In 1644, Sir John Hotham, and his son, Captain Hotham, who had been imprisoned in the Tower in the preceding summer on the charge of intending to surrender the town of Hull to the King, were both beheaded on Tower Hill. Hotham may be described as the Bazaine of the Parliament. The town of Hull was the greatest magazine of arms and ammunition in England. Charles had in vain summoned Hotham, who was the Governor for the Parliament, to surrender the town, and on his refusal had declared him a traitor. There is little doubt that both Hotham and his son were Royalists at heart, and both were convicted of having entered into a correspondence with the King’s party in order to come to terms for the surrender of the town and arsenal to the Royalist forces. Another governor—Sir Alexander Carew, who held Plymouth for the Parliament—was beheaded in the same month as the Hothams for a like “intention.” Carew is said to have been decapitated with the same axe with which Strafford was killed, and it was reported that at the time of Strafford’s trial, Carew had said that sooner than not vote for the Earl’s death, he would be ready to be the next man to suffer on the same scaffold, and with the same axe: a wish which was literally fulfilled. (Dugdale’s “Short View of the Late Troubles.”) By one of those strange vagaries of fortune which are the characteristic of the history of this period, and in which the Tower played its accustomed part of imprisonment, George Monk, the future Duke of Albemarle, and one of the makers of our history, was imprisoned in the Tower for three years after his capture by Fairfax at the siege of Nantwich. He was a colonel at the time, and only regained his freedom by consenting to take the command of the Parliamentary forces sent to Ireland (Ludlow’s Memoirs). Two of Monk’s fellow-prisoners, Lord Macquire and Colonel MacMahon, who had both been fighting on the Royalist side in Ireland, made a desperate attempt to escape from the Tower in this same year (1644). They succeeded in sawing through their prison door and lowered themselves by a rope, which they had been enabled to find through directions written on a slip of paper that had been placed in a loaf of bread, sent to them by some of their friends. They got down into the moat, across which they swam, but were taken on the other side and hanged at Tyburn in February 1645, although Macquire pleaded that, as an Irish peer, he had the right of dying by the axe and not by the halter. For allowing the escape of these officers from their prison chamber the Lieutenant of the Tower was fined heavily.