In 1724 the Earl of Suffolk was committed to the Tower “for granting protection in breach of the standing orders of the House of Lords,” whatever that crime may have been, and in the following year Lord Chancellor Macclesfield was imprisoned there “for venality and corruption in the discharge of his office.” [Illustration: _Middle Gate_] CHAPTER XIX GEORGE II. Before coming to the year 1746, when the old fortress was the scene of the imprisonment and death of the Jacobite leaders of the rebellion of 1745, it will be necessary to enter at some length into the treatment of some obscure Scotch prisoners who, shortly before the great outbreak in Scotland, were put to death in the Tower. The story of the deaths of these unfortunate men has never appeared in any account of the Tower and its prisoners, and I am therefore all the more anxious to give as full an account as I have been able to find of that event. It was owing to the kindness of Mr Gardiner, who placed in my hands a pamphlet with illustrations of the time, describing the fate of the brothers Macpherson and Shaw, that I became aware of this tragic story.[6] This triple execution, which, as I have said, took place shortly before the Jacobite rising in Scotland in the “’45,” may have had something to do with the strong feeling against the English Government which prevailed in the North; it was certainly one of those acts by which governments make themselves and their ministers odious. And the execution on Tower Green in 1744 may well have caused the unpopularity, not to say hatred, amongst the Scotch of the English Government. The only reference I have been able to find to this event are two short passages in Hume and Smollett’s “History of England” (vol. xi. page 164), and the other in a letter from Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann (“Walpole’s Letters,” vol. i., Letter LXXIV.). [Illustration: _Published according to Act of Parliament 1753_ _A North West View of the Tower of London._ | _Vue du coté du Nord-ouest de la Tour de Londres._]