en round for signature, praying that their sentence
of death or of imprisonment might be exchanged for transportation. But,
whether these high-spirited gentlemen expected that another insurrection
might act in their favour, or whether they preferred death to a final
farewell, under circumstances so dreadful, to their country, does not
appear. They mostly refused to sign the petition, which was offered to
them singly: and the commandant at Preston, Colonel Rapin, in his
correspondence with Lord Townshend, expresses his annoyance at their
obstinacy, and expatiates on the inconvenience of the numbers under his
charge at Preston. At length, after Captain John Dalzell, brother to the
Earl of Carnwath, had signed the petition, a large body of the
prisoners were ordered to be transported without their petitioning, and
to be put in irons. They were hurried away to Liverpool, to embark
thence for the Colonies, gentlemen and private soldiers mingled in one
mass; but orders were afterwards sent by Lord Townshend to detain the
gentlemen. Three hundred and twenty-seven prisoners had, however, been
already shipped off. Those who remained were not permitted to converse,
even with each other, without risk,--one Thomas Wells being appointed as
a spy to write to the Jacobites, and to discourse with them, under the
garb of friendliness, in order to draw out their real sentiments.[21]

From this digression, which may not be deemed irrelevant, since it marks
the spirit of the times, we return to the unhappy prisoners in the
Tower, which was now thickly tenanted by the fallen Jacobites.

Lord Nithisdale had the sorrow of knowing that many of his friends and
kinsmen were in the same gloomy and impenetrable fortress to which he
had been conducted. It is possible that the Jacobite noblemen were not
hopeless; and that remembering the clemency of William the Third to
those who had held a treasonable correspondence with the Court of St.
Germains, they might look for a similar line of policy from the reigning
monarch.

It must be acknowledged, however, that Government had been greatly
exasperated by acts of violence and of wanton destruction on the part of
the Jacobites throughout the country; and that the general disaffection
throughout the North, and, in particular, the strong Tory predilections
at Oxford, must have greatly aggravated the dangers, and consequently,
in a political view, have enhanced the crimes of the Chevalier's
adherents. "The