As news reached town that the rebellion did not grow in the North, and that there was no rising in England to help it, Walpole wrote, ‘Spirit seems to rise in London.’ The king, or as Walpole calls him, ‘the person most concerned,’ took events with heroic imperturbability, or stupid indifference. Charles Edward had repealed the union between England and Scotland. King George believed himself to be, and likely to remain, King of Great Britain, as before. When ministers proposed to him any measures with reference to the outbreak, his Majesty only answered, ‘Pooh! don’t talk to me about that stuff!’ It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that ministers did not summon Parliament. They had nothing either to offer or to notify. The London merchants, on the other hand, were zealous and liberal in opening subscriptions for raising more troops. [Sidenote: _VARYING OPINIONS._] In this time of uncertainty, if not trouble, the professional patriot came to the surface in the person of Alderman Heathcote. At a City meeting, that sham Jacobite proposed to supplant a loyal address to the king by a demand for a redress of grievances; ‘but not one man seconded him.’ Walpole, with all his affected indifference and pretence of indifference on the part of the public, betrays the true temper of the metropolis, when he says, ‘We have great hopes the Highlanders will not follow him [Charles Edward] so far [into England], very few of them could be persuaded the last time to go to Preston.’ And something of the general uneasiness may be traced in Walpole’s intimation to Montagu, of his dislike of becoming ‘a loyal sufferer in a thread-bare coat, and shivering in an antechamber at Hanover, or reduced to teach Latin and English to the young princes at Copenhagen. Will you ever write to me in my garret at Herrenhausen?’ With all this simulation of light-heartedness, Walpole writes seriously enough, from Arlington Street, ‘Accounts from Scotland vary perpetually, and at best are never very certain.... One can’t tell what assurances of support they may have from the Jacobites in England ... but nothing of the sort has yet appeared.... One can hardly believe that the English are more disaffected than the Scotch, and among the latter no persons of property have joined them.’ The temper of the Government is also described in a few words: ‘Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the king that it is an affair of no consequence; and, for the Duke of Newcastle, he is glad when the rebels make any progress in order to refute Lord Granville’s assertions.’ London was as delighted as Walpole with the naval watch kept in the Channel, and with the spirit of the English nobility adding, or promising to add, regiments to the regular force, to which, however, they gave little or no additional strength. He who had been laughing and calling others laughers, confesses in September that his own apprehensions were not so strong as they had been.