PLOTTING AND PARDONING.
Therewith came a doubtful sort of pardoning to about a thousand rebels cooped up in vessels on the Thames, or in prisons ashore. They, and some Southwark prisoners who had been condemned to death, were compelled to suffer transportation to the American Plantations. ‘They will be transported for life,’ the papers tell their readers, ‘let them be of what quality and condition soever.’
ÆNEAS MACDONALD.
There was one Jacobite prisoner in Newgate who was disinclined to live in durance, to take his trial, or to be hanged after it or transported without it. This was Æneas or Angus Macdonald, known as the Pretender’s Banker. He had surrendered soon after Culloden, and was lodged in Newgate. Seeing the death-like aspect of things, Macdonald got two friends to call upon him, one evening. There was nothing strange in such a visit. Newgate was like a huge hotel, open at all hours, where turnkeys acted as footmen who introduced visitors. Young Mr. Ackerman, the keeper’s son, received Mr. Macdonald’s friends. As soon as he had opened the wicket, behind which the prisoner was standing, they knocked Ackerman down, and as he was attempting to rise, they flung handfuls of snuff into his face. He succeeded in getting on his legs, but, when he could open his eyes, the captive and his friends had disappeared. Alarm was given; young Ackerman led the pursuit, and he came up with Macdonald in an adjacent street. Æneas faced his pursuer as if to quietly surrender, but as soon as Ackerman came near, he flung a cloud of snuff into his face. The gaoler struck him down with his keys and broke his collarbone. When Macdonald was again within the prison walls, he politely apologised for the trouble he had given. Mr. Ackerman quite as politely begged him not to think of it, ‘but, you see, Sir,’ he added, ‘I am bound to take care it does not happen again,’ and clapping a heavy suit of irons on the prisoner’s limbs, he stapled and screwed the banker down to the floor, sending the surgeon to him to look to his collarbone.
THE COUNTESS OF DERWENTWATER.
The banker’s trial was put off from time to time, between July and December. The public in general were beginning to doubt its ever coming on at all; and the autumn seemed dull to people now long used to excitement, when London suddenly heard that Charles Radcliffe’s widow, with a son and two daughters, had arrived in London, and had taken a mansion in, then highly fashionable, Golden Square. She was a Countess (of Newburgh), in her own right; but, of course, the gentry with Jacobite sympathies, who called on her, recognised her as Countess of Derwentwater. This arrival in Golden Square may have had some influence on a demonstration at Westminster Abbey. For years, on the anniversary of that rather un-English king and canonized saint, Edward the Confessor, groups of Roman Catholics were accustomed to gather round his shrine, kneeling in prayer. ‘Last Tuesday,’ says the ‘Penny Post,’ ‘being the anniversary of Edward the Confessor, the tombs were shut in Westminster Abbey, by order of the Dean and Chapter, to prevent the great concourse of Roman Catholics, who always repair there on that day. Notwithstanding which, most of them were kneeling all the day at the gates, paying their devotions to that Saint.’
This incident having passed out of discussion, the trial of Macdonald was looked for. When it did come on, in December, at St. Margaret’s, Southwark, it disappointed the amateurs of executions, and delighted the Jacobites. The prisoner’s main plea was that he was French, and was legally at Culloden. The jury found that he was not French, but was a Scotch rebel. He was sentenced to death; but the whole thing was a solemn farce, the sentence was not carried out; and we shall presently see wherefore he was immediately liberated on condition of leaving the kingdom for ever, with liberty to live where he pleased, out of it.
SERGEANT SMITH.
This was on December 10th. All public entertainment for the death-delighting mob seemed suppressed; but there was an exulting crowd the next day, lining the road from the barracks and military prison, in the Savoy, to the parade, St. James’s Park, and from the latter place to Hyde Park, where savages had come ‘in their thousands,’ and assembled round a gibbet in the centre of the Park. From the Savoy was brought a stalwart sergeant, in gyves, marching, without music, and eagerly gazed at as he passed on his way to the Parade. He was a good soldier, something of a scholar, knew several languages, and was utterly averse from serving any other sovereign than King James or his friend King Louis. Sergeant Smith had deserted, had been caught, and was now to suffer, not a soldier’s death by shooting, but the ignominious one of a felon. On the Parade, he was received by his own regiment, in the centre of which he was placed, and so guarded went slowly on to Hyde Park, to a dead roll of the drums. He was dressed in a scarlet coat, all else white. In token of his Jacobite allegiance, he wore, and was allowed to wear, a rosette of tartan ribbons on his bosom, and similar bunches of ribbons on each knee. The sergeant went on with a smile. His self-possession made the hangman nervous, and Smith bade his executioner pluck up a spirit and do his duty. And so he died; what remains of him may perhaps still lie in the Park, for the Jacobite sergeant was buried beneath the gibbet. The quality of the newspaper reporting at this time is illustrated by the fact that, in some of the journals, Jacobite Smith is said to have been shot.
THE JACOBITE’S JOURNAL.