CHAPTER IX

QUEEN ANNE

There is nothing picturesque and very little that is important in the history of London during the reign of Queen Anne. An address to the new Queen, a public reception of Her Majesty by the City, several days of Thanksgiving for successes over the enemy, quarrels about elections, High Church riots, mainly exhaust the annals of this reign.

On Friday, November 26, 1703, the greatest hurricane of wind and rain ever known in this country “o’er pale Britannia passed.” This really belongs chronologically to the eighteenth century, and has been described in that volume, but some reference to it here is also necessary. It began about seven o’clock in the evening, and raged all night long. It overturned houses, uprooted trees, blew down stacks of chimneys, rolled up the lead on the roofs of churches, overthrew walls, and tore off tiles, which it blew about like snowflakes. The streets were covered with brickbats, broken signs, tiles, bulks, and pent-houses; the houses in the City at daybreak looked like skeletons, being stripped of their roofs, with their windows blown in or out; the people destroyed were said, and believed, to number thousands; all business was suspended while the houses were made once more weather-proof; the price of tiles rose from a guinea to six pounds a thousand; at sea twelve men-of-war were destroyed with 1800 men on board, and the whole of the shipping in the Pool except four vessels were driven from their moorings to beat against each other and to founder off Limehouse.

The Common Council in 1704 considered the condition of the night watch. They ordered that 583 men, strong and able-bodied, should watch all night, divided among the respective wards. When we read that for the small precinct of Blackfriars alone six men were ordered to patrol the streets all night, that for Monkwell Street alone two men were to walk up and down all night, one wonders at the stories of midnight violence, burglary, and robbery belonging to the eighteenth century. What were those able-bodied men doing? It is another illustration of the difference between a strong law and a strong executive.

The Union of England and Scotland being at last happily accomplished, the Queen was carried to St. Paul’s in a solemn procession for a Thanksgiving service.

In 1709 arrived in London a body of helpless and destitute people from the Palatinate, which had been devastated by the French; there were nearly 12,000 of them. At first they were maintained by charity, over £22,000 being subscribed for their immediate necessities. They were then settled in various places; about 3000 were sent to Ireland, to each of the provinces of North and South Carolina about 600, and to the Province of New York about 3500. This settlement was made by a Committee appointed by the Queen. It consisted of the Great Officers of State, many of the nobility, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City and other persons of distinction, in number 121. These Trustees, as they were called, met every afternoon in the week at four o’clock, either at Whitehall or at the Guildhall Council Chamber. There were not wanting malcontents who thought that the country had paupers enough of its own without importing others. The example of the Huguenots, whose reception in this country brought new industries and increased wealth, might have taught a lesson, but it did not. Perhaps the double example of the welcome given to the Huguenots first and the Palatinates next may serve for another lesson at the present moment when the immigration of Polish and Russian Jews by the thousand terrifies some of us.

During the whole of this reign, and in that of its successor, party feeling ran high with High Churchmen and Moderates, including Dissenters.

In the autumn of the year 1709 two sermons were preached, by one Henry Sacheverell, D.D., which produced consequences not often due to the pulpit. The preacher himself has been represented by those of the opposite side as an obscure divine, of bad moral character, of no learning, of no eloquence, and of boundless impudence. This description of the famous Doctor must be taken with a very large deduction for the personal equation. Henry Sacheverell was the son of a clergyman, Rector of Marlborough, Wilts, and the grandson of a strong Presbyterian. He was entered at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had Addison for his fellow-student and his friend. Certain Latin verses of his are inserted in the _Musæ Anglicanæ_, and certain English verses of his may be found in Nichol’s Collection. He was born in 1672, was Master of Arts in 1696, and Doctor of Divinity in 1708. He lectured or took pupils at Oxford for a few years, and then became successively vicar of a country parish and Chaplain of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. In August 1709 he delivered a sermon at the Derby Assizes, in which he maintained the doctrine, which many Oxford men then held, of passive obedience. To us the doctrine appears too ridiculous to need refutation; to the Tories and High Churchmen of that time it was a very serious position indeed, and one which was maintained by the support of Scripture. On November the 5th of the same year he was invited to preach before the Mayor and Corporation at St. Paul’s Cathedral. His sermon on this day was to the same effect. He took for his text the words “Perils from false brethren.” He asserted in the strongest terms the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance; he spoke of the Revolution as a crime never to be forgiven, and he called the Bishops perfidious prelates and false sons of the Church because they approved of toleration. It was customary for the Mayor to command the printing of any sermon preached before the Corporation. But in this case the Mayor did not make the usual order, the reason being that many of the Aldermen and Common Council were alarmed at the extreme views advanced.

Let us understand that if this man had been the impudent, arrogant, self-seeking quack which some histories represent him, it is quite unlikely that the Mayor would have invited him to preach. Vain, carried away by his sudden popularity, he may have been, but he was eloquent, he was scholarly, and he undoubtedly possessed the power of moving his audience. Other divines on the High Church side had raged against the Revolution but to no purpose; there is talk of a certain Higgins who is said to have made loud outcries against the condition of the Church and the general wickedness. Yet no one heeded Higgins. But Sacheverell they did heed.

His sermons, both that of Derby and that of St. Paul’s, were published. The Tories ran after them eagerly, cried them up, ordered everybody to buy them, with the result that 40,000 copies were sold throughout the kingdom. The number, to us who are accustomed to see popular papers sold by millions, does not seem large, but think what it really meant at that time; it meant about two copies for every parish in the kingdom. In the town parishes the pamphlet was handed about from one to the other. Forty thousand copies of a sermon represent ten times that number of readers; it means the whole nation moved and agitated. All who could read did read these sermons; all who could not listened to the discussions on them.

They were considered by the Council. All were of the opinion that the preacher ought to be prosecuted; there were differences as to the method and as to the court by which he should be tried. It was finally resolved that he should be impeached before the two Houses of Parliament.

There were delays before the impeachment could be carried out. Meantime the High Church party and the clergy in general were actively engaged in proclaiming that the Church was in danger, and in inflaming the minds of the people against the Dissenters. And then occurred one of those strange tumults in which the lowest classes in London have risen up, from time to time, in favour of religion and morality, as if they understood in the least what these words mean. The ’prentices waging war against disorderly houses, the craftsmen destroying the Savoy in defence of their Bishop, the mob tearing down Mass-houses, the mob throwing up their hats for Sacheverell, the mob following Lord George Gordon—all these are risings of the same kind. Other reasons are assigned in each case; the one and only reason, apart from the general love of a fight, which lies always in the heart of the Londoner, was a blind desire for truth and justice. Who were the Dissenters? They were Puritans; they were the people, who, when they had the power, forbade the old sports, and persecuted those who would still play them; they were the masters who commanded the way of their people in matters of religion as in matters of politics; they had turned merry London into morose London. It is generally believed that the common people did not go to church, and therefore had no love for the church. This is most untrue. The City was still full of the craftsmen; all those who lived in the City went to church. How many of those who lived outside the walls, what proportion of those who were settled beyond the walls, went to church one has no means of ascertaining. But within the walls all the people went to church. So that when we hear that ’prentices, butchers, chimney-sweepers, scavengers, fellowship porters, and the like made up the mob which bawled in the streets the cry of “The Church in danger,” we need only remark that respectable people never join a mob and never bawl in the streets for any cause whatsoever. In a word, there is every reason to believe the mob to have been filled with an honest conviction that this cause was that of religion, pure and undefiled.

On the 27th day of February, Dr. Sacheverell was brought to the bar before the Lords and Commons in Westminster Hall. Immense importance was attached to the case; the Queen was present, but privately. Seats were arranged for the Commons and for the noble ladies who were here in crowds; galleries were set up at the end of the hall for the people, and a raised platform for the managers of the impeachment and for the defendant. We need not follow the course of the trial. On the 23rd day of March, more than three weeks after it began, the case ended. The Doctor was ordered to abstain from preaching for three years. Meantime the mob had been showing the sincerity of its conviction not only by cheering the defendant every day as he went to the Hall or returned, but by wrecking the Dissenting chapels. They broke into the Gate Street Chapel, took out everything—pulpit, pews, Bibles, cushions, sconces—and carried the whole into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they made a bonfire of the things, shouting “High Church and Sacheverell!” In Blackfriars, Clerkenwell, Long Acre, Shoe Lane, and Leather Lane they also wrecked the chapels. The rioters were dispersed by a detachment of Guards without any bloodshed.

The sentence passed upon the Doctor was considered as an acquittal. Bonfires illuminated the City in the evening; drink flowed; every one was made to drink the health of the Doctor. The subsequent career of Sacheverell was tame. He made a kind of triumphal progress through the country, though some of the towns refused to admit him. Oxford received him as if he was a martyr, or a confessor at least. Finally, he settled down at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, where he died at the age of fifty. Such a man must needs make many enemies. Among them was the Duchess of Marlborough. She calls him “a lewd, drunken, pampered man,” and says that “he had not learning enough to speak or write true English, but a heap of bombast, ill-connected words at command.” He had a “haughty and insolent air” which helped him with the public. She acknowledges, however, that he had “a good assurance, clean gloves, white handkerchief, well managed, with other suitable accomplishments, which moved the hearts of many at his appearance.” She says that his speech in defence was written for him; that many of the “weaker” ladies were more like mad or bewitched than like persons in their senses. It might seem to us, who live so very far from passive obedience and non-resistance, as if the occasion were enormously exaggerated. That, however, was certainly not the case. The clergy were only too ready, one and all, to join in the prosecution of the Nonconformists, in the suppression of free thought, and in the corresponding doctrines of non-resistance. It was most certainly desirable, above all things, if the Protestant succession were to be secured, that these doctrines should be placed before the people in their true light; whatever the mob might bawl, whatever ecclesiastics might preach, the men of sense and understanding must not only go on their way, but must show the world the reason of their action. By the impeachment of a greatly overrated preacher before both Houses of Parliament the Government committed both Houses to the maintenance of religious toleration, to the Protestant succession, and to the liberties of the country. Considered from that point of view the case of this person must be regarded as the most important State trial. The Doctor is reproached with having his head turned by the honours bestowed upon him. We may forgive him. Who would not have his head turned, first, by the enormous success of a sermon; next, by being thought worthy of a State trial in Westminster Hall; lastly, by receiving every evidence of popular approval that a shouting, bawling mob can give, to say nothing of the gifts, the letters, the assurances of great ladies and noble lords? Of course his head was turned.

When the Sacheverell tumults were finished and over, the Lord Mayor issued an order for the suppression of such assemblies of rude and disorderly persons by the constables. We have already noted the appearance of these documents and proclamations and their futile character, because without sufficient force of police in reserve such general orders are powerless.

The Statute for the erection of fifty new churches in the suburbs of London indicates the growth of the City outside the walls. Fifty churches would provide accommodation for fifty thousand people; or, allowing for the infants, the aged, the infirm, and those who attended service only once a day, probably a hundred thousand. At the present day the parishes of Greater London frequently include eight thousand to twenty thousand souls.

The last years of Queen Anne were distracted, as readers of history know, by secret conferences, correspondence, and conspiracies to secure the succession of the elder Pretender, James Francis. The reports and whispers of these things kept London in a state of continual alarm and ferment; rumours were constantly spreading around; it was said that a large number of disaffected persons calling themselves Mohocks and Hawkabites came out at night and scoured the streets, assaulting and wounding harmless persons; it was also said that they flattened the noses of those they seized, or slit them; that they cut off their ears; that they stretched their mouths or gagged them; that they cruelly pricked and stabbed them; that they set women on their heads, with other terrible things. The citizens were afraid to go into the streets at night for fear of being “mohocked.” A proclamation was issued offering a reward of one hundred pounds for the conviction of every such offender. But no one was apprehended, nor could any one be found who had suffered from the cruelties of the so-called Mohocks and Hawkabites. In fact it was a scare, baseless except for the occasional acts of violence which took place in the streets. Another scare was started about the same time. It was bruited abroad that the suburbs and fields around London were haunted by a wretch called Whipping Tom, whose practice it was to seize on all the women he met with and flog them. No one asked how this could be done if the woman resisted or ran away, because one would want both hands for the purpose, and the fields—meaning Moor Fields—and suburbs were not so lonely that a woman’s cries could not be heard. However, the women of London were put into a state of great terror in consequence of this report, and for a long time none would venture abroad without an escort.

At this time there were complaints that many shopkeepers employed assistants who were not Freemen of the City. The Mayor and Common Council passed a strict order that this practice was to cease, and that the persons employed in the City in any capacity should be Freemen of the City.

Queen Anne died on August 1, 1714.

RELIGION, GOVERNMENT, AND TRADE