[Sidenote: _THE STREET WHIPPING POST._] To watching the doings of Jacobites at home, was to be added the trouble ministers had in watching, through their agents, Jacobites abroad. Our agent, Lord Stair, in Paris, kept the Hon. Charles Cathcart (afterwards eighth Lord) well advised of what was going on, or was to be attempted in London. In July, my Lord states that the Duke of Leeds had left Paris, for Rouen, on his way to England, ‘to put some very wise project of his own contrivance into execution. The Pretender and his court have given in to it, and the party in England are ready to assist him.’ Lord Stair suspected a design upon Sheerness. ‘I thought it better,’ he adds, ‘to let him go than to stop him.’ The writer left the ministers in London to do as they pleased with the duke, after he arrived. The duke escaped, singularly enough. He got drunk in London, was knocked down and run over by a hackney-coach, and he lay ill in bed, instead of going about conspiring for James III. The police, however, was on the alert, the laws were severe, and ignorant people abounded. One of the acute messengers of the time, Nightingale, heard two women in the street, crying for sale ‘The whole trial, examination, conviction, and sentence of Conscience, who was tried and condemned at Conventicle Hall,’ &c. The messenger charged them with sedition. He carried them before the next justice of the peace, and his worship, finding them guilty, sent them forthwith ‘to be corrected at the next Whipping Post.’ The anti-Jacobite mob delighted in the cruel spectacle which was there offered to them. They, and Jacobites generally, were still more delighted at reading the following matter-of-fact paragraph in all the papers. ‘On Saturday night’ (the first Saturday in August), ‘between 8 and 9 o’clock, the Earl of Wintoun made his escape out of the Tower.’ Lord Wintoun, who was not such a fool as he was taken for, had sawn the bars of his prison-window, and had oiled the palms of his keeper, and had passed into the street unmolested. He had a servant, Nicholson, in Newgate (taken also at Preston), but as the master had freed himself, the Government kindly liberated the servant, and took their revenge on the warden of the Tower. They accused him of having connived at the escape of both Lords Nithsdale and Wintoun; and they dismissed him from the Tower without allowing him to sell the wardenship, for which he himself had once given a good price. [Sidenote: _PATTEN IN ALLENDALE._] In August, London saw the last not only of Wintoun, but also of that worthy parson, Patten. In the above month, he shook hands with his fellows in town, and set off for his old parish in Allendale, Northumberland. His incumbency had been kept open for him by a substitute, who resigned as soon as Patten returned to his old flock. On the Sunday after his arrival, Patten preached to a crowded congregation; ‘being,’ say the London Whig papers, ‘always well respected in his parish.’