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his nerve. He had seen how quickly the gunpowder exploded the evening before. Something must have gone wrong. Abandoning his drink, Killingbeck hurried out into the street. But there, to his relief, he saw Spittell coming towards him. Back in the pub, Spittell told him ‘that Westminster Hall was all in an uproar, people tumbling over one another and the Constables busy with their staves; [and] while he was saying this came in Nixon, who said that when he … got to the place where the Grand Jury usually sit he heard it (the packet) give a great bounce.’ The only disappointment was that the plan for two other explosions had to be abandoned. ‘In the disorder and confusion [Spittell] saw in theHall he took the two packets out of his pocket and dropt them in the crowd.’
    Back in Westminster Hall, business was slowly getting back to normal. The smoke soon cleared; gradually everyone realised this wasn’t a second Gunpowder Plot. ‘At first,’ the Duke of Newcastle reported, ‘the business a little stopped in the respective courts; but they soon proceeded, till the … seditious and treasonable paper was brought into the King’s Bench by some of the officers of the court, who had picked up several of them in Westminster Hall.’ Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, immediately sent a message to Middlesex Quarter Sessions, which was then sitting, to issue a warrant against the libellous paper and its author. A Jacobite demonstration so close to the heart of government was a serious matter, even if it was more coup de théâtre than coup d’état . Newcastle, Hardwicke and Walpole moved fast. The King was away in Hanover, but the Queen and Council issued a proclamation and reward the same weekend.
    Sir Robert Walpole, for one, had no doubt who was to blame for the outrage. Nor did he doubt that sooner or later he would track them down. ‘Since my coming to town,’ he wrote to his brother a fortnight later, ‘I have been endeavouring to trace out the authors and managers of that vile transaction, and there is no reason to doubt that the whole was projected and executed by a set of low Jacobites … Of this I have had an account from the same fellow that brought me these and many such sort of intelligencies.’ 6 Walpole’s spy network was in good shape. In the end it didn’t take long to pick up Nixon, Spittell and Killingbeck. Fringe members of the gang – printers and associates – soon cracked. It wasn’t long before Samuel Killingbeck was giving the authorities chapter and verse.
    Robert Nixon, arrested after a tip-off on 14 August, was the only one who put up anything of a fight. The Duke of Newcastle interviewed him personally, but Nixon denied knowing anythingabout either the libel or the bomb. Then the Duke tried another tack. The clergyman had been arrested on his way back from church. ‘Being asked whether they prayed for the King in that congregation, [Nixon] said, “Yes, always.”’ The question was which King? ‘Being asked whether they pray’d for King George, he said, they never named names.’ 7 It was forty-seven years since James Stuart fled his throne, and twenty-one since the 1715 rebellion, but the Jacobites still hadn’t given up.
    Jacobitism was the fly in the ointment of Hanoverian stability; it was Britain’s loose cannon, its unfinished business. Nearly half a century after the Glorious Revolution, the Old Pretender still waited in Paris with his ridiculous court and his bogus ceremonial; whenever a French king wanted to annoy the English, he still had only to start talking about invasions and restorations. Back in England, the wounds of the Glorious Revolution had still not healed over.
    All the same, Jacobitism had changed in the past few decades. The passage of half a century was bound to change something. Even in 1715, restoration had been a real possibility. There had been a real Stuart army in Britain, with real support from Jacobite aristocrats, and from at least part of the