The plot in which these persons of varying degrees were accused of being implicated, was to seize the Tower, and raise a rebellion in favour of the Chevalier, an idea which goes to show that the old fortress was even as late as the days of our first Hanoverian sovereign regarded as an essential to the assumption of the supreme power in the country. Atterbury was attainted and banished, after undergoing a strict imprisonment, which he endured with much patience from the 24th of August 1722, until the 18th of January in the following year.
“How pleasing Atterbury’s softer hour;
How shines his soul unconquered in the Tower,”
as Pope has sung it. Atterbury never returned to England, dying after eight years of exile in France.
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.”
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]