Lord Ferrers was taken from the Tower in his own carriage, drawn by six horses, to the gallows. He wore a superb dress, a pale-coloured silk coat edged with silver lace, and was accompanied by grenadiers, and horse and foot guards, his carriage being followed by some of the coaches of members of his family, and his hearse, which was also drawn by six horses. The streets were so crowded to see this unusual sight, that it took the procession three hours to reach Tyburn from the Tower. Lord Ferrers went out of the world in a far more becoming manner than he had lived in it. He regretted, he said, not to have been allowed to be executed on Tower Hill, where his ancestor, the Earl of Essex, had been beheaded. If he actually made this remark, he could not have been aware that his ancestor had not been beheaded on Tower Hill, but within the Tower walls, on the Green. To judge by his portrait, painted by the French portrait painter, Andran, Lord Ferrers had a bullet-shaped head, and must have closely resembled the ordinary type of jockey when he appeared in his riding-boots and jockey cap before his peers at his trial. [Illustration: _Waggons going into the Tower with treasure taken from the Spaniards (temp. George II.)_] One of the greatest naval achievements of the last century must not be omitted from the story of the Tower during George the Second’s reign. The great Spanish treasure, worth a million and a half of dollars, captured by Lord Anson, with his ship, the _Centurion_, on the 20th of June 1743, was brought to the Tower the following year. Two rare old engravings are here reproduced, in which the treasure-laden waggons are being haled by the joyous crowd up Tower Hill. Since the days of Elizabeth, when the ships of Drake and Raleigh despoiled the fleets and merchantmen of the Spaniards, no such spoil as this had rewarded British prowess. CHAPTER XX GEORGE III. The first political prisoner to enter the Tower in the reign of George the Third was John Wilkes, the notorious member for Middlesex. On the 30th of April 1763, Wilkes was imprisoned in the Tower under a warrant signed by Lords Egremont and Halifax, the charge against him being, that he had written and published the _North Briton_ newspaper, the forty-fifth number of which was styled “a most infamous and seditious libel.” Wilkes, however, was only kept for a week in the fortress, the Lord Chief-Justice (afterwards Lord Camden) deciding that the offence for which he was committed to prison, “was not an offence sufficient to destroy the privilege of a member of Parliament, that it was unconstitutional, illegal, and absolutely void.”