The French embassy made as magnificent an appearance in England as the English embassy had made in France. The mansion of the Duke of Ormond, one of the finest houses in Saint James's Square, was taken for Tallard. On the day of the public entry, all the streets from Tower Hill to Pall Mall were crowded with gazers who admired the painting and gilding of his Excellency's carriages, the surpassing beauty of his horses, and the multitude of his running footmen, dressed in gorgeous liveries of scarlet and gold lace. The Ambassador was graciously received at Kensington, and was invited to accompany William to Newmarket, where the largest and most splendid Spring Meeting ever known was about to assemble. The attraction must be supposed to have been great: for the risks of the journey were not trifling. The peace had, all over Europe, and nowhere more than in England, turned crowds of old soldiers into marauders.[1] Several aristocratical equipages had been attacked even in Hyde Park. Every newspaper contained stories of travellers stripped, bound and flung into ditches. One day the Bristol mail was robbed; another day the Dover coach; then the Norwich waggon. On Hounslow Heath a company of horsemen, with masks on their faces, waited for the great people who had been to pay their court to the King at Windsor. Lord Ossulston escaped with the loss of two horses. The Duke of Saint Albans, with the help of his servants, beat off the assailants. His brother the Duke of Northumberland, less strongly guarded, fell into their hands. They succeeded in stopping thirty or forty coaches, and rode off with a great booty in guineas, watches and jewellery. Nowhere, however, does the peril seem to have been so great as on the Newmarket road. There indeed robbery was organised on a scale unparalleled in the kingdom since the days of Robin Hood and Little John. A
- ↑ George Psalmanazar's account of the state of the south of France at this time is curious. On the high road near Lyons he frequently passed corpsese fastened to posts. "These," he says, "were the bodies of highwaymen, or rather of soldiers, sailors, mariners, and even galley slaves, disbanded after the peace of Reswick, who, having neither home nor occupation, used to infest the road in troops, plunder towns and villages, and, when taken, were hanged at the county town by the dozens, or even scores sometimes, after which their bodies were thus exposed along the highway in terrorem."
