At Highgate, the cavalcade of captives no longer bore the likeness of an army. The men taken after the disaster at Preston were bound back to back, two by two upon horses; the peers, for their part, were conducted to the Tower of London. In Camden Pelham’s retrospective relation, this ignominious entry into London marked the collapse of an enterprise that had professed to restore a king, only to conclude in dungeons, forensic debates, and capital sentences. The Earl of Derwentwater, Viscount Kenmure, and the Earl of Winton figured among the prisoners. Their common cause would not preserve them from disparate judicial destinies.
The design had assumed shape upon the accession of George I. The adherents of James, styled James III by Pelham, sought to assert by force of arms a succession rejected by the newly established government. In Scotland, the Earl of Mar levied an army; in the north of England, Thomas Forster, Member of Parliament for Northumberland, rallied other gentlemen to the standard. These endeavours formed no steady or concerted progress. An attempt upon Edinburgh Castle was foiled; to the south, Forster and his companions failed to secure Newcastle. Forster, having been joined by Scottish insurgents, advanced upon Preston, where his adherents encountered the King’s forces under Generals Carpenter and Wills.
The defeat delivered some fifteen hundred men into the hands of the government. The captured noblemen were conveyed to London alongside nearly three hundred other prisoners; others taken at Preston were dispatched to Liverpool and neighbouring towns. Pelham depicts these captives abandoned to the insults of the populace. The peers were subsequently lodged in the Tower, whilst the remainder were distributed between Newgate and various other gaols. The rebellion, which had proclaimed a monarch, was thenceforth resolved into distinct individuals, each liable to be called before justice by his own name.
The flight of the Pretender altered nothing of their fate. After his entry into Scone, where he had assumed the outward trappings of royal authority, James was compelled to abandon all expectation of the succours promised from France. He reached Montrose, and thence quitted Scotland alongside the Earl of Mar and sundry chiefs of the rising, under cover of night. Those who remained in ward could no longer lean upon the presence of the prince whom they had served. The House of Commons exhibited articles of impeachment against the rebel peers and expelled Forster from his seat. The inferior prisoners were remitted to the ordinary tribunals; as for the lords, the Commons carried their impeachment to the House of Peers, which sat under the presidency of the Lord High Steward, Lord Chancellor Cowper.
The course of the proceedings soon brought into relief the distinctions among the accused. All the peers impeached in this narrative, the Earl of Winton excepted, pleaded guilty; they subsequently urged extenuating circumstances, casting themselves upon the royal clemency. Derwentwater, in particular, contested the legality of the Commons’ impeachment. His defence did not arrest the progress of judgment. Having replied to the arguments advanced, the Lord High Steward pronounced upon Derwentwater, Lord Widdrington, the Earls of Nithisdale and Carnwath, Viscount Kenmure, and Lord Nairn the statutory doom for high treason. The language of the sentence admitted no distinction of rank: the selfsame punishment, in its most barbarous form, was decreed for peers of the realm as for a felon of the lowest degree.
The royal prerogative nevertheless remained the centre of all suspense. The kinsmen and adherents of the condemned multiplied their supplications for mercy. Within the House of Lords, the King’s power to grant a respite upon an impeachment became the subject of vehement debate; the address ultimately adopted prayed the Sovereign to respite such of the lords as should appear worthy of his clemency, leaving the duration of the reprieve to his royal pleasure. George I replied that he would act in such manner as should appear most consistent with the dignity of his crown and the safety of his people. This declaration held out no promise. On the very day the address was presented, the Council resolved that Derwentwater and Kenmure should suffer on the morrow.
The Earl of Nithisdale perceived that he was like to be included in the same warrant. Pelham relates that he escaped from the Tower on the eve of the appointed day, disguised in a woman’s riding-hood, though he attributes the apparel to a visit from the prisoner’s mother. The Countess of Nithsdale’s own letter, preserved in James Savage’s compendium, offers another testimony: the Countess details her own contrivances, aided by two female companions and a substitution of raiment. This record of her own hand corrects Pelham’s familial attribution. The episode availed nothing to the two noblemen already marked for death. On the morning of the 24th of February 1716, three detachments of the Horse Guards proceeded to Tower Hill and took up their stations about the scaffold. The Sheriffs received the prisoners toward ten of the clock. An hour or thereabouts elapsed before Derwentwater gave notice that he was prepared to appear; the Sheriff thereupon granted him whatever further time he might desire for his devotions.
Upon the scaffold, the Earl read aloud a paper he had composed. Therein he expressed his contrition for having pleaded guilty, reaffirmed his unswerving loyalty to King James, and prayed that his death might contribute to the re-establishment of the ancient constitution. He professed the Roman Catholic faith, offered up his prayers, and resigned himself into the executioner’s hands. Pelham records that he instructed the headsman to strike at the third utterance of the words “Sweet Jesus,” and his head was severed from his body at a single stroke. The remains were wrapped in black cloth and delivered to the Earl’s friends. This final scene neither effaced the confession uttered at the bar nor altered the tenor of his dying speech; it merely set side by side two distinct utterances, delivered in different forms and under disparate necessities.
Kenmure next ascended the platform. A Protestant, he declined to enlarge upon his religious or political sentiments before the two divines who attended him, alleging reasons of prudence; Pelham conjectures that he was restrained by tender regard for his brother-in-law, the Earl of Carnwath, who was yet suing for a pardon. Kenmure forgave the executioner and presented him with eight guineas. A surgeon marked with his finger the exact place where the blow should fall. He suffered in the same manner as Derwentwater, and his body was forthwith delivered to an undertaker. The historical record accords Kenmure no political manifesto: his final moments are legible only through these recorded actions, the grim precautions of the block, and the circumspection he preserved before the ministers of the Gospel.
The Earl of Winton, who had declined to plead guilty, was brought to the bar on the 15th of March. He maintained that he had surrendered only upon General Wills’s promise of quarter; a witness deposed to the contrary, affirming that the insurgents had surrendered at discretion. The particulars of his march with the rebels were laid open, and his peers unanimously pronounced him guilty. He received sentence of death in common with the rest. Pelham records that he subsequently found means to effect his escape from the Tower, after the manner of Nithisdale, whilst Forster and M’Intosh broke ward from Newgate. These evasions in no wise alter the reality of the two executions carried out in February; they merely demonstrate that the finality of the judicial decrees did not impose an identical term upon all who stood beneath their shadow.
The proceedings arising from Preston thus brought forth diverse ends under a single charge of treason. Derwentwater and Kenmure perished upon the same day, following the formalities of parliamentary impeachment and the rejection of their appeals for grace; Winton stood his trial apart and broke prison after judgment had been passed. Pelham’s compilation preserves their words, the arguments alleged in their mitigation, and the answers returned by the Crown, yet it omits the greater part of the depositions and the legal instruments of the trial. It nevertheless allows the observer to trace the fragmentation of a collective enterprise into solitary dooms: at Highgate, the captives had ridden two by two; before the Peers, their pleas parted company; upon Tower Hill, each stepped forward alone.