The Londoners now looked for nothing more eagerly than for the arrival in town of the prisoners taken at Preston. Some officers among them had been shot for desertion. On the march to London the body consisted of about three hundred men. The officers walked or rode first. The gentlemen-volunteers followed, and the Highlanders brought up the rear. They travelled by easy journeys, and were sometimes fettered, at others free, according to the caprice of those who had them in guard. The public were informed that they would enter London in four bodies, ‘according to the several prisons they were to go to,’ the first body to the Tower, the second to Newgate, the third to the Fleet, the fourth to the Marshalsea. On the march several attempted to escape. A few succeeded; others were recaptured; some were cut down by pursuing soldiery. Among the slain was a Cornet Shuttleworth. There was found on his body the Chevalier’s banner. It was of ‘green taffety, with buff-coloured silk fringe round it――the device, a pelica feeding her young, with this Latin motto, “Tantum valet amor regis et patriæ,” “So prevalent is the love of King and Country.” All London was in a fever of agitation for this arrival――friends, that they might condole; foes, that they might exult. [Sidenote: _TYBURN TREE._] Even the march of Major-General Tatton’s detachment of Guards up Gray’s Inn Lane to Highgate, to meet the prisoners there, attracted crowds, despite the severe weather. The last day of November a spectacle of a gloomier character attracted the Londoners. Three Jacobite captains――Gordon, Kerr, and Dorrell――went up Holborn Hill in carts to Tyburn. They had been captains under William and under Anne, but had flung up their commissions under George to take others from ‘King James.’ Even the Tyburn mob must have respected them――they died in such heroic, gentlemanlike fashion. They were calm, and declined to acknowledge the justice of their sentence. ‘Obstinate and sullen’ were the terms applied to them by the Whigs. To the last they persisted in justifying themselves. To account for which it was illogically said that ‘Gordon died a Papist, and ’tis shrewdly suspected the other two were tainted with the same principles.’ ‘It is therefore no great wonder,’ said the Whig ‘Evening Post,’ ‘that the precepts of their Religion as well as the Sake of their Cause should inspire them to leave the World in such an unrelenting Manner.’ These captains had striven to secure Oxford for their king. [Sidenote: _JACOBITE CAPTAINS._]