The countess who walked her husband out of the Tower

William Maxwell, Earl of Nithsdale, was captured with the Jacobite army at Preston in November 1715 and sentenced to death. His wife Winifred rode from Scotland through snow to London, petitioned the king in person and was refused. On 23 February 1716, the evening before the execution, she visited his room in the Lieutenant's Lodgings with several women friends, moving them in and out in a deliberate muddle. Under cover of the confusion she dressed her husband as one of them, in a cloak and hood, with his beard shaved and his face painted, and her maid led him out past the guards. Winifred stayed behind talking to an empty room, then left, telling the guards not to disturb him. He reached Rome; she followed. Her letter to her sister describing the escape survives, and the cloak is at Traquair House in the Scottish Borders.

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The Tower’s great escape was not made with ropes or tunnels. It was made with a cloak, a hood, a painted face and a woman who understood that guards see what they expect to see.

William Maxwell, fifth Earl of Nithsdale, was a Catholic Scottish nobleman who joined the Jacobite rising of 1715 in support of the exiled James Stuart. The rising collapsed at Preston in November; Nithsdale surrendered with the rest and was brought to London in chains. In February 1716 he and other Jacobite lords were tried by their peers in Westminster Hall, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to be beheaded. The date was set for 24 February. Two of them, Derwentwater and Kenmure, would die that day on Tower Hill.

His wife, Winifred Herbert, was the daughter of a Welsh marquess and had been raised in the exiled Stuart court in France. When the news reached her at their home in Dumfriesshire she rode south in midwinter, through snow so deep the coaches had stopped, reached London, and tried everything a woman could then try. She petitioned George I in person, catching hold of his coat in a palace corridor; he had her pulled away. When the petition failed she began to plan.

The evening of 23 February

Nithsdale was held in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, the timber-framed house on the west side of Tower Green that is now called the Queen’s House. Prisoners of rank were allowed visitors, and Winifred had been visiting daily, chatting with the guards and, as she later admitted, making sure they were well supplied with drink.

On the last evening she came with a party of women: her landlady Mrs Mills, a friend Miss Hilton, and her maid Evans. She had chosen Mrs Mills because she was tall and stout, roughly her husband’s build, and had brought her in tears, with a hood pulled forward over her face, as a woman might weep the night before an execution. In the earl’s room Mrs Mills took off an outer layer of clothes. Winifred then led Miss Hilton out, loudly asking her to fetch the maid, and brought her back in; then took Mrs Mills out, now in her ordinary dress, still crying. The guards, watching women in hoods come and go in the dim passage, lost count.

Inside, Winifred shaved her husband’s beard, painted his eyebrows to match Mrs Mills’ fairer colouring, rouged his cheeks, and put him into the petticoats, the cloak and the hood. Then she led him out by the hand, holding a handkerchief to his face, and passed him at the door to Evans, who took him down the stairs and out across the green. As they went, Winifred talked to him in a loud, anxious voice about Mrs Mills being late.

She went back into the empty room and kept up a conversation with her absent husband, answering herself in a lowered voice, for as long as she dared. Then she came out, told the guard at the door that her husband was at prayer and must not be disturbed, and walked out of the Tower.

After

Nithsdale hid in London for several days and was then smuggled to the coast, some accounts say in the livery of the Venetian ambassador’s servants, and across to the Continent. Winifred went back to Scotland to secure the family’s papers, then followed him into exile. They lived the rest of their lives in Rome at the court of the man they had risen for. She died in 1749.

Everything above comes, at one remove or another, from a letter Winifred wrote to her sister Lucy, a nun at Bruges, the following year, describing the whole business in detail. The cloak said to be the one he wore is displayed at Traquair House near Peebles. Whether it is exactly that cloak is the kind of question this site tries to be honest about; the letter, at least, is hers.