THE VERDICT.
The conclusion of the protracted affair was that Lovat was pronounced guilty by the unanimous verdict of 117 peers. He made no defence by which he could profit; and when he spoke in arrest of judgment, he said little to the purpose. There was a sorry sort of humour in one or two of his remarks. He had suffered in this trial by two Murrays, he said, by the bitter evidence of one, and the fatal eloquence of another, by which he was hurried into eternity. Nevertheless, though the eloquence had been employed against him, he had listened to it with pleasure. ‘I had great need of my friend Murray’s eloquence for half an hour, myself; then, it would have been altogether agreeable to me!’ In whatever he himself had done, there was, he said, really no malicious intention. If he had not been ill-used by the Government in London, there would have been no rebellion in the Frasers’ country. George I. had been his ‘dear master;’ for George II. he had the greatest respect. He hoped the Lords would intercede to procure for him the royal mercy. The Commons had been severe against him, let them now be merciful. Nothing of this availed Lovat. The peevish Lord Hardwicke called him to order; and then, with a calm satisfaction, pronounced the horrible sentence which told a traitor how he should die. Lovat put a good face on this bad matter.—‘God bless you all!’ he said, ‘I bid you an everlasting farewell.’ And then, with a grim humour, he remarked:—‘We shall not meet all in the same place again, I am quite sure of that!’ He afterwards desired, if he must die, that it should be in the old style of the Scottish nobility,—by the Maiden.
GENTLEMAN HARRY.
While this tragic drama was in progress, there arose a report in the coffee-houses of a Jacobite plot. It came in this way. At the March sessions of the Old Bailey, a young highwayman, named Henry Simms, was the only offender who was capitally convicted. ‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ said the handsome highwayman, ‘you would have had a kind of maiden assize; so, you might as well let me go!’ As the judges differed from him, he pointed to some dear friends in the body of the court, and remarked, ‘Here are half a dozen of gentlemen who deserve hanging quite as much as I do.’ The Bench did not doubt it, but the remark did not profit Gentleman Harry, himself, as the young women and aspiring boys on the suburban roads called him. But Mr. Simms was a man of resources. As he sat over his punch in Newgate, he bethought himself of a means of escape. He knew, he said, of a hellish Jacobite plot to murder the king and upset the Happy Establishment. Grave ministers went down to Newgate and listened to information which was directed against several eminent persons. Harry, however, lacked the genius of Titus Oates; and besides, the people in power were not in want of a plot; the information would not ‘hold water.’ The usual countless mob of savages saw him ‘go off’ at Tyburn; and then eagerly looked forward to the expected grander display on Tower Hill. But Lovat and his friends spared no pains to postpone that display altogether.
The Scots made a national question of it. The Duke of Argyle especially exerted himself to get the sentence commuted for one of perpetual imprisonment. This was accounted for by Mr. Harris (Malmesbury Correspondence), in the following manner: ‘The Duke owes Lord Lovat a good turn for letting the world know how active his Grace was in serving the Government in 1715, and for some panegyric which the Duke is not a little pleased with.’
In the Tower, Lovat mingled seriousness and buffoonery together. But this was natural to him. There was no excitement about him, nor affectation. He naturally talked much about himself; but he had leisure and self-possession to converse with his visitors on other topics besides himself. Only two or three days before his execution he was talking with two Scottish landed proprietors. The subject was the Jurisdiction Bill. ‘You ought to be against the Bill,’ said Lovat; ‘the increase of your estates by that Bill will not give you such an interest at Court as the power did which you are thereby to be deprived of.’ The interest of his own friends at Court was gone.
THE DEATH WARRANT.
On April the 2nd, the Sheriffs of London received the ‘death warrant’ from the Duke of Newcastle for Lovat’s execution. At the same time, a verbal message was sent expressing the duke’s expectation that the decapitated head should be held up, and denounced as that of a traitor, at the four corners of the scaffold.
EXECUTION.
On the 9th, the hour had come and the old man was there to meet it. It is due to him to say that he died like a man, therein exemplifying a remark made by Sir Dudley Carleton, on a similar occurrence, ‘So much easier is it for a man to die well than to live well.’ Lovat was very long over his toilet, from infirm habit, and he complained of the pain and trouble it gave him to hobble down the steps from his room, in order to have his head struck off his shoulders. On the scaffold, he gazed round him and wondered at the thousands who had assembled to see such a melancholy sight. He quoted Latin lines, as if they illustrated a patriotism or virtue which he had never possessed or practised. He would have touched the edge of the axe, but the headsman would not consent till the Sheriffs gave their sanction. With, or apart from all this, ‘he died,’ says Walpole, ‘without passion, affectation, buffoonery, or timidity. His behaviour was natural and intrepid.’ Walpole adds, ‘He professed himself a Jansenist.’ Other accounts say, ‘a Papist,’ which is a Jansenist and something more. ‘He made no speech; but sat down a little while in a chair on the scaffold, and talked to the people round him. He said, he was glad to suffer for his country, dulce est pro patriâ mori; that he did not know how, but that he had always loved it, Nescio quâ natale solum, &c.; that he had never swerved from his principles, (!) and that this was the character of his family who had been gentlemen for 500 years! He lay down quietly, gave the sign soon, and was despatched at a blow. I believe it will strike some terror into the Highlands, when they hear there is any power great enough to bring so potent a tyrant to the block. A scaffold fell down and killed several persons; one, a man that had ridden post from Salisbury the day before to see the ceremony; and a woman was taken up dead with a live child in her arms.’ This scaffold consisted of several tiers which were occupied by at least a thousand spectators. It was built out from the Ship, at the corner of Barking alley. About a dozen people were killed at the first crash, which also wounded many who died in hospital. The master-carpenter who erected it, had so little thought of its instability, that he established a bar and tap beneath it. He was joyously serving out liquors to as joyous customers, when down came the fabric and overwhelmed them all. The carpenter was among the killed.