On the following morning, the 7th of June, Dr. Cameron expressed a strong desire to see his wife once more, to take a final leave, but this was explained to him to be impossible. With a singular carefulness as to his own appearance, which carefulness indeed distinguished all who suffered in the same cause, he was dressed in a new suit, a light coloured coat, red waistcoat and breeches, and even a new bagwig! The hangman chained him to the hurdle on which he was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn. ‘He looked much at the Spectators in the Houses and Balconies,’ say the papers, ‘as well as at those in the Street, and he bowed to several persons.’ He seemed relieved by his arrival at the fatal tree. Rising readily from the straw in the hurdle, he ascended the steps into the cart, the hangman slightly supporting him under one arm. Cameron, with a sort of cheerfulness, welcomed a reverend gentleman who followed him,—‘a Gentleman in a lay habit,’ says the ‘Daily Advertiser,’ ‘who prayed with him and then left him to his private devotions, by which ’twas imagined the Doctor was a Roman Catholic, and the Gentleman who prayed with him, a Priest.’ This imagining was wrong. On one of the slips, pencilled in the Tower, and delivered to his wife, the Doctor had written: ‘I die a member of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, as by law established before that most unnatural Rebellion began in 1688, which, for the sins of this nation, hath continued till this day.’ At Tyburn, moreover, Cameron made a statement to the sheriff, that he had always been a member of the Church of England. There was no discrepancy in this, he was simply an active Jacobite Nonjuror. THE LAST VICTIM. As the reverend gentleman who attended him, hurriedly descended the steps, he slipped. Cameron was quite concerned for him, and called to him from the cart, ‘I think you do not know the way so well as I do.’ Walpole says: ‘His only concern seemed to be at the ignominy of Tyburn. He was not disturbed at the dresser for his body, nor for the fire to burn his bowels;’ but he remembered the emphatic remark of his Judge, that the burning was to take place while he was yet alive; and he asked the sheriff to order things so that he might be quite dead before the more brutal part of the sentence was carried out. The sheriff was a remarkably polite person. He had begged Cameron, after he had mounted into the cart, not to hurry himself, but to take his own time: they would wait his pleasure and convenience, and so on. The courteous official now promised he would see the Doctor effectually strangled out of life, before knife or fire touched him. On which, Cameron declared himself to be ready. It was at this juncture, the chaplain hurriedly slipt down the steps. ‘The wretch,’ says Walpole, who in doubt as to his Church, calls him ‘minister or priest,’ ‘after taking leave, went into a landau, where, not content with seeing the Doctor hanged, he let down the top of the landau, for the better convenience of seeing him embowelled.’
IN THE SAVOY.
Even such brutes as then found a sensual delight in witnessing the Tyburn horrors were touched by the unpretentious heroism of this unhappy victim. Some of them recovered their spirits a day or two after, when a man was pilloried at Charing Cross. They repaired to the spot with a supply of bricks and flung them with such savage dexterity as soon to break a couple of the patient’s ribs. On the 9th of June at midnight, there was a spectacle to which they were not invited. The Government (wisely enough) were resolved that Cameron’s funeral should be private. The body lay where Lovat’s had lain, at Stephenson’s the undertaker, in the Strand, opposite Exeter Change. A few Jacobite friends attended and saw the body quietly deposited in what the papers styled, ‘the great vault in the precincts of the Savoy.’
It was in this month a report was spread that an attempt had been made to blow up the Tower, from which, perhaps, the legend has arisen that the young Chevalier and a friend in disguise had been there to see if it could not be done! ‘The Report,’ according to the ‘Weekly Journal,’ ‘of a lighted match being found at the door of the Powder Magazine in the Tower was not true.’ A bit of burnt paper lying on the ground within the Tower gave rise to a story which agitated all London for a day or two;—and which will be presently referred to.
A SCENE AT RICHARDSON’S.
How Dr. Cameron’s death affected both parties, in London, is best illustrated by a well-known and picturesque incident recorded by Boswell. Soon after the execution, Hogarth was visiting Richardson, the author of ‘Clarissa Harlowe.’ ‘And being a warm partisan of George II., he observed to Richardson that certainly there must have been some very unfavourable circumstances lately discovered in this particular case which had induced the King to approve of an execution for rebellion so long after the time when it was committed, as this had the appearance of putting a man to death in cold blood, and was very unlike his Majesty’s usual clemency. While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window of the room shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forward to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against George II., as one who, upon all occasions, was unrelenting and barbarous, mentioning many instances. In short, he displayed such a power of eloquence that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that the idiot had been at the moment inspired. Hogarth and Johnson were not made known to each other at this interview.’
CAMERON’S CASE.
Neither Hogarth nor Johnson knew the real facts of this case. Cameron played a desperate game and lost his stake. Scott, in the Introduction to Redgauntlet,’ declares that whether the execution of Cameron was political or otherwise, it might have been justified upon reasons of a public nature had the king’s Ministry thought proper to do so. Cameron had not visited Scotland solely on private affairs. ‘It was not considered prudent by the English Ministry to let it be generally known that he came to inquire about a considerable sum of money which had been remitted from France to the friends of the exiled family.’ He had also, as Scott points out, a commission to confer with Macpherson of Cluny who, from 1746 to 1756, was the representative or chief agent of the ‘rightful King,’ an office which he carried on under circumstances of personal misery and peril. Cameron and Macpherson were to gather together the scattered embers of disaffection. The former, being captured, paid the forfeit which was legally due. ‘The ministers, however,’ says Scott, ‘thought it proper to leave Dr. Cameron’s new schemes in concealment, lest, by divulging them, they had indicated the channel of communication which, as is now well known, they possessed to all the plots of Charles Edward. But it was equally ill-advised and ungenerous to sacrifice the character of the King to the policy of the administration. Both points might have been gained by sparing the life of Dr. Cameron, after conviction, and limiting his punishment to perpetual exile.’ As it was, Jacobite plots continued to ‘rise and burst like bubbles on a fountain.’ An affectionate memory of Cameron was also transmitted through the hearts of his descendants. In the reign of Victoria, his grandson restored honour to a name which, in a political point of view, had never been dishonoured.
In the royal chapel of the Savoy, the following inscription is to be read on the wall beneath a painted glass window:—In memory of Archibald Cameron, brother of Donald Cameron of Lochiel, who having been attainted after the battle of Culloden in 1746, escaped to France, but returning to Scotland in 1753, was apprehended and executed. He was buried beneath the Altar of this Chapel. This window is inserted by Her Majesty’s permission in place of a sculptured tablet which was erected by his grandson, Charles Hay Cameron, in 1846, and consumed by the fire which partially destroyed the Chapel in 1864.
The window above referred to has six lights, and each light now contains figures representing St. Peter, St. Philip, St. Paul, St. John, St. James, and St. Andrew.