A History of the Four Georges, Volume IMcCarthy, Justin
History
A History of the Four Georges, Volume I
McCarthy, Justin
Great Britain -- History -- 1714-1837; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1714-1837
Lord Derwentwater and Lord Kenmure were executed on Tower Hill on the
24th of February. The young and gallant Derwentwater declared on the
scaffold that he withdrew his plea of guilty, and that he acknowledged no
one but James Stuart as his king. Kenmure, too, protested his repentance
at having, even formally, pleaded guilty, and declared that he died with
a prayer for James Stuart. Lord Wintoun was not tried until the next
month. He was a poor and feeble creature, hardly sound in his mind.
"Not perfect in his intellectuals," a writer in a journal of the day
observed of him. He was found guilty, but afterwards succeeded in making
his escape from the Tower. Like Lord Nithisdale, he made his way to the
Continent; and, like Lord Nithisdale, he died long after at Rome.
Humbler Jacobites could escape too. Forster escaped from Newgate through
the aid of a clever servant, and got off to France, while the angry Whigs
hinted at connivance on the part of persons in high places. The
redoubted Brigadier Mackintosh, who figures in descriptions of the time
as a "beetle-browed, gray-eyed" man of sixty, speaking "broad Scotch,"
succeeded in escaping, together with his son and seven others, in a rush
of prisoners from the Newgate press-yard. Mr. Charles Radcliffe had an
even stranger escape; for one day, growing tired, as well he might, of
prison life, he simply walked out of Newgate under the eyes of his
jailers, in the easy disguise of a morning suit and a brown tie-wig.
Once some Jacobite prisoners, who were being sent to the West Indian
plantations, rose against the crew, seized the ship, steered it to
France, and quietly settled down {143} there. Later still some prisoners
got out even more easily. Brigadier Mackintosh's brother was discharged
from Newgate on his own prayer, and on showing that "he was very old, and
altogether friendless."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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