Mr. Ratcliffe, thirty years later, paid the penalty to the law which he had escaped on this occasion. A warm adherent of the Pretender, he embarked from France for Scotland to take part in the Jacobite rising in 1745. The French ship was captured, and Ratcliffe sent as a prisoner to the Tower. He was presently arraigned at the Bar of the King’s Bench for having escaped from Newgate in 1716, when under sentence of death for high treason. Ratcliffe at first refused to plead, declaring that he was a subject of the French king, and that the court had no jurisdiction over him. Then he denied that he was the person named in the record produced in court, whereupon witnesses were called to prove that he was Charles Ratcliffe. Two Northumbrian men identified him as the leader of five hundred of the Earl of Derwentwater’s men, remembering him by the scar on his face. They had been to see him in the Tower, and could swear to him; but could not swear that he was the same Charles Ratcliffe who had escaped from Newgate prison. A barber who had been appointed “close shaver” to Newgate in 1715, and who attended the prison daily to shave all the rebel prisoners, remembered Charles Ratcliffe, Esq., perfectly as the chum or companion of Basil Hamilton, a reputed nephew of the Duke of Hamilton; but this barber, when closely pressed, could not swear that the prisoner at the bar was the very same Charles Ratcliffe whom he had shaved, and who had afterwards escaped out of Newgate. No evidence indeed was forthcoming to positively fix Mr. Ratcliffe’s identity; but “a gentleman” was called who deposed that the prisoner had in the Tower declared himself to be the same Charles Ratcliffe who was condemned in the year 1716, and had likewise told him, the witness, that he had made his escape out of Newgate in mourning, with a brown tye wig, when under sentence of death in that gaol. Upon this evidence the judge summed up against the prisoner, the jury found a verdict of guilty, and Ratcliffe was eventually beheaded on Tower Hill. CHAPTER VIII. THE GAOL CALENDAR.