The 1745 rebellion brought the heads of fresh victims to the Bar, and this was the last triumph of barbarous justice. Colonel Francis Townley's was the sixth head; Fletcher's (his fellow-officer), the seventh and last. The Earls of Kilmarnock and Cromarty, Lord Balmerino, and thirty-seven other rebels (thirty-six of them having been captured in Carlisle) were tried the same session. Townley was a man of about fifty-four years of age, nephew of Mr. Townley of Townley Hall, in Lancashire (the "Townley Marbles" family), who had been tried and acquitted in 1715, though many of his men were found guilty and executed. The nephew had gone over to France in 1727, and obtained a commission from the French king, whom he served for fifteen years, being at the siege of Philipsburg, and close to the Duke of Berwick when that general's head was shot off. About 1740, Townley stole over to England to see his friends and to plot against the Hanover family; and as soon as the rebels came into England, he met them between Lancaster and Preston, and came with them to Manchester. At the trial Roger M'Donald, an officer's servant, deposed to seeing Townley on the retreat from Derby, and between Lancaster and Preston riding at the head of the Manchester regiment on a bay horse. He had a white cockade in his hat and wore a plaid sash.
George Fletcher, who was tried at the same time as Townley, was a rash young chapman, who managed his widowed mother's provision shop "at Salford, just over the bridge in Manchester." His mother had begged him on her knees to keep out of the rebellion, even offering him a thousand pounds for his own pocket, if he would stay at home. He bought a captain's commission of Murray, the Pretender's secretary, for fifty pounds; wore the smart white cockade and a Highland plaid sash lined with white silk; and headed the very first captain's guard mounted for the Pretender at Carlisle. A Manchester man deposed to seeing at the Exchange a sergeant, with a drum, beating up for volunteers for the Manchester regiment.
Fletcher, Townley, and seven other unfortunate Jacobites were hanged on Kennington Common. Before the carts drove away, the men flung their prayer-books, written speeches, and gold-laced hats gaily to the crowd. Mr. James (Jemmy) Dawson, the hero of Shenstone's touching ballad, was one of the nine. As soon as they were dead the hangman cut down the bodies, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered them, throwing the hearts into the fire. A monster—a fighting-man of the day, named Buckhorse—is said to have actually eaten a piece of Townley's flesh, to show his loyalty. Before the ghastly scene was over, the heart of one unhappy spectator had already broken. The lady to whom James Dawson was engaged to be married followed the rebels to the common, and even came near enough to see, with pallid face, the fire kindling, the axe, the coffins, and all the other dreadful preparations. She bore up bravely, until she heard her lover was no more. Then she drew her head back into the coach, and crying out, "My dear, I follow thee—I follow thee! Lord God, receive our souls, I pray Thee!" fell on the neck of a companion and expired. Mr. Dawson had behaved gallantly in prison, saying, "He did not care if they put a ton weight of iron upon him, it would not daunt him."
A curious old print of 1746, full of vulgar triumph, reproduces a "Temple Bar, the City Golgotha," representing the Bar with three heads on the top of it, spiked on long iron rods. The devil looks down in ribald triumph from above, and waves a rebel banner, on which, besides three coffins and a crown, is the motto, "A crown or a grave." Underneath are written these patriotic but doggrel lines:—
"Observe the banner which would all enslave,
Which misled traytors did so proudly wave:
The devil seems the project to surprise;
A fiend confused from off the trophy flies.
While trembling rebels at the fabric gaze,
And dread their fate with horror and amaze,
Let Britain's sons the emblematic view,
And plainly see what is rebellion's due."
The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put on the Bar August 12, 1746. On August 15th Horace Walpole, writing to a friend, says he had just been roaming in the City, and "passed under the new heads on Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look." According to Mr. J.T. Smith, an old man living in 1825 remembered the last heads on Temple Bar being visible through a telescope across the space between the Bar and Leicester Fields.
Between two and three A.M., on the morning of January 20, 1766, a mysterious man was arrested by the watch as he was discharging, by the dim light, musket bullets at the two heads then remaining upon Temple Bar. On being questioned by the puzzled magistrate, he affected a disorder in his senses, and craftily declared that the patriotic reason for his eccentric conduct was his strong attachment to the present Government, and that he thought it not sufficient that a traitor should merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation, and it had been his constant practice for three nights past to amuse himself in the same manner. "And it is much to be feared," says the past record of the event, "that the man is a near relation to one of the unhappy sufferers." Upon searching this very suspicious marksman, about fifty musket bullets were found on him, wrapped up in a paper on which was written the motto, "Eripuit ille vitam."
After this, history leaves the heads of the unhappy Jacobites—those lips that love had kissed, those cheeks children had patted—to moulder on in the sun and in the rain, till the last day of March, 1772, when one of them (Townley or Fletcher) fell. The last stormy gust of March threw it down, and a short time after a strong wind blew down the other; and against the sky no more relics remained of a barbarous and unchristian revenge. In April, 1773, Boswell, whom we all despise and all like, dined at courtly Mr. Beauclerk's with Dr. Johnson, Lord Charlemont (Hogarth's friend), Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other members of the literary club, in Gerrard Street, Soho, it being the awful evening when Boswell was to be balloted for. The conversation turned on the new and commendable practice of erecting monuments to great men in St. Paul's. The Doctor observed: "I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. Whilst we stood at Poet's Corner, I said to him,—
"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."—Ovid.
When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, and pointing to the heads upon it, slily whispered,—