Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/49

Rh Bolingbroke and asked him, 'Well, my Lord, what is to be done?' but he found him quite palsied. Bishop Atterbury urged the party as strongly as possible to proclaim the Pretender. They asked him who would venture to do it; he said: 'I will send for my lawn sleeves this instant, and do it on horseback at Charing Cross if you will support me.' Lord Oxford, on the other hand, was sincerely well disposed to the. (See their letters to him, and see what faith is to be put in Princes.) I have been told by some of the old people that when Lord Oxford came into the House of Lords after the accession of and his consequent disgrace, every Peer left the side bench where he placed himself, and the Prince of Wales went alone and placed himself next him with a great German hat, looking at him in a bullying attitude, to the great satisfaction of the House. Sir Eardley Wilmot has told me that his father, a very sensible man, was High Sheriff of Derbyshire the year of the Revolution, and that the people were ten to one against the Revolution. The Church to a man was violently active against the House of Hanover. The old Lord Ilchester told me that, for a long time after the accession, cannon were obliged to be kept at Whitehall to keep the mob in order and to protect the King from the Park to Westminster. An old Mr. Mildmay, whose epitaph may be seen, written by himself, at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, told me that he returned a young man from abroad, and inquiring for his father found that he was at dinner at the King's Arms with Lord Bolingbroke and the party, where he went and had all manner of questions put to him about Hanover, which he answered so much to their satisfaction that Lord Bolingbroke took him aside when the company were breaking up, and said to him: 'Young man, you appear a smart young man; if you will enlist with me I will do the best I can for you; I think I have the best end of the staff.' He made him afterwards his secretary, and sent him on a famous affronting message to Lord Oxford, which he was to deliver to him at his full levée at the cockpit, for which his tall thin