(1720-’21-’22.)
[Illustration: Drop-I]n the 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,’ had _sold_
their stock, there was a ruinous panic. When he returned, in November,
he made a gift to Cambridge of 2,000_l._, towards building a library.
In 1715, he had, at a cost of 6,000_l._, 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 bring _Whig_ and _Tory_ into 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!
[Sidenote: _ATTERBURY’S HOPES._]
The prelatic conspirator at the Deanery in Westminster addressed a
letter to the Chevalier de St. 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 a
_good_ Englishman. 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 still in 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.’
[Sidenote: _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. ◆[Sidenote:
_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 fathers and 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_.’
[Sidenote: _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 a cold iron; and the loyal soldier was restored, nothing the
worse, to his regiment.
[Sidenote: _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. The
papers 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.’
[Sidenote: _CIBBER’S REFUSAL._]
On St. 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!’
[Sidenote: _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 Whig
jury found him _guilty_, 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 50_l._, 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 thundering _hurrahs!_ of the densely-packed
spectators.
The more loyal Whig _mobile_ did 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 remonstrate with 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!’
[Sidenote: _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 at St. 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 of St. 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 near
St. Andrew’s, Holborn.’ This refers to Sacheverel’s appointment to
the living of St. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 had been ‘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 a _present_ to the ‘Great King of Prussia!’
[Sidenote: _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 most of 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.
[Sidenote: _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 James III. 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 conspicuous by 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 ran thus:――
[Sidenote: _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.
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.
[Sidenote: _ARREST OF JACOBITES._]
The year was a critical one. The Jacobite press was more audacious than
ever――sure symptom that some 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 James
III. in the kingdom than he, and Kelly, the Nonjuror, was his daring,
crafty, and reckless aide-de-camp.
[Sidenote: _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 doing so 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!
[Sidenote: _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 of _all_ of 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 celebrated _every
day_ at 11 o’clock.
[Sidenote: _THE OFFICERS IN CAMP._]
This order could not have been obeyed by the _petits maîtres_ among
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
military _petit maître_ in 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.’
[Sidenote: _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 Charles I. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 the
_Mater 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.
[Sidenote: _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 in St. 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 out _what_!
[Sidenote: _MORE ARRESTS._]
The appearance of the Earl of Oxford once more in public was an event
to be discussed. As Harley walked 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 of Quality 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.
[Sidenote: _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 the funeral――
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 James
III. to London, and very probably had his eye on the ‘pompous vanity’
of Canterbury.
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