Murray yielded at the first pressure. As early as July, Walpole speaks of him as having made ‘ample confessions, which led to the arrest of the Earl of Traquair and Dr. Barry; and to the issuing of warrants for the apprehension of other persons whom Murray’s information had put in peril. Walpole believed that the Ministry had little trustworthy knowledge of the springs and conduct of the rebellion, till Murray sat down in the Tower and furnished them with genuine intelligence. While he and Lord Lovat were travelling slowly by land to the Tower, traitors were coming up, by sea, to depose against him, or any other, by whose conviction they might purchase safety. The ‘General Advertiser’ announced the arrival in London (from a ship in the river) of six and twenty ‘Scotch rebels,’ who were conducted to the Plaisterer’s Corner, St. Margaret’s Lane, Westminster, where they were kept under a strong military guard. ‘They are brought up,’ says the above paper, ‘as evidences for the king. Several of them are young. Some have plaids on; others in waistcoats and bonnets, and upon the whole make a most despicable and wretched figure.’ Meanwhile Lovat struggled hard for the life he affected to despise, and which he tried to persuade his accusers was not worth the taking. He kept them at bay, for months, by his pleas; and he vehemently declared his innocence of every one of the seven heads of accusation brought against him,――of every one of which he was certainly guilty. Towards the close of December, he was arraigned at the bar of the House of Lords. There is no better condensation of what took place than that furnished by Walpole, on Christmas Day, 1746:――‘Old Lovat has been brought to the bar of the House of Lords. He is far from having those abilities for which he has been so cried up. He saw Mr. Pelham at a distance, and called to him, and asked him, if it were worth while to make all this fuss to take off a grey head fourscore years old. He complained of his estate being seized and kept from him. Lord Granville took up this complaint very strongly, and insisted on having it enquired into. Lord Bath went farther and, as some people think, intended the duke; but I believe he only aimed at the Duke of Newcastle.... They made a rule to order the old creature the profits of his estate till his conviction. He is to put in his answer on the 13th of January.’ [Sidenote: _TILBURY FORT._] In the meantime, the papers reported that there were nearly four hundred Scottish rebels cooped up in Tilbury Fort. Watermen’s arms were weary with rowing boats full of Londoners down to the fort, to visit the wretched captives, or to stare at the fort which held them in. Most of them were transported to the Plantations. There was a sanguinary feeling against all such offenders. The last words in the ‘General Advertiser’ for December 31st, 1746, are contained in the two concluding lines of a poem, signed ‘Williamite,’ and which are to the following charitable effect:――