The last of the iron poles or spikes on which the heads of the unfortunate Jacobite gentlemen were fixed, was removed only at the commencement of the present century.[21] The above-named Christopher Layer was a barrister, living in Old Southampton Buildings, who had engaged in a plot to seize the Bank and the Tower, to arm the Minters in Southwark, to seize the king, Walpole, and Lord Cadogan, to place cannon on the terrace of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields gardens, and to draw a force of armed men together at the Exchange. The prisoner had received blank promissory-notes signed in the Pretender’s own hand, and also treasonable letters full of cant words of the party in disguised names--such as Mr. Atkins for the Pretender, Mrs. Barbara Smith for the army, and Mr. Fountaine for himself. It was proved that, at an audience in Rome, Layer had assured the Pretender that the South Sea losses had done good to his cause; and the Pretender and the Pretender’s wife (through their proxies, Lord North and Grey, and the Duchess of Ormond) had stood as godfather and godmother to his (Layer’s) daughter’s child. He was executed at Tyburn in May 1723, and avowed his principles even under the gallows. His head was taken to Newgate, and the next day fixed upon Temple Bar; but his quarters were delivered to his relations to be decently interred. In April 1773 Boswell dined at Mr. Beauclerk’s with Dr. Johnson, Lord Charlemont, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and some other members of the Literary Club--it being the evening when Boswell was to be balloted for as candidate for admission into that distinguished society.[22] The conversation turned on Westminster Abbey, and on the new and commendable practice of erecting monuments to great men in St. Paul’s; upon which the doctor observed-- “I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. While we surveyed the Poets’ Corner, I said to him-- ‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur illis.’ When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and slily whispered-- ‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur _istis_.’”[23] This walk must have taken place a year or two before 1773, for in 1772, as we have seen, the last head but one fell. O’Keefe, the dramatist, who arrived in England on August 12, 1762, the day on which the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.) was born, describes the heads of poor Townley and Fletcher as stuck up on high poles, not over the central archway, but over the side posterns. Parenthetically he mentions that he had also seen the walls of Cork gaol garnished with heads, like the ramparts of the seraglio at Constantinople.[24] O’Keefe tells us that he heard the unpopular peace of 1763 proclaimed at Temple Bar, and witnessed the heralds in the Strand knock at the city gate. The duke of Nivernois, the French ambassador on that occasion, was a very little man, who wore a coat of richly-embroidered blue velvet, and a small _chapeau_, which set the fashion of the Nivernois hat.[25]