with but too good a choice of inflammatory topics.  Some seamen deserted; some mutinied; then came executions; and then came more ballads and broadsides representing those executions as barbarous murders.  Reports that the government had determined to defraud its defenders of their hard earned pay were circulated with so much effect that a great crowd of women from Wapping and Rotherhithe besieged Whitehall, clamouring for what was due to their husbands.  Mary had the good sense and good nature to order four of those importunate petitioners to be admitted into the room where she was holding a Council.  She heard their complaints, and herself assured them that the rumour which had alarmed them was unfounded.462 By this time Saint Bartholomew’s day drew near; and the great annual fair, the delight of idle apprentices and the horror of Puritanical Aldermen, was opened in Smithfield with the usual display of dwarfs, giants, and dancing dogs, the man that ate fire, and the elephant that loaded and fired a musket.  But of all the shows none proved so attractive as a dramatic performance which, in conception, though doubtless not in execution, seems to have borne much resemblance to those immortal masterpieces of humour in which Aristophanes held up Cleon and Lamachus to derision.  Two strollers personated Killegrew and Delaval.  The Admirals were represented as flying with their whole fleet before a few French privateers, and taking shelter under the grins of the Tower.  The office of Chorus was performed by a Jackpudding who expressed very freely his opinion of the naval administration.  Immense crowds flocked to see this strange farce.  The applauses were loud; the receipts were great; and the mountebanks, who had at first ventured to attack only the unlucky and unpopular Board of Admiralty, now, emboldened by impunity and success, and probably prompted and rewarded by persons of much higher station than their own, began to cast reflections on other departments of the government.  This attempt to revive the license of the Attic Stage was soon brought to a close by the appearance of a strong body of constables who carried off the actors to prison.463 Meanwhile the streets of London were every night strewn with seditious handbills.  At all the taverns the zealots of hereditary right were limping about with glasses of wine and punch at their lips.  This fashion had just come in; and the uninitiated wondered much that so great a number of jolly gentlemen should have suddenly become lame.  But, those who were in the secret knew that the word Limp was a consecrated word, that every one of the four letters which composed it was the initial of an august name, and that the loyal subject who limped while he drank was taking off his bumper to Lewis, James, Mary, and the Prince.464

It was not only in the capital that the Jacobites, at this time, made a great display of their wit.  They mustered strong at Bath, where the Lord President Caermarthen was trying to recruit his feeble health.  Every evening they met, as they phrased it, to serenade the Marquess.  In other words they assembled under the sick man’s window, and there sang doggrel lampoons on him.465