spirit this year was made, where it was to be expected, at Bartholomew Fair, which was then held in August. There came to the fair, when revelry was at its highest tide, a Yorkshire ‘squire named More. He was said to be of the blood of the famous Chancellor of that name. The ‘squire entered the Ram Inn, in Smithfield, and called for wine. The chambers were so crowded that he could find no place where to quaff it in comfort, nor the sort of company whom he cared to ask to make room for him. At length, he espied a table at which were seated two ‘Gentlemen of the Life Guards,’—a Captain Cunliffe and one of the same regiment variously described as ‘Corporal Giles Hill,’ and as the Captain’s ‘right-hand man.’ The ‘squire, saluting them, asked their leave to take a seat and drink his wine at their table. This was readily granted, and no small quantity of Bartholomew Fair wine seems to have been quaffed. Presently, entered the Fiddlers, who, after giving some taste of their quality, were ordered by the Yorkshire‘squire to play the ‘Duke of Ormond’s March.’ In an instant the room was in an uproar. The Whigs were frantic with rage and the Jacks with delight. The gentlemen of the Life Guards grew angry, as they were bound to do; and their anger flamed higher when the descendant of the Lord Chancellor got to his feet and proposed the Duke of Ormond’s health. The landlord ran out of the room to escape being involved in unpleasant consequences. The Life Guardsmen railed at the Jacobite ‘squire as rogue and knave and liar. More persisted in giving the treasonable sentiment. ‘The Duke is an honest man,’ said the wine-flushed ‘squire,—‘let us drink his health.’ ‘You are a rascal Jacobite,’ cried the ‘right-hand man,’ ‘to propose such a health to gentlemen who wear his Majesty’s cloth and eat his bread.’ Corporal and ‘squire clapt their hands to their swords, and in less time than it takes to tell it, the Life Guardsman’s sword was ten inches deep in the ‘squire’s body; and the ‘squire himself, after a throe or two, was lying dead on the floor. The Jacobites swore that the trooper had slain him before the ‘squire could draw his own sword to defend his life. The Whigs swore all was done in fair fight, and pointed to the naked sword lying at More’s side. The Jacks accused them of having taken advantage of the confusion that prevailed, when the ‘squire fell, to draw his sword from the scabbard and lay it at his side.—The issue of all was that Hill was tried and was convicted of ‘Manslaughter.’ His sentence was ‘to be burnt in the hand;’ but this could be done, on occasions, with acold iron; and the loyal soldier was restored, nothing the worse, to his regiment.
STOPPING THE KING’S EXPRESSES.
The severity of the Government against the outspoken defiances of the Jacobites does not appear to have silenced many of them. Even the keeper of the Hounslow toll-bar was not afraid to publish such seditious principles as Atterbury more prudently kept within the knowledge of himself and his confederates. One night, a ministerial messenger,—a mounted post-boy, in fact,—with expresses for Scotland, rode up to the bar, announced his office, and demanded free and instant passage. The toll-collector, Hall, refused to accede to either demand. ‘You don’t know,’ said the post-boy, ‘what comes of stopping the king’s expresses.’ —‘I care no more for the one than I do for the other!’ was the disloyal reply of Hall, who actually kept the lad from proceeding for a couple of hours. When he raised the bar he was reminded of what would follow, at which he laughed; but he looked solemn enough a little later, when he stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, and lay for a fortnight in that Hell upon Earth, Newgate.
The year 1721 began with a burst of spring which terrified nervous people. ‘Strange and ominous,’ was the comment on the suburban fields full of flowers, and on the peas and beans in full bloom at Peterborough House, Milbank. When the carnations budded in January, there was ‘general amazement’ even among people who cut coarse jokes on the suicides which attended the bursting of the South Sea bubble. Thepapers were quite funny, too, at the devastation which an outbreak of smallpox was making among the young beauties of aristocratic families. The disease had silenced the scandal at tea-tables, by carrying off the guests, and poor epigrams were made upon them. Dying, dead, or ruined, everyone was laughed at. ‘Among the many persons of distinction,’ say the papers, ‘that lie ill of various distempers, is the Lady of Jonathan Wild,Esq., Chief Thief-Taker-General to Great Britain. She is at the point of death at his worship’s house in the Old Bailey.’
CIBBER’S REFUSAL.
OnSt.Valentine’s day, in this year, at Drury Lane, Cibber reaped the first fruits of politics grafted on the drama, from the seed he had sown, in 1717, by his ‘Nonjuror.’ The anti-Jacobite piece, on the present occasion, was ‘The Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It is a poor adaptation of Molière’s ‘Femmes Savantes,’ but it served its purpose of crying up present Whiggery and crying down the Toryism of Queen Anne’s reign. Applause or murmurs, according to individual circumstances, greeted such a provocative passage as this: ‘What did your courtiers do all the last reign, but borrow money to make war, and make war to make peace, and make peace to make war; and then to be bullies in the one and bubbles in the other!’
IN STATE TO THE PILLORY.
This matter, however, was forgotten in the prosecution of Mist, the proprietor of one of the three Weekly Journals. Mist had dared to speak sarcastically of King George’s interference on behalf of the Protestants of the Palatinate. On prosecution for the same, a Whigjury found himguilty, and a Whig judge sentenced the obnoxious Jacobite to stand in the pillory twice, at Charing Cross and at the Royal Exchange, to pay a fine of 50l., to be imprisoned three months, and to find unquestionable security for his good behaviour, and the reform of his paper for seven years! There is no trace of the reform ever having been begun. Mist and his correspondents made the columns of his journal crackle with their fun. Jacobite writers complimented him on his elevation to the pillory as being equal to raising him to the rank of surveyor of the highways. When the Marshalsea gates opened for him to proceed to the high position in question, a countless guard of Jacobites received him, and they preceded, surrounded, or followed his coach to the Cross and the Exchange. At each place they gathered about the scaffold, in such numbers, that the most audacious and loyal of Whigs would not have dared to lift an arm against him. After Mist had stood his hour in both places, the carefully guarded object of popular ovation resumed his seat in his coach, escorted by his Jacobite friends, and cheered by the thunderinghurrahs!of the densely-packed spectators.
The more loyal Whigmobiledid not neglect to manifest their own opinions. They set out from the Roebuck, and attacked the Tory White Horse, in Great Carter Lane. They had heard that some of Mist’s servants were carousing there; and, consequently, they gutted the house, spilt all the liquor they could not drink, and cut off a man’s nose who attempted to remonstratewith them; all which they felt justified in doing, as the Jacobite Mist had not been treated in the pillory, according to his deserts! Meanwhile, the streets were melodious with street ballad-singers, who made Whigs mad with singing the ‘New Hymn to the Pillory,’ and with announcing the birth of Charles Edward at Rome, in December 1720, by the new and popular song, ‘The Bricklayer’s son has got a Son of his own!’
BIRTH OF THE ‘YOUNG CHEVALIER.’
Each party resorted to bell-ringing by way of manifestation of their feelings. On the anniversary, in February, of Queen Anne’s birthday ‘of glorious memory,’ Mist’s Jacobite journal recorded its disgust, that ‘honest ringers,’ who wanted to ring a peal atSt.Mildred’s, were refused by puritanical Cheapside churchwardens, who spitefully told them that rather than suffer any ringing, they would cut the ropes and break the bells! At a later period, in April, the Jacobite churchwardens had it all their own way. Merry peals came rattling out from the tower ofSt.Mary Overy, and from other High Church summits. It was the turn of the Whig papers to sneer, as they explained that the ringing was in honour of ‘the Anniversary of the Padlock’s being taken off from the mouth of a certain Rev. Doctor, now living nearSt.Andrew’s, Holborn.’ This refers to Sacheverel’s appointment to the living ofSt.Andrews, in April 1713, before the expiration of the term of three years’ suspension from preaching, to which he had been condemned. The first sermon he preached there, as Rector, was published. Forty thousand copies were sold in London alone.
GOVERNMENT AND THE JACOBITES.
London saw the Duke of Gordon go northward, and were not sorry that he bore with him a pardon for Lochiel, who had been lately stirring among the Jacobites. Londoners saw the Countess of Mar drive with cheerful face, from the Secretary of State’s office. They rightly guessed that she had obtained a letter of license to visit her husband, abroad. Some uneasiness existed. Sanguine Whigs affected to see ‘the most hopeful and promising bulwark of the Protestant religion, in the charity schools,’ and they jeered the Jacobites, in very coarse terms, on the accounts of the birth of Charles Edward, in the presence of two hundred witnesses, in Rome. Occasionally a condemned rebel of no note, who had escaped, might be seen in Cheapside, but he soon disappeared. He was not molested, he was simply warned to depart. There was a disposition to get rid of them, and even such a once fierce Jacobite as ‘Major Mackintosh, brother to the late Brigadier Mackintosh,’ was discharged from Newgate on his own prayer and showing that ‘he was very old and altogether friendless.’ The depressed party found consolation in the fact that the High Church party had gained the elections in Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, and in the University of Cambridge; but the cheering of the mob, as the king went to open Parliament, dashed their hopes again. His Majesty, in spite of mysterious threatening letters, written anonymously to wondering lords, who gave them up to the Secretary of State, continued to go about in public without any show of fear. He went from the Opera, where he hadbeen ‘mightily taken’ with ‘Rhadamanthus,’ to sup with the Duchess of Shrewsbury, quite careless at the thought that anyone might assassinate him on the way. And he stood Godfather in person to ‘Georgiana,’ daughter of the Duke of Kingston, when moody Jacobites, in solitary lodgings, were meditating as to where it would be most easy to fall upon and despatch him. Whigs shook their heads at the lax discipline of the sentinels at the prince’s house in Leicester Fields. They thought the king was too generous by half, when he sent Mr. Murphy, one of the gentlemen of his household, to Berlin, in charge of fifteen overgrown British Guardsmen, as apresentto the ‘Great King of Prussia!’
TREASONABLE WIT.
Undaunted Mist, in his paper of the 29th May, had an article on the Restoration. It went heartily into a description of the joy which England must have felt (after being oppressed by an usurper and his fool of a son) at the restoration of the glorious House of Stuart to the British throne. But the authorities saw treason in every line of it, and Mist was brought before the Privy Council. Pressed to give up the name of the writer, he persistently refused, and did not shelter himself under a plea of ignorance. He protested, moreover, that there could be no treason in rejoicing at the overthrow of an usurper, and the restoration of a legitimate monarch. What could be done with so crafty a Jacobite? He was sent back to prison, and was cheered as he went, by a delighted mob, many of whom had just come from the hanging spectacle at Tyburn; and mostof whom, after they had seen Mist disappear within the gates of his prison, rushed to the Park, to see a race, ‘fifteen times round,’ contested by a couple of running footmen.
RECRUITING FOR THE CHEVALIER.
The footmen, at least those of Members of Parliament, had ceased to be partisans. On the Speaker’s birthday, those people buried their and their masters’ differences in punch. Of that conciliating liquor they brewed upwards of forty gallons in a trough, and drank it uproariously, in the Court of Wards, the use of which was granted to them for the occasion! Meanwhile the Whigs were uneasy. They pointed to the fact that recruiting was carried on for the Pretender in the obscure Tory mug-houses; that money had been subscribed and conveyed to Rome as a gift to the young Charles Edward, and that an Irish gentleman had been openly drinking, in London and Oxford coffee-houses, the healths of the Duke of Ormond and JamesIII.It was some consolation to the Whigs that the offender was arrested and sentenced to be whipped. When he prayed to be hanged, as a circumstance which might befal an Irish gentleman without disgracing him, the Whigs roared at the joke,—that he would be altogether spared as a gentleman, and flogged simply as an Irish traitor.
A goodly body of Tories, on more solemn purpose, followed Prior to his grave in the South Cross of Westminster Abbey, on the 25th of September, 1721. Jacobite Atterbury, Dean of the Abbey, as well as Bishop of Rochester, was looked for, but he was conspicuousby his absence. Two days after, the bishop wrote to Pope:—‘I had not strength enough to attend Mr. Prior to his grave, else I would have done it to have shew’d his friends that I had forgot and forgiven what he wrote on me.’ The offence thus condoned lay in the sting of an epigram purporting to be an epitaph on the prelate, who, for the nonce, was supposed to be dead. The lines ranthus:—
EPIGRAMMATIC EPITAPH.
Meek Francis lies here, friend. Without stop or stay,As you value your peace, make the best of your way.Though at present arrested by Death’s caitiff paw,If he stirs he may still have recourse to the law;And in the King’s Bench should a verdict be found,That, by livery and seizin, his grave is his ground,He will claim to himself what is strictly his due,And an action of trespass will straightway ensue,That you without right on his premises tread,On a simple surmise that the owner is dead.
Meek Francis lies here, friend. Without stop or stay,As you value your peace, make the best of your way.Though at present arrested by Death’s caitiff paw,If he stirs he may still have recourse to the law;And in the King’s Bench should a verdict be found,That, by livery and seizin, his grave is his ground,He will claim to himself what is strictly his due,And an action of trespass will straightway ensue,That you without right on his premises tread,On a simple surmise that the owner is dead.
Meek Francis lies here, friend. Without stop or stay,
As you value your peace, make the best of your way.
Though at present arrested by Death’s caitiff paw,
If he stirs he may still have recourse to the law;
And in the King’s Bench should a verdict be found,
That, by livery and seizin, his grave is his ground,
He will claim to himself what is strictly his due,
And an action of trespass will straightway ensue,
That you without right on his premises tread,
On a simple surmise that the owner is dead.
That Atterbury was actively engaged this year on behalf of the Chevalier is now well attested. In April, the bishop in London wrote to James:—‘Sir, the time is now come when with a very little assistance from your friends abroad, your way to your friends at home is become safe and easy.’ Of this there is earnest iteration. Late in December, James wrote to the bishop a letter which Atterbury received the next month at the Deanery by a messenger. Atterbury’s king thanked him for past service, and allured him with a prospect of ‘a rank superior to all the rest.’ The eventful year was supposed to be at hand.
ARREST OF JACOBITES.
The year was a critical one. The Jacobite press was more audacious than ever—sure symptom thatsome peril was at hand. In what it consisted was notified to the king by the Regent Duke of Orleans,—namely, a design to seize the king himself, and to restore the Stuarts. Angry Nonjurors, and still more angry Ultramontanists, accused the Earl of Mar, and cursed his folly, for having sent, through the ordinary post, a letter, which was opened in London as a matter of course, and which contained unmistakable treason. Walpole, with his intricate agencies, probably knew as much of the design as the Regent and Mar themselves, and the circle around his intended victims was gradually closing. The danger was real. It led to the formation of great camps, to various arrests in the course of the year, and to severe measures against the Papists. Among those arrested on suspicion of being guilty of treason were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Orrery, and Lord North and Grey, with a Captain Kelly, a Nonjuring priest of the same name, and a prelate who was, in August, innocently engaged in a correspondence with Potter, Bishop of Oxford, as to the exact time at which the several Gospels were written. But it was for less innocent matter that Atterbury was arrested. There was not a more active agent of JamesIII.in the kingdom than he, and Kelly, the Nonjuror, was his daring, crafty, and reckless aide-de-camp.
ATTERBURY’S CORRESPONDENCE.
In the Stuart papers there is a letter, dated April, 1722, in which Atterbury writes to Mar, expressing his willingness to enter into a long-interrupted correspondence with Lord Oxford, and ‘upon a better foot than it has ever yet stood, being convinced that my doingso may be of no small consequence to the service. I have already taken the first step towards it, that is proper in our situation, and will pursue that by others as fast as I can have opportunity, hoping the secret will be as inviolably kept on your side, as it shall be on this, so far as the nature of such a transaction between two persons who must see one another sometimes can pass unobserved. I hope it will not be expected I should write by post, having many reasons to think it not advisable for me so to do.’
Outwardly there was a peaceful look, and peaceful thoughts and words, just where the storm and the thunderbolt were preparing. Atterbury, the most active Jacobite agent of the time, wrote pious and philosophical and pharisaical letters, from the Deanery at Westminster, to Pope. ‘I know not,’ he writes (April 6), ‘how I have fallen into this train of thinking;—when I sat down to write I intended only to excuse myself for not writing, and to tell you that the time drew nearer and nearer to dislodge; I am preparing for it: for I am at this moment building a vault in the Abbey for me and mine. ’Twas to be in the Abbey, because of my relation to the place; but ’tis at the West door of it; as far from Kings and Cæsars as the space would admit of.’ The prophet knew not the sense of his own prophecy. The despiser of kings and Cæsars was then plotting to overthrow a king to whom he had sworn allegiance, and to bring in a Cæsar hot from Rome, and ready to be Rome’s humble vassal!
JACOBITE TRYSTING PLACES.
In May, when the peril was made known, there was great stir in London among the adherents of the royal family. The early Jacobites gathered together in the morning at the Exchange. At noon, groups of them collected about Temple Bar. The ‘Malignants’ in finer clothes walked and talked in front of the Cocoa Tree (St.James’s Street) between two and three. The Temple Garden was the chosen spot ofallof them at night. Hyde Park, and their old Walnut Tree walk there, were deserted by them as soon as preparations for pitching the camp in that spot were commenced. A few, however, were to be found there mingling with Whigs and discussing the aspects of the time. Amid it all, the king, by Lord Townshend, announced to the Lord Mayor that the Pretender was projecting an invasion of the kingdom. Mayor and municipality replied that they were ready to lay down their lives to prevent it. Then followed a seizure of seditious printers and their apprentices. Papists and Nonjurors were ordered to withdraw to a distance of ten miles from London; and these measures having been adopted, the ministers deemed that the country was in safety. But timid men quoted Steele’s expression, first made in 1715,—‘Ministers employ a flute when they should blow a trumpet.’ The louder alarum was soon given. The country was dotted with camps. The most important of these was pitched in Hyde Park. It consisted of about one thousand cavalry, of whom more than half comprised the ‘gentlemen of the Horse Guards.’ The infantry amounted to about four thousand.There was a reasonable amount of artillery, and a creditable supply of chaplains, the king having peremptorily ordered that Divine service should be celebratedevery dayat 11 o’clock.
THE OFFICERS IN CAMP.
This order could not have been obeyed by thepetits maîtresamong the officers. Perhaps they were exceptional, the Sybarites, whose tents were little palaces—tapestried and carpeted. Their gorgeously curtained beds were covered with heavily laced counterpanes. The militarypetit maîtrein the Park rose at ten, took his tea, and received friends in his dressing-gown till eleven. Then he slowly, languidly, yet elaborately, adorned himself, and when the world was sufficiently well aired for his Prettiness to appear in it, he issued from his retreat, a plumed, powdered, periwigged Adonis—a sword on his thigh, dice in his pocket, a gold-headed cane attached to one of his buttons, and a snuff-box, from which his diamonded finger, ever and anon, gave dust to the nose. The officers gave splendid entertainments to ladies from Court and ladies from the City. Of these, some took tea, some preferred ratifia. It was the humour of the belles to conform as nearly as they could to military fashions, by wearing red cloaks. These ladies in camp were severely satirised in a pungent pamphlet called ‘Whipping Tom, or a rod for a proud lady, bundled up in four feeling discourses, both serious and merry. First, of the foppish mode of taking snuff. Second, of the expensive use of drinking tea. Third, of their ridiculous walking in red cloaks, like soldiers. Fourth,of their immodest wearing of hoop-petticoats. To which is added a new satire for the use of the Female Volunteers in Hyde Park.’
A CAVALRY BISHOP.
But for military fashion the ladies had an example in no less a person than the Bishop of Durham. That prelate was the nearly nonagenarian Nathaniel, Lord Crew, the first bishop of noble birth since the Reformation. At one of the reviews by the king—gallant spectacle, when peers and commoners, and illustrious foreigners, gathered round the sovereign, and ‘the Right Honourable Robert Walpole, the famous Minister,’ was coming among them, with bevies of semi-military ladies to soften the scene—the noble old bishop nobly caracolled in the presence, on a well-trained war-horse, which the right reverend father in God bestrode in a lay habit of purple, jack-boots, his hat cocked, and his black wig tied up behind in true military fashion. The ladies adored the old bishop; they perhaps had some awe of a man who as a boy had ridden his pony in the park in the days of CharlesI.The amazons having seen him ride away, and gazed at the spectacle of the procession of royalty, from its position near the walnut trees, to the magnificent banqueting pavilion, they prepared for the dance, and, oblivious of politics, ended the day in camp to the stimulating music of the fiddles.
One of the disciplinary regulations seemed harsh to the gayer lads in arms, namely, the prohibition to ‘lie out of their tents at night,’ but as the ladies remained late to dance, there was not much to complain of.
THE LADIES IN CAMP.
Never was a Metropolis more merrily guarded.Pope remarks that the Scythian ladies that dwelt in the waggons of war were not more attached to the luggage than the modern women of quality were to Hyde Park Camp. ‘The Matrons,’ he writes to Digby, ‘like those of Sparta, attend their sons to the field, to be the witnesses of their glorious deeds; and the Maidens, with all their charms displayed, provoke the spirit of the Soldiers. Tea and Coffee supply the place of Lacedemonian black broth. The Camp seems crowned with perpetual victory, for every sun that rises in the thunder of cannon, sets in the music of violins. Nothing is yet wanting but the constant presence of the Princess to represent theMater Exercitus!’
While the military were encamped in the Park, the civil authorities were busy in hunting down traitors. Unlucky Jacobite printers and their apprentices were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, and they thought themselves fortunate if, instead of fine, imprisonment, or ruin in worse shape, they were admitted to even heavy bail in the morning. The shops of sword- and gun-makers were overhauled, and forfeiture of weapons followed detection of sword blades bearing some questionable motto on them, or of gun-barrels directed to as questionable localities.
WHIG SUSCEPTIBILITY.
Whigs recognised the bloodthirstiness of the Tories in the stabbing of honest Mr. Barrett in the Strand, who had recently quitted the Romish religion for that of King George. For the safety of that royal person,they were so anxious as to consider with fear the fact that he occasionally walked for an hour or two together, almost alone, in Kensington Gardens, and went to dine with his most favoured nobles, or to the playhouse with its mixed audience, almost unattended. They were dissatisfied with messengers, assumed to be Jacobites, from whose custody traitors of mark escaped, as was supposed in return for costly bribes. They plucked up courage when an Irish papist priest, having been seized with dangerous papers upon him, was held to such bail as it was impossible for the wretch to procure. They shook their heads in displeasure when Colonel Arskine (Erskine) was allowed to go at large, on the security of his brother, the Earl of Buchan. The hanging of two Irish soldiers, lately in the Spanish service, Carrick and Mulhoney, who had come to London to be ready for the outbreak that was preparing, was perhaps justifiable; but a couple of strange gentlemen could not take lodgings inSt.James’s parish without risk of being arrested; and ladies unprotected, and having apartments in the same district, were often invited to give an account of themselves to the nearest magistrate. The lightest words were strangely perverted; and when the Rev. Mr. Mussey, in Sacheverel’s old church,St.Andrew’s, Holborn, preached against the practice of Inoculation, contending factions thought there might be something in it; but neither party could well make outwhat!
MORE ARRESTS.
The appearance of the Earl of Oxford once more in public was an event to be discussed. As Harleywalked from his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, holding Harcourt by the arm, there were men who thought as they gazed that Harley should never have been allowed to leave the Tower. Treason seemed to lurk in the least likely places. Why had the Lord Chamberlain so summarily ordered Lady Wentworth to vacate the lodgings she had been permitted to occupy, at the Cockpit? Simply because she had allowed disaffected persons to meet there. There had been a mysterious vessel lying off the Tower, and a going to and fro between it and Lady Wentworth’s lodgings. The police visited both. They seized treasonable papers aboard the ship, and they swept the lodgings clear of all its inmates, including the servants. The former included the famous Captain Dennis Kelly, his wife, her mother, Lady Bellew (sister of the Earl of Strafford), and some persons of less note. They were all about to ship for France, in furtherance of the conspiracy. The ladies were allowed to go free, but the Captain, with some co-mates in misery, were fast locked up in the Tower. There, reflection so worked upon Kelly, that he became fearfully depressed, and petitioned to have a warder sleep in his room at night, for the company’s sake!
To be going to France was as dangerous as coming from it, for plotting. In the former case, money was carried to the Jacobite chiefs, raised here under guise of subscriptions in aid of poor foreign Protestants. There was a ‘sensation’ in town, when the papers one morning announced that ‘A certain Person ofQuality has been seized in the Isle of White, upon Account of the Conspiracy, as he was endeavouring to make his Escape beyond Sea.’ The ‘Person’ was Lord North and Grey of Rolleston. Whigs saw him go from the Lords’ Committee of Council to the Tower with approval. They could not see why Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, who had been taken at his seat in Buckinghamshire, should be permitted to be under arrest in his London mansion in Glass House Street, though it was garrisoned by thirty soldiers whom he had to keep. This earl’s subsequent removal to the Tower was a gratification to loyal minds.
ATTERBURY TO POPE.
On July 30th, Atterbury, not long before his arrest, was indulging in disquisitions on death, in railing at human greatness, in sneers at the Duke of Marlborough, lately deceased—a man whose loyalty, like that of the bishop who was about to bury him—had been paid to two antagonistic masters. ‘I go to-morrow,’ the prelate tells Pope, ‘to the Deanery; and I believe I shall stay there till I have said Dust to dust, and shut up that last scene of pompous vanity.… I shall often say to myself while expecting thefuneral—
O Rus, quando ego te aspiciam! quandoque licebitDucere sollicitæ jucunda oblivia vitæ!
O Rus, quando ego te aspiciam! quandoque licebitDucere sollicitæ jucunda oblivia vitæ!
O Rus, quando ego te aspiciam! quandoque licebit
Ducere sollicitæ jucunda oblivia vitæ!
This gentle sigher after a quiet life was then ready to welcome JamesIII.to London, and very probably had his eye on the ‘pompous vanity’ of Canterbury.