London in the Jacobite times, Volume IDoran, Dr. (John)
History
London in the Jacobite times, Volume I
Doran, Dr. (John)
London (England) -- History -- 18th century
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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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