we often find that a merry word spoken in season will do more than all
your Flaming Ordinances, and Terrific Denunciations of Fire and Sword.
And although at this time (beginning of the year 1746) authority very
properly exerted itself to procure obedience to the constitution, by
instilling Awe into men's minds, and did breathe nothing in its official
documents but heading, hanging, and quartering, with threats of
bombardments, free quarters, drum-head courts-martial, chains, gags,
fines, imprisonment, and sequestration,--yet I question whether so much
good was done by these towards the stability of the cause of the
Protestant Religion and King George, or so much harm to that of the
Pretender, Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes, as by a little series
of Pamphlets put forth by the witty Mr. Henry Fielding, a writer of
plays and novels then much in vogue; but a sad loose fish, although he
afterwards, as I am told, did good service to the State as one of the
justices of peace for Middlesex, and helped to put down many notorious
gangs of murderers, highwaymen, and footpads infesting the metropolis.
This Mr. Fielding--whom his intimates used to call Harry, and whom I
have often seen lounging in the Temple Gardens, or about the
gaming-houses in St. James's Street, and whom I have often met, I grieve
to say, in the very worst of company under the Piazzas in Covent Garden
much overtaken in liquor, and his fine Lace clothes and curled periwig
all besmirched and bewrayed after a carouse--took up the Hanoverian
cause very hotly,--having perhaps weighty reasons for so doing--and,
making the very best use of his natural gifts and natural weapons,
namely, a very strong and caustic humour, with most keen and trenchant
satire, did infinite harm to the Pretender's side by laughing at him and
his adherents. He published, probably at the charges of authority,--for
he was a needy gentleman, always in love, in liquor, or in debt,--a
paper called the _True Patriot_, in which the Jacobites were most
mercilessly treated. Notably do I recall a sort of sham diary or
almanack, purporting to be written by an honest tradesman of the City
during the predicted triumph of the Pretender, and in which such
occurrences were noted down as London being at the mercy of Highlanders
and Friars; Walbrook church and many others being razed to the ground;
Father O'Blaze, a Dominican, exulting over it; Queen Anne's statue at
Paul's taken away, and a large Crucifix erected in its place; the Bank,
South-Sea, India Houses, &c. converted into convents; Father Macdagger,
the Royal confessor, preaching at St. James's; three Anabaptists hung at
Tyburn, attended by their ordinary, Mr. Machenly (a grotesque name for
the ranting fellow who was wont to be known as Orator Henley); Father
Poignardini, an Italian Jesuit, made Privy-Seal; four Heretics burnt in
Smithfield; the French Ambassador made a Duke, with precedence; Cape
Breton given back to the French, with Gibraltar and Port Mahon to the
Spaniards; the Pope's nuncio entering London, and the Lord Mayor and
Aldermen kissing his feet; an office opened in Drury Lane for the sale
of papistical Pardons and Indulgences; with the like prophecies
calculated to arouse the bigotry of the lower and middle orders, and to
lash them into a religious as well as a political frenzy. For a cry of
"No Popery" has ever acted upon a true-born Englishman as a red rag
does on a bull. Perhaps the thing that went best down of all Mr.
Fielding's drolleries, and tickled the taste of the town most amazingly,
was the passage where he made his honest London tradesman enter in his
diary to this effect: "My little boy Jacky taken ill of the itch. He had
been on the parade with his godfather the day before to see the Life
Guards, and had just touched one of their plaids." One of the King's
Ministers said long afterwards that this passage touching the itch was
worth two regiments of horse to the cause of Government. At this
distance of time one doesn't see much wit in a scurrilous lampoon, of
which the gist was to taunt one's neighbours with being afflicted with a
disease of the skin: and, indeed, the lower ranks of English were, in
those days, anything but free from similar ailments, and, in London at
least, were in their persons and manners inconceivably filthy. But 'tis
astonishing what a mark you can make with a coarse jest, if you only go
far enough, and forswear justice and decency.
Strange but true is it to remark that, in the midst of all such
tremendous convulsions as wars, battles, sieges, rebellions, and other
martial conflagrations, men and women and children do eat and drink, and
love and marry, and beget other babes of humanity, and at last Die and
turn to dust, precisely as though the world--or rather the concerns of
that gross Orb--were all going on in their ordinary jog-trot manner.
Although from day to day we people in London knew not whether before the
sun set the dreaded pibroch of the Highland Clans might not be heard at
Charing Cross, and the barbarian rout of Caterans that formed the
Prince,--I mean the Chevalier,--I mean the Pretender's Army, scattered
all about the City, plundering our Chattels, and ravaging our fair
English homes; although, for aught men knew, another month, nay another
week, might see King George the Second toppled from his Throne, and King
James the Third installed, with his Royal Highness Charles Edward
Prince of Wales as Regent; although it was but a toss-up whether the
Archbishop of Canterbury should not be ousted from Lambeth by a Popish
Prelate, and the whole country reduced to Slavery and Bankruptcy;--yet
to those who lived quiet lives, and kept civil tongues in their heads,
all things went on pretty much as usual: and each day had its evil, and
sufficient for the day was the evil thereof. That the Highlandmen were
at Derby did not prevent the Hostess of the Stone Kitchen--that famous
Tavern in the Tower--from bringing in one's reckoning and insisting on
payment. That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King
meditating flight and the Royal Family in tears and swooning, did not
save the little schoolboy a whipping if he knew not his lesson at
morning call. It will be so, I suppose, until the end of the world. We
must needs eat and drink, and feel heat and cold, and marry or be given
in marriage, whatsoever party prevail, and whatsoever King carries crown
and sceptre; and however dreadful the crisis, we must have our Dinners,
and fleas will bite us, and corns pinch our Feet. So while all the
Public were talking about the Rebellion, all the world went nevertheless
to the Playhouses, where they played loyal Pieces and sang "God save
great George our King" every night; as also to Balls, Ridottos, Clubs,
Masquerades, Drums, Routs, Concerts, and Pharaoh parties. They read
Novels and flirted their fans, and powdered and patched themselves, and
distended their coats with hoops, just as though there were no such
persons in the world as the Duke of Cumberland and Charles Edward
Stuart. And in like manner we Warders in the Tower, though ready for any
martial emergency that might turn up, were by no means unnecessarily
afeard or distraught with anxiety; but ate and drank our fill, joked the
pretty girls who came to see the shows in the Tower, and trailed our
halberts in our usual jovial devil-me-care manner, as true Cavaliers,
Warders in the service of his Majesty the King, should do.
By and by came the news of Stirling and Falkirk, after the disastrous
retreat of the Highlandmen back into England. And then happened that
short but tremendous fight of Drummossie Moor, commonly called the
Battle of Culloden, where claymores and Lochaber axes clashed and
glinted for the last time against English broadswords and bayonets.
After this was what was called the pacification of the Highlands,
meaning that the Duke and his dragoons devastated all before them with
fire and sword; and then "retributive justice" had its turn, and the
work of the Tower Warders began in earnest.
Poor creatures! theirs was a hard fate. At Carlisle, at Manchester, at
Tyburn, and at Kennington Common, London, how many unhappy persons
suffered death in its most frightful form, to say nothing of the
unspeakable ignominy of being dragged on a hurdle to the place of
execution, and mangled in the most horrible manner by the Hangman's
butcherly knife, merely because they held that King James, and not King
George, was the rightful sovereign of these realms! Is there in all
History--at least insomuch as it touches our sentiments and feelings--a
more lamentable and pathetic narration than the story of Jemmy Dawson?
This young man, Mr. James Dawson by name,--for by the endearing
aggravative of Jemmy he is only known in Mr. William Shenstone's
charming ballad (the gentleman that lived at the Leasowes, and writ the
Schoolmistress, among other pleasing pieces, and spent so much money
upon Ornamental Gardening),--this Mr. James Dawson, I say, was the son
of highly reputable parents, dwelling, by some, 'tis said, in the county
of Lancashire, by others, in the county of Middlesex. At all events, his
father was a Gentleman of good estate, who strove hard to bring up his
son in the ways of piety and virtue. But the youth was wild and froward,
and would not listen to the sage Counsels that were continually given
him. After the ordinary grammar-school education, during which course he
much angered his teachers,--less by his reckless and disobedient conduct
than by his perverse flinging away of his opportunities, and manifest
ignoring of the parts with which he had been gifted by Heaven,--he was
sent to the University of Oxford to complete the curriculum of studies
necessary to make him a complete gentleman. And I have heard, indeed,
that he was singularly endowed with the properties requisite for the
making of that very rare animal:--that he was quick, ready, generous,
warm-hearted, skilful, and accomplished,--that he rode, and drove, and
shot, and fenced, and swam, and fished in that marvellously finished
manner only possible to those who seem to have been destined by a
capricious Fate to do so well that which they have never learned to do.
And at college, who but Jemmy Dawson--who but he? For a wicked prank, or
a mad carouse; for a trick to be played on a proctor, or a kiss to be
taken by stealth,--who such a Master of Arts as our young Undergraduate?
But at his lectures and chapels and repetitions he was (although always
with a vast natural capacity) an inveterate Idler; and he did besides so
continually violate and outrage the college rules and discipline, that
his Superiors, after repeated admonitions, gatings, impositions, and
rustications (which are a kind of temporary banishment), were at last
fain solemnly to expel him from the University. Upon which his father
discarded him from his house, vowing that he would leave his broad acres
(which were not entailed) to his Nephew, and bidding him go to the
Devil; whither he accordingly proceeded, but by a very leisurely and
circuitous route. But the young Rogue had already made a more perilous
journey than this, for he had fallen in Love with a young Madam of
exceeding Beauty, and of large Fortune in her own right, the daughter of
a neighbouring Baronet. And she, to her sorrow, poor soul, became as
desperately enamoured of this young Scapegrace, and would have run away
with him, I have no doubt, had he asked her, but for a spark of honour
which still remained in that reckless Heart, and forbade his linking the
young girl, all good and pure as she was, to so desperate a life as his.
And so he went wandering for a time up and down the country, swaggering
with his boon companions, and pawning his Father's credit in whatsoever
inns and pothouses he came unto, until, in the beginning of that fatal
year '46, he must needs find himself at Manchester without a Shilling in
his pocket, or the means of raising one. It was then the time that the
town of Manchester had been captured, in the Pretender's interest, by a
Scots Sergeant and a Wench; and the notorious Colonel Towneley was about
raising the Manchester Regiment of Lancashire Lads to fight for Prince
Charlie. Desperate Jemmy Dawson enlisted under Towneley; and soon, being
a young fellow of good figure and shining talents, was made a Captain.
But the ill-fated Manchester Regiment was ere long broken up; and Jemmy
Dawson, with Colonel Towneley himself, and many other of the officers,
were captured. They were all tried at the Assizes held after the Assizes
at St. Margaret's Hill, Southwark; and James Dawson, being convicted of
high treason, was sentenced to the usual horrible punishment for that
offence. He was drawn on a hurdle to Kennington Common; he was hanged,
disembowelled, and quartered; but the young Madam of whom I have spoken
was true to him unto the last. For many days following the sentence she
vainly solicited his pardon; but finding all useless, she on the fatal
morning (having trimmed a shroud for him overnight, in which, poor Soul,
his mangled remains were not to rest) followed him in a Mourning Coach
to Kennington Common. She saw the Dreadful Tragedy played out to its
very last Act; and then she just turned on her Side in the Coach, and
with a soft Murmur, breathing Jemmy's Name, she Died. Surely a story so
piteous as this needs no comment. And by Heaven it is True!
CHAPTER THE NINTH.
REBELLION IS MADE AN END OF, AND AFTER SOME
FURTHER SERVICE WITH HIS MAJESTY I GO INTO
BUSINESS ON MY OWN ACCOUNT.
MEMORANDUM.--About a year before the Rebellion, as the Earl of
Kilmarnock was one day walking in his Garden, he was suddenly alarmed
with a fearful Shriek, which, while he was reflecting on with
Astonishment, was soon after repeated. On this he went into the House,
and inquired of his Lady and all the Servants, but could not discover
from whom or whence the Cry proceeded; but missing his Lady's Woman, he
was informed that she was gone into an Upper Room to inspect some Linen.
Whereupon the Earl and his Lady went up and opened the Door, which was
only latched. But no sooner did the Gentlewoman within set eyes on his
Lordship's face than she fainted away. When, proper aid being given to
her, she was brought to herself, they asked her the meaning of what they
had heard and seen. She replied, that while she sat sewing some Linen
she had taken up to mend, the Door opened of itself, and a _Bloody Head_
entered the Room, and rolled upon the Floor; that this dreadful Sight
had made her cry out, and then the Bloody Head disappeared; that in a
few Moments she saw the same frightful Apparition again, on which she
repeated her Shrieks; and at the third time she fainted away, but was
just recovered when she saw his Lordship coming in, which had made the
Impression on her they had been witness of.
This Relation given by the affrighted Gentlewoman was only laughed at
and ridiculed as the Effect of Spleen-Vapours, or the Frenzy of a
deluded Imagination, and was thought no more of, till one Night, when
the Earl of Kilmarnock, sitting round a Bowl by the Winter Fire with my
Lord Galloway,--and it is at such a Time that men are most prone to
fall-to telling of Ghost Stories,--and their Lordships' conversation
turning on Spectres and Apparitions, the vulgar notions of which they
were deriding, the terrible tale of the Bloody Head was brought up, and
then dismissed as the idle fancy of a Hoity-toity Tirewoman. But after
Kilmarnock had engaged in the Rebellion, and Lord Galloway was told of
it, he instantly recollected this Story, and said, "I will wager a dozen
Magnums of Claret, and my best Silver-laced Justaucorps, that my Lord
Kilmarnock will lose his Head."
Nobody took his bet, not daring thus to trifle with the lives of the
Quality; but that Scots Lord lost his Head, notwithstanding; and I saw
it cut off on Tower Hill in the latter summer of the year '46.
This story of the Bloody Head was common Talk among us Warders at the
time,--who were full as superstitious as other Folks, you may be sure.
Many such Legends are there, too, current of Persons who were to die
Violent Deaths at the hands of the Public Executioner, being forewarned
many years before of their Impending Fate. And sometimes hath the
Monition come nearer to the Catastrophe, as in the case of K. C. the
1st, who, entering Westminster Hall at that Unnatural Assize presided
over by Bradshaw, the Gold Head fell off his Walking-Staff, and rolled
on the Pavement of the Hall among the Soldiers; nor, when it was
restored to him, could any Efforts of his make it remain on. Also it is
said of my Lord Derwentwater, that the last time he went a hunting in
the north, before he joined the Old Chevalier of St. George, his
whippers-in unearthed a litter of Fox-cubs, every one of which Vermin
had been born without Heads. And as well authenticated is it, that when
my Lord Balmerino (that suffered on Tower Hill with the Earl of
Kilmarnock) was coming back condemned to Death from his Trial before
his Peers at Westminster, his Lordship being of a merry, Epicurean
temper, and caring no more for Death than a Sailor does for a wet Shirt,
stopped the coach at a Fruiterer's at Charing Cross, where he must needs
ask Mr. Lieutenant's Attendant to buy him some Honey-Blobbs, which is
the Scottish name for ripe Gooseberries.
"And King Geordie maun pay for the bit fruitie; for King James's auld
soldier has nae siller of his ain save twa guineas for Jock Headsman,"
quoth he in his jocular manner, meaning that those about him must pay
for the Gooseberries; for indeed this Lord was very poor, and I have
heard was, when in town, so much driven as to borrow money from the man
who keeps the Tennis-court in James Street, Haymarket.
Well, it so happened that the Season was a backward one; and the
Fruiterer sends his duty out to his Lordship, saying that he has no ripe
Gooseberries, but that of green ones he has a store, to which that
unfortunate Nobleman is heartily welcome.
"I'll e'en try one," says my Lord; and from a Punnet they brought him he
picks a Green Gooseberry; when, wonderful to relate, it swells in his
hand to the bigness at least of an egg-plum, and turns the colour of
Blood. "The de'il's in the Honey-Blobb," cries my Lord in a tiff, and
flings it out of window, where it made a great red stain on the
pavement.
And this the Warder who stood by, and the Messenger who was in the coach
itself, told me.
Less need is there to speak of such strange adventures as my Lady
Nithisdale's child (that was born soon after her Lord's escape from the
Tower, in which, with such a noble valour and self-sacrifice, she aided
him) being brought into the World with a broad Axe figured, as though by
a Limner, on its Neck; or of the Countess of Cromartie's infant (she
likewise Lay-in while the Earl was under sentence) having a thin red
line or thread right round its neck. These things are perhaps to be
accounted more as Phenomena of nature than as ominous prognostications,
and I so dismiss 'em. But it is worth while to note that, for all the
good authority we have of Lord Kilmarnock's Waiting-woman being
affrighted by the vision of a Bloody Head, the story itself, or at least
something germane to it, is as old as the Hills. During my travels in
Sweden, I was told of a very strange mischance that had happened to one
of their Kings who was named Charles;--but Charles the what, I do
confess I know not;--who walking one evening in his garden, saw all at
once a Wing of the Palace, that had been shut up and deserted for Twenty
years, all blazing with Light from the Windows, as for some great
Festival. And his Majesty, half suspecting this might be some
Masquerading prank on the part of the Court Ladies, and half afraid that
there was mischief in it, drew his Sword, and calling upon a brace of
his Gentlemen to follow him, stave in a door and came into a Great Old
Hall, that was the principal apartment in the said Wing. And at the
upper End, where the ancient Throne of his ancestors was long since gone
to Rags and Tatters, and abandoned to Dust and Cobwebs, he saw, sitting
on the chair of Estate, and crowned, a little child that was then but a
boy--the Duke of Sudermania. And lo! as he gazed upon him a Dreadful
Ball, that seemed fashioned in the similitude of his own Head, showed
itself under the Throne, rolled down the steps, and so came on to his
very Feet, where it stopped, splashing his Boots unto the very ankle
with Gore. The tale of the Bloody Boots, as 'tis called, is still quite
familiar to every Nurse in Sweden; but I never heard how it ended, or
whether King Charles had his Head cut off in the Long-run; but every
Swede will swear to the Story; and as for the Boots, I have heard that
they are to be seen, with the dark brown stains of the Blood still upon
'em, in a glass case at the House of one Mr. Herdstroem, who sells Aqua
Vitae over the Milliner's in the Bogbindersgade at Stockholm.
'Twas in the summer of 1747 that I put off my Warder's dress for good
and all, the Rebellion being by this time quite Dead and crushed out;
but before I laid down my halbert 'twas my duty to assist at the
crowning consummation of that disastrous Tragedy. One of the Prime
Traitors in the Scottish Risings had been, it is well known, the
notorious Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, of Castle Downie, in Scotland, then
come to be Eighty years old, and as atrocious an old Villain as ever
lived, but so cunning that he cheated the Gallows for three quarters of
a century, and died like a Gentleman, by the Axe, at last. He had been
mixed up in every plot for the bringing back of King James ever since
the Old Chevalier's Father gave up the Ghost at St. Germain's, yet had
somehow managed to escape scot-free from Attainder and Confiscation.
Even in the '45, when he sent the Clan Fraser to join the Young
Chevalier, he tried his best to make his poor Son, the Master of Lovat
(a very virtuous and gallant young Gentleman), the scapegoat for his
misdeeds, playing Fast and Loose between France and the Jacobites on
one side, and the Lord Justice Clerk and the King's Government on the
other. But Justice had him on the hip at last, and the old Fox was
caught. They brought him to London by Easy Stages, as he was, or
pretended to be, mighty Infirm; and while he was resting at an Inn at
St. Alban's, Mr. Hogarth the Painter (whom I have seen many a time
smoking a pipe and making Caricatures of the Company at the Tavern he
used--the Bedford Head, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden: a skilful
Draughtsman, this Mr. Hogarth, but very Uppish and Impudent in his Tone;
for I remember that he once called me Captain Compound, seeing, as the
fellow said, that I was made up of three--Captain Bobadil, Captain
Macheath, and Captain Kyd),--this Mr. H. went down to St. Alban's, and
took a picture of the old Lord, as he sat in his great chair, counting
the strength of the Scottish clans on his fingers. 'Twas afterwards
graved on copper, and had a prodigious sale.