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The Last of the Stuarts

The reign of James II saw a Catholic king in a Protestant nation, experiments in religious toleration, rebellion, high treason, foreign invasion, and a Whig revolution that put the king’s daughter and nephew on the throne. The age of William and Mary saw expensive wars with France, a Dutch-dominated court, high taxation, suppression of Ireland, and a continuous Jacobite threat. Queen Anne’s reign was shaped by partisan politics, religious division, more war and taxation, and a succession crisis solved by dynastic jiggery-pokery. The thirty years from the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 to the Jacobite uprising of 1715 gave English men and women no shortage of topics to talk about. An energetic press gave further stimulus to the national conversation, in an age of growing prosperity. More people than ever were literate, by some estimate 45 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women.¹ By the end of the seventeenth century England’s population exceeded five million, double its size at the start of the Tudor era, and its impact on the world was greater than ever.

God Bless the Right James

Even before the Duke of York became King James II in February1685 there were Englishmen predicting a sticky end for him. Merrymakers aboard the Pearl of White haven drank healths to the Duke of Monmouth in April 1684 and predicted that ‘parliament will lop off (the Duke of York’s) head’.² Drinkers in London likewise proposed healths to the Duke of Monmouth and confusion to his royal uncle.³

Given the long subversive tradition of traducing the reigning monarch, and the particular opprobrium attached to the Catholic duke, it was not surprising that some English men and women spoke disrespectfully of their new King James. The treason law of 1661, which penalized treasonous words, expired with the death of Charles II. But the medieval treason law still applied, and seditious speakers still faced the pillory, fines or prison. Some country districts still put unruly speakers in the stocks.⁴ Most of the magistrates could distinguish undutiful speech from treasonous acts, and did not shrink from sending real traitors to execution.

Amidst conventional expressions of joy, celebrations for the accession of James II were marred by dissident voices that claimed, among other things, that the new king was responsible for the burning of London, that he had poisoned his late brother, and that he was, in any case, illegitimate. Young women in Hampshire were heard discussing an apparition of King Charles that confronted King James ‘and said to him, “Dost thou think to be king that has murdered me?” and then went up into his chamber and lay down upon his bed,’ so frightening the queen that she miscarried and died.⁵ A Worcestershire bargeman, John Stewart (no relation to the royal family), indicted at midsummer 1685 for upholding Monmouth, also declared that Charles II had been poisoned.⁶

Deborah Hawkins, the wife of a London yeoman, appeared before the Middlesex sessions in March 1685 for ‘audaciously and seditiously’ telling another woman that King James ‘is no king but an elective king, and if there were wars as I believe there will be, I will put on the breeches myself to fight for the Duke of Monmouth’. Before James II should be crowned, she asserted, ‘this head of mine shall go off, and before that day comes there will be a great deal of bloodshed’. Her words were clearly seditious, but the court did not regard them as particularly dangerous. Treating her as an ignorant and disorderly woman, rather than a self-announced Amazon traitor, the court found her guilty but fined her the derisory amount of 13s. 4d. She had to stand in the pillory for an hour with a paper on her head declaring her offence.⁷

Deborah Hawkins was by no means alone in claiming that England now had an elective monarchy. A paper found on the road from Barking to London in March 1685, turned in to Essex magistrates, claimed that James, though declared king by the Council, was

not by the consent of the nation ensembled in parliament, and therefore no ways binding upon the people to look upon him as [England’s lawful king]. His virtues no man knows. His vices are very public and unnumerable … burning of London and Southwark, murdering of Justice Godfrey and great Essex, and poisoning his brother to come to the crown, and these are his practices to bring England down.⁸

The claims were familiar, the stuff of popular parlance and paranoid partisan gossip.

More threatening, perhaps, were the words of John Hathaway, a yeoman of Stepney, Middlesex, who told all comers in March 1685, ‘I would fight for the Duke of Monmouth’, and that ‘rather than the king should not be killed, I would do it’. Found guilty of sedition, but not treason, he was fined £6 13s. 4d., and whipped at a cart’s tail from East Smithfield to Ratcliffe Cross, then committed to Newgate until he had paid his fine.⁹

A subversive minority drank healths to the Duke of Monmouth and urged Monmouth’s claim to the throne. Some prophesied that King James would not live till his coronation (in April 1685), that there would be a bloody battle for the crown, and that Monmouth ‘shall sway, and shall sway’.¹⁰ ‘I hope the Duke of Monmouth will get the better of the king. And if he doth, I will hang twenty of you,’ declared Martha Tickner, the wife of a Kentish labourer.¹¹ Very few people were prepared to match these words with actions.

Monmouth’s revolt that summer seemed to fulfil expectations of civil war. Its failure secured the second Jacobean regime. But, despite the collapse of the rebellion, and the traitor’s grisly execution in July 1685, some of Monmouth’s supporters refused to believe that their hero was dead.¹² Others clung to Monmouth’s name, even though he was no longer a leader. James Audley was indicted in London, for example, for saying ‘that Monmouth was an honester man than the king, and had more right to the throne than he hath… that Monmouth had more honesty in his little finger than the king had in his whole body’.¹³ Similar seditious nostalgics looked back from Charles II to Oliver Cromwell, and from James I to Queen Elizabeth.

‘Here’s a health to the right king of England, the right king of England is alive,’ cried George Wright, carrier, from the top of the market cross at Bolton, Lancashire, in 1686. Other witnesses heard Wright saying, ‘I hate all papists’ and ‘God bless the right James, the right king of England’, referring to Charles II ‘s illegitimate son.¹⁴ Peter Hutchinson, a Yorkshire blacksmith, offered a health to the Duke of Monmouth in April 1687 (almost two years after the rebel’s execution), saying that the duke was ‘alive as certainly as he was himself’, and refused to have ‘any of these popish dogs to be our king’.¹⁵‘God damn the king, for the Duke of Monmouth is alive in Holland,’ declared a Westminster woman, Margaret Hambleton, also in 1687.¹⁶

Stephen Duffield of Ripon, Yorkshire, spread a particularly inventive rumour in January 1687 when he told a Sunday morning drinking assembly that ‘the queen told the king that she could not conceive unless she drank Charles [i.e. James] Monmouth’s blood… that unless she might drink his heart’s blood it would do her no good’.¹⁷ This may have been a joke as much as a flying report, but it quickly came to the attention of the magistrate Sir Jonathan Jennings. Duffield’s remark touched the most sensitive of state issues, the highest arcana imperii, opening to inspection and ridicule the most intimate dealings of the king and queen and the most pressing issue of the succession. It was grotesque to imply that the queen was a ghoul, and that Monmouth’s blood might give her a child. The story may have evoked the drinking of healths, as well as propitiatory eucharistic blood, but its burden was that Monmouth was alive, in crown custody, and that his life was in imminent danger. History tells that Queen Mary of Modena would indeed soon become pregnant, presumably through more orthodox efforts, giving birth to the ill-starred James Francis Edward Stuart in June 1688.

Traditional rules of deference and decorum still governed English society, but scandalous, scurrilous, and seditious words reverberated throughout James II’s short reign. The young Lord Altham, second son to the Earl of Angelsea, was arrested in October 1685 ‘for words spoken’ while drinking in a tavern, ‘as if he seemed more inclinable to drink the king’s damnation than his health’. According to the chronicler Roger Morrice, ‘the court said that men should be responsible indeed for words they spoke in drink, but much more for actions’, and fined him a hundred marks.¹⁸

‘The queen is the pope’s bastard,’ declared William Pratt, yeoman of Westminster, explaining in July 1685 that ‘it is no treason to speak against the queen because she never was crowned with the crown of England’. There was at least a fraction of truth in this assertion, since Queen Mary of Modena wore a newly commissioned crown in the April ceremony, but Pratt was not charged with speaking treason. His scandalous words earned him the paltry fine of 3s. 4d. (not much more than the cost of a dinner and a round of drinks), and to be whipped from Temple Bar to Charing Cross.¹⁹

It was by no means unusual to hear speakers declare that King James II was a ‘papist and a rogue’. Paul Roach, a yeoman of Clerkenwell, Middlesex, was fined £13 6s. 8 d. for such words in January 1687.²⁰ ‘God damn the king for a papist dog,’ said the Chelsea fisherman Thomas Bennett in October 1687.²¹ Another Londoner, John Seyton, was found guilty of ‘speaking seditious words’ for calling James II ‘a cheat’.²²

Compassing the king’s death, though still illegal, was not so perilous as in previous years. When Cornelius Alder, yeoman, of St Martin in the Fields observed of the king and queen in October 1687, ‘oh, what a fine opportunity the City hath to shoot them as they go by any corner’, his wife Mary chimed in, ‘oh, that I were a man’, implying that she might just take that action. Report of this dangerous exchange brought the couple before the Middlesex sessions, but a jury found them both not guilty.²³

In November 1686 a cleric, Samuel Johnson, was degraded from his ministry, fined 500 marks, made to stand three days in the pillory, and then whipped ‘from Newgate to Tyburn’ for inciting the king’s subjects to rebellion against him. But Johnson was punished for his pen, not his tongue. He was sentenced at King’s Bench for ‘writing and publishing two false, scandalous and seditious libels, tending to sedition and rebellion’. The printed broadsheet describing his punishment reached a wider audience and probably stimulated more discussion than his original manuscript libels.²⁴

A Dutch Dog and a Usurper

We have no conversational transcript of the crisis that unseated King James and brought William and Mary to power. The words of the revolution are lost to the wind. The constitutional and high political history of these months is exceptionally well documented, but we have little access to its popular discursive accompaniments. Licensing of the press broke down in November 1688 and was not reimposed until the following February. ‘Everything, till now concealed, flies abroad in public print, and is cried about the streets,’ the diarist John Evelyn observed, but he gave no examples of those expressions. Widely distributed newsheets reflected and stimulated public debate. The licensing act expired in May 1695, and journalists were free to print the news.²⁵

It comes as no surprise to find the kind of opprobrium poured on the Stuart monarchs redirected against their revolutionary successors. Partisan voices mixed with the usual stream of rowdy denigration. Reports reached London in 1689 from various parts of England of men and women cited ‘for uttering scandalous and seditious words against the government’, for ‘affronting and opposing the king’, and for other utterances of ‘dangerous words’.²⁶ In July 1689 the Londoner Thomas Page was charged with high treason for saying, ‘God damn him, he would murder King William and Queen Mary… Why did they come into England to take away their father’s possessions?’²⁷ Northern drinkers caused trouble with competitive health-drinking, to King William or King James, and toasts of ‘confusion’ to the other.²⁸

Dozens more were convicted at the Middlesex sessions for spreading false news or for speaking scandalous and seditious words against the new king, queen, and government. Most were made to stand an hour in the pillory at the busiest time of day at Charing Cross, Covent Garden, St James Street, St John Street, Bow Street, the Strand, or New Palace Yard. Offenders were also fined sums ranging from 5 marks to £100, and remanded to Newgate until their fine was paid. Finally, on discharge, they had to pay fees of between 4s. and 18s.²⁹

The Council was unwilling to act on mere hearsay, however, and was careful to secure corroboration of alleged seditious words. Though not necessarily more tolerant than the previous government, it took care to screen out false and malicious accusations and to give the accused the benefit of the law.³⁰ Having ousted an arbitrary regime, it did not want to appear tyrannical itself. On the other hand, William III’s government was prepared to investigate all threats to the crown, and referred speakers of ‘scandalous and seditious words’ to the assizes.³¹ When the mayor of Exeter released a suspect charged with speaking scandalous and seditious words in December 1689, the Council reprimanded him. The Earl of Shrewsbury chastised officials who slighted his majesty’s service, in the case of a crime ‘which seems to tread upon the heels of treason’.³² Prudence argued for vigilance, with arbitrariness kept at bay.

Written material worried the late-Stuart regime much more than casual conversation. Seditious papers, libels, books, or pamphlets vexed the authorities much more than seditious words. The government of William and Mary sought out unlicensed, false, and scandalous books and papers, and set out to apprehend their authors.³³ In 1691 it went after ‘seditious newsmongers and incendiaries’ who distributed false reports and inveighed against the government in coffee houses.³⁴ As a de facto government making extraordinary financial demands, it was ever alert to seditious publications, watchful for correspondence with the king’s enemies, and attentive to dangers from the Jacobites and from France. When licensing of the press ended in 1695, newspapers occasionally reported trials ‘for speaking seditious words against the king’, but rarely reproduced the offensive language.³⁵

A scatter of cases captures the flavour of dangerous popular speech in the 1690s. The army lieutenant James Weames was charged in September 1690 with ‘speaking scandalous and seditious words’, to the effect that ‘the land would never be blessed’ until the French had restored King James to his throne. As for King William, Weames called him ‘a villain’. Character witnesses, however, affirmed the officer’s good affection to the present government, and the Old Bailey jury found him ‘not guilty’.³⁶ In 1691 the Jacobite Giles Griffiths tried to suborn one of the soldiers of ‘their now majesties’, saying: ‘you are all lobstring faggoting dogs, rogues, rebels and traitors to your lawful king, I wish the king’s ships were all on fire.’ For this he was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, and then set free after paying his fees.³⁷

A London woman, Ann Knot, was acquitted in 1692 after allegedly saying: ‘God damn King William, I would clip off his ears for a groat if I could come at him.’ She was no real threat to the crown, and the jury found the evidence insufficient.³⁸ A soldier who rode through the streets in 1695 shouting out that ‘the king is dead’ was bailed after a short stay in Newgate.³⁹ A mariner found guilty in 1696 of speaking treasonable and seditious words was sentenced to be carried in a boat from ship to ship with a halter about his neck, to receive 100 lashes, and then to be put ashore. Unfortunately, we do not know what he said.⁴⁰ Hanna Bromfield of Upton Warren, Worcestershire, however, declared in 1696 that ‘King William is a son of a whore, and if ever King James comes in I’ll be one that shall help to put down Justice Chettle’s house or set it on fire, but I’ll have it down’. Aflame with both local and national grievances, she had to answer for her words at the Worcestershire Quarter Sessions.⁴¹

Writing later in William III’s reign, Justice Sir John Holt made the distinction that courts had been making in practice for several generations: ‘Loose words, spoken without relation to any act or project are not treason; but words of persuasion to kill the king are overt acts of high treason.’⁴² The precedent of Pyne’s case cast long shadows.

Government legal advisers raised doubts whether prosecutions for seditious language would hold up in court. In the divided political culture of Williamite England it was hard to gauge a jury’s sympathies and difficult to amass the weight of evidence necessary to secure a conviction. When in 1701 a Mr Bliss allegedly spoke ill of King William, the Attorney General Sir Edward Northey doubted whether there was proof enough to have him punished.

If the woman that makes it be to be believed, he is guilty of a very great misdemeanour, for which he may be proceeded against by indictment or information, as his majesty shall direct; but in regard there is but one witness, and that a woman, and one who, as appears, had declared herself to be against Mr Bliss… it may be a question whether she will have so much credit with a jury as on her single testimony to convict Mr Bliss.

It would not be good, the king’s attorney cautioned, for the prosecution to be ‘baffled by an acquittal’. Nonetheless, after due consideration, the government decided to proceed to indictment. Unfortunately for the historian, the specific words that triggered this action are not preserved in the record.⁴³

A greater legal uncertainty attached to the words of one Colonel Cage, who crossed over to Calais on a packet boat from Dover in August 1701. Safely ashore in France, Cage drank a bottle of wine with the master of the ship and ‘discoursed about the state of England’. The seaman Samuel Lucas affirmed that he was ‘very happy in so good a king as King William’, but Cage disagreed and ‘spoke slighting words of King William and his government, and said there would be an alteration of the government in a little time, and after spoke in favour of King James and the pretended Prince of Wales’. When Cage refused to join Lucas in a health to King William, ‘they had some hot words’, and Lucas took his story to the Council in London.⁴⁴

Colonel Cage, evidently, was a Jacobite, but had he also committed an offence? According to Attorney General Northey,

the charge is so general that no indictment or information can be founded on it, viz., that he spoke very slighting words of his majesty and his government, not mentioning any, and that he spoke in favour of the late King James and the pretended Prince of Wales, not mentioning the words. As to the words, that he said there would be an alteration of the government in a little time, I doubt they are so general that they are not criminal, without that he had further explained what alteration he meant. Besides, the words being spoken beyond sea, no information or indictment can be brought for the same; for by the law, the words must be said to be spoken in some county of England, and proved to have been there spoken; the law being defective in this case.⁴⁵

This last may technically have been correct, but it had not prevented previous regimes, from Queen Elizabeth to Charles I, from monitoring and punishing seditious words spoken by subjects overseas.

A final case, which began in the last year of King William’s reign, was tried at the Surrey assizes under his successor, Queen Anne. An account of the case was soon published, details entered the law reports, and a transcript survives in the National Archives.⁴⁶ These sources make possible a partial reconstruction of a conversation that took place in the Duke’s Head victualling house in Long Lane, Southwark, on 30 January 1702, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. James Taylor, ‘a poor tanner’, was discoursing with John Albery, a man of somewhat more reputable status. Taylor, the court observed, was ‘a noted republican or dissenter, and a frequenter of the Calves Head Club’. Their conversation turned on the calendar, with its controversial days of embedded political significance:

TAYLOR. It is a brave holy day.

ALBERY. It is no holy day, but a solemn fast day.

TAYLOR. For what?

ALBERY. For the sins of the nation, for the heinous and barbarous murder of King Charles the first.

TAYLOR. You are one of those blockheads who believe that King Charles the first died a martyr.

ALBERY. I am one of them that you call blockheads, if you count those who love King Charles to be so.

TAYLOR. (‘with a great deal of impudence’). King Charles the first was rightly served in having his head cut off, and it was also pity that his two sons, Charles and James, had not been served so at the same time.

ALBERY. This is very rude and barbarous language towards crowned heads.

TAYLOR. I never knew any good that any of the Stewarts did in their lives.

ALBERY. I never knew any mischief or hurt any of them had done.

TAYLOR. Yes, King Charles the first murdered the protestants in Ireland… King Charles the second minded nothing but whores; and as for King James, he was a papist.

ALBERY. Though he was so, two very good branches proceeded from him—Queen Mary and Princess Anne (which then was, but now is our most gracious queen).

Upon which Taylor spoke very factious, seditious and scandalous words against her present majesty.

Having failed to restrain Taylor’s animosity towards the royal family, Albery took his information to a gentleman at court, who relayed it to the Earl of Nottingham. Eventually the case reached the Kingston assizes in March 1704, where Taylor was tried for ‘seditious words’ and ‘speaking treasonable words of the dead’. This was a questionable legal concept, but the crown argued that the words were of ‘ill consequence’ and ‘bad example’ that could also ‘affect the living’. They tended ‘not only to the destruction of the very root and branch of the royal family, but even monarchy itself’. Potent historical memories and allegiances were in play, with dangerous implications for the current regime. Citing Pyne’s case from 1628, the court found Taylor guilty of a misdemeanour, noting that ‘this misdemeanour has a tendency to treason, and shows a treasonable intent in the speaker’. He was fined 40 marks and made to stand twice in the pillory, but was otherwise unmolested.

That Brandy-Nose Bitch, the Queen

The accession of Queen Anne in March 1702 elicited the usual mixture of polite acclaim and crude denigration. Jacobite loyalism dogged Queen Anne’s regime, along with the radicalism of the good old cause and conventional plebeian obstreperousness. Nicholas Wolstenholme, esquire, of Enfield, Middlesex, declared to drinkers at the Bell at Edmonton that ‘if the queen were King James’s daughter, I am sorry she is crowned’. John Pott, a London grocer, had opened conversation by remarking: ‘we have now a lawful and rightful queen of our country, King James’s daughter, and I like her the better and thank God for her.’ Wolstenholme responded ‘that he did not know whether she was King James’s daughter or not, but if she was, he liked her the worse’.⁴⁷ These were sensitive and dangerous remarks. To stress too hard that the new queen was ‘lawful and rightful’ was, perhaps, to imply that the late King William had been neither. To disparage Queen Anne for being King James’s daughter could be construed as opposition to the royal house of Stuart. The Secretary of State, Sir Charles Hedges, duly noted the information against Wolstenholme, but the accused seemed to suffer no harm. In September 1702 he became Deputy Lieutenant for Middlesex.⁴⁸

Much more scandalous were the words of Thomas Wadley, a Londoner who was walking with George Dunn of Shoe Lane in March 1703 when conversation turned to recent legislation concerning prisoners. According to Dunn, Wadley moved to say: ‘God damn the judges and their warrants and the parliament for making such an act, and that brandy-nose bitch, the queen, for signing it; but I suppose she will not stay to sign any more, for I believe she will run away after her father into France before another parliament comes.’ These were inflammatory and seditious words, but with only one witness the offence was hard to prove. Dunn could add only that he also heard Wadley’s brother William speak words to the same effect.⁴⁹ Though it was common parlance, though defamatory, for one subject to tell another, ‘you are a brandy-nosed whore, you stink of brandy’, it was outrageous to apply such language to the queen.⁵⁰

Also arrested for ‘seditious words’ in 1703 was the dissenting preacher Campion of Wapping, who prayed aloud for God to bring ‘satisfaction … to a languishing and complaining people who were ready to perish’. When it came time to pray for the queen, Campion prayed aloud: ‘God send her counsel from heaven, for I am afraid she has none upon earth that will advise her any good.’ The informer, Thomas Crocket of Symond’s Inn, who brought this remark to the attention of the authorities, characterized it as ‘the very trumpet of sedition and rebellion, and tending to nothing less than the sowing [of] discord in one of the most happy governments in the world’.⁵¹ More ‘words highly reflecting on her majesty’ were charged against Thomas Tudway, Professor of Music and organist of St Mary’s, Cambridge, who was removed from his post and deprived of his degrees, though afterwards restored on recantation.⁵²

In the face of the Jacobite threat and the danger from France, the government passed an act in 1705 ‘for the better security of her majesty’s person and government’. This made it high treason to maintain by writing or printing that Queen Anne was not the lawful and rightful monarch of the realm. Written text posed the greatest danger, but talk too could be seditious. Anyone ‘maliciously and directly by preaching, teaching or advised speaking’ challenging the queen’s title could ‘incur the danger and penalty of praemunire’ (forfeiture, imprisonment, and exclusion from public office). Conviction still required two credible witnesses, and the words had to be reported within three days and prosecuted within three months of being spoken. In 1707, after the union with Scotland, these provisions were extended to the entire United Kingdom.⁵³

Relatively few speakers suffered from these new statutes. The Londoner John Baldwin faced charges in October 1706 after telling drinkers at the Griffin and Parrot in Drury Lane ‘that he would swear that the Prince of Wales was King James’s son’.⁵⁴ Another Londoner, John Denton, was fined a mere sixpence and whipped from the Bell alehouse to the Post and Chain in Cripplegate in 1708 for speaking seditious words and for profanely cursing her majesty. Several more were put in the pillory or remanded to Newgate for seditious and treasonable words against the queen, but documented cases are few and slender.⁵⁵

Without more information the government could do little about the unnamed customer in a barber’s shop in Holborn in May 1710, who predicted ‘that the pretender was coming over, and that Dr Sacheverell would be made archbishop’. When asked ‘what was to be done with the queen when the pretender came over, he replied that she must be put aside’. The barber would not identify his client by name, but allowed he ‘had spoke treasonable words’.⁵⁶

Report reached the Council in January 1711 of ‘highly criminal’ talk among military officers. A witness, Richard Tilden, heard a Captain Gill say ‘that kings were sent for a curse to the people’. His companion, Purser Campbell, concurred, saying he would fight for her majesty only ‘so long as [she] governed to please the people and according to the constitution, but if [she] did otherwise, he swore he would then turn his sword and fight as heartily against as ever he had for her majesty’. To this Gill concurred, ‘so will I’.⁵⁷ This was ‘commonwealth’ talk, subversive if not treasonous, but hard to prove with only one witness. It was the mere echo of a conversation, not the grounds for a case at law.

More dangerous talk stirred the air in a victualling house at Portsmouth in June 1711, when John Franklyn allegedly declared that ‘the Prince of Wales is right heir to the crown of England, and the queen has no title to it’. Furthermore, he offered to part with all his money, ‘to furnish them with arms to assist the Prince of Wales’. Franklyn was evidently a Jacobite, and he was almost certainly drunk when he spoke. But he may also have been the victim of a malicious accusation by an informant who owed him money. Other reports identified Franklyn as a dissenter, ‘a quiet man, and not likely to have spoken such words’. He was allowed bail, to answer at the next assizes.⁵⁸

In January 1712 Charles Collins of St Mary le Bow, Middlesex, was charged with ‘speaking false, seditious and dangerous words’ the previous December. Prompted by a passage in the newspaper The Postman about an intended royal visit, Collins declared of Queen Anne: ‘she’s not worthy to carry Prince Eugene’s shoes after him, damn her… she’s but a mechanick, the daughter of a collier, her father was a rogue, and I am better born than she.’ Found guilty, he was sentenced to a fine and the pillory.⁵⁹

Another report of Jacobite vaunting came in February 1713, when the labourer John Shore recalled a conversation among workers at a printing house in Cripplegate. One of those present, Freeman Collins, allegedly said: ‘we shall never have any good times till the Pretender come, and that he hoped to see the mass houses fuller than the churches.’ The informant allowed, however, that Collins spoke ‘in a jocular way’.⁶⁰ Justinian Chamnies, esquire, was tried at Maidstone in July 1713 ‘for speaking abominable and atheistical words with respect to God and religion and seditious words of the queen’, but like many other speech offenders was found ‘not guilty’ on all charges.⁶¹

Even if convicted of political crimes of the tongue, English men and women of the early eighteenth century were unlikely to suffer gravely. The ancient punishment of nailing and clipping ears had fallen into disuse, and the stocks, a standard punitive tool since the Middle Ages, were rarely employed. Nor was whipping regularly imposed on these speakers of sedition. Even the pillory, which would stand for another hundred years, was no longer an essential instrument in sentencing. Crippling fines and extended imprisonment for speech against the crown also seem to have fallen into disuse. In most instances a token punishment was enough. The state no longer felt imperilled by dangerous words, so long as those words were not distributed through writing. By the early years of the eighteenth century the English had freedom to speak as they pleased, provided they steered clear of blasphemy and slander.