Note 366 — Chapter XVI · ON THE STATE OF THE CONSTITUTION IN THE REIGNS OF ANNE, GEORGE I., AND GEORGE II.

See in the Lockhart Papers, ii. 565, a curious relation of Charles Edward's behaviour in refusing to quit France after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was so insolent and absurd that the government was provoked to arrest him at the opera, and literally to order him to be bound hand and foot; an outrage which even his preposterous conduct could hardly excuse.

Dr. King was in correspondence with this prince for some years after the latter's foolish, though courageous, visit to London in September 1750; which he left again in five days, on finding himself deceived by some sanguine friends. King says he was wholly ignorant of our history and constitution. "I never heard him express any noble or benevolent sentiment, the certain indications of a great soul and good heart; or discover any sorrow or compassion for the misfortune of so many worthy men who had suffered in his cause." Anecdotes of his own Times, p. 201. He goes on to charge him with love of money and other faults. But his great folly in keeping a mistress, Mrs. Walkinshaw, whose sister was housekeeper at Leicester House, alarmed the jacobites. "These were all men of fortune and distinction, and many of them persons of the first quality, who attached themselves to the P. as to a person who they imagined might be made the instrument of saving their country. They were sensible that by Walpole's administration the English government was become a system of corruption; and that Walpole's successors, who pursued his plan without any of his abilities, had reduced us to such a deplorable situation that our commercial interest was sinking, our colonies in danger of being lost, and Great Britain, which, if her powers were properly exerted, as they were afterwards in Mr. Pitt's administration, was able to give laws to other nations, was become the contempt of all Europe."—P. 208. This is in truth the secret of the continuance of jacobitism. But possibly that party were not sorry to find a pretext for breaking off so hopeless a connection, which they seem to have done about 1755. Mr. Pitt's great successes reconciled them to the administration; and his liberal conduct brought back those who had been disgusted by an exclusive policy. On the accession of a new king they flocked to St. James's; and probably scarcely one person of the rank of a gentleman, south of the Tweed, was found to dispute the right of the house of Brunswick after 1760. Dr. King himself, it may be observed, laughs at the old passive obedience doctrine (page 193); so far was he from being a jacobite of that school.

A few nonjuring congregations lingered on far into the reign of George III., presided over by the successors of some bishops whom Lloyd of Norwich, the last of those deprived at the revolution, had consecrated in order to keep up the schism. A list of these is given in D'Oyly's Life of Sancroft, vol. ii. p. 34, whence it would appear that the last of them died in 1779. I can trace the line a little farther: a bishop of that separation, named Cartwright, resided at Shrewsbury in 1793, carrying on the business of a surgeon. State Trials, xxiii. 1073. I have heard of similar congregations in the west of England still later. He had, however, become a very loyal subject to King George: a singular proof of that tenacity of life by which religious sects, after dwindling down through neglect, excel frogs and tortoises; and that, even when they have become almost equally cold-blooded!