A WOMAN'S LOVE; AT THE SCAFFOLD AND

THE GRAVE.

N the twenty-ninth day of June, 1797, a middle-aged woman, evidently suffering from some great sorrow, and clad in a black silk gown, a scarf modecloak, a purple shawl, a black bonnet, and a deep gauze veil, might have been seen waiting with a companion at the palace of St. James, in the great city of London. Every minute has a weight of agony, and the sound of the bells as they strike the slowly passing hours seem to her like a death-knell. is only a sailor's wife and a poor woman, but, fired with a passionate love, and a determina

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tion such as possessed the heart of Jeanie Deans, she has succeeded, like that heroine of romance, in making her way from Scotland to the metropolis of England, in order to see her husband, and save him, if possible, from the sentence of a felon and a dishonourable grave.

Three days before he had been condemned to death by court-martial; and she had a petition drawn up in her name, which the Earl of Morton, her fellow-countryman, had promised to present to Queen Charlotte, praying her gracious Majesty to use her influence on behalf of her husband-on the ground that he was insane, that he had on

that account, at a former time, been dismissed from his position in the navy, and that his sister was actually in confinement as labouring under the same disease. This prayer of the loving wife has been presented by her noble Scottish patron, and as she waits anxiously for an answer from the Queen, she talks to the pitiful bystanders of her sorrows, and assures the attendants in the guard-chamber that she would give a thousand guineas if she could save her husband's life. At last, wearied and hopeless of success, she hears the hour of five struck; the wife of King George has not deigned to notice her petition, and she drives away with her companion so that she may be able to reach Sheerness and see her husband for the last time, before his execution on the following morning.

It was close on midnight when the Rochester coach arrived at its destination, carrying among its other passengers the forlorn wife of Richard Parker, the notorious mutineer, whose name had been in the mouth of every man, woman, and child in that district of Kent during the past few weeks. In spite of this odium, however, she immediately succeeded in finding a boatman who was going up to Sheerness in the morning with garden vegetables, and who agreed to take her with him. At the early hour of seven she reached the side of the Sandwich, the vessel on which her husband was to suffer at the yard-arm; but the stern sentinels, heedless of her anxious request to see him, ordered her off, and even threatened to fire in case of disobedience. When this first boatman had taken her back to Sheerness on the pretext that as the yellow flag had not been hoisted no execution would take place that day, she engaged a second. As this boat was rowed up she discerned the fatal flag; again she begged to see her husband; but in spite of her intense pleading, she was once more ordered off, and taken back on shore. She hired a third boat, and this time, as she approached, she saw the fatal procession of her husband, with his hands bound, from the quarter-deck to the forecastle. My dear husband!" she exclaimed with a loud shriek, as she fainted away; recovering again, she beheld him mount the platform on the cathead and the dark-robed chaplain leave his side; but from that moment a pall fell upon her sight, and she" saw nothing but the sea, which appeared covered with blood." An hour had passed away before she reached the ship in a fourth boat, in time to see her husband's lifeless body lowered from the yard-arm. It was immediately placed in a shell already prepared for its reception, and exactly at midday it was interred in the Naval Burying Ground at Sheerness, amid the deep silence of a large company of the comrades of the unhappy man.

It was in vain that the sailor's widow made an earnest and immediate appeal to one of the vice-admirals for the disposal of her husband's body; and she formed a resolution for securing it, by means that have perhaps no parallel even in the wildest of romances. When darkness had stolen down upon the quiet waters of the Thames, and silence reigned over the harbour of Sheerness, this faithful wife, accompanied by three other women, clambered over the high gateway of the graveyard, and by their aid dug up with her hands the rude coffin in which her husband's dishonoured body was enclosed. But how, after this first portion of the strange undertaking had been accomplished, was the dismal freight to be carried off unseen? Whatever means were adopted, and one story of the time gives an account, which, though perhaps true, reads like a ghastly fable, certain it is that the shell which encased the remains of Richard Parker was safely lodged in a room hired by his widow in the Hoop and Horseshoe public-house, Little Tower Hill; that immense crowds gathered there on the two succeeding days; that the weeping woman was led before the magistrates in Lambert Street police-court; and that the public authorities, in fear of tumults, had the body buried secretly and finally, shortly after midnight, in the vault of Whitechapel church.

This last scene in the tragic episode of the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore may fitly serve as an introduction to a narrative of the strange events of the spring of the year 1797, when the seamen of the British navy rose in rebellion against the cruelties, tyranny, and neglect to which they were subjected, and in the course of their determined stand imperilled the naval supremacy, and perhaps the independence, of their country

THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD; PANICS OF 1797.

Never during her whole history was the greatness of England so completely staked upon the solid fibre of her "wooden walls" as in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The glorious spring of the French Revolution was like a mother that devours her own children. Paris, the mother of freedom, had become the fierce metropolis. The "far-famed tree" of liberty, of which the peasant bard of Ayrshire had sung exultingly, had yielded such monstrous fruit as Marat, Danton, Robespierre. And now the whole of Europe trembled, bled, and crouched before Napoleon's invincibles. The first months of the year 1797 beheld the sacred Head of the Roman Church "taking the trouble" to bow before his "dear son," ceding to the French Republic the sum of thirty million livres in specie and diamonds,

and yielding up for ever Avignon and other fair and fertile provinces; boastful Venice, whose republic had stood for many centuries, furiously butchered Frenchmen in the hospitals, and was crushed out of political existence; and the Emperor of Germany was driven in the early days of April to sue for peace from the great general who had chased his armies out of Italy, and was striking blow after blow on the triumphant march to Vienna.

England stood alone at last as the unbending and unbroken foe of France, her ambition, her allies, and her legions. Never was it so true as then that she was mistress of the seas; the maritime traffic of the world was in her hands; she had swept the trading craft of France and Holland from every corner of the main; and amid the deep convulsions of Europe, the insurance of British vessels sailing to India and "far Cathay" actually sank from fifteen guineas to one half of that amount. At last the point of the lance was held out towards our "impregnable" shores. Ireland was filled with discontent and insurrection, panting like a wild bird that is caged in view of the green fields. A French expedition of 25,000 men, under Hoche, had attempted in December 1796 to land on the reckless isle of Erin, but had gone back to Brest to wait for better winds and better luck; and in the month of February, a band of 1200

country banks and emptied them of specie. These again hastened to devour the reserve of the Bank of England. The heads of that great national institution were at their wits' end. Payment in specie was suspended. The country, exclaimed Fox, was in the gulf of bankruptcy. The governors of the Bank immediately assured the nation that it was in "the most affluent and flourishing condition."

Britain had little need of domestic troubles. She required her whole strength. Her reliance and her boast were in her "wooden walls." Not to travel back to the distant times of Alfred, or to those of Richard of the Lion Heart, whose strong-fisted men had boarded the impregnable Dromunda, the floating castle of Saladin, or to those of

Willoughby, Drake,

Howard, Essex, Raleigh; not to speak of the more recent achievements of the dauntless dare-devil Benbow, of Sir Cloudesley Shovel,and of Rooke, who in the year 1704 hoisted the British colours on the Rock of Gibraltar, where they are flying to this hour-had we not still with us, in the chief command of our brave and loyal tars, Earl Howe, the hero of the "First of June," when the French were thrashed in the Bay of Biscay; and had not Jervis and Commodore Nelson, on the 14th day of February in this very year, thrown a bright gleam of sunshine into "the wild and darkening forest that threatened to close around us," by smiting the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, fifteen sail of the line against twenty-seven? Neither merchant nor statesman permitted himself for one moment to dream that the great wave of the righteous power of manhood which had swept over France would touch the decks of our wooden walls, and that the mariners who guard our native seas would be found swerving in the years of storm and license.

men, picked veterans and ragged scoundrels, provided with seventy cart-loads of powder and balls, scrambled on shore among the rocks of Pembrokeshire, began to steal clothes, and marched into the country. Our fleet was to be decimated by the united war-ships of the triumvirate of France, Spain, and Holland, and a great army was to "march to the capital of that mighty nation, seize the immense heaps of gold in the Bank of London, the prodigious wealth contained in their shops, their warehouses, and their magazines, the riches contained in their gilded palaces and their stately mansions," etc., etc.

The fear of French invasion created a panic throughout England in the last ten days of February. Millions of solid British gold had been spent in lending sinews to the feeble arm of Austria. Farmers flew to their

BLACK DICK, THE SAILOR'S FRIEND; UNHEEDED MURMURS.

Richard, Earl Howe, had grown old and worn in the service of his country. The veteran admiral, now half a decade beyond the allotted span of threescore years and ten, suffered from the gout in his feet and ankles, and had gone down to take the waters at

Bath in the autumn of 1796. During the whole winter he was confined to his room, and was not able to throw aside his crutches till the end of March. No name, in his own special line, was more respected by the nation or more trusted by the seamen of the navy. To these last the tall and serious admiral was familiarly known as "Black Dick," from a mezzotint portrait that used to hang in his cabin, the sight of which, when first presented to the noble tar, threw him into a state of ludicrous amazement. They also called him the "sailor's friend ;" and rightly, for beneath that dark, serious, and haughty countenance there lay a heart which was not only firm as an oak, and never knew what fear was,-to use his own words,-but which was at the same time humane and tender as a true tar's. Was there a sailor in the whole fleet who did not know how, after the famous "first of June," a deputation of petty officers and seamen came aft to thank him for leading them to victory, and how he replied with faltering voice and tear-filled eyes: "It is you, my brave lads, it is you, not I, that have conquered"? There were stories, too, of his benign condescension,how he was accustomed to go below when a bloody action was over, sitting by the cradles of the poor wounded fellows, talking cheerily to them; and how the sick were nursed with his live stock and wines.

In the last days of February and the opening days of March, the old admiral was disturbed by the receipt of anonymous petitions from four vessels of the Channel Fleet at Spithead. One of these complainants had been his own flag-ship, the Queen Charlotte, which was for ever famous, because of the glorious victory of the 1st of June, 1794, when her 900 men and 100 guns had dealt death and havoc among the French. So dear was her cabin to him, that the library at his mansion near St. Alban's was fitted up as a facsimile of his ocean home. The seamen in these petitions simply asked him to request the Board of Admiralty to extend to them, whose payment was the petty sum of 9 d. per day, the same munificence that the army had received.

The earl saw that three of the petitions were written in the same hand. This seemed to him suspicious. But as these petitions of the brave tars dropped in day after day, doubtless his memory recalled the serious murmurs of bygone years. He would remember that in the House of Lords he had declared that his own flag-ship was very filthy, and that many of the vessels were in a wretched state; how, among the several mutinies of 1783, the crews at Portsmouth, on a report that the ships just returned were to be refitted and unjustly sent to sea again, had confined their officers and had rushed

down with lighted matches ready to fire on the appearance of any attack from without, and that he had hastened on board the Janus, ending the mutiny by a timely and just concession; how, for this same complaint, three men had been hanged in that year on the yard-arm of the Raisonnable; how eight men had been sentenced to death on the Culloden at the close of 1794, and that he had cast the blame of this discontent upon the captains, who were accustomed to regale themselves on shore, while the toiling tars were kept on board like prisoners.

But the old ways were too inveterately ingrained in Howe. There was no hurry. He intended to take the petitions in his pocket to Earl Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, when he went up to town from the waters at Bath; and in the meantime he wrote to two of the chief officers of the Channel Fleet, whose inquiries ended in a report that there was no perceptible disaffection, and that the smoke was simply manufactured by some evilly-disposed person, in order to throw scandal on the government of William Pitt. Whatever discontent there might be would instantly blow off when the ships stood out to sea, and the patriotic tars were brought face to face with the mortal foes of England. He and his correspondents were mistaken. They forgot the homely proverb that "a stitch in time saves nine." Unseen, the neglected embers were nursed into a flame, which broke forth weeks after into a series of mutinies that threatened the ruin of the country.

OUTBREAK OF THE SPITHEAD MUTINY.

Thus neglected by their friend, the crews carried on a secret correspondence, and

formed a sullen resolution that not an anchor should be lifted until their complaints were attended to and their grievances redressed. The officers remained in strange ignorance of the "conspiracy," and the Admiralty had no knowledge of its existence until the 12th of April, when orders were at once telegraphed to Admiral Bridport, the commander of the fleet, to put out to sea. On Saturday the 15th he gave the signal to weigh anchor and proceed to St. Helen's. Three cheers instantly rose from the crew of the Queen Charlotte; and instead of mustering obediently round the handspikes of the capstan, the sailors ran up the shrouds. As if by magical contagion, every other crew in the roadstead echoed the cheers of the flag-ship, and similarly manned the fore-shrouds. Not a single anchor in the fleet was lifted. The officers spent their threats and eloquence in vain. The marines were disarmed and the maga zines seized. Within a few minutes the authority of the officers was at an end, and the common seamen were masters of the fleet.

It remained to be seen whether the seamen were able to hold down the combatant they had surprised and stunned; in other words, whether they possessed sufficient determination, cohesion, and administrative capacity. Two "delegates "-that "dangerous" word which had been employed in 1794 by the rebels of the Culloden-were appointed by each of the sixteen ships. On the following day, which was Easter Sunday, these thirtytwo deputies assembled to deliberate in the favourite cabin of Lord Howe; and on Easter Monday they went through the ceremony of swearing every sailor upon the Bible, the ropes which were run out at the yard-arm of each ship hinting grimly to any unwilling tar the terrible penalty of disobedience. A list of rules prepared by the committee enjoined, under severe penalty, the greatest attention to the orders of the officers; that every ship should give three cheers both morning and evening; that no private communication should be held with the shore; that no ship should lift its anchor until the demands of the fleet were satisfied; that no woman should be permitted on shore, but as many might come in as pleased; and that any person found drunk or attempting to bring liquor into the ship should be rigorously punished. These laws were enforced with unrelenting severity; for instance, a sailor who had dared to smuggle a pint of spirits on board was flogged unmercifully with a thief-cat; and on one occasion the Royal William, having declined to join in the general cheering of the fleet, was peremptorily warned that she would be fired into if she repeated this act of disobedience. Even the sick seamen who lay in Haslar Hospital (opposite Portsmouth) were infected with the spirit of enthusiasm, tacked their handkerchiefs into a flag, and added their daily cheers to those on board the fleet. The officers whose cruelty had rendered them obnoxious, in spite of all their fears, received no greater injury than that of being sent ashore by the mutineers; and the terrific yard-ropes were called on to perform no sterner duties than that of ducking any sailors who were found guilty of petty misdemeanours, a more amusing and less brutal punishment than the lash, from which many of the honest tars had suffered for similar offences. Altogether the conduct of these half-enslaved seamen deserves the eulogy of Earl Stanhope, that "perhaps no men raised to power by a successful mutiny ever showed so much temper and moderation."

PETITIONS OF THE SEAMEN; A TALE OF LONG SUFFERING, STATE NEGLECT, AND ROBBERY.

On the 18th of April, two petitions, distinguished by a most respectful and loyal

tone, were prepared and signed by the thirtytwo delegates of the mutinous fleet, in order to make plain to the authorities and the nation the wrongs of sailors, and the only terms under which they could be expected to remain in the service of their country. One of these, addressed to the House of Commons, set forth their disappointment and surprise at the neglect of Howe, in whom they had expected to find an advocate, as under his command they had often made the British flag ride triumphant over that of their enemies; asked for an increase of the Greenwich pensions from seven to thirteen pounds per annum, and for an increase of their own pay sufficient to enable them and their families to live in the same comfortable manner as seamen and marines did in the time of Charles II. ; for, strange to tell, as is pointed out in this address, their wages were still as low as they had been fixed by Act of Parliament more than a century before, "when the necessaries of life and slops of every denomination were at least thirty per cent. cheaper."

The address to the Admiralty is more emphatic, and presents a fuller tale of wrongs, and yet does not even mention the hardships of impressment and flogging, which formed the leading articles of indictment among non-seafaring people and parliamentary philanthropists. In addition to the insufficiency of pay, the demands therein set forth are as follows :—

"Thirdly,

To look into the state of the sick on board H.M. ships, that they may be better attended to, and that . . such necessaries as are allowed for them in time of sickness . . . be not on any account embezzled.

Fourthly, .. That we may in somewise have grant and opportunity to taste the sweets of liberty on shore, when in any harbour, and when we have completed the duty of our ship . . .; which is a natural request, and congenial to the heart of man, and certainly to us, that you make the boast of being the guardians of the land.

'Fifthly, That if any man is wounded in action, his pay be continued until he is cured and discharged; and if any ship has any real grievances to complain of, we hope your Lordships will readily redress them, as far as in your power; to prevent any disturbances."

In the preamble and the epilogue of this wail from the sea, care was taken to speak with deference, moderation, and patriotism, so that no pitiable excuse might be given to a dense-hearted and close-fisted government