The last beheading on Tower Hill

Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was perhaps the most duplicitous magnate of his age. He had played both sides of every Jacobite crisis since 1690, exiled to France, made a Catholic, made again a Protestant; abducted his cousin's widow and forced a marriage to secure the Lovat title; lost the title in court and stolen it back; spied for the British government and for the Stuart court alternately, sometimes simultaneously.

In 1745 he played his last hand. His son Simon raised the clan for Bonnie Prince Charlie under his orders. After Culloden the old lord was found hiding in a hollow tree on an island in Loch Morar. He was eighty.

Tried for treason at Westminster in March 1747, condemned, he asked for pen and paper to write to his son and was refused. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 9 April 1747. Crowds packed every viewing scaffold. One stand collapsed under the weight, killing roughly twenty spectators — more than the single execution they had come to see. Lovat, looking on from the block, is said to have laughed.

He was the last man beheaded in Britain.