ordered that the city officers do keep the streets clear of common prostitutes.——Signed, Wood, Mayor."[1]
A more foolish and undignified proceeding, however, than this "Bill of Pains and Penalties" can scarcely be conceived. Its fate might almost have been predicted from the first. The second reading was carried on the 6th of November, by a majority of twenty-eight, but the third (for the reasons already given) by a majority of nine only; whereupon, the Earl of Liverpool said that, "had the third reading been carried by as considerable a number of peers as the second had been, he and his colleagues would have felt it their duty to persevere with the bill and to send it down to the other branch of the legislature. In the present state of the country, however, . . . they had come to the determination not to proceed further with it."[2] The victory will be acknowledged by us now-a-days as damaging as a defeat; but the result, curious to relate, was hailed by the queen and her party as if her innocence had been triumphantly vindicated. In signing a document prepared by her counsel on the 8th of November, she wrote, "Carolina Regina," adding the words, "there, Regina still, in spite of them." The abandonment of the bill was followed by three nights of illumination; but it was observed that they were of a very partial character, wholly unlike those which had greeted the great victories by sea and land, in which the public sympathy was spontaneous and universal. The mob in some cases testified its disapproval when these signs of satisfaction were wanting; and one gentleman in Bond Street, on being repeatedly requested to "light up," placed a single rushlight in his two-pair-of-stairs window. Some of the transparencies were, as might have been expected, of a singular character. A trunk maker in the same street displayed the follow-
- ↑ This of course may not be the case. The Duke of Kent, we know, was dead at the time, and Wood, we believe, was not Lord Mayor. He had been Lord Mayor some time before, and the satire may possibly allude to some order made at that time. At the same time, I find the caricature amongst those assigned (in the large but badly arranged collection to which I have present access) to this particular period.
- ↑ "Annual Register," 1820 [190].
