The circumstances under which Mr. Pitt the governor of Newgate was superseded in his functions have been described in a previous chapter. Mr. Pitt was so strongly suspected of Jacobite leanings that he was tried for his life. No doubt escapes were scandalously frequent during his _régime_, and it is just possible that they were due to the governor’s complicity, although Mr. Pitt was actually acquitted of the charge. More probably they owed their success to the ingenuity of desperate men easily triumphing over the prevailing carelessness of their keepers. The first escape which made a considerable noise was that of Mr. Forster, commonly known as General Forster, who headed the Northumbrian rising in 1715, and lost the battle of Preston Pans. Mr. Forster was allowed considerable liberty, and lodged in apartments in the keeper’s house. One afternoon, when Forster and another were drinking French wine with Mr. Pitt, Mr. Forster sent his servant to fetch a bottle of wine from his own stock to “make up the treat.” The servant on pretence of going to the vault left the room. Being long away, Mr. Forster pretended to be very angry, and followed him out of the room. Meanwhile the servant had sent the governor’s black man, a species of hybrid turnkey, down to the cellar for the wine, and had locked him up there. The black thus disposed of, Forster’s servant returned and waited for his master just outside Mr. Pitt’s parlour door. Being an adept at the locksmith’s art as well as a smart intelligent fellow, the servant had previously obtained an impression in clay of Mr. Pitt’s front door key, and had manufactured a counterfeit key. Directly Mr. Forster appeared, the front door was unlocked, master and servant passed through and went off together, first taking care to lock the door on the outside and leave the key in the lock to prevent their being readily pursued. Mr. Forster got to Prittlewell in Essex by four o’clock next morning with two more horsemen that had been waiting to attend them. From Prittlewell they hastened on to Leigh, where a vessel was provided, in which they made a safe voyage to France. “By this it appears,” says the chronicler, evidently a stout Whig, “that Mr. Forster was much better skilled in contriving an escape than leading an army, which shows the weakness of the Pretender and his council, who put so great a trust in the hands of a person who was altogether unfit for it, and never made other campaign than to hunt a fox and drink down his companions.”