(1715.)
[Illustration: Drop-T]he second homage paid by the stage to the royal
family was, in 1715, rendered in person by Tom Durfey. Tom had been
occasionally a thorough Tory. Charles II. had leant on his shoulder.
Great Nassau, nevertheless, enjoyed his singing. Queen Anne laughed
loudly at his songs in ridicule of the Electress Sophia; and yet here
was the Electress’s son, George I., allowing the Heir Apparent to be
present at Tom’s benefit. This took place on January 3rd, 1715. On
this occasion, Tom turned thorough Whig. After the play, he delivered
an extraordinary speech to the audience on the blessings of the new
system, the condition and merits of the royal family, and on the state
of the nation as regarded foreign and domestic relations! At the other
play-house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a piece was acted called the
‘Cobler of Preston,’ in which _Kit Sly_ and his story were ‘lifted’
from the ‘Taming of the Shrew.’ _Kit_ was played by Pinkethman. When
he said, ‘Are you sure now that I’m your natural Lord and Master? I
am devilishly afraid I am but a _Pretender_!’――the Whigs clapped till
their hands were sore, and the Tories ‘pished’ at the poorness of the
joke.
[Sidenote: _AT THE PLAY._]
If more taste had been shown in those who catered for the royal family
when they went to the play, it would have been as well. At an evening
drawing room, in February, the Duchess of Roxburgh, hearing that the
Princess of Wales was going to Drury Lane the following day, told the
Countess of Lippe and Buckinberg that the play which was to be acted
on that occasion ‘was such a one as nobody could see with a good
reputation.’ ‘It was “The Wanton Wife,”’ says the Countess Cowper in
her Diary, and the Princess’s irreproachable lady-in-waiting adds of
Betterton’s play, which is better known by its second title, ‘The
Amorous Widow,’――‘I had seen it once, and I believe there are few in
town who had seen it so seldom; for it used to be a favourite play, and
often bespoke by the ladies. I told this to the Princess, who resolved
to venture going, upon my character of it.’ The result is admirably
illustrative of the morals of the time.――‘Went to the play with my
mistress; and to my great satisfaction she liked it as well as any play
she had seen; and it certainly is not more obscene than all comedies
are.’ ‘It were to be wished,’ adds the lady, ‘our stage was chaster,
and I cannot but hope, now it is under Mr. Steele’s direction, that it
will mend.’
[Sidenote: _FLIGHT OF ORMOND._]
While Princesses and their ladies were amusing themselves in this way,
the public found amusement in watching the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was
to be seen looking, half the day long, through his windows into the
street. They knew therefrom that he had been turned out of his Lord
Chamberlainship. Whigs who rejoiced at this disgrace were almost as
glad at seeing the Earl of Cardigan leisurely riding down Piccadilly.
He had nothing more to do, they said, with the Buckhounds. It was
reported in the coffee-houses that Dean Swift had been arrested. This
was not correct. It was quite true, however, that Lord Oxford was not
only in the Tower, but was kept in closer restraint than ever. While
Tories were buying Ormond’s portrait, ‘engraved by Grebelin,’ for 1_s._
6_d._, as the portrait of a leader who had not fled, and was not under
ward in the Tower, there was one morning partly a cry, partly a whisper
running through the town,――‘Ormond’s away!’ It was time. Secretary
Stanhope had impeached him and other, but less noble, peers, of High
Treason; and the tender-hearted Whig, Sir Joseph Jekyll, had said in
the Commons, ‘If there is room for mercy, he hoped it would be shown to
the noble Duke.’ When the warrant reached Richmond, the nest was warm
but the bird had flown.
On Sundays, the general excitement nowhere abated. At church, political
rather than religious spirit rendered congregations attentive. They
listened with all their ears to a clergyman, when he referred to
the king’s supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and when he had to
enumerate the royal titles in the prayer before the sermon. If he
omitted to note the supremacy, and the congregation were Whiggish,
there was a loyal murmur of disapproval. If he happened to speak of
his Majesty, not as ‘King by the Grace of God,’ but as ‘King by Divine
Permission,’ the more sensitive loyalists would make a stir, withdraw
from the church; and certain of the papers would be full of a holy
horror at such proceedings on the part of the minister.
[Sidenote: _SACHEVEREL._]
In the sermon preached at St. Andrew’s, on the 20th of January――the
Thanksgiving day for the accession of George I.――Sacheverel (while
the king was being almost deified at St. Paul’s) reflected severely
on the Government, and obliquely on the king himself and his family.
Court, city, and army were alike charged with degrading vices. With
still greater boldness did he attack the ministry for appointing
as a Thanksgiving time the anniversary of the day on which Charles
I. was brought to trial. Finally, Sacheverel denounced the Crown’s
interference with the clergy. They who advised that course, he said,
might any day counsel the king to commit acts hostile to both Law and
Gospel. During the delivery of this political harangue, the Doctor’s
friends were disturbed by an individual who took notes of the sermon.
They said ‘it was more criminal to steal the Doctor’s words out of his
mouth in the church than to pick a man’s pocket in the market, or to
rob him on the highway.’ This sermon, which fired London, seems now
to be but a poor thing. The text was from Matthew xxiii. 24-26. The
discourse affirmed that national sins brought national punishment,
especially ‘_the sin of that day_,’ which, it was inferred, had for its
penalty――the present sad condition of England. The Jacobite spirit
manifested itself most sharply in a passage referring to the regicides
‘who were concerned in the bloody actions of that bloody tragedy of
that glorious martyr, King Charles the First, who was next of all to
the Son of God himself.’ After murdering the king, the greatest sin,
said Sacheverel, was to usurp the place of the heir. Every hearer
felt that George I. was here hinted at as the usurper of the seat
which by right belonged to James III. The putting to death of Charles,
Sacheverel declared to be ‘the greatest sin that ever was.’ The
‘rebellion of the creature against the Sovereign’ was censured almost
as heavily. The censure appeared to point against those who dethroned
James II., but every hearer felt that it was directed against those who
kept the throne――against James II.’s son and heir.
[Sidenote: _POLITICS IN THE PULPIT._]
When the discourse was ended, the congregation fell upon the
note-taker. They demanded his papers, and were not enlightened by his
exclamation:――‘Ah! you’ve spoilt my design!’ Each party took him for
an adversary, and the man would have been murdered had not Sacheverel
ordered his clerk and servant to go to his rescue. When it was
discovered that the victim was ‘one Mologni (_sic_), an Irish Papist,’
the Whigs were probably sorry that they had not rolled him in the
gutter that then ran down the centre of Holborn Hill.
[Sidenote: _CALUMNY AGAINST SACHEVEREL._]
Every possible (and impossible) sin was charged upon Sacheverel for
this sermon, especially by the notorious bookseller and pamphleteer,
John Dunton. This worthy ally of Hanover, in his ‘Bungay, or the
false brother proved his own executioner,’ which was circulating
in London, immediately after the sermon of January 20th, roundly
accused Sacheverel of being ‘a man of the bottle that can sit up whole
nights drinking until High Church is drunk down, and laid low or flat
under the table, as you were at Sir J. N――――rs in Oxfordshire, which
occasioned that sarcasm, _There lies the pillar of our Church_.’
Sacheverel was accused of being guilty of the most profligate
gallantry. His own clerk, it was said, had to rouse him up from cards,
on a Sunday, when service time was at hand! and as for blasphemy,
Sacheverel, it was affirmed, could never make reference to Dissenters
without damning them for Hanoverians, and consigning them to their
master, the Devil! The list of crimes would have been incomplete if it
had not closed with the assertion that Sacheverel was at heart really
an Atheist!
Tavern Whigs waxed religiously wrathful against Sacheverel. One Dunne,
in a Southwark tavern, after roaring over his drink against the Tory
parson, reeled forth on a dark and stormy night, and happened to come
on a funeral by torch-light, on its way to St. Saviour’s. A clergyman
walked with it, as was then the custom. ‘D―――― me!’ exclaimed Dunne,
‘here’s the Doctor of Divinity! I’ll have a bout with him.’ The
clergyman was not Dr. Sacheverel, but his curate, Mr. Pocock. It was
all one to Dunne, who assaulted the curate, pulled off his hat, tore
off his peruke, and finally knocked him down. Dunne was conveyed
away by the watch. The Tory ‘Post Boy’ was sarcastic on the incident,
‘The clergy,’ it said, ‘within the bills of mortality, who are about
six feet high and wear black wigs, are desired to meet at Child’s
coffee-house, St. Paul’s Churchyard, next Thursday, in order to
consider proper methods to distinguish themselves from Dr. Sacheverel,
that they may not be murthered by way of proxy instead of the said
Doctor.’ The other side remarked, that there would be no safety for
tall men with flaxen wigs till Sacheverel was hanged out of the way.
[Sidenote: _DANGER IN THE DISTANCE._]
On similar occasions in London there were similar manifestations in
an opposite sense. ‘On the eve of the Pretender’s birthday (10th of
June), they make great boasts of what they will do to-morrow,’ said the
Whig papers, ‘which, they say, is the anniversary of his birth. But it
is believed that the High Church wardens, who pretend a right to the
bells, will not be very fond of hanging in the ropes. A serenade of
warming pans will be more suitable for the occasion, and brickbats may
serve instead of clappers for a brickmaking brat.’
[Sidenote: _FLIGHT OF BOLINGBROKE._]
In March, London had been called from personal to national
considerations. There was a phrase in the king’s speech, on opening
Parliament in this month, which sounded like a trumpet-call to
battle. ‘The Pretender,’ said the Prince who had leapt into his
place, ‘who still resides in Lorraine, threatens to disturb us, and
boasts of the assistance he still expects here, to repair his former
disappointments.’ The national prosperity was said to be obstructed
by his pretensions and intrigues. In reply to this, the faithful
Parliament expressed all becoming indignation; and Jacobites who felt
unsafe in London began to take measures for securing a refuge. On the
18th of March, or as some reports say, the 5th of April, a nobleman
seemed to court notice at Drury Lane Theatre. He was now with one
friend, now with another, among the audience. He was quite as much
among the actors, having a word with Booth (who had experienced his
liberality on the night that ‘Cato’ was first played) anon, gossiping
smartly with Wilks, and exchanging merry passages of speech with
delicious Mrs. Oldfield. All who saw him felt persuaded that the
Viscount Bolingbroke had reason to be above all fear, or he would not
have been there, and in such bright humour, too. Bolingbroke ordered a
play for the next night, left the house, and half an hour after, having
darkened his eyebrows, clapped on a black wig, and otherwise disguised
himself, was posting down to Dover under the name of La Vigne, without
a servant, but having a Frenchman with him who acted as courier. The
fugitive reached Dover at six in the morning, but he was detained by
tempestuous weather till two, when, despite the gale, the wind being
fair, the master of a Dover hoy agreed to carry him over to Calais,
where Bolingbroke landed at six in the evening. An hour later, he was
laughing over the adventure with the governor of the town, who had
invited him to dinner. At the same hour the next night, all London was
in a ferment with the news of this flight of Bolingbroke. The Privy
Council was immediately summoned. They were alarmed, but powerless;
and finding themselves helpless, they had nothing better to do than to
commit to Newgate the honest man who had brought the intelligence to
London!
[Sidenote: _BOLINGBROKE PAMPHLETS._]
Bolingbroke’s enemies and friends were alike busy, the first to injure,
the latter to defend him. His foes issued, at the price of 4_d._,
‘A merry letter from Lord Bol――――ke to a certain favourite mistress
near Bloomsbury Square.’ It was ‘printed and sold by the pamphlet
sellers of London and Westminster.’ It was in doggrel rhyme, not witty
but, emphatically, ‘beastly.’ Towards the conclusion, the following
mischievous lines occur, foreshadowing invasion and his own return:――
In the meantime, I hope
The mist will clear up,
That the thunder you’ll hear
May soon purge the air,
And then that the coast
May be clear at the last.
[Sidenote: _BOLINGBROKE’S CHARACTER._]
This unclean and menacing pamphlet offended Tories who were not
altogether Jacobites. It was not answered, no one could stoop to do
_that_, but it was followed by a sixpenny pamphlet, from More’s, ‘near
Fleet Street,’ in which Bolingbroke was rather ill-defended by one
of those friends whose precious balsam aggravates rather than heals.
The writer, however, was earnest. With regard to Bolingbroke’s idle
talk at table over his wine, the anonymous advocate observed:――‘My
Lord, everybody knows, drank deep enough of those Draughts which
generally produce Secrets, and had Enemies enough to give Air to the
least unguarded Expressions in favour of the Pretender.’ To the not
unnatural query of the Whigs,――‘Why did he fly?’ Bolingbroke’s champion
loftily replies:――‘My Lord had too elegant a Taste of Life to part with
it, to gratify only the Resentments of his Enemies! If he was a Rake,
it was his nature that was to be blamed; if he was a Villain, no one
could charge him with hypocritically attempting to hide it.’ ‘As to
personal Frailties, his Lordship had his Share, and never strove to
hide them by the sanctified cover which Men of high Stations generally
affect; whose private Intrigues are carried on with as much Gravity
as the Mysteries of State. His Faults and Levities were owing to his
Complexion, and that Life and Humour with which he enlivened them, made
them so pleasing that those who condemned the Action could not but
approve the Person. A vein of Mirth and Gaiety were as inseparable from
his Conversation, as an Air of Love and Dignity from his Personage, and
a Greatness of Spirit from his Soul.’
Meanwhile, Lady St. John, Bolingbroke’s mother, was showing to
everybody at Court a letter from her son to his father, in which he
protested that he was perfectly innocent of carrying on any intrigue
with the Pretender. Of which letter, says Lady Cowper, ‘I have taken a
copy, but I believe it won’t serve his turn.’
[Sidenote: _POLITICS IN LIVERY._]
Court and parliament being agitated, the lackeys imitated their
betters. The footmen, in waiting for their masters, who were members
of Parliament, had free access to Westminster Hall. For six and thirty
years they had imitated their masters, by electing a ‘Speaker’ among
themselves, whenever the members made a more exalted choice within
their own House. The Whig lackeys were for Mr. Strickland’s man. The
Tory liveried gentry resolved to elect Sir Thomas Morgan’s fellow. A
battle-royal ensued in place of an election. The combatants were hard
at it, when the House broke up, and the members wanted their coaches.
Wounds were then hastily bandaged, but their pain nursed wrath. On the
next night, the hostile parties, duly assembled, attacked each other
with fury. The issue was long uncertain, but finally the Tory footmen
gained a costly victory, in celebration of which Sir Thomas Morgan’s
servant, terribly battered, was carried three times triumphantly round
the Hall. There was no malice. The lackeys clubbed together for drink
at a neighbouring ale-house, where the host gave them a dinner gratis.
The dinner was made expressly to create insatiable thirst, and before
the banquet came to a close, every man was as drunk as his master.
[Sidenote: _SATIRE._]
In March, 1715, Bishop Burnet, the man more hated by the Jacobites
than any other, died. These perhaps further indulged their hatred of
the very name, by attributing to his youngest son, Thomas Burnet, the
authorship of a famous Tory ballad, which was long praised, condemned,
quoted or sung in London coffee-houses,――it was named
BISHOP BURNET’S DESCENT INTO HELL.
The devils were brawling at Burnet’s descending,
But at his arrival they left off contending;
Old Lucifer ran his dear Bishop to meet,
And thus the Archdevil, th’ Apostate did greet:――
‘My dear Bishop Burnet I’m glad beyond measure,
This visit, unlook’d for, gives infinite pleasure.
And, oh! my dear Sarum, how go things above?
Does George hate the Tories, and Whigs only love?’
‘Was your Highness _in propriâ personâ_ to reign,
You could not more justly your empire maintain.’
‘And how does Ben Moadley?’――‘Oh! he’s very well,
A truer blue Whig you have not in hell.’
‘Hugh Peters is making a sneaker within
For Luther, Buchanan, John Knox, and Calvin;
And when they have toss’d off a brace of full bowls,
You’ll swear you ne’er met with much honester souls.
‘This night we’ll carouse in spite of all pain.
Go, Cromwell, you dog, and King William unchain,
And tell him his Gilly is lately come down,
Who has just left his mitre, as he left his crown.
Whose lives till they died, in our service were spent;
They only come hither who never repent.
Let Heralds aloud then our victories tell;
Let George reign for ever!’――‘Amen!’ cried all hell.
Court-life was certainly not particularly exemplary. A Stuart Princess
would not have dared to seek reception at St. James’s, but the mistress
of a Stuart King was welcomed there. The old Louise de Querouaille,
Duchess of Portsmouth, chief of the royal Husseydom in the apartments
of Charles II., was presented to the Princess of Wales by the Duchess’s
granddaughter, the Countess of Berkeley, Lady of the Bedchamber, then
in waiting! According to the records of the time, the Duchess was
‘most graciously received.’ Next evening (it was in March, 1715) this
painted abomination of a woman sat at the king’s side, at a supper
given by the Duke of Richmond, in Priory Gardens. The royal harridan’s
granddaughter sat on the other hand of George I.! Her husband, the Earl
of Berkeley, and the Earl of Halifax made up this highly respectable
party of six.
[Sidenote: _FLYING REPORTS._]
This laxity of moral practice, at Court, was made capital of by the
Jacobites. Throughout April and May, they proclaimed that there was
not a man about St. James’s who was not noted for disaffection or
lukewarmness to Church principles. There was a report that a ‘new
Academy was to be erected at Hampstead, for instructing youths in
principles agreeable to the present times.’ The existing Parliament was
declared to be as capable of burning Articles, Homilies, and Liturgies,
as ‘Sacheverel’s Parliament’ was of burning the Oxford decree.
Episcopalian clergymen were said to be looked on with such small favour
by the Government, that a prelatic military chaplain in Scotland was
removed by the authorities in London on the sole ground of his being an
Episcopalian. This, the Duke of Montrose told the Archbishop of York,
‘could not be got over.’ Presbytery would be more perilous to England
than Popery; but both menaces would disappear, if George and his
hopeful family were ‘sent back to their own German dominions, for which
Nature seems to have much better fitted them.’[1] This was said to be
the opinion of the most sensible Whigs, as well as of all the Tories
in England.
[Sidenote: _DECREE IN THE ‘GAZETTE.’_]
There is little doubt that the Tories in London were exasperated
to the utmost by the disregard which the Whig and the Dissenting
preachers manifested for the decree in the ‘Gazette’ which forbade
the meddling with State affairs in the pulpit. Bradbury made his
chapel echo again with demands for justice against traitors. Tories
called him the ‘preaching Incendiary.’ They had previously treated
Bishop Burnet as ‘a lay preacher who takes upon him, after a series
of lewdness and debauchery, in his former life, to set up for an
instructor of Ministry, and impudently tells the Ministers of State,
the King’s Majesty, and all, that he expects the last Ministry should
be sacrificed to his resentments, and their heads be given to him in a
charger, as that Lewd Dancer did to John the Baptist.’[2]
Humble Jacobites, on the other hand, were often mercilessly treated.
Ill words spoken of the king brought the hangman’s lash round the loins
of the speaker. Half the Whig roguery of London went down to Brentford
in May, to see a well-to-do Tory butcher whipped at the cart’s tail
from Brentford Bridge round the Market Place. That roguery was very
much shocked to see wicked Tory influence at work in favour of the High
Church butcher; for, he not only was allowed refreshment, but the cart
went so fast and the lash so slowly, that the Hanoverian cockneys
swore it was not worth while going so far to see so little.
[Sidenote: _THE LASH._]
To their loyal souls, ample compensation was afforded soon after.
There was a Jacobite cobler of Highgate who, on the king’s birthday,
was seen in the street in a suit of mourning. On the Chevalier’s natal
day, he boldly honoured it by putting on his state dress, as holder
of some humble official dignity. Jacobites who, on the same occasion,
wore an oaken sprig or a white rose, well-known symbols, could easily
hide them on the approach of the authorities, but a beadle who came
out in his Sunday livery, to glorify the ‘Pretender,’ was courting
penalties by defying authority. The magnanimous cobler went through a
sharp process of law, and he was then whipped up Highgate Hill and down
again. To fulfil the next part of his punishment, the cobler was taken
to Newgate, to which locality he was condemned for a year. People in
those days went to see the prisoners in Newgate as they did the lions
in the Tower, or the lunatics in Bedlam, and parties went to look at
the cobler. If they were Tories, they were satisfied with what they
saw, but Whigs turned away in disgust. ‘Why,’ said they, ‘the villain
lives in the press-yard like a prince, and lies in lodgings at ten or
twelve shillings a week!’ The disgusted Whig papers remarked that ‘he
was not whipped half as badly as he deserved.’ They were not always
thus dissatisfied. A too outspoken French schoolmaster, one Boulnois,
was so effectually scourged for his outspokenness, from Stocks Market
to Aldgate, that he died of it. The poor wretch was simply flogged to
death. The Stuart party cried shame on the cruelty. The Hanoverians
protested that there was nothing to cry at. The man was said to be not
even a Frenchman, only an Irish Father Confessor in disguise! What else
could he have been, since the Jacobites, before Boulnois was tied up,
gave him wine and money. Such gifts to suffering political criminals
were very common. ◆[Sidenote: _THE PILLORY._]◆ An offender was placed
in the pillory in Holborn, for having cursed the Duke of Marlborough
and the ministry. He must have been well surrounded by sympathisers.
Not a popular Whig missile reached him; and when, with his head and
arms fixed in the uprights, his body being made to turn slowly round
to the mob, he deliberately and loudly cursed Duke and ministry, as he
turned, the delight of that mob, thoroughly Tory, knew no bounds. They
even mounted the platform and stuffed his pockets with money.
[Sidenote: _A HARMLESS JACOBITE._]
The author of ‘George III., his Court and family,’ in the introductory
part illustrates the gentler side of George I.’s character, by quoting
his remark when entrapped by a lady into drinking the Pretender’s
health,――‘With all my heart! I drink to the health of all unfortunate
princes.’ And again, when paying one of his numerous visits to private
individuals in London, the king marked the embarrassment of his host as
his Majesty looked on a portrait of the Chevalier de St. George, which
the host had forgotten to remove. ‘It is a remarkable likeness,’ said
the king, ‘a good family resemblance.’ Nor was he insensible to humour,
if the following story, told in the above-named work, may be taken
for a true one. ‘There was a gentleman who lived in the City, in the
beginning of the reign of this Monarch, and was so shrewdly suspected
of Jacobitism that he was taken up two or three times before the
Council, but yet defended himself so dextrously, that they could fasten
nothing on him. On the breaking out of the Rebellion in 1715, this
person, who mixed some humour with his politics, wrote to the Secretary
of State, that as he took it for granted that at a time like the
present he should be taken up as usual for a Jacobite, he had only
one favour to beg, that if the administration meant any such thing,
they would do it in the course of next week; for, the week after, he
was going down to Devonshire on his own business, which, without this
explanation, would no doubt be construed as transacting the business of
the Pretender. Lord Townshend, who was Secretary of State at that time,
in one of his convivial moments with the king, showed him this letter,
and asked him what his Majesty would direct to be done with such a
fellow. “Pooh! pooh!” says the king, “there can be little harm in a man
who writes so pleasantly!”’
[1] ‘Letter, from Perth to a gentleman in Stirling.’
[2] ‘Confederacy of the Press and the Pulpit for the blood
of the last Ministry.’
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