Meanwhile, detachments of Horse Guards patrolled the suburbs, and delegations of Scotch Presbyterian ministers marched up, day after day, to St. James’s, to congratulate the king on being securely seated on his throne. Now and then one of the above guards, yielding to love of liquor, would drink the Pretender’s health, for a draught of ale, gratis; and would find himself next day, in Newgate, in the company of priests whose papers and persons had just been seized by Messengers, or in the place of rebel-prisoners who had just escaped, or who had died, as _poor_ captives died, of that loathsome confinement. Captivity could not tame the bolder spirits. Sunderland, the coffee-house man, locked up for circulating that inflammatory pamphlet,――‘Robin’s Last Shift,’――talked more Jacobitism in prison than out of it; while Flint,――ultra-Jacobite author of the ‘Weekly Remarks,’――wrote more seditiously in his cell than in his own printing office;――till orders came down to keep pen, ink, and paper from a man who made such bad use of them. [Sidenote: _POLITICS ON THE STAGE._] As Oxford and Cambridge represented, the first, Tory;――the second, Whig principles; so Drury Lane Theatre was popular with the Whigs, while the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields lay under the suspicion of being Jacobite. The suspicion probably arose from the fact that, in the days of Queen Anne, one of the company, the handsome actor, Scudamore, had often gone to St. Germain as an agent of the London Jacobites. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ players, however, repudiated all grounds for suspicion against their loyalty. Mrs. Knight, on the occasion of her benefit, published an address in which she told the Jacobites their money was as good as that of other people, but that their political principles were _not_ so good. She told the Whigs that her ‘zeal for government had been expressed in the worst of times.’ At night, she delivered an epilogue, in the character she had been playing, ‘Widow Lockit,’ in which politics were thus introduced into the domain of the drama:―― Whatever t’other House may say to wrong us, We have, as well as they, some honest Whigs among us, Who do our Country’s Enemies disdain, And hate disloyalty as much as Drury Lane. But there were dramas elsewhere, as interesting as any on the stage. [Sidenote: _SIMON FRASER, AS A WHIG._]