With the House of Hanover the Tower records take a graver turn. Under
George I. the rebellion of 1715 brought young Derwentwater, taken
prisoner at Preston, to the Tower. Lord Kenmure was captured at the
same time, with other Jacobite Lords, and was brought, with
Derwentwater, to Tower Hill, and there, together, they were executed.
Kenmure was put to death first, and all marks of his tragic end having
been removed from the scaffold, Derwentwater was brought out of the
house on Tower Hill (where Catherine House now stands), to suffer on the
same block. The crowd in Trinity Square had been disappointed of a third
victim, for Lord Nithsdale, as we shall see later, managed to escape
from the Tower on the evening before. In 1722 the Jacobites plotted to
seize the Tower; their plan failed; they were made prisoners there
instead, and lay in the dungeons for several months. We have passed
through the period of _The Black Dwarf_ and come to the days of
_Waverley_ and the romantic “Forty-five.” In 1744 three men of a
Highland regiment, which had mutinied on being ordered to Flanders after
being promised that foreign service should not be required, were shot on
Tower Green; others were sent to the plantations. This roused great
resentment in Scotland, and prepared the way for the coming of Prince
Charles Edward, who landed on the Island of Eriskay in July 1745. This
young hero of incomparable song and story was, to quote Andrew Lang,
“the last of a princely lineage whose annals are a world’s wonder for
pity, and crime, and sorrow,” and Prince Charlie “has excelled them all
in his share of the confessed yet mysterious charm of his House.” After
Culloden a sad harvest was reaped on Tower Hill, and we shall hear more
of the last of the Jacobites, who perished at the block for their
loyalty, when we visit the scene of their sufferings.
A few political prisoners in George III.’s reign; the committal of
Arthur O’Connor, one of the “United Irishmen,” in 1798; the imprisonment
of Sir Francis Burdett in 1810; and the placing there of the Cato Street
conspirators in 1820, brings our list of captives to a close.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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