Accession of George I—Impeachment of Harley—The Rebellion of 1715—Execution of Lords Derwentwater and Kenmuir—Escape of Nithisdale—Plots of Atterbury and others in 1722—Imprisonment of Lord Macclesfield—The “45”—Execution of Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, Charles Retcliff, and Lord Lovat—Imprisonment and Trial of Wilkes and his Friends on the Charge of Treason—of Alderman Oliver and Lord Mayor Crosby for alleged Condonation of Misdemeanour—of Horne Tooke and his Companions for Treason—of Sir Francis Burdett for Breach of Privilege—Of the Cato Street Conspirators—The Fire of 1841—The Fenian Conspiracy of 1885—Conclusion.

The accession of George I was at once marked by the ascendency of the Whigs, and they lost no time in showing this. Robert Harley, whom Queen Anne had made Earl of Oxford, and who had been a favourite minister of the nation, was impeached on the charge that during the French wars, in his hatred of the Duke of Marlborough, he had instructed the French king as to the best method of capturing Tournai. On June 10, 1715, the House of Commons, of which but a short time before he had been the idol, sent him to the Tower, where he languished for two years, never losing confidence. His continual petition to be tried was at last conceded, and he was acquitted in July, 1717.

But there was an influential party among the high Tories who were unmistakably anxious to restore the Stuarts, and even the Duke of Marlborough, who all his life through had a passion for intrigue, finding that he was not trusted by King George, seems to have entered into negotiations with the Pretender, “the Chevalier de St. George,” who in August, 1715, published from France a manifesto, asserting his right to the throne. When the Whig Government impeached Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond for complicity, they fled to France. But the rising incapable man; and though he was joined by other nobles in the North, and might have won most dangerous successes, he shrank before the Duke of Argyll, who had been sent by the king to oppose him. The result was the rebellion of 1715 and its failure. The most conspicuous character in this ill-starred attempt was James Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater, a young man of twenty-six who deserved a better fate, for all accounts describe him as singularly attractive and winning in person and manner. He was the only Englishman of note who joined the enterprize. His mother, Mary Tudor, was a natural daughter of Charles II, who brought him up as a Roman Catholic. He was very rich for those days. His home, from which he took his title, was an island in the most beautiful of English lakes, and his income from mines was nearly £40,000 a year. With him were six Scotch nobles, William Maxwell, Earl of Nithisdale; Robert Dalzell, Earl of Carnwarth; William Gordon, Lord Kenmure, brother-in-law of Carnwarth; George Seton, fifth Earl of Wintoun; William, Lord Nairn; and William, fourth Lord Widdrington. They were brought up to London tightly bound on horseback, and paraded through the streets to the prison. Much interest was made for them in Parliament, and a vote of petition for pardon was carried in the House of Lords. They were tried in February, 1716, and condemned. Wintoun was the only one who refused to plead guilty, but was convicted and sentenced. Next year Widdrington, Carnwarth and Nairn were pardoned, the others were left for death. So greatly was Derwentwater loved in his own home that it is said the peasantry drove his wife out of it because, as they alleged, she had driven him to rebel and so deprived them of a generous landlord. But when the crowds assembled on Tower Hill, they found, to their great amazement, that there were only three victims. For Lord Nithisdale had escaped the night before. His young wife had travelled up, through the winter snow, all the way from their home in Dumfriesshire to beg forgiveness for him. Failing in this, she formed her plans with great skill, and has left the narrative, which reads like an entrancing romance—the taking into the condemned cell a friend to whom she had confided her method as they walked along the street, the double dress which she persuaded the friend to put on at entrance, enduing the prisoner with the outer dress, and so deceiving the sentinels. They got away safely, hid for a few days in London, and then he went away to Rome, disguised as one of the footmen of the Venetian ambassador. Not content with this feat, she resolved to petition for the restoration of the estates, and made her way into St. James’s Palace, and into the king’s presence. He would have gone out without answering her, but she writes, “I caught hold of the skirt of his coat that he might stop and hear me. He endeavoured to escape out of my hands, but I kept such strong hold that he dragged me on my knees from the middle of the room to the very door. At last one of the Blue Ribands who attended his Majesty took me round the waist, while another wrested the coat from my hands.” They lived together at Rome till 1749, when he died, and she not long afterwards. How Wintoun escaped is not precisely known, but the probability seems to be that he bribed a warder and filed through the bars of a window.

The zeal for the house of Stuart was by no means quenched, and the failure of the South Sea project, the panic in the money market arising out of it, the downfall of great commercial houses, produced general discontent, which rekindled the hopes of the Jacobites. This time, in 1722, the movement was led by Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. Joined with him were the Duke of Norfolk, Lords North, Orrery and Grey, some commoners, and an Irish priest named Kelly. They planned to seize the Tower and the Bank, to arrest the king, and proclaim King James. But the plot became known to the regent Orleans, who was on terms of friendship with the English king, and told him of it. The conspirators were all sent to the Tower on a charge of high treason. They lay in prison for some months. Atterbury was deprived and banished the country. He died eight years later, just seventy years old, and was brought to England and buried in the abbey that he loved.

Lord Chancellor Macclesfield was imprisoned in 1724 for “venality in the discharge of his office.”

We come now to a very serious and important passage in the records of the great fortress, namely, the rebellion of “the Forty-five.” The Scotch were, as we have seen, largely in sympathy with the exiled family. In 1743 a Highland regiment, distinguished for its good order and discipline, mutinied on being ordered to Flanders. They declared that they had received a promise that they should not be sent abroad where they would very likely be brought into warfare with their Jacobite friends. A hundred and nine of them laid down their arms and marched away. Three regiments of dragoons were sent to bring them back; they were sent to the Tower; three were shot, and the others sent to the plantations. This cruel measure produced a most bitter feeling through Scotland, and rendered comparatively easy a fresh endeavour of the Stuarts to re-establish themselves. Twenty years of calm had passed when Charles Edward, “the Young Pretender,” landed in Inverness-shire in July, 1745. His adventures are nowhere better told than in Waverley. He defeated Cope at Prestonpans, marched into England as far as Derby, retreated, was crushed by the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden on April 8, 1746, and the hopes of the Stuarts were at an end for ever. He, as we know, made his escape, but the “rebel lords” who had thrown in their lot with him were brought to the Tower, which had seen no political prisoners for more than twenty years. William Boyd was fourth Earl of Kilmarnock; William Murray, Marquis of Tullibardine, son of the Duke of Atholl, had been pardoned after taking part in the “15”; he now brought a great number of Atholl men at this second rising, gave himself up after Culloden, quite worn out, though he was only fifty-eight; he died in the Tower in a few days. Arthur Elphinstone, sixth Baron Balmerino, had also been pardoned after the “15,” but joined the fresh rebellion, hid himself after Culloden, but was betrayed. There were also Charles Radcliffe, a younger brother of the Earl of Derwentwater, who had perished in 1715, and a few others of little mark. Horace Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann, gives a striking account of the trial of the three lords in Westminster Hall. Kilmarnock and Cromarty pleaded guilty, Balmerino not guilty, but he was condemned by the unanimous vote of the peers. He was evidently a man of high character; “the brave, noble old fellow,” Walpole calls him. His calmness, courage, piety in his last days, had a profound effect upon all who were with him. Cromarty was afterwards pardoned. The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1745 gives full details of the execution of the other two on Tower Hill. They died with firm courage. Radcliffe also died on the same scaffold. Somewhat later followed another execution; Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, an utterly unscrupulous political intriguer, and a man whose disreputable life reads like a bad novel. He had what was probably a unique experience, in having been a prisoner in the Bastille in 1702, on the charge of betraying a Jacobite plot to the English Government, and in the Tower for treasonable correspondence with the Pretender. While on his way from his capture in Scotland to the Tower he rested at the White Hart at St. Albans, and there fell in with Hogarth, who there and then made the portrait of him which is now in the National Portrait Gallery, and the engravings of which are so familiar to us. This engraving was made under the superintendence of the painter, and there was such a run upon it, the printing press being always at work, day and night, that for a considerable time he made £12 a day by the sale. Lovat was beheaded on April 9, 1747, and it was the last execution on Tower Hill. There were two more executions from the Tower—Earl Ferrers in 1760 for shooting his steward, and Henry Francis de la Motte, a French spy—but these were both hanged at Tyburn. Lord Ferrers would certainly in our day have been acquitted on the ground of insanity.

A few more names have to be mentioned before we close the history of the Tower as a State prison. John Wilkes, M.P. for Middlesex, was brought in on April 30, 1763, as the author of No. 45 of The North Briton, which was styled in the warrant committing him, “a most infamous and seditious libel.” After argument in the Court of Common Pleas, Chief Justice Pratt decided that the misdemeanour charged against him was “not an offence sufficient to destroy the privilege of a member of Parliament,” and he was immediately liberated (May 3). Alderman Oliver and Sir Brass Crosby, Lord Mayor, were both sent to the Tower in March, 1771, for admitting a man to bail who had, under the Speaker’s warrant, apprehended the printer of the London Evening Post for publishing the debates of the House of Commons. They justified their conduct on the ground of city privileges, and the House against them asserted its authority. They remained immured till Parliament was prorogued in the following July, and were then released; but public opinion was evidently so strong in their favour that the Commons from that time gave in. Lord George Gordon was imprisoned after the riots of 1780, was tried next year, and declared “not guilty.” At the same time the Earl of Pomfret was committed for challenging the Duke of Grafton. In 1794 John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall, Thomas Hardy and others were imprisoned on the charge of high treason. They had distributed the writings of Thomas Paine, and had gone certain lengths in favour of the “Rights of Man,” but repudiated the application of the principles of the French Revolution to England. They were “radicals” in desiring reform, yet were not in favour of general subversion. In fact, they were men who, after raising a cry, were frightened at the logical consequences of it, and settled down into quietude. Chief Justice Eyre tried them with conspicuous fairness, and they were at once pronounced “Not guilty,” to the satisfaction of the spectators.