It is interesting what comes to me through my google news search feature - like
this
To have a Catholic and Jacobite wife on his arm might have been a social embarrassment once Stubbs moved to London, but such a woman would surely be the key to his circle of friends during his five or six years' residence in York. With a single exception, all the individuals who can now be marked down as his associates in the city were either Jacobites or members of York's small and embattled papist community. The most significant of these was Dr John Burton, a highly politicised man-midwife, who commissioned Stubbs to etch the anatomical illustrations in his book Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery . Burton himself had narrowly escaped the gallows after making contact with the Pretender during the 1745 rebellion, and would later become a pivotal character in Laurence Sterne's Yorkshire epic Tristram Shandy , in which he was cast as the bungling medic Dr Slop.
