Borlum, who knew that his trial would speedily take place, meditated on plans for emulating the success of Forster. Strange to say, notwithstanding a knowledge of the irregularities that were carried on in Newgate, the public authorities made no change in the administration of affairs. Wine flowed, punch was sent round, and the prisoners suffered scarcely any stint in their indulgences. Things were indeed rather worse than better—all which was favourable to a plan concocted by Borlum and his fellow-captives. ‘The prisoners,’ says Dr Doran, ‘might cool themselves after their drink, by walking and talking, singing and planning, in the court-yard, till within an hour of midnight. Evil came of it. On the night of the 4th [May] the feast being over, nearly five dozen of the prisoners were walking about the press-yard. Suddenly, the whole body of them made an ugly rush at the keeper with the keys. He was knocked down, the doors were opened, and the prisoners swept forth to freedom. All, however, did not succeed in gaining liberty. As the attempt was being made, soldiers and turnkeys were alarmed. The fugitives were then driven in different directions. Brigadier Mackintosh, his son, and seven others overcame all opposition. They reached the street, and they were so well befriended, or were so lucky, as to disappear at once, and to evade all pursuit. They fled in various directions.’ Some others less fortunate were secured, ‘and were not only heavily ironed and thrust into loathsome holes, but treated with exceptional brutality.’ What a picture of a metropolitan prison in the reign of George I.!
The escape of Borlum from Newgate with certain other convicts produced an immense sensation. For decency’s sake, if for nothing else, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen came down to the prison, and solemnly gathered some evidence on the subject. The least thing in the way of amends was to offer a reward for the capture of ‘William Mackintosh, commonly called Brigadier Mackintosh.’ Placards were profusely posted up describing the appearance of Borlum. ‘A tall, raw-boned man, about sixty years of age, fair complexioned, beetle-browed, gray-eyed, speaks broad Scotch.’ The reward for capturing him was two hundred pounds, to which sum, however, were added a thousand pounds by the government. Every effort failed to secure the old Highland chief. He and his son succeeded in getting on board a vessel in the Thames, by which they reached the coast of France, and there for the present we must leave him.
These furtive escapes did not slacken operations at Tyburn, to which doomed men from Newgate were carried in half-dozens, as if for a public entertainment. We can hardly in the present day realise the brutality of these exhibitions, to which, however, ladies of quality regularly adjourned to see the show. Hanging formed a holiday amusement of the fashionable society of London. Such was the disregard of humane feeling that officers of the law were not ashamed to practise cruel deceptions on convicts at the very scaffold. Dr Doran describes a case of this kind. It was that of a person named David Lindsay, convicted of traitorous visits to France, who was sentenced to die, and carted to Tyburn in spite of an amnesty. ‘When his neck was in the noose, the sheriff tested David’s courage, by telling him he might yet save his life on condition of revealing the names of alleged traitors. David, however sorely tempted, declined to save his neck on such terms. Thereupon, the sheriff ordered the cart to drive on; but even this move towards leaving Lindsay suspended did not shake his stout spirit. All this time the sheriff had a reprieve for the unnecessarily tortured fellow in his pocket. Before the cart was fairly from under Lindsay’s feet, it was stopped, or he would have been murdered.’ Taken back alive to Newgate, a very unusual spectacle, Lindsay, after being nearly starved in a loathsome dungeon, was sent into perpetual banishment; ultimately he died of hunger and exposure in Holland.
As the hanging of some thousands of rebels would have shocked ordinary decency, vast numbers were condemned to be banished, as an act of grace, to the Plantations, or were ‘made over as presents to trading courtiers,’ who might pardon them for ‘a consideration.’ Think of lords and ladies at court being presented with groups of convicts on whom money could be made by selling pardons! The fact throws a new light on this period of English history. As regards transportation, Dr Doran gives some not uninteresting and little known particulars concerning Rob Roy. Twelve years after the rebellion of 1715, Rob was taken to London in connection with the Disarmament Act, and sentenced with many others to be transported to Barbadoes. Handcuffed to Lord Ogilvie, he was marched from Newgate through the streets of London to a barge at Blackfriars, and thence to Gravesend. ‘This,’ says Dr Doran, ‘is an incident which has escaped the notice of Walter Scott and of all Rob’s biographers.’ Before quitting England, the barge-load of convicts were pardoned and allowed to return home.
Matters had considerably calmed down, when the country was startled with the rebellion which broke out in 1745, headed by the young Chevalier, Charles Edward, grandson of James II. It was a daring and romantic adventure, but as badly conceived and supported as that of thirty years previously. No promised auxiliaries were supplied from France; and that the attempt to upset a powerful and settled government by a handful of adventurous Highlanders and the adherents of a few discontented noblemen and gentry should have ended disastrously, as it finally did on the field of Culloden, is not at all surprising. This fresh outbreak in the reign of George II. affords new material for the graphic pen of Dr Doran; and to his second volume we must refer for many painful though curious details concerning the treatment of the unfortunate prisoners. The manners of the more fashionable classes in the metropolis do not seem to have improved. We are told that ‘people of fashion went to the Tower to see the prisoners as persons of lower quality went there to see the lions. Within the Tower, the spectator was lucky who saw Murray [of Broughton], Charles Ratcliffe, Lord Traquair, Lord Cromarty and his son, and the Lord Provost, at their respective windows. Lady Townshend, who had fallen in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at the first sight of “his falling shoulders,” when he appeared to plead at the bar of the Lords, was to be seen under his window at the Tower.’ The Lord Provost, here alluded to, was Archibald Stewart, who, known to be of Jacobite proclivities, was charged with culpable neglect of duty, in having allowed a party of Highlanders to rush in and take possession of Edinburgh. Stewart was tried and acquitted. Lord Cromarty’s life was spared; but Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat perished by beheading on Tower Hill. Lovat had expressed a passionate desire to be buried with his head in his own country in Scotland. The wish was gratified. His head was sewed on again by the undertaker before the body was despatched northwards! Lord Traquair was liberated.
The case of Charles Ratcliffe was peculiar. He was a younger brother of Lord Derwentwater who was executed in 1716, and he had himself only evaded the same fate at that time by being one of the prisoners who escaped from Newgate and took refuge in France. Assuming the title of Earl of Derwentwater, he was made prisoner in 1745, on board a French vessel on its way to Scotland with supplies for Prince Charles. The sentence of death which had been passed on him thirty years before was now raked up. He was condemned to be executed; and giving him the benefit of his assumed title of nobility, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, his manly courage and proud bearing not deserting him at the last dreadful scene.
Like Patten, in the former rebellion, Murray of Broughton, who had acted as secretary to Charles Edward, was saved by basely turning king’s evidence, and sending many better men than himself to the scaffold. He retreated into private life under a deserved load of infamy. Years afterwards, as we learn from Lockhart, Murray, several times in disguise, visited Mr Scott, father of Sir Walter, for the sake of professional advice. On one of these occasions, Mrs Scott, from curiosity, intruded with the offer of a cup of tea, which Murray accepted. When he withdrew, Mr Scott lifted the window-sash, and threw the empty cup into the street. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was silenced by the remark: ‘I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr Murray of Broughton.’ As a memento of this curious incident, Sir Walter made prize of the saucer, which he preserved.
The executions of the untitled prisoners were conducted in a wholesale manner on Kennington Common, to which crowds flocked to see the hideous show. Drawers attended to supply wine to the culprits while the ropes were put round their necks, for the Jacobites drank treasonous toasts till the last. At one of these tragic ceremonials, ‘Captain Wood, after the halter was loosely hung for him round his neck, called for wine, which was supplied with alacrity by the prison drawers. When it was served round, the captain drank to the health of the rightful king, James III.’ The slight delay so caused was lucky for another culprit, Captain Lindsay, who was coming up with a second batch. ‘While the wine was being drunk, Lindsay was “haltering,” as the reporters called it. He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was courteously invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved his life.’ At this period, London could not be deemed a pleasant place of residence for any one with delicate feelings. The entrances to the town were lined with decaying bodies hanging in chains. At length the sights became so offensive as to cause public remonstrance.
Dr Doran winds up his dramatic narrative with some graceful remarks on the altered state of feeling towards the Jacobites in the reign of George III. By the decease of Charles Edward in 1788, after having sunk to the character of a sot, the Jacobite fanaticism was considerably abated, and only lingered as an expiring sentiment till the death of Charles’s brother, Henry, Cardinal York, 1807, when the house of Stuart was extinct.
It is pleasant to know that the royal family always spoke with sympathy of the Stuarts. Charles Edward, as is well known, was unhappy in his marriage with Louise, Countess of Albany, daughter of Count von Stolberg. She left him for a convent in 1780, and subsequently to his death became the wife of the Italian poet, Vittorio Alfieri. By a strange turn in the wheel of fortune, she sought an asylum in England, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, and was well received at the court in St James’s Palace, the king and queen vying to do her honour. She went to see the king in the House of Lords with the crown on his head, when proroguing parliament, 1791. Hannah More speaks of seeing the Countess of Albany on that occasion seated among ladies ‘just at the foot of the throne which she might once have expected to have mounted.’ Finding London dull, with ‘crowds but no society,’ and that the climate of England did not suit her, she returned to the continent.