Dr. Doran

“ On the other hand, there was much more misery in the loyal than in the Jacobite army. The Londoners saw nothing for the encouragement of loyalty in such a sight as the landing at the Tower wharf of some of the troops that had been with Cope at Preston Pans. ‘The poor men,’ say all the papers, ‘were in a most miserable shocking condition. Some without arms or legs, others their noses cut off and their eyes put out; besides being hacked and mauled in many parts of their bodies, after a most terrible and cruel manner.’ This ‘atrocity’ was forgotten in the news that roused London in April. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Baron Montague protested that all good subjects would be lost in amazement at finding that rebels, who ought to be convicted, could actually find favour. The angry baron pointed out, not without force, that five men who had followed Towneley and Tildesley into making war against the king, had been hanged for it in the country, and yet the two who had drawn them into it, were allowed to escape! Such a jury was no longer to be trusted with the lives of alleged traitors, and that judicial body was ignominiously discharged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the very outset, what savagery there was, was fostered by the London gentlemen who lived at home at ease. Walpole suggested if Cumberland were sent against the Jacobite army, ‘it should not be with that sword of Mercy with which the present Family have governed their people. Can rigour be displaced against bandits?’ But, if the young duke should be full of compassion after victory, Walpole rejoiced to think that in General Hawley there was a military magistrate of some fierceness, who would not sow the seeds of disloyalty by too easily pardoning the rebels. ”

“ The public looked on from the galleries like spectators gazing into the arena where a deadly struggle for life was going on. When, at the close of the day, the Peers refused to allow Wintoun further time, as being contrary to custom after a man was once on trial, the earl remarked: ‘I think it very hard and great injustice that I should be tied down to a foolish form, when I am in danger of my life!’ He curtly bowed, walked out between his two over-officious friends, the Lieutenant and the Gentleman with the axe, and was shortly after conveyed in a carriage to the Tower. ”

“ A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the Divine Right of kings. He who believes in the Divine Right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the Divine Right of bishops. He that believes in the Divine Right of bishops believes in the Divine Authority of the Christian Religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig, for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.’
DEATH OF THE DUKE OF CUMBERLAND.
Be this as it may, Jacobitism was as surely dying out as he was who had crushed the hopes of Jacobites at Culloden. ”

“ David was a sensible man: he straightway articled his brother Robin to Cooper, the celebrated engraver, for six years. Robin served his time with credit to himself. The world of art still profits by Robin’s assiduity. He was out of his time, and twenty-three years of age when, in 1744, bonnie Isabella Lumisden’s beauty made prisoner of his soul. ‘No man may be lover of mine,’ said Isabella, ‘who is not ready to fight for my prince.’ Strange, forthwith, became Isabella’s slave and Charles Edward’s soldier. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ In the morning, two sledges stood ready for the dragging of eight prisoners from the New Prison, Southwark, to the gallows, disembowelling block, and fire, on the Common. This was not an unfrequent spectacle; and on this occasion, as on others, there was, without cowardly feeling, a certain dilatoriness on the part of the patients, who never knew what five minutes might not bring forth. Sir John Wedderburn, indeed, went into the foremost sledge, with calm readiness, and Governor (of Carlisle) Hamilton stept in beside him. Captain Bradshaw stood apart, hoping not to be called upon. ”

“ The poor earl was quite sure that if the ordinary course of justice had not been followed, it was because mercy might be the more readily extended to him, if the circumstances of his case could authorise it. He complimented the king for his royal attribute of clemency, and the earl the more urged its exercise on the ground that forgiveness would not encourage anyone to the future commission of treason, upon the presumption that his offence would necessarily be mercifully visited.—Guilty, no doubt, he had been, but he could hardly account for having become so. ”

“ Lechmere seemed to make of the sovereign a conspirator against himself. The monarch, he said, was of such a tender nature that he could not find it in his heart to be severe against his enemies. ‘On the contrary, those who have shown the greatest aversion to his government, have received the kindest invitations and enjoyed the highest indulgences from him.’ Equally at fault was the Impeacher when he avowed that impeachment of the seven lords was a safer process than leaving their case to be treated in the ordinary course of law and justice. ”

“ Later in the autumn, the opening of a Nonjuring chapel in Spital Fields roused the fury of ‘loyal people.’ The pious and peaceable ‘Weekly Journal’ hoped that ‘all persons loyally affected to King George will timely suppress the diabolical society, as they have done the like seditious assemblies of blind, deluded fools in the Savoy, Scrope’s Court in Holborn, and in Aldersgate Street;’—where the chapels had been set on fire, and the congregations beaten and kicked, as they tried to escape, by the Hanoverian roughs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quidnuncs in the Cheapside taverns made light of ‘your James III.’ They advised him to learn to get his bread by tile-making, by cutting corns, by selling Geneva, or by turning horse-doctor. They cocked their hats as they swaggered home on the causeway, but the low whistling of a Jacobite air, by some hopeful person on the opposite side of the street, showed them that the White Rose was not so withered as they thought it to be. Men’s minds were anxious as to coming struggles, though the Hanoverians affected much, and well-founded, confidence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had a great mind to save Lord Carnwath. ‘She has desired me,’ writes Lady Cowper, ‘to get Sir David Hamilton to go and speak to him, to lay some foundation with the king, to save him; but he will persist in saying that he knows nothing. ’Tis a thousand pities. He is a man of good understanding, and not above thirty. He has had his education at Oxford,’—the Whig lady adds, by way of fling at the Tory university—‘as one might judge from his actions.’
Lord Carnwath, however, wrote a letter which Hamilton carried to court, and which Lady Cowper delivered to the Princess of Wales. ”

“ It was more easy for a Whig official to whip a white rose out of the button hole of a ‘gentle’ Jacobite’s coat, and draw a little Jacobite blood in the process, than it was to suppress the seditious sayings and doings of the common people. ”

“ Lockhart’s visit to London, where he associated with Whigs and Tories, taught him a sad truth to which he gives melancholy expression. ‘The old race drops off by degrees, and a new one sprouts up, that, having no particular bias to the king, as knowing little more of him than what the public newspapers bear, enter on the stage with a perfect indifference, at least coolness, towards him and his cause, which consequently must daily languish and, in process of time, be totally forgot. ”

“ On the 5th of May, Sir William Yonge, in the House of Commons, brought in a good-natured Bill, without242 opposition, ‘to allow council to prisoners on impeachment for treason, as they have on indictments. It hurt everybody at old Lovat’s trial, all guilty as he was, to see an old wretch worried by the first lawyers in England, without any assistance, but his own unpractised defence. This was a point struggled for in King William’s reign, as a privilege and dignity inherent in the Commons—that the accused by them should have no assistance of council. ”

“ On one Sunday, in the chapel in the Savoy, a Whig, at this part of the service added aloud, ‘George!’ Forthwith, a dozen infuriated Jacks sprung to their feet, exclaimed ‘James!’ and with a cry of ‘We’ll George you!’ flourished their sticks, whereupon a battle-royal ensued, heads were broken, and provocation was given to make many a subsequent Sunday disgracefully distinguished by the bigots on both sides. The temper of the times was fatal to the then noted school at Edmonton, where Mr. Le Hunt received Roman Catholic young gentlemen from all parts of the world. ”

“ If England had an oppressive government, this country together with its people would be the last in the universe: bad climate, bad soil, and consequently tasteless productions. It is only the excellence of its government that makes it habitable.’ This judgment of England by a Jacobite princess or queen, whose husband would have changed all but the climate, is at least interesting. ”

“ At length news arrived that the king and the prince had left the Hague, where, in their impatience to reach England, they had tarried eleven days, and laid all the blame upon the wind. Next, London was a-stir with the intelligence that the ‘Peregrine Yatch,’ bearing Cæsar and his fortunes, with a convoy of men of war, was off the buoy at the Nore. The new sovereign was to land at Greenwich, whither every sort of vehicle, carrying every sort of persons, now repaired. The loyal excursionists hoped to have a good view of their new sovereign as he went processionally through the Park. ”

“ They paused at the houses of celebrated personages, to hail them with blessings or curses equally highly-pitched. ‘Sometime before their arrival at the Roebuck, on their return, a sneaking Jacobite mob, perceiving the pile for the bonfire unguarded, came up with a shout of “King George for ever!” the better to deceive the people, and scower’d off with the faggots into bye-lanes and corners.’
Eastward, the procession went as far as Grace-church Street, amid vast multitudes of people. The trumpets and hautboys now played none but Protestant tunes. ”

“ At Tyburn, as the two stood up in the cart beneath the gallows, there ensued the scene not uncommon on such occasions. The utmost liberty was given to a man, about to die, to unburthen his soul in any way he pleased. Layer made the most of the privilege. He said boldly, but without bluster, that there was no king but James III.; that the so-called King George was an usurper; that it was a glorious duty to take up arms for the rightful sovereign; that there would be no joy in the land till that sovereign was restored ”

“ His royal highness the Prince of Wales has now no guards to attend him. He passes every day to and fro in the streets of London, and travels everywhere about London without so much as one soldier to guard him. Nay, he has not so much as one sentry upon his house in St. James’s Square, and yet his Royal Highness lives, I believe, in as great security, at his house in St. James’s Square, without one sentry to guard him, as his Majesty can be supposed to do in St. James’s Palace with all the guards about him.’
The debate in the Lords was of much the same quality as that in the Commons. ”

“ Chesterfield, in his speech in the Lords against the proposed Act, denounced it as a long stride towards the destruction of liberty itself.72 He declared that it would be made subservient to the politics and schemes of the Court only. In the same speech occurred the famous passage: ‘This Bill, my Lords, is not only an encroachment upon Liberty, but it is likewise an encroachment upon Property. Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property. It is the property of those who have it, and too often the only property they have to depend on. It is indeed but a precarious dependence. ”