Decorated bannerCHAPTERX.(1746.)
Decorated banner
betweencondemnation and execution, Drury Lane, as if London had not had enough of trials and judgments, got up a showy spectacle, in one act, partly obtained from Shakespeare’s ‘HenryV.,’ called ‘The Conspiracy Discovered, or French Policy Defeated,’ with ‘a representation of the Trial of the Lords for High Treason, in the reign of HenryV.’ This was first acted on the 5th of August. But the populace knew where to find a ‘spectacle, gratis.’
Gazing at the heads above Temple Bar became a pastime. Pickpockets circulated among the well-dressed crowd, reaping rich harvest; but, when detected, they were dragged down to the adjacent river, and mercilessly ‘ducked,’ which was barely short of being drowned. A head, called ‘Layer’s,’ had been there for nearly a quarter of a century. An amiable creature, in a letter to a newspaper, thus refers to it, in connection with those recently spiked there:—‘Thursday, August 7.—Councillor Layer’s head on Temple Bar appears to be making a reverend Bow to the heads ofTowneley and Fletcher, supposing they are come to relieve him after his long Look-out, but as he is under a mistake, I think it would be proper to put him to Rights again, which may be done by your means.—An Abhorrer of Rebellion.’
THE DUKE AT VAUXHALL.
About this time Walpole offers, with questionable alacrity, evidence against the character of the Duke of Cumberland. The duke had fixed an evening for giving a ball at Vauxhall, in honour of a not too reputable Peggy Banks. The evening proved to be that of the day on which the lords were condemned to death, the 1st of August. The duke immediately postponed the ball, but Walpole says he was ‘persuadedto defer it, as it would have looked like an insult to the prisoners.’ After all, the unseemly festivity was only deferred from the 1st of August to the 4th; and Walpole was one of the company. He saw the royalties embark at Whitehall Stairs, heard the National Anthem played and sung on board state city-barges; and saw the duke nearly suffocated by the crowds that greeted him on his landing at Vauxhall. He was got safely ashore, not being helped by the awkward officiousness of Lord Cathcart who, a few evenings previously, at the same place, stepping on the side of the boat to lend his arm to the duke, upset it; and the conqueror at Culloden and my lord were soused into the Thames up to their chins.
OPINION IN THE CITY.
In another letter Walpole declares that the king was inclined to be merciful to the condemned Jacobites, ‘but the Duke, who has not so much of Cæsar after avictory as in gaining it, is for the utmost severity.’ Walpole adds the familiar incident: ‘It was lately proposed in the city to present him with the freedom of some company;’ one of the aldermen said aloud: ‘Then let it be ofthe Butchers!’ If this alderman ever said so, he represented the minority among citizens. ‘Popularity,’ writes Walpole (August 12th, 1746), ‘has changed sides since the year ’15, fornow, the city and the generality are very angry that so many rebels have been pardoned. Some of those taken at Carlisle dispersed papers at their execution, saying they forgave all men but three, the Elector of Hanover, thepretendedDuke of Cumberland, and the Duke of Richmond, who signed the capitulation of Carlisle.’ This bravado in the North was not calculated to inspire mercy in the members of the administration (who were the real arbiters of doom) in London.
IN THE TOWER.
People of fashion went to the Tower to see the prisoners as persons of lower ‘quality’ went there to see the lions. Within the Tower, the spectator was lucky who, like Walpole, in August, ‘saw Murray, Lord Derwentwater (Charles Radcliffe), Lord Traquair, Lord Cromartie and his son, and the Lord Provost, at their respective windows.’ The two lords already condemned to death were in dismal towers; and one of Lord Balmerino’s windows was stopped up, ‘because he talked to the populace, and now he has only one which looks directly upon all the scaffolding.’ Lady Townshend, who had fallen in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at the first sight of ‘his falling shoulders,’ whenhe appeared to plead at the bar of the Lords, was to be seen under his window in the Tower. ‘She sends messages to him, has got his dog and his snuff-box, has taken lodgings out of town for to-morrow and Monday night; and then goes to Greenwich; foreswears conversing with the bloody English, and has taken a French master. She insisted on Lord Hervey’s promising her he would not sleep a whole night for Lord Kilmarnock! And, in return, says she, “Never trust me more if I am not as yellow as a jonquil for him!” She said gravely the other day, “Since I saw my Lord Kilmarnock, I really think no more of Sir Harry Nisbett than if there was no such man in the world.” But of all her flights, yesterday was the strongest. George Selwyn dined with her, and not thinking her affliction so serious as she pretends, talked rather jokingly of the executions. She burst into a flood of tears and rage, told him she now believed all his father and mother had said of him; and with a thousand other reproaches, flung upstairs. George coolly took Mrs. Dorcas, her woman, and made her sit down to finish the bottle. “And pray, Sir,” said Dorcas, “do you think my mistress will be prevailed upon to let me go see the execution? I have a friend that has promised to take care of me, and I can lie in the Tower the night before.”—My lady has quarrelled with Sir Charles Windham, for calling the two lords, malefactors. The idea seems to be general, for ’tis said, Lord Cromartie is to be transported, which diverts me for the dignity of the peerage. The Ministry really gave it asa reason against their casting lots for pardon, that it was below their dignity.’ Walpole, who has thus pictured one part of London, in 1746, says, in a subsequent letter,—‘My Lady Townshend, who fell in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at his trial, will go nowhere to dinner, for fear of meeting with a rebel-pie. She says, everybody is so bloody-minded that they eat rebels.’
LORD CROMARTIE.
The Earl of Cromartie, the smallest hero of the Jacobite group, was among the most fortunate. He owed his comparative good luck to the energy of his countess who, having driven him into rebellion, moved heaven and earth to save him from the consequences. One Sunday, she obtained admission to St. James’s, and presented a petition to the king, for her husband’s pardon. The sovereign was civil, but he would not at all give her any hope. He passed on, and Lady Cromartie swooned away. On the following Wednesday, she presented herself at Leicester House, to procure the good offices of the Princess of Wales, accompanied by her four children. The princess, seeing the force and tendency of this argument, ‘made no other answer,’ says Gray, in a letter to Wharton, ‘than by bringing in her own children, and placing them by her; which, if true, is one of the prettiest things I ever heard.’ Lady Cromartie and her daughter, who was as actively engaged as her mother, prevailed in the end. Her lord was pardoned; and Walpole made this comment thereupon: ‘If wives and children become an argument for saving rebels, there will cease to be a reason against their going into rebellion.’ Walpole’sremarks are only the ebullition of a little ill-temper. Writing to Mann, in August, 1746, he says, ‘The Prince of Wales, whose intercession saved Lord Cromartie, says he did it in return for old Sir William Gordon (Lady Cromartie’s father), coming down out of his death-bed, to vote against my father in the Chippenham election. If His Royal Highness,’ adds Walpole, ‘had not countenanced inveteracy, like that of Sir Gordon, he would have no occasion to exert his gratitude now, in favour of rebels.’
LORD KILMARNOCK.
The doomed peers bore themselves like men, and awaited fate with a patience which the unpleasantly circumstantial old Governor Williamson could not disturb for more than a moment. On the Saturday before the fatal Monday, he told Lord Kilmarnock every detail of the ceremony, in which he and Balmerino were to bear such important parts. The summoning, the procession, the scaffold in sables, the whole programme was minutely dwelt upon, as if the governor took a sensual delight in torturing his captive. There was something grim in the intimation that my lord must not prolong his prayers beyond one o’clock, as the warrant expired at that hour; and, of course, he could not lose his head, that day, if he was unreasonably long in his orisons. There was not much, moreover, of comforting in the assurance that the block, which had been raised to the height of two feet, to make it comfortable for Lord Kenmure, had been so steadied, that Lord Kilmarnock need not fear any unpleasantness from its shaking. They talked of the heads and the bodies asif they belonged to historical personages. ‘The executioner,’ said the governor, ‘is a good sort of man.’ Kilmarnock thought his moral character might make him weak of purpose and performance. My lord hoped his head would not be allowed to roll about the scaffold. The governor satisfied him on that point; but, he added, ‘it will be held up and proclaimed as the head of a traitor.’ ‘It is a thing of no significance,’ said the earl, ‘and does not affect me at all.’—The governor then visited Lord Balmerino, whose wife, ‘my Peggy,’ was with him. At an allusion to the fatal day, the poor lady swooned. ‘Damn you!’ said the old lord, ‘you’ve made my lady faint away.’
ON TOWER HILL.
The details of the last scene on Tower Hill are better known than those of any similar circumstances. It was nobly said by Balmerino, when he met Kilmarnock, on their setting out, ‘My Lord, I greatly regret to have you with me onthisexpedition.’ Careful of the honour of his prince, he questioned Kilmarnock on the alleged issue of the order to give no quarter to the English, at Culloden. Lord Kilmarnock believed that the order was in the hands of the Duke of Cumberland, signed only by Lord George Murray. ‘Then, let Murray,’ said Balmerino, ‘and not the Prince, bear the blame.’ He exhorted Kilmarnock, who preceded him to the scaffold, ‘not to wince;’ and, when he himself appeared there, he prayed for King James, requested that his head might not be exposed, and that he might be buried in the grave where lay the Marquis of Tullebardine. These requests were granted.
THE EXECUTIONS.
The sight-seers were disappointed in one respect. The papers had announced that Lord Balmerino had bespoken a flannel waistcoat, drawers, and night-gown, in which he had resolved to make his appearance on the scaffold. But he came in his old uniform, and had nothing eccentric about him. The newspapers compared the two sufferers much to Balmerino’s disadvantage. ‘Lord Kilmarnock’s behaviour,’ says the ‘General Advertiser,’ ‘was so much the Christian and gentleman that it drew tears from thousands of spectators.’ Then, remarking that ‘the executioner was obliged to shift himself by reason of the quantity of blood that flew over him,’ the ‘Advertiser’ announces that, ‘Balmerino died with the utmost resolution and courage, and seemed not the least concerned; nor even the generality of spectators for him.’
A sympathising Jacobite lady honoured Balmerino with the followingepitaph:—
Here lies the man to Scotland ever dear,Whose honest heart ne’er felt a guilty fear.
Here lies the man to Scotland ever dear,Whose honest heart ne’er felt a guilty fear.
Here lies the man to Scotland ever dear,
Whose honest heart ne’er felt a guilty fear.
A much more remarkable, and altogether uncomplimentary, effusion was to be found in verses addressed ‘to the pretended Duke of Cumberland, on the execution of the Earl of Kilmarnock, who basely sued for life by owning the usurper’s power, whereby he became a traitor, and, though apprehended and condemned for a loyalist, died arebel:—
The only rebel thou hast justly slainWas base Kilmarnock, &c.
The only rebel thou hast justly slainWas base Kilmarnock, &c.
The only rebel thou hast justly slain
Was base Kilmarnock, &c.
But this censure sprang from the fact of Kilmarnock’s declaration that Charles Edward had no religious principle at all, and that he was prompt to profess membership with every community where a shadow of advantage was to be derived from the profession.
There remained two other rebels of quality who were destined to afford another savage holiday to the metropolis.
CHARLES RADCLIFFE.
On the 21st of November, the road from the Tower to Westminster was crowded, in spite of the weather, to see Charles Radcliffe ride, under strong military escort, to his arraignment in the Court of King’s Bench. He was the pink of courtesy on his way, but spoilt the effect by his swagger in Court. He denied that he was the person named in the indictment, asserted that he was Earl of Derwentwater; and, it is supposed, he wished to create a suspicion that he might be his elder brother, Francis. He would not address the Chief Justice as ‘my Lord,’ since he himself was not recognised as a peer. He also refused to hold up his hand, on being arraigned, though the Attorney-General appealed to him as a gentleman, and assured him there was nothing compromising in what was a mere formality. In short, Mr. Radcliffe, according to the news-writers, behaved very ‘ungentlemanly to Governor Williamson as also to Mr. Sharpe for addressing a letter to him asMr. Radcliffe. He said he despised the Court and their proceedings, and he behaved in every respect indecent and even rude and senseless. He appeared very gay, being dressed in scarlet faced inblack velvet, and gold buttons, a gold-laced waistcoat, bag wig, and hat and white feather.’
THE TRIAL.
On the above Friday, his trial was fixed for the 24th, the following Monday. On the Friday evening, Radcliffe had one more chance of escape, if he had only had friends at hand to aid him. ‘As the Guards,’ says the ‘Daily Post,’ ‘were conveying him back through Watling Street to the Tower, the coach broke down at the end of Bow Lane, and they were obliged to walk up to Cheapside before they could get another.’ This last chance was unavailable, and the captive remained chafed and restless till he was again brought, in gloomy array, on the long route from the Tower to the presence of his judges and of a jury whose mission was not to try him for any participation in the ’45 Rebellion, but to pronounce if he were the Charles Radcliffe who, when under sentence of death for high treason, in 1716, broke prison, and fled the country. Two Northumbrian witnesses, who had seen him in arms in ’15, and who had been taken to the Tower to refresh their memories, swore to his being Charles Radcliffe, by a scar on his cheek. A third witness, whose name has never transpired, but who seems to have been ‘planted’ on Radcliffe, swore that the prisoner, when drunk, had told him he was Charles Radcliffe, and that he had described the way in which he had escaped from Newgate. This witness said, he was not himself drunk at the time; but Radcliffe, who had evidently treated him to wine in the Tower, flung at him the sarcasm,—that there were people ready enough to get drunk if otherpeople would pay for it. The jury very speedily found that the prisoner was the traitor who, when under sentence of death, had escaped to the Continent. This old sentence must, therefore, now be executed. There seemed no room for mercy.MR. JUSTICE FOSTER.Mr. Justice Foster, however, made an effort to save the prisoner. The latter had pleaded that he was not the Charles Radcliffe named in the indictment. The jury had found that he was. At this point the prisoner pleaded the king’s general pardon. The other judges held that the prisoner must stand or fall by his first plea; it failed him, and execution, it was said, must follow. ‘Surely,’ remarked the benevolent Foster, ‘the Court will neverin any state of a causeaward execution upon a man who plainly appeareth to be pardoned.’ He thought that if anyone could show that Mr. Radcliffe was entitled to the benefit of the Act of Pardon, he should be heard. The Chief Justice ruled otherwise, and it was ultimately shown that as the prisoner had broken prison when under attainder, he came within certain clauses of exception in the Act—and could therefore not be benefitted by it.
The papers of the day make an almost incredible statement, namely, that Radcliffe was informed, if he himself wouldswearhe was not the person named in the indictment, he should have time to bring witnesses to support him; but he remained silent. Still, ‘he was very bold,’ is the brief journalistic comment on his hearing. It is quite clear that Charles Radcliffe did not keep his temper, and he therefore lost some dignityon the solemn occasion of his being brought up to Westminster Hall to have the day of his execution fixed. He is described, in the Malmesbury correspondence, as acting with unheard-of insolence, and apparently wishing to set the whole Government at defiance. This is the evidence of a contemporary. Lord Campbell (in the ‘Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’) says, on the contrary, that the calmness of his demeanour, added to his constancy to the Stuart cause, powerfully excited the public sympathy in his favour. Moreover, Lord Campbell does not think that the identity of the Charles Radcliffe of ’45 with him of ’15 was satisfactorily established by legal evidence, though he has no doubt as to the fact.
CONDUCT OF RADCLIFFE.
Radcliffe was condemned to die on the 8th of December. His high pitch (naturally enough, and with no disparagement to his courage) was lowered after his sentence; and he stooped to write in a humble strain to the Duke of Newcastle, for at least a reprieve. His niece, the dowager Lady Petre, presented the letter to the duke, and seconded her uncle’s prayer with extreme earnestness, as might be expected of a daughter whose father had suffered, thirty years before, the terrible death from which she wished to save that father’s brother. The duke was civil and compassionate, but would make no promise. In fact, it was resolved that the younger brother of the Earl of Derwentwater should die, lying as he did under the guilt of double rebellion. ‘If I am to die,’ said Radcliffe, splenetically, ‘Lord Morton ought to be executed atParis, on the same day.’ Morton was a gossiping tourist, who, being in Brittany, made some idle reflections on the defences of Port L’Orient in a private letter, which the French postal authorities took the liberty to open. This brought the writer into some difficulty in France, but as no harm was meant, Lord Morton suffered none.
TO KENNINGTON COMMON.
The ever-to-be-amused public were not left without diversity of grim entertainment between the condemnation of Radcliffe and the execution of his sentence. On Friday, November 28th, there was the strangling (with the other repulsive atrocities), of five political prisoners, on Kennington Common, in the morning, and the revival of a play (which had years before been condemned because of the political opinions of the author), in the evening. In the morning, two sledges stood ready for the dragging of eight prisoners from the New Prison, Southwark, to the gallows, disembowelling block, and fire, on the Common. This was not an unfrequent spectacle; and on this occasion, as on others, there was, without cowardly feeling, a certain dilatoriness on the part of the patients, who never knew what five minutes might not bring forth. Sir John Wedderburn, indeed, went into the foremost sledge, with calm readiness, and Governor (of Carlisle) Hamilton stept in beside him. Captain Bradshaw stood apart, hoping not to be called upon. There was a little stir at the gate which attracted feverish attention on the part of the patients.—‘Is there any news for me?’ asked Bradshaw, nervously. ‘Yes,’ replied afrank official, ‘the Sheriff is come and waits for you!’ Bradshaw had hoped for a reprieve; but hope quenched, the poor fellow said he was ready. Another Manchester Captain, Leath, was equally ready but was not inclined to put himself forward. Captain Wood, after the halter was loosely hung for him around his neck, called for wine, which was supplied with alacrity by the prison drawers. When it was served round, the captain drank to the health of the rightful king, JamesIII.Most lucky audacity was this for Lindsay, a fellow officer from Manchester, bound for Kennington. While the wine was being drunk, Lindsay was ‘haltering,’ as the reporters called it. He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was being courteously invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved his life. Two other doomed rebels, for whom that day was to be their last, had been reprieved earlier in the morning, and that was why the puzzled spectators, on the way or at the place of sacrifice, were put off with five judicial murders when they had promised themselves eight.
CIBBER’S ‘REFUSAL.’
In the evening, the play which was to tempt the town was a revival of Cibber’s ‘Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It had not been acted for a quarter of a century (1721), when it had failed through the opposition of the Jacobites, who damned the comedy, by way of revenge for the satire which Cibber had heaped on the Nonjurors.Now, the play went triumphantly. No one dared,—when the hangman was breathless with over-work, and the headsman was looking to theedge of his axe, for the ultimate disposal of Jacobites,—to openly avow himself of a way of thinking which, put into action, sent men to the block or the gallows. All that could be done in a hostile spirit was done, nevertheless. The Jacks accused Cibber of having stolen his plot from predecessors equally felonious; but they could not deny that the play was a good play; and they asserted, in order to annoy the Whig adaptor, that theWitlingof Theophilus Cibber was a finer touch of art than that of his father in the same part.
EXECUTION OF RADCLIFFE.
On the 8th of December, Charles Radcliffe closed the bloody tragedies of the year, with his own. He came from the Tower like a man purified in spirit, prepared to meet the inevitable with dignity. They who had denied his right to call himself a peer, allowed him to die by the method practised with offenders of such high quality. The only bit of bathos in the scene on the scaffold was when the poor gentleman knelt by the side of the block, to pray. Two warders approached him, who took off his wig, and then covered his head with a white skull cap. His head was struck off at a blow, except, say the detail-loving newspapers, ‘a bit of skin which was cut through in two chops.’ The individual most to be pitied on that December morning was Radcliffe’s young son, prisoner in the Tower, who was still believed by many to be the brother of the young Chevalier.
There was another prisoner there whose life was in peril; namely Simon, Lord Lovat. The progress up to London of Lovat and of the witnesses to be producedagainst him was regularly reported. There was one of the latter who hardly knew whether he was to be traitor or witness, Mr. Murray of Boughton. The following describes how he appeared on his arrival at Newcastle, and is a sample of similar bulletins. ‘July 17th. On Thursday Afternoon, arrived here in a Coach under the Care of Lieutenant Colonel Cockayne, escorted by a Party of Dragoons, John Murray, Esq., of Boughton, the Pretenders Secretary, and yesterday Morning he proceeded to London. He seem’d exceedingly dejected and looked very pale.’
LOVAT’S PROGRESS.
The London papers sketched in similar light touches the progress of Lovat. In or on the same carriage in which he sat were other Frasers, his servants or retainers who, as he knew, were about to testify against him, and whose company rendered him extremely irritable. The whole were under cavalry escort, travelling to London, only by day. On the morning Lovat left his inn at Northampton, the landlady was not there to bid him farewell. The old gallant enquired for her. He was told that she was unavoidably absent. ‘I have kissed,’ said he, ‘every one of my hostesses throughout the journey; and am sorry to miss my Northampton landlady. No matter! I will salute her on my way back!’ On Lovat’s arrival at St. Albans, Hogarth left London, for what purpose is explained in part of the following advertisement, which appears in the papers under the date of Thursday, August 28th. ‘This day is published, price one shilling, a whole length print of Simon Lord Lovat, drawn from the life and etch’d in Aqua fortis, byMr. Hogarth. To be had at the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields, and at the Print shops. Where also may be had a Print of Mr. Garrick in the character of RichardIII., in the first scene, price 7s.6d.’
HOGARTH’S PORTRAIT OF LOVAT.
On the day on which the above advertisement appeared, the Rev. Mr. Harris enclosed one of the sketches of Lovat in a letter to Mrs. Harris, written in Grosvenor Square, in which he says:—‘Pray excuse my sending you such a very grotesque figure as the enclosed. It is really an exact resemblance of the person it was done for—Lord Lovat—as those who are well acquainted with him assure me; and, as you see, it is neatly enough etched. Hogarth took the pains to go to St. Albans, the evening that Lord Lovat came thither in his way from Scotland to the Tower, on purpose to get a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up; and this he obtained with a greater ease than could well be expected; for, in sending in his name and the errand he came about, the old lord, far from displeased, immediately had him in, gave him a salute and made him sit down and sup with him, and talked a good deal very facetiously, so that Hogarth had all the leisure and opportunity he could possibly wish to have, to take off his features and countenance. The portrait you have may be considered as an original. The old lord is represented in the very attitude he was in while telling Hogarth and the company some of his adventures.’
ARRIVAL AT THE TOWER.
The old roystering Lovelace who kissed his hostesses on his way up, and talked of saluting them onhis way back, was so infirm that to descend from his carriage he leaned heavily on the shoulders of two stout men, who put their arms round his back to keep him from falling. As he crossed Tower Hill he came suddenly on the partly dismantled scaffold on which the two lords had recently suffered; and he was heard to mutter something as to his perception of the way it was intended he should go. But, on being lifted from the carriage, he said to the lieutenant, ‘If I were younger and stronger, you would find it difficult to keep me here.’—‘We have kept much younger men here,’ was the reply. ‘Yes,’ rejoined Lovat, ‘but they were inexperienced; they had not broke so many gaols as I have.’ The first news circulated in London after Murray, the Chevalier’s ex-secretary, had passed into the same prison, was that he had given information where a box of papers, belonging to the Pretender, was buried, near Inverness. A couple of king’s messengers riding briskly towards the great North Road were taken to be those charged with unearthing the important deposit.
Of the two prisoners,—one was eager to save his life by giving all the information required of him. The other, equally eager, pleaded his innocence, his age, and his debility; but apart from declaring that he was a loyal subject, and that he willingly had no share in the rebellion, although his son had, he remained obstinately mute to all questioning, or he answered the grave queries with senile banter.
REBELS AND WITNESSES.
Murray yielded at the first pressure. As early as July, Walpole speaks of him as having made ‘ampleconfessions, which led to the arrest of the Earl of Traquair and Dr. Barry; and to the issuing of warrants for the apprehension of other persons whom Murray’s information had put in peril. Walpole believed that the Ministry had little trustworthy knowledge of the springs and conduct of the rebellion, till Murray sat down in the Tower and furnished them with genuine intelligence.
While he and Lord Lovat were travelling slowly by land to the Tower, traitors were coming up, by sea, to depose against him, or any other, by whose conviction they might purchase safety. The ‘General Advertiser’ announced the arrival in London (from a ship in the river) of six and twenty ‘Scotch rebels,’ who were conducted to the Plaisterer’s Corner, St. Margaret’s Lane, Westminster, where they were kept under a strong military guard. ‘They are brought up,’ says the above paper, ‘as evidences for the king. Several of them are young. Some have plaids on; others in waistcoats and bonnets, and upon the whole make a most despicable and wretched figure.’ Meanwhile Lovat struggled hard for the life he affected to despise, and which he tried to persuade his accusers was not worth the taking. He kept them at bay, for months, by his pleas; and he vehemently declared his innocence of every one of the seven heads of accusation brought against him,—of every one of which he was certainly guilty. Towards the close of December, he was arraigned at the bar of the House of Lords. There is no better condensation of what took place than thatfurnished by Walpole, on Christmas Day, 1746:—‘Old Lovat has been brought to the bar of the House of Lords. He is far from having those abilities for which he has been so cried up. He saw Mr. Pelham at a distance, and called to him, and asked him, if it were worth while to make all this fuss to take off a grey head fourscore years old. He complained of his estate being seized and kept from him. Lord Granville took up this complaint very strongly, and insisted on having it enquired into. Lord Bath went farther and, as some people think, intended the duke; but I believe he only aimed at the Duke of Newcastle.... They made a rule to order the old creature the profits of his estate till his conviction. He is to put in his answer on the 13th of January.’
TILBURY FORT.
In the meantime, the papers reported that there were nearly four hundred Scottish rebels cooped up in Tilbury Fort. Watermen’s arms were weary with rowing boats full of Londoners down to the fort, to visit the wretched captives, or to stare at the fort which held them in. Most of them were transported to the Plantations. There was a sanguinary feeling against all such offenders. The last words in the ‘General Advertiser’ for December 31st, 1746, are contained in the two concluding lines of a poem, signed ‘Williamite,’ and which are to the following charitableeffect:—
A righteous God, with awful hands,In justice, Blood for Blood demands.
A righteous God, with awful hands,In justice, Blood for Blood demands.
A righteous God, with awful hands,
In justice, Blood for Blood demands.
At the same time a print was selling which represented‘Temple Bar, the City Golgotha,’ with three heads on the spikes,—allegorical devils, rebel flags, &c.,—and more ‘blood for blood’ doggrel intimating that the naughty sons of Britain might there see ‘what is rebellion’s due.’
FRENCH IDEA.
The idea of altogether sacrificing Charles Edward was as distasteful to his numberless friends in France, as it was to the English Jacobites. One of the most singular of the French suggestions for a definite arrangement was made to this effect, in some of the French papers, namely:—that GeorgeII.should withdraw to his electorate of Hanover, taking his eldest son and heir with him; renouncing the English crown for himself and successors, of the elder line, for ever;—that the Chevalier de St. George should remain as he was;—that the Prince Charles Edward should be made King of Scotland and Ireland;—and that the Duke of Cumberland should, as King of England, reign in London. It was a thoroughly French idea,—making a partition of the United Kingdom, and establishing the duke in the metropolis to reign over a powerless fragment of it,—a Roi de Cocagne! Both political parties laughed at it in their several houses of entertainment.
The Prince of Wales, himself, was something of a Jacobite; but he was a Jacobite for no other reason, probably, than because his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, had crushed the Jacobite cause. It is due to the Prince, however, to notice that he once solemnly expressed his sympathy when the Princess, his wife, had just mentioned, ‘with some appearance of censure,’the conduct of Lady Margaret Macdonald, who harboured and concealed Prince Charles when, in the extremity of peril, he threw himself on her protection. ‘And would not you, Madam,’ enquired Prince Frederick, ‘have done the same, in the same circumstances? I am sure,—I hope in God,—you would.’ Hogg relates this incident in the introduction to his ‘Jacobite Relics,’ and it does honour to the prince, himself,—who used at least to profess fraternal affection, if not political sympathy, by standing at an open window at St. James’s overlooking the Park, with his arm round the Duke of Cumberland’s neck.
A LONDON ELECTOR’S WIT.
Frederick, however, was not a jot more acceptable to the Jacobites, because he was on bad terms with the king, and that he refrained from paying any other compliment than the above-named one to the Duke of Cumberland, on his victory at Culloden. The prince invariably came off, more or less hurt, whenever he engaged personally in politics. When his sedan-chair maker refused to vote for the prince’s friend, Lord Trentham, a messenger from his royal highness’s household looked in upon the elector, and bluntly said, ‘I am going to bid another person make his royal highness a chair!’ ‘With all my heart!’ replied the chair maker, ‘I don’t care what they make him, so they don’t make him a throne!’ Again, on that day which all Tories kept as an anniversary of crime and sorrow, the 30th of January,—‘the martyrdom of King Charles,’ the prince entered a room where his sister Amelia was being tended by her waiting woman, Miss Russell, whowas a great grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell. Frederick said to this lady, sportively, ‘Shame, Miss Russell, why have you not been to Church, humbling yourself, for the sins on this day committed by your ancestors?’ To which she replied, ‘Sir: I am a descendant of the great Oliver Cromwell. It is humiliation sufficient to be employed, as I am, in pinning up your sister’s tail!’
TRIAL OF LOVAT.
During the early months of 1747, the Londoners waited with impatience for the trial of Lord Lovat. The old rebel had exhausted every means of delay. The time of trial came at last. On the 9th of March, Lovat was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall. An immense crowd lined the whole way, and the people were the reverse of sympathetic. One woman looked into his coach, and said: ‘You ugly old dog, don’t you think you will have that frightful head cut off?’ He replied, ‘You ugly old ——, I believe I shall!’ Lovat was carried through the hall in a sedan-chair, and to a private room, in men’s arms. Mr. Thomas Harris, writing of the trial next day, from Lincoln’s Inn, says:—‘It was the largest and finest assembly I ever saw: the House of Commons on one side; ladies of quality on the other, and inferior spectators without number, at both ends.’—After much pantomimic ceremony on the part of officials, Lovat, having been brought in, knelt (as he is described to have done on each of the nine days of the trial). On each occasion Lord Hardwicke solemnly said to him, ‘My Lord Lovat, your Lordship may rise.’ On the opening day, the prosecuting managers of the impeachmentsent up by the Commons, ‘went at him,’ at dreary, merciless, length. After them, the prosecuting counsel opened savagely upon him, especially Murray, the Solicitor-General, whose chief witness was his own Jacobite brother, and who was himself suspected of having drunk the Pretender’s health on his knees. Lovat lost no opportunity of saving his life.SCENE IN WESTMINSTER HALL.He pitifully alluded to his having to rise by 4 o’clock, in order to be at Westminster by 9. He spoke of his frequent fainting fits; he often asked leave to retire, and, in short, he so exasperated the Lord High Steward as to make that official grow peevish, and to wrathfully advise Lord Lovat to keephistemper. When the Attorney-General called his first witness, Chevis of Murtoun, the lawyer described him, with solemn facetiousness, as being as near a neighbour as man could be to Lovat, but as far apart from him as was possible in thought and action. Lovat protested against the legal competency of the witness, he being Lovat’s tenant and vassal. Hours were spent over this objection, and the old lord wearied the clerk, whom he called upon to read ancient Acts of Parliament, from beginning to end. The protest was disallowed; and the witness having been asked if he owed Lovat money, and if a verdict of guilty might help him not to pay it, emphatically declared that he owed Lovat nothing. He then went into a long array of evidence, sufficient to have beheaded Lovat many times over, as a traitor to the reigning family, and indeed no faithful servant of the family desiring to reign. The traitor himself laughed whenthis witness quoted a ballad in English, which Lovat had composed, ‘inErse’:—
When young Charley does come over,There will be blows and blood good store.
When young Charley does come over,There will be blows and blood good store.
When young Charley does come over,
There will be blows and blood good store.
‘When,’ said the witness, ‘I refused a commission offered me by the Pretender, Lord Lovat told me I was guilty of High Treason.’ Further, Lovat had drunk ‘Confusion to the White Horse and the whole generation of them;’ and had cursed both the Reformation and the Revolution. Lovat retorted by showing that this not disinterested witness was a loyal man living at the expense of Government. ‘He is trying to hang an old man to save himself,’ said Lovat. This was warmly denied, but Lovat was right in the implication.
FATHER AND SON.
Lovat’s secretary, Fraser, was a dangerous witness. He proved that, by Lord Lovat’s order, he, the secretary, wrote to Lord Loudon (in the service of GeorgeII.) informing him that he was unable to keep his son out of the rebellion, and another letter to the Pretender that, though unable to go himself to help to restore the Stuarts, he had sent his eldest son to their standard. It was shown that the son was disgusted at his father’s double-dealing, and only yielded to him at last (in joining the army of Charles Edward), on the ground that he was bound to obey his sire and the chief of the clan Fraser. Undoubtedly, the attempt to save himself by the sacrificing of his son, was the blackest spot in Lovat’s mean, black, and cruel character. According to Walpole, ‘he told’ Williamson, the Lieutenant ofthe Tower, ‘We will hang my eldest son and then my second shall marry your niece!’
THE FRASERS.
Fraser after Fraser gave adverse evidence. Lovat maintained that they werecompelledto speak against him. One of them confessed, with much simplicity, that he lived and boarded at a messenger’s house; but that he had no orders to say what he had said. ‘I am free: I walk in the Park or about Kensington; I go at night to take a glass,’—but he allowed that the messenger went with him. One or two witnesses had very short memories, or said what they could for their feudal superior. Another, Walker, spoke to the anger of Lovat’s son, on being driven into rebellion. ‘The Master of Lovat took his bonnet and threw it on the floor. He threw the white cockade on the fire, and damned the cockade, &c.’ Lord Lovat, on the other hand, had sworn he would seize the cattle and plaids of all the Frasers who refused to rise, and would burn their houses. One of these adverse Frasers, being hard pressed by Lovat, allowed that he expected to escape punishment, for his evidence, but that he had not been promised a pardon. ‘If,’ said he, ‘I give evidence, in any case it should be the truth; and,’ he added, with a composure so comic that it might well have disturbed the august solemnity, ‘if the truth were such as I should not care to disclose, I would declare positively I would give no evidence at all.’ Another witness, a Lieutenant Campbell, in the king’s service, but who had been a prisoner in the power of the Jacobites, being questioned as to a conversation he had had with Lovat,made the amusingly illogical remark, ‘As I did not expect to be called as a witness, so I do not remember what passed on that occasion.’ The lieutenant did, however, recollect one thing, namely, that Lovat had said that his son had gone into the rebellion, but that he himself was a very loyal person. A second officer, Sir Everard Falconer, secretary to the Duke of Cumberland (and very recently married to Miss Churchill, daughter of the old general), stated that he had been sent by the duke to converse with Lovat, and he repeated the loyal assertions that the prisoner had made. ‘Will your Lordship put any question to Sir Everard?’ asked the Lord High Steward, of Lovat. ‘I have only,’ replied Lovat, ‘to wish him joy of his young wife.’
MURRAY OF BOUGHTON.
The most important witness of all was, of course, Mr. Murray, of Boughton, late secretary to the young Chevalier, and, only a day or two before, a prisoner in the King’s Bench, from which he had been discharged. In the course of his answers, Murray said he had been ‘directed’ to give a narrative of the springs and progress of the late rebellion,—when he came to be examined at the Bar of the High Court of Justice, where he was then standing. ‘Directed?’ exclaimed the Earl of Cholmondely, ‘whodirectedyou?’ The Lord High Steward and the Earl of Chesterfield protested they had not heard the word ‘directed’ used by the witness. There was a wish to have the matter cleared up, and Murray then said, ‘Some days after my examination in the Tower, by the honourable Committee of the House of Commons, a gentleman, who, I believe wastheir secretary, came to me to take a further examination; and to ask me as to any other matter that had occurred since my last examination. Some days after that, he told me I should be called here before your Lordships, upon the trial of my Lord Lovat, and that at the same time, it would beexpectedthat I should give an account of the rise and progress of the Rebellion in general.’
MURRAY’S EVIDENCE.
The above shows pretty clearly how the weak natures of prisoners in the Tower were dealt with, in order to get evidence by which they would destroy at once the life of a confederate and their own honour. Murray did what he was ‘directed’ or ‘expected’ to do, without passion but with some sense of pain and shame. The whole rise and course of the insurrection may be found in his testimony; he was prepared for the questions, equally so with the answers he gave to them; and his evidence is of importance for a proper understanding of the outbreak. Some merit was made of his ‘voluntary surrender,’ but Lord Talbot, quite in Lovat’s interest, roughly asked if Murray had really intended to surrender himself at the time he became a prisoner to the Royal forces. The poor man truthfully answered that ‘it was not then my intention particularly to surrender myself’;—adding, ‘it was not my intention till I saw the dragoons;’—but that he had never since attempted to escape.—‘Have you ever taken the Oaths of Allegiance and Fidelity to the King?’ asked Lord Talbot. He never had. ‘Did you ever take such Oaths to anybody else?’CROSS EXAMINATION.Murray let dropa murmured ‘No’; and then Sir William Yonge, one of the Managers for the Commons, came to his help, with the expression of a hope that the king’s witness should not be obliged to answer questions that tended to accuse himself of High Treason. To which Lord Talbot replied that the gentleman had already confessed himself guilty of that crime. Lord Talbot then asked Murray if he was a voluntary evidence. Murray requested him to explain what he meant by those two words. ‘Are you here?’ said Talbot, ‘in hopes of a pardon? And if you had been pardoned, would you now be here as a witness at all?’ The Attorney-General came to the rescue. It was an improper question, he said, resting upon the supposition of a fact which had not happened. Lord Talbot insisted: he asked Murray, ‘Do you believe your life depends upon the conformity of the evidence you shall give on this trial, with former examinations which you have undergone?’ There was a fight over this matter, but a lull came in the fray, and then Murray spoke with a certain dignity, and said: ‘I am upon my oath and obliged to tell the truth; and I say that possibly and very probably, had I been in another situation of life, I should not have appeared before your Lordships as a witness against the noble Lord at the Bar.’ There was a touch of mournful sarcasm in Murray’s truthful answer, which escaped Lord Talbot, for he remarked: ‘I am extremely well satisfied with the gentleman’s answer; and it gives me a much better opinion of his evidence than I had before.’