The first to be led out was young Lord Derwentwater; as he mounted the scaffold steps his face was seen to be blanched, but beyond this he showed no other sign of emotion in that supreme moment, and when he spoke to the people it was with a firm voice and a composed manner. After praying for some time he rose from his knees and read a paper in which he declared himself a faithful subject of the Chevalier St George, whom he said he regarded as his rightful King. There was some roughness upon the surface of the block, which Derwentwater perceiving, he bade the executioner plane it smooth with the axe. He then took off his coat and waistcoat, telling the headsman to look afterwards in the pockets, where he should find some money for himself to pay him for his trouble, adding that the signal for the blow would be when for the third time he repeated the words, “Lord Jesus, receive my soul,” by stretching out his arms. He was killed at one stroke. Thus perished in his twenty-eighth year a man who was loved by all who knew him, rich and poor, and whose memory still lingers in his beautiful northern lake country in many an old song and ballad.
There is a curious legend connected with Derwentwater’s death to the effect that after his execution, the peasantry rose and drove Lady Derwentwater from Lord’s Island, believing that it was at her instigation that her husband had joined the Jacobite rising; a ravine near their old home, through which Lady Derwentwater is supposed to have fled, still goes by the name of the “Lady’s Rake.” On the night of his execution a brilliant “aurora borealis” lighted the northern skies of Derwentwater, which the people in that district interpreted as being a signal of Heaven’s displeasure at the death of the popular young Earl; and the aurora is still called in the North, “Lord Derwentwater’s Lights.”
The Earl of Derwentwater.
(From a Contemporary Engraving.)
After the scaffold had been cleaned, and every mark of the first execution removed, Lord Kenmure was brought out from the house in which he had waited whilst Derwentwater was being put to death, and came on the scaffold accompanied by his son, two clergymen, and some other friends. Kenmure, unlike Derwentwater, belonged to the Church of England. He made no formal speech, but expressed his sorrow at having pleaded guilty. He told the executioner that he should give him no signal, but that he was to strike the second time he placed his head upon the block. It required two blows of the axe to kill him.
Kenmure had married the sister of Robert, Earl of Carnwath, who was one of his fellow-prisoners, but who was respited and pardoned. By judicious management, Lady Kenmure was able to save a remnant out of the forfeited estates of her husband, and, later on, George the First returned part of the family estates to her and her children.
Some of the crowd who had gone to Tower Hill that morning in the hope of seeing three of the Jacobite lords beheaded, must have been surprised when only two appeared; the third doomed man, Lord Nithsdale, had made his escape from the Tower a few hours before his fellow-captives were led out to die.
Lord Nithsdale’s escape on the eve of his execution reads more like a romance than sober history. But it was his wife who made the name famous for all time by her devotion and undaunted courage. All hope seemed lost after the Address for Mercy had been rejected by the King, and all idea of respite had indeed been abandoned except by the brave Lady Nithsdale, who was the daughter of William, Marquis of Powis, and was born about the year 1690. On hearing of the capture of her husband at Preston, Lady Nithsdale had ridden up to London from their home, Torreglas, in Dumfriesshire, through the bitter winter weather, and, although not a strong woman, had endured all the hardships of the long journey and the anguish of anxiety regarding her husband, with heroic courage.
Before leaving Torreglas she had buried all the most important family records in the garden. Accompanied by her faithful Welsh maid, Evans, and a groom, she rode to Newcastle, and thence by public stage to York, where the snow lay so thick that no mail-coach could leave the city for the south. Nothing daunted, Lady Nithsdale rode all the way to London. On her arrival in the capital, her first object was to intercede for her husband with the King. She went to St James’s Palace, where George was holding a drawing-room, and sat waiting for him in the long corridor on the first floor, through which the King would pass after leaving his room before entering the state rooms. Lady Nithsdale had never seen George the First, and in order to make no mistake, she had brought a friend, a Mrs Morgan, who knew the King by sight. When George appeared, “I threw myself,” Lady Nithsdale writes, “at his feet, and told him in French that I was the unfortunate Countess of Nithsdale, that he might not pretend to be ignorant of my person. But seeing that he wanted to go off without taking my petition, I caught hold of the skirt of his coat, that he might stop and hear me. He endeavoured to escape out of my hands, but I kept such strong hold, that he dragged me on my knees, from the middle of the room to the very door of the drawing-room. At last one of the Blue Ribands who attended his Majesty took me round the waist, while another wrested the coat from my hands. The petition, which I had endeavoured to thrust into his pocket, fell to the ground in the scuffle, and I almost fainted away from grief and disappointment.”
There was no time to be lost, and after this last chance of obtaining a hearing from King George had failed, Lady Nithsdale knew that she, and she alone, could save her husband’s life. To this almost hopeless task she now devoted all her mind and all her courage.