There were other attempts, such as that of Mr. Robertson, who tried to make off in a clergyman's habit, but was discovered and stopped before he had passed one of the doors; and of Mr. Ramsay, who escaped with the crowd that came to hear the condemned sermon. Now and then there was the concerted action of a number, as when the prisoners thronged about the gates in order to make their escape. Trouble, again, was only prevented by timely warning that there was a design to convey large iron crows to the rebels, by which they might beat open the gaol and escape. The most important and about the last of the rebel escapes was that of Mr. Ratcliffe, brother of the unfortunate Lord Derwentwater. This was effected so easily, indeed, with so much cool impudence, that connivance must assuredly have been bought. Mr. Ratcliffe seized his opportunity one day when he was paying a visit to Captain Dalziel and others on the master's side. At the gate he met by previous agreement a "cane-jobber," or person who sold walking-sticks, and who had once been an inmate of Newgate himself. Mr. Ratcliffe paused for a time and bargained for a cane, after which he passed under the iron chain at the gate, and upon the cane-seller's saying that he was no prisoner, the turnkey and guard suffered Ratcliffe to get off. The author of the "History of the Press-yard" says that Mr. Ratcliffe bribed the officer, "which," as another writer adds, "must be owned to be the readiest way to turn both lock and key." Mr. Ratcliffe, thirty years later, paid the penalty to the law which he had escaped on this occasion. A warm adherent of the Pretender, he embarked from France for Scotland to take part in the Jacobite rising in 1745. The French ship was captured, and Ratcliffe sent as a prisoner to the Tower. He was presently arraigned at the bar of the King's Bench for having escaped from Newgate in 1716, when under sentence of death for high treason. Ratcliffe at first refused to plead, declaring that he was a subject of the French king, and that the court had no jurisdiction over him. Then he denied that he was the person named in the record produced in court, whereupon witnesses were called to prove that he was Charles Ratcliffe. Two Northumbrian men identified him as the leader of five hundred of the Earl of Derwentwater's men, remembering him by the scar on his face. They had been to see him in the Tower, and could swear to him; but could not swear that he was the same Charles Ratcliffe who had escaped from Newgate prison. A barber who had been appointed "close shaver" to Newgate in 1715, and who attended the prison daily to shave all the rebel prisoners, remembered Charles Ratcliffe, Esq., perfectly as the chum or companion of Basil Hamilton, a reputed nephew of the Duke of Hamilton; but this barber, when closely pressed, could not swear that the prisoner at the bar was the very same Charles Ratcliffe whom he had shaved, and who had afterwards escaped out of Newgate.