Lady Cowper confirms these accounts. In her Diary, under date, December, 1715, she says:――‘This week the prisoners were brought to town from Preston. They came in with their arms tied, and their horses (with the bridles taken off), led each by a soldier. The mob insulted them terribly, carrying a warming-pan before them, and saying a thousand barbarous things which some of the prisoners returned with spirit. The chief of my father’s family was among them. He is above seventy years old.’ Lady Cowper’s maiden name was Judith Clavering; and it was the aged chief of that Jacobite house who rode defiantly through the Low Church blackguards. ‘A desperate fortune,’ adds Lady Cowper, ‘had drawn him from home, in hopes to have repaired it. I did not see them come into town, nor let any of my children do so. I thought it would be an insulting of the relations I had here; though almost everybody went to see them.’ [Sidenote: _JACOBITE REPORTS._] From the very outbreak of the rebellion London had teemed with reports which had no shadow of foundation. They were spread chiefly by Jacobite incendiaries of figure and distinction. They protested that if King George reigned, he would make a bridge of boats from Hanover to Wapping,――a phrase which served to intimate that the kingdom would be annexed to the electorate. People in the country were told that the London churches were closed, and that a clergyman could not appear in the streets in his clerical dress without risking a knock on the head. As for resisting the Jacobites, the Highlanders were described as too powerful to be resisted. It was certainly in ridicule of such exaggerations that a story ran for a few days to the effect that those terrible Highlanders had cut off the Dutch auxiliaries, had put on their breeches, and, advancing on an English detachment which did not recognise them, had cut the Whig soldiers to pieces. It is quite as certain that the London Jacobites claimed the victory at Preston for _their_ side, and were not silenced till the cavalcade of Jacobite captives was passing from Highgate to the London prisons. Even then, ultra-Tories were found who strongly suspected, or said they did, that half the prisoners were hired players who were dismissed when the public performance came to an end! [Illustration: Leaves] [Illustration: Decorative banner] CHAPTER VII. (1715-16.)