The Prince was proclaimed in the market-place, and a sum of £3,000 was seized from the excise offices. On the following morning a French priest celebrated Mass in All Saints’ Church after the Roman use, which is said to have annoyed the English Catholics, who used the Marian missal in their private chapels. The Stuart forces quartered in Derby on the first night numbered 7,098, and on the second night 7,148. A small vanguard pushed on as far as Swarkeston bridge, but on the third day, the 6th December, the prince, disappointed of the expected additions to his forces and war chest, ordered a retreat, and the little army again passed through Ashbourne to the north. To this county belongs the discredit of being the last place in the provinces where that horrible medley of butchery and torture—“hung, drawn, and quartered”—which our forefathers invented as a penalty for high treason, was carried out, although happily in a somewhat modified form. The actually last instance occurred in 1820, when the five Cato Street conspirators were beheaded after being hung. This shocking form of death fell to the lot of a Derbyshire framework knitter and two stonemasons in 1817. This was the time when the distress amongst the working classes in the Midlands had come to a climax, when every project of constitutional reform was stifled, and when a few half-starved men, deliberately incited by the spies and informers of those in authority, planned an abjectly foolish but riotous and murderous scheme to obtain relief, which was hatched at the “White Horse” Inn, Pentrich. The two or three score of labourers who took part in this rising were almost instantly scattered by the yeomanry; but the policy of the Government seems to have been to use this instrument to terrify the populace at large, and thereby to crush all attempts at reform. Hence everything was done that could be to exaggerate the so-called rebellion, and although the misguided ringleaders richly deserved punishment at the hands of the ordinary authority, it seems monstrous to have charged the offenders with high treason, and with the crime of levying war against the King. However, a special commission of four judges was appointed, and the trials at Derby, which extended over ten days, began on 15th of October. Most of the forty-six prisoners were condemned to transportation, but three of the ringleaders, James Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, received the capital sentence for high treason. The Prince Regent signed the warrant for the execution of these three “traitors,” drawn from the humblest station in life, remitting that part of the sentence which related to “quartering,” with other absolutely unspeakable details, but ordering the hanging, drawing, and beheading. Two axes were ordered of Bamford, a smith of Derby, the pattern being taken from one in the Tower, which was supposed to have served in like cases.