In 1715, Liverpool was as much excited as London by the question between the king regnant and the king claimant. Young Sheppard was gloomy and silent. The fray fought out adversely to the Jacobites, and the executions of the next year chafed his temper. Among his fellows, he let drop the fearful words that it might be a good thing _to kill the king_. He was counselled, if he would not go to the gallows, not to give tongue to such possibilities, for the future. The matter sank deep into his mind. Sheppard thought much and wrote much, and at last, he disappeared from Liverpool. Shortly after, it was early in 1718, a quiet-looking young man left a letter at the City dwelling of a Nonjuring minister, named Leake. He would call for an answer, he said, in a day or two. The minister was nearly lost in fear and horror when he read this monstrous epistle from a stranger. The writer spoke of the ‘discontents’ of the nation; and suggested that they might be remedied by removing _Prince_ George, and putting ‘_our_ king’ in his place. This could be done, said the writer, without much bloodshed! The young maniac then stated that if Leake would pay Sheppard’s journey to Italy, and furnish him with a letter to King James, he would undertake to bring the king secretly into the country, and to smite the usurper in his palace. It was, he said, ‘easy to cut the thread of human life.’ If he succeeded, King James could publicly appear. If he failed, the king might still lie safely hiding. Sheppard promised that, if he himself were taken, no amount of torture should extract from him a single word damaging to the sacred cause. He was ready to suffer the cruelest death, the best preparation for which, he thought, would be the reception of the Sacrament daily from the hands of a Priest, ignorant of his design. [Sidenote: _A FIGHT IN NEWGATE._] To be found in possession of such a letter was a hanging matter. Leake dropped it at once into the flames, and then hurried to Sir John Fryer, a magistrate, who severely reprimanded him for destroying such an important document, and ordered the arrest of the enthusiast. Before the magistrate, in presence of the Secretary of State, and at his trial, at the Old Bailey, the speech and general carriage of young Sheppard were most becoming. When Leake tried to repeat the contents of the fatal letter, Sheppard calmly prompted or corrected him. The latter wrote it out from memory, and it agreed, literally, with a draft discovered among the prisoner’s papers. He was, of course, found _Guilty_; and when the Recorder urged him to ask mercy of the king, Sheppard replied, ‘I cannot hope for mercy from a King whom I cannot own!’