There was a considerable remnant of Jacobite feeling in the county, particularly amongst the clergy, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The Stuart rising of 1715, which came to an end at Preston, caused much stir in Derbyshire, and there were several small tumults in the county town. The town of Derby became much distinguished in 1745 as the furthest place in England to which the brave Prince Charles Edward with his little army penetrated, in what has been rightly termed a gallant effort to achieve the impossible. There is no doubt that a very considerable majority of the upper and middle classes of Derbyshire were on the side of the constituted powers as then established; but the local authorities were fully aware that there was a certain amount of faith in a direct monarchical descent still current, and they were in some doubts as to the views of others in a district such as North Derbyshire, where there was still a considerable minority of adherents to Roman Catholicism. They did not dare, therefore, to call out the militia or any general forces of the county; but at a meeting summoned by the Duke of Devonshire on the 28th of September, at the “George Inn,” Derby, it was resolved to raise 600 volunteers in two companies to resist the pretensions of a “Popish Pretender,” of which the Marquis of Hartington and Sir Nathaniel Curzon, the two knights of the shire, were to be colonels. A subscription list for the necessary funds soon reached a sum of upwards of £6,000, and in the course of the next month the number of troops raised was increased to a thousand. On December 12th these troops were reviewed in the forenoon at Derby by the Duke as Lord-Lieutenant. An hour later an express reached Derby that the vanguard of the Scots had entered Ashbourne, whereupon in the afternoon, to the astonishment of many, the local troops were again drawn up in the market-place, and at ten in the evening “marched off by torchlight to Nottingham, headed by His Grace the Duke of Devonshire.” On the following morning the Scots entered Derby, and though they tarried there for two days, the Derbyshire volunteers had no share in their subsequent retreat and dispersion, for they were well out of the way in the adjoining shire of Nottingham. An amusing and bitter skit was written on the behaviour of this Derbyshire regiment, known as the “Blues” from the colour of their uniform, wherein they were upbraided for vanishing at the very moment when they were urgently needed. The following is one of the concluding paragraphs:—
“And when they came to Retford, they abode until word was brought that the young man was returned from Derby by the way which he came. And they returned back, and when they came nigh Derby they gave great shouts, saying, ‘Hail, Derby! happy are we to behold thee, for we greatly feared never to have seen thee.’”
The Prince was proclaimed in the market-place, and a sum of £3,000 was seized from the excise offices. On the following morning a French priest celebrated Mass in All Saints’ Church after the Roman use, which is said to have annoyed the English Catholics, who used the Marian missal in their private chapels. The Stuart forces quartered in Derby on the first night numbered 7,098, and on the second night 7,148. A small vanguard pushed on as far as Swarkeston bridge, but on the third day, the 6th December, the prince, disappointed of the expected additions to his forces and war chest, ordered a retreat, and the little army again passed through Ashbourne to the north.
To this county belongs the discredit of being the last place in the provinces where that horrible medley of butchery and torture—“hung, drawn, and quartered”—which our forefathers invented as a penalty for high treason, was carried out, although happily in a somewhat modified form. The actually last instance occurred in 1820, when the five Cato Street conspirators were beheaded after being hung. This shocking form of death fell to the lot of a Derbyshire framework knitter and two stonemasons in 1817. This was the time when the distress amongst the working classes in the Midlands had come to a climax, when every project of constitutional reform was stifled, and when a few half-starved men, deliberately incited by the spies and informers of those in authority, planned an abjectly foolish but riotous and murderous scheme to obtain relief, which was hatched at the “White Horse” Inn, Pentrich. The two or three score of labourers who took part in this rising were almost instantly scattered by the yeomanry; but the policy of the Government seems to have been to use this instrument to terrify the populace at large, and thereby to crush all attempts at reform. Hence everything was done that could be to exaggerate the so-called rebellion, and although the misguided ringleaders richly deserved punishment at the hands of the ordinary authority, it seems monstrous to have charged the offenders with high treason, and with the crime of levying war against the King. However, a special commission of four judges was appointed, and the trials at Derby, which extended over ten days, began on 15th of October. Most of the forty-six prisoners were condemned to transportation, but three of the ringleaders, James Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, received the capital sentence for high treason. The Prince Regent signed the warrant for the execution of these three “traitors,” drawn from the humblest station in life, remitting that part of the sentence which related to “quartering,” with other absolutely unspeakable details, but ordering the hanging, drawing, and beheading. Two axes were ordered of Bamford, a smith of Derby, the pattern being taken from one in the Tower, which was supposed to have served in like cases.
On the morning of Friday, the seventh of November, the three miserable men, heavily ironed, were jolted round the prison yard on a horse-drawn hurdle or sledge, prepared, like the block, by Finney, the town joiner. On mounting the scaffold in front of the county jail, Brandreth and his fellows briefly testified that they had been brought to this plight by the tempting of Oliver, the degraded Government spy. They hung from the gallows for half an hour. Brandreth’s body was the first taken down and placed on the block. The greatest difficulty had been experienced in finding an executioner, but at last the high fee of twenty-five guineas secured several applicants. The chosen headsman was a Derbyshire collier; he was masked, and his identity was never disclosed. The mutilation was bungled; but when accomplished, the executioner seized the head by the hair, and holding it at arm’s length in three different directions over the crowd, thrice proclaimed, “Behold the head of the traitor Jeremiah Brandreth.” The other two were served in like manner. The scaffold was surrounded by a strong force of cavalry with drawn swords, and several companies of infantry were also present. The dense crowd was quite over-awed, and could utter no other protest than “terrifying shrieks.”
In that crowd was the poet Shelley. The day before the execution, the Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, and Shelley seized the opportunity to write a vigorous and now most rare pamphlet drawing a contrast between the two deaths.
The block on which these three men were beheaded is still preserved in the new county gaol at Derby. It consists of two 2½ in. planks fastened together, and measures 6 ft. 6 in. by 2 ft. Six inches from one end a piece of wood 3 in. high is nailed across. The whole is tarred over, but the wood, strangely enough, remains damp in places. A tradition used to be current that the block sweated every seventh of November, on the anniversary of the execution; the writer visited it on that day in 1888, and found no difference in the sweating to what he had noticed in the previous week.
With Derbyshire during the century that has elapsed since the time of this absurdly misnamed Pentrich “insurrection,” we have now no concern. Its history during that period has been on the whole peaceful, and, in the best sense of the word, progressive. When in times to come the story of Derbyshire in the nineteenth century comes to be written, there can be no doubt that one name will stand out in letters of gold above its fellows. Florence Nightingale, now in her eighty-eighth year, was the younger daughter of Mr. William E. Nightingale, of Lea Hurst, near Matlock. It would be impossible to exaggerate the talent, energy, and devotion which that lady displayed in her almost impossible task of mitigating the horrors that overtook our sick and wounded soldiers in the great Russian war. It is not too much to say that this one gentle-born lady has entirely changed the conditions of military and general hospital nursing, not only in England, but throughout the civilised world. The Geneva Convention and the wearing of the Red Cross are but some of the fruits of this Derbyshire lady’s noble example.
May it also be permitted in a single brief sentence to record the fact that Derbyshire of the twentieth century has had the honour of giving Chancellors to each of our two great universities—for the Duke of Devonshire has for some time held the office of Chancellor of Cambridge, whilst Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the late Viceroy of India, was elected Chancellor of Oxford in March, 1907.