While this tragic drama was in progress, there arose a report in the coffee-houses of a Jacobite plot. It came in this way. At the March sessions of the Old Bailey, a young highwayman, named Henry Simms, was the only offender who was capitally convicted. ‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ said the handsome highwayman, ‘you would have had a kind of maiden assize; so, you might as well let me go!’ As the judges differed from him, he pointed to some dear friends in the body of the court, and remarked, ‘Here are half a dozen of gentlemen who deserve hanging quite as much as I do.’ The Bench did not doubt it, but the remark did not profit Gentleman Harry, himself, as the young women and aspiring boys on the suburban roads called him. But Mr. Simms was a man of resources. As he sat over his punch in Newgate, he bethought himself of a means of escape. He knew, he said, of a hellish Jacobite plot to murder the king and upset the Happy Establishment. Grave ministers went down to Newgate and listened to information which was directed against several eminent persons. Harry, however, lacked the genius of Titus Oates; and besides, the people in power were not in want of a plot; the information would not ‘hold water.’ The usual countless mob of savages saw him ‘go off’ at Tyburn; and then eagerly looked forward to the expected grander display on Tower Hill. But Lovat and his friends spared no pains to postpone that display altogether. The Scots made a national question of it. The Duke of Argyle especially exerted himself to get the sentence commuted for one of perpetual imprisonment. This was accounted for by Mr. Harris (Malmesbury Correspondence), in the following manner: ‘The Duke owes Lord Lovat a good turn for letting the world know how active his Grace was in serving the Government in 1715, and for some panegyric which the Duke is not a little pleased with.’ In the Tower, Lovat mingled seriousness and buffoonery together. But this was natural to him. There was no excitement about him, nor affectation. He naturally talked much about himself; but he had leisure and self-possession to converse with his visitors on other topics besides himself. Only two or three days before his execution he was talking with two Scottish landed proprietors. The subject was the Jurisdiction Bill. ‘You ought to be against the Bill,’ said Lovat; ‘the increase of your estates by that Bill will not give you such an interest at Court as the power did which you are thereby to be deprived of.’ The interest of his own friends at Court was gone. [Sidenote: _THE DEATH WARRANT._] On April the 2nd, the Sheriffs of London received the ‘death warrant’ from the Duke of Newcastle for Lovat’s execution. At the same time, a verbal message was sent expressing the duke’s expectation that the decapitated head should be held up, and denounced as that of a traitor, at the four corners of the scaffold. [Sidenote: _EXECUTION._]