United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The defection of this young nobleman was no insignificant event. For Queensberry was the head of the Protestant Episcopalians of Scotland, a class compared with whom the bitterest English Tories might be called Whiggish; and Drumlanrig himself was Lieutenant Colonel of Dundee's regiment, a band more detested by the Whigs than even Kirke's lambs.
"True, true, Isabella; and one must allow for the original descent; something of the German boorishness still flows in the blood; something of the whiggish and perverse opposition to established rank and privilege.
Clearly not a family of any very great pretensions a race for the most part of frugal, upright country gentlemen to be found, with scarcely an exception, on the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English stuff the stuff which has made, and still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
This is that foolish Sir Guy Mardykes, who crossed the Border and joined Dundee, and was shot through the temple at Killiecrankie and whom more prudent and whiggish scions of the Mardykes family removed forthwith from his place in the Hall, and found a retirement here, from which he has not since emerged.
"There speaks the common wash of Whiggish blood. MacBryde will out! No Raincy would thus have sold his birthright for a mess of pottage."
But in truth it was a strange family for him to seek a wife in, and many were the whispered gibes the news of his courtship provoked at Edinburgh. Was this strong Samson, men asked, to fall a prey at last to a Whiggish Delilah?
The malcontents of the whiggish faction, enraged to find their credit declining at court, joined in the cry which the Jacobites had raised against the government.
As far, however, as he could be said to have any opinions, his opinions were Whiggish. Since his return from exile, his influence had been generally exerted in favour of the Whig party. It was by his counsel that the Great Seal had been entrusted to Somers, that Nottingham had been sacrificed to Russell, and that Montague had been preferred to Fox.
As his authority grew in the party he discouraged the excesses in theory and speech which invited the Episcopal thunders; even in his earliest days his radicalism was of a decidedly Whiggish type and his political color was several shades milder than the fiery red of Papineau, Dorion and Laflamme.
Perhaps none of the munificent subscriptions of our own age has borne so great a proportion to the means of the nation. The King was bitterly mortified by the large amount of the collection which had been made in obedience to his own call. He knew, he said, what all this liberality meant. It was mere Whiggish spite to himself and his religion.
Word Of The Day