A STUART AMONG THE QUAKERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3097, 23 July 1913, Page 76

A STUART AMONG THE QUAKERS.

The autumn of 1688 had made shipwreck of the Stuart fortunes, and during t):e winter months that followed the shores of France and the remoter counties of England were strewn with the wreckage. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam cast up by this calamity there was no figure so remarkable as that of Jane Stuart, the King’s natural daughter. She had spent the 35 years of her life at the Court an acknowledged and favourite child. Then, seizing the opportunity of her father’s flight, she herself stole away in disguise from Whitehall, and taking no one into her confidence travelled alone and on foot through half the counties of England. The goal of her journey was Wisbech, then an obscure market-town in Cambridgeshire. She had chosen it, perhaps, for its remoteness and inaccessibility, which had become a by-word in the seventeenth century. Arriving towards the end of the summer, she joined a group of labourers who were standing to be hired beside the Old Bridge, where farmers still come to engage their extra workers haytime and harvest. In spite of her evident inexperience she was hired with the others and sent out to reap in the fields So great was her industry that before the season was over she had come to he known as the “Queen of the Reapers”—a strange title for a woman whose sister was even then seated upon the throne of England. As the winter drew on she bought a spinning-wheel, and, hiring a cellar, she took home the flax and wool which are the chief produce of that grazing and agricultural county. Then, sitting on a stand in the marketplace amongst the farmers’ wives, she sold the thread which she had spun. From the time of her arrival she attached herself to the Quaker Meeting, a little community which was beginning to breathe again after the barbarous persecutions of the reign of Charles 11. Little by little her story leaked out. Her speech or her habits betrayed her. She was discovered in the act of reading the Greek Testament, and her confusion still further aroused the suspicions of her neighbours. Reluctant as she was to speak of her past life, the day came when the chief facts of her history were known in the town. For 30 years after her death in 1742 her memory was preserved only in the recollection of the inhabitants who had known her, and in the entry in the Friends’ Registry of Burials. But in 1773 the grandfather of the present Lord Peckover came to live in Wisbech, and set himself to collect such details as still survived. In 1809 they appeared for the first time in print in an article in the Friends’ Monthly Magazine. lam indebted for this information, as well as for some further particulars, to the kindness of Lord Peckover of Wisbech. He can himself remember his grandfather, who died in 1833, and thus forms a link, however slender, with this surprising history. —Birth. — Jane Stuart was born in Paris in 1654, a natural daughter of the exiled Duke of York, but hamo- beyond the usual -fata of these children in 'bearing her father's name. It is significant that her mother’s identity has never been known, though she is'believed to have been a Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, and a Protestant. This secrecy seems to indicate that she came of a family which felt the disgrace of the Royal favours, and the name of Stuart may have been granted to the child as an expiation of the wrong done to her mother. # She may have been one of the ladies referred to by the Earl of Sandwich, when he declared that Anne Hyde was not singular in being able to produce a piomise of marriage, signed by James with his own blood while ho was resident in France. At the time of Jane’s birth her father was a youth of 21, handsome, brave, and affable. He was the idol, if we may believe Chancellor Hyde, of the French Court, and of the army, to which he was attached as a member of the staff of Marshal Turenne. But in 1663 the French Treaty with Cromwell obliged him to leave’ the country and to resign his commission. He removed with his whole household, which included hislittledaughter, to Bruges. Here and at Brussels she it tew up in the midst of a society only fe-s corrupt than that of the Court of the Restoration. When in 1660 the exiles were welcomed back to Whitehall she came to Engla-nd in her father’s train; and when he set un his establishment on a scale comparable to that of the King himself he was careful that proper pro-vi-ion should be made for the child. In the following autumn his secret marriage was acknowledged with the daughter of .Sir Edward Hvde, the Chancellor. whose loyalty had been newlv rewarded bv a peerage. The bride brought the leaven of decent middle c!a;s virtues into James’s household, and it is to her influence that one can trace manv of the qualities of Jane Stuart which would be otherwise inexplicable—her integritv and economy, her love of learning, and her purity of lifo.

—The Friends at Court.— Her attachment to the Quakers, which showed itself while she was still living at St. James’s, is easily capable of explana-, tion. Ihe Friends held a prescriptive right, which they still possess, to appear before the King, and during the persecution which followed the Conventicle Act they came almost daily to Charles II to plead the cause Of their society. Their “Thou Speech,” as it was called, and their quaint dress, crowned by the hats, which they refused to remove on a point of conscience, were familiar to every habitue of the Court. The Duke of York was notoriously friendly to them, and added to the distrust with which he was regarded by his intimacy with William Penn, the son of his favourite Admiral. Jane Stuart herself travelled in Germany in her girlhood, where she would be entertained by her father’s cousin, the learned Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, the correspondent of Fox and Penn, and a kind hostess to all wandering Quakers. Jane Stuart’s “convincement” to their principles brought no difference in her position. It is related, though the tale has the smack of legend, that she pushed her beliefs to the nly conclusion possible at the time, and suffered imprisonment at Newgate. She had hoped to escape by marriage from a position that was distasteful to her, and was about to wed a man whose name and station have both been lost in the wreck of her memory. The wedding was to be celebrated in the Quaker Meeting House; but as she was driving to the place with the bridegroom and his brother the coach overturned and the bridegroom was killed. Jane, who had escaped unhurt, drove on to London with the brother, whose leg had been broken in the accident, and stayed with him in his lodgings, nursing him till he recovered. The only other picture which she has left of this period of her life is a glimpse of the infant Prince, afterwards the Old Pretender, ‘‘a little white-headed boy,” whom she nursed upon her knee. His birth gave the signal for the Revolution, and in a few months Jane herself was an exile, working unknown amongst the fields of Wisbech. At first some effort seems to have been made to draw her back to her old life. The partisans of the new King in particular desired her presence a witness to their contention that the nev. born Prince was a supposititious child and not the heir to the throne. The Duke, of .Argyll succeeded, in fact, in tracing her as far as Wisbech. But Jane recognised the familiar arms upon his coach as she sat in her stall in the market-place, and hastily packing up her thread, she hid herself until the search which she had foreseen had been abandoned. —“Out” in the ’ls. — Once, indeed, she was tempted out of her retreat. When her brother, the O.d Pretender, landed at Peterhead, to lead the ill-fated rising of the ’ls, Jane Stuart hired a chaise and travelled the 300 miles into Scotland to see him, a journey which is in itself sufficient corroboration of his claim to be the eon of James 11. With this brief and heart-stirring interlude her life pursued its even course for 54 years. Through the summer she worked in the fields, and in the winter she toiled at the spinning-wheel in her dark cellar or sat without awning or shelter among the farmers’ wives in the market-place. Her cellar was filled with birds, which she loved and cared for. She was never so happy as in the company of children, to whom, it is related, ‘‘she gave suitable religious advice when opportunity offered.” The last scene of her life has a touch of that romantic pathos which was the birthright of her family. She had fainted one dav in the Friends’ Graveyard, and, as she ‘came to herself, the peace of that green shade stole into her brain, and she asked that when she died she might he buried in the place where she had fallen. She had a rowan tree planted to mark the spot—a tree, as one of her chroniclers has noted, most fitted to guard the rest-ing-place of a daughter of Scotland. The tree grew too large for the little graveyard, and was eventually cut down and sold for 12s. But the grave is not uncared for. Some reverent hand has hedged it round with box, and her initials, with her age, 88. and the date, 1742, grow in evergreen letters upon it. She was perhaps the happiest of all her ill-starred race, for she has left it on record in the only saving of hers that has come down to us, that “she enjoyed such contentment and peace that she would not leave her cell and soinniug-wheel to be the Queen of England.”—Matu-x R. Brailsfokd, in the Glasgow Herald.