(1719.)
[Sidenote: _THE SKIRMISH AT GLENASHIELS._]
[Illustration: Drop-T]he year 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 5,000_l._ 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, 1,000_l._ was the sum offered; and
rebel gentlemen beneath the dignity of a peer, were valued at 500_l._
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 5,000_l._
by capturing Ormond, ‘Captain-General of 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.
After further doggerel and the usual infusion of coarseness, the Grub
Street bard concludes by singing:――
Three hours beaten and none die,
Yet no man knows the reason why,
’Tis very strange ’tween you and I!
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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 in
St. James’s Square was for sale, they went to it like pilgrims to a
shrine, and saw it pass away, for 7,500_l._, 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 to St. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 disreputable German 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, 1,500_l._ a year, and 5,000_l._ 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, _alias_ Kendal,’ as the papers register that lady, with quite
an Old Bailey air.
[Sidenote: _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 380,000_l._ 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 of St. 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.
[Sidenote: _RIOT IN CHURCH._]
On the following morning groups of men and women were assembled in
front of St. 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 collector and upset
the cash. ◆[Sidenote: _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 own making!’ 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.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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
pamphlets were 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 found _guilty_.
[Sidenote: _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
named Browster 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.
[Sidenote: _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 which _had_ taken place.
On the night before execution, the prisoners who were 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 ordinary _pro 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.
[Sidenote: _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.’
[Sidenote: _A LAST REQUEST._]
When the condemned three had been transferred into the cart beneath
the gallows, Matthews placed a written 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 in St. 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, Red Lion
Square, to St. 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.
[Sidenote: _AN APOLOGETIC SERMON._]
On the Sunday after the execution, a clergyman in the parish preached
from 2 Corinthians i. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 have dreamt 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 pass St. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 were discovered, 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 ‘Henri IV. 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.
[Sidenote: _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
of Shakespeare’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 through
St. James’s Park, a Nonjuring minister indiscreetly gave uncourteous
expression to his Jacobite thoughts, and found his liberty curtailed,
in consequence.
[Sidenote: _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. Even the
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――6,000_l._――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!
[Sidenote: _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
of St. 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.
[Sidenote: _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, at St. James’s, for suppressing the
Jacobite Rob Roy. A halo of romance has been thrown round this 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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