_Barclay and Perkins._
Have you ever amused yourself by tracing historical parallels? did you
ever note how often one age reflects the character of another, so that
the stage of real life seems to us at intervals as a theatre on which we
see represented the passions of the past, its political tendencies, and
monied speculations; the only change being that of costume, and a wider
but more modified method of action? So true it is that men change,
institutions vary, and that human nature is always the same. The church
reproduces its Laud, the railway exchange its Law, the bench has its
Mansfield, the Horse Guards its greater Marlborough, and Newgate its
Mrs. Brownrigg. We have giants as great as King Charles's porter, and a
Tom Thumb who would have frightened the very _ghosts_ of all departed
Jeffery Hudsons,--a class not generally accused of fear, except at
daybreak,--by his unequalled _diminutiveness_. Take the great questions
which agitate the church and the senate-house, which agitated them in
the sixteenth, during much of the two following centuries, and you will
find the same theological, political, commercial, and sanitary questions
debated with equal honesty, equal truth, and similar prospects of
satisfactory solution. I confess, however, that for one historical
coincidence I was unprepared; and that "Barclay and Perkins," in the
case of assault upon a noted public character, should have an historical
antecedent in the seventeenth century, has caused me some surprise. It
is not necessary for me to recall to your attention how Barclay and
Perkins were noised about on the occasion of the attack on General
Haynau. The name of the firm was as familiar to our lips as their
porter:
"Never came reformation in a flood
With such a _heady_ currance."
There had been no similar _emeute_, as I was told by a civic wit, since
the days of "Vat Tyler." Now let me remind you of the Barclay and
Perkins and the other Turnham Green men's plot, who conspired to assault
and assassinate King William III. Mind, the coincidence is only in name.
The historic parallel is rather of kind than event, but it is not the
less remarkable when we consider the excitement twice connected with
these names. The character of James II. may be described as the
_villainy of weakness_. It possessed nothing of elevation, breadth, or
strength. It was this weak obliquity which made him deceive his people,
and led them to subvert the laws, supplant the church, and to become a
tyrant in the name of religious liberty. His means to recover the throne
were as mean as the manner of its desertion was despicable. He tried
cajolery, it failed; the bravery of his Irish soldiers, it was
unavailing. He next relied on the corruption of Russell, the avarice of
Marlborough; but as these men were to be bought as well as sold, he put
his trust finally in any villain who was willing to be hired for
assassination. In 1692 M. de Grandval, a captain of dragoons, was shot
in the allied camp, who confessed that King James at St. Germain, in
the presence of the queen, had engaged him to shoot King William. Four
years later James had contrived another plot. At the head of this were
Sir George Barclay and Sir William Perkins, and under their guidance
twenty men were engaged to assist in the assassination of King William.
The plan was as follows. It was the custom of the king to hunt near the
house of Mr. Latten, in the neighbourhood of Brentford, and they
designed to surprise the king on his return at a hollow part of the road
between Brentford and Turnham Green, one division of them being placed
behind some bushes and brushwood at the western end of the Green. Some
of your correspondents may perhaps fix the spot; but as the Green
extended then far beyond what it now does, I suspect it was about the
road leading to Gunnesbury; the road itself I recollect as a boy seeing
much elevated and improved. The design failed, two of the gang betrayed
the rest,--Barclay escaped, but Perkins and some others were hung.
Jeremy Collier attended them on the scaffold, and publicly gave them
absolution in the name of Christ, and by imposition of hands, for all
their sins. I need not describe to you the excitement caused by this
plot of Barclay and Perkins: the event connected with their names, as at
our later period--
"Was a theme of all conversation;
Had it been a pillar of church and state,
Or a prop to support the whole dead weight,
It could not have furnished more debate
For the heads and tails of the nation."
James closed the drama becomingly; he published a defence of his conduct
in a paper, the style of which has been well described as the "euphemism
of assassination." The road between Turnham Green and Kew was long after
associated with the names of "Barclay and Perkins."