ian ambassador's two
or three days after. Lord Nithisdale put on a livery, and went in the
retinue of the ambassador to Dover. The ambassador, it should be said,
knew nothing about the matter, but his coach-and-six went to Dover to
meet his brother; and it was one of the servants of the embassy who acted
in combination with Lord and Lady Nithisdale. A small vessel was hired
at Dover, and Lord Nithisdale escaped to Calais, where his wife shortly
after joined him. It is said by nearly all contemporary writers that
King George, when he heard of the escape, took it very good-humoredly,
and even {142} expressed entire satisfaction with it. Lady Nithisdale
does not seem to have believed this story of George's generosity. The
statement made to her was that "when the news was brought to the King, he
flew into an excess of passion and said he was betrayed, for it could not
have been done without some confederacy. He instantly despatched two
persons to the Tower to see that the other prisoners were well secured."

[Sidenote: 1716--Anti-Catholic legislation]

Lord Derwentwater and Lord Kenmure were executed on Tower Hill on the
24th of February. The young and gallant Derwentwater declared on the
scaffold that he withdrew his plea of guilty, and that he acknowledged no
one but James Stuart as his king. Kenmure, too, protested his repentance
at having, even formally, pleaded guilty, and declared that he died with
a prayer for James Stuart. Lord Wintoun was not tried until the next
month. He was a poor and feeble creature, hardly sound in his mind.
"Not perfect in his intellectuals," a writer in a journal of the day
observed of him. He was found guilty, but afterwards succeeded in making
his escape from the Tower. Like Lord Nithisdale, he made his way to the
Continent; and, like Lord Nithisdale, he died long after at Rome.

Humbler Jacobites could escape too. Forster escaped from Newgate through
the aid of a clever servant, and got off to France, while the angry Whigs
hinted at connivance on the part of persons in high places. The
redoubted Brigadier Mackintosh, who figures in descriptions of the time
as a "beetle-browed, gray-eyed" man of sixty, speaking "broad Scotch,"
succeeded in escaping, together with his son and seven others, in a rush
of prisoners from the Newgate press-yard. Mr. Charles Radcliffe had an
even stranger escape; for one day, growing tired, as well he might, of
prison life, he simply walked out o