Some adherents to the cause of the Stuarts have survived to the present reign, and one at least may be found who was keeper of the sovereign’s conscience, and sat on the woolsack. It is certainly somewhat remarkable to find that one of Her Majesty’s chancellors was not only a Jacobite at heart, like Johnson in part of the Georgian Era, but openly expressed, that is, printed and published, his opinions. In Lord Campbell’s life of Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor who presided at the trial of the rebel lords in 1716, the biographer alludes to the new Riot Act brought in by Cowper, in which it was stated that if as many, or as few, as a dozen persons assembled together in the streets, and did not disperse within an hour after a magistrate’s order to that effect, the whole dozen would incur the penalty of death, and might be lawfully strangled at Tyburn. ‘This,’ says Lord Campbell, ‘was perhaps a harsher law than ever was proposed in the time of the Stuarts,’ but he adds that it was not abused in practice, yet, nevertheless, ‘it brought great obloquy upon the new dynasty.’ Lord Cowper in charging and in sentencing the rebel lords in 1716, and Lord Hardwicke, in addressing and passing judgment upon the rebel lords in 1746, could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express the wickedness, barbarity, and hellish character of the rebellion and of the lords who were the leaders in it. As to their own disgust at such unmatched infamy, like Fielding’s _Noodle_, they could scarcely find words to grace their tale with sufficiently decent horror. Lord Chancellor Campbell, in the reign of Victoria, flames up into quite old-fashioned hearty Jacobitism, and ‘bites his thumb’ at his two predecessors of the reigns of the first two Georges. In especial reference to the ultra severe strictures of the Chancellor Hardwicke in 1746, the Jacobite chancellor in the reign of Victoria says, in Hardwicke’s ‘Life,’ ‘He forgot that although their attempt, not having prospered, was called _treason_, and the law required that they should be sentenced to death, they were not guilty of any moral offence, and that if they had succeeded in placing Charles Edward on the throne of his grandfather, they would have been celebrated for their loyalty in all succeeding ages.’ [Sidenote: _TIME’S CHANGES._] And now, in the year 1877, we are gravely told that the claims of the brother, who supposes himself to be a legitimate heir of the Stuarts (a supposition as idle as the claim of the convict Orton to be a baronet is infamous), have been fully investigated by a ‘delegation of Roman Catholic clergy, nobility, and nobles of Scotland,’ who, it is added, with amusing significance, pronounced those claims to be _valid_.’ We hear nothing, however, of the names of the investigators, nor of the evidence on which their judgment was founded. Awaiting the publication of both, the investigation (if it ever took place) may be called a _trait_ of the very latest Jacobitism on record.[3]