The Maxwell Prison Break from the Tower of London

Winnifred Maxwell's husband was tried and sentenced to death after participating in the 1715 Jacobite uprising against King George I. She refused to let that stand.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie listener Discretion advised for the
guards at the Tower of London. February twenty third, seventeen
sixteen was a day like any other. A despondent wife

(00:20):
came to visit her husband, who was scheduled for execution.
The wife had brought a few family friends with her
and they each took turns visiting with the prisoner. The
guards listened at the door as the woman said goodbye
to her husband for the last time, giving her a
bit of privacy and the couple there alone time. The

(00:42):
next morning, the guards came to collect the prisoner to
bring him to the scaffold. But when they opened his cell,
they gasped.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
It was empty. The prisoner was gone. How could that be?
He had been in his cell talking with his wife
just hours before. What the guards didn't know was that
this prisoner's wife was no ordinary woman. She was a
woman of indomitable spirit who wasn't going to take a

(01:13):
death sentence lying down. When she had been visiting her
husband's cell earlier, she had been talking to herself. Her
husband was already making his way out of the tower
thanks to one of the most creative and audacious prison
breaks in history. I'm Danish Sports and this is noble blood.

(01:40):
Winifred Maxwell was born in sixteen seventy two, the youngest
of six children. Her parents were devoted courtiers of King
James the Second. Once James was ousted in sixteen eighty
eight in what would become known as the Glorious Revolution,
Winnifred's parents moved to France, where Winifred met her future husband.

(02:04):
William Maxwell, was a Scottish nobleman who, as you might imagine,
was also from a family of longtime Stuart supporters. With
their family politics lining up quite conveniently, Winifred and William
fell in love and were married in sixteen ninety nine.
The Maxwell clan were power players in British history for centuries,

(02:28):
known mostly for their fighting abilities. The Maxwell men were
renowned fighters, and we could speculate that Winifred's spirited nature
made her a natural match for the man who would
eventually become the fifth Earl of Nithsdale. Shortly after their marriage,
Winifred and William settled into a comfortable noble life at

(02:52):
their manor house in Scotland. They had five children, two
of whom would survive to adulthood. Aside from those losses,
which were no doubt significant, life on the manor was
quiet and largely uneventful for the better part of fifteen years.
And then King George the First was crowned King of

(03:13):
England and things got a lot more complicated. For a
bit of background here, Queen Anne had died, leaving no successor,
and Parliament appointed as her successor George of Hanover, a
distant cousin of Queen Anne, who happened to have the
qualification of being a Protestant. Electing a Protestant German who

(03:38):
spoke no English to the throne was the not so
subtle nail in the coffin of the Stuart line. Since
the Stuarts were by and large devout Catholics. A group
of Scottish lords immediately began planning a rebellion. Calling themselves Jacobites,
a derivation of the name James. They formed a plan

(04:00):
to overthrow the foreign king and put in his place
the son of their beloved James the Second. The rebels
would need all the help they could get, so naturally
they came calling for the son of one of Scotland's
most notorious fighting families. William Maxwell wasn't necessarily excited to

(04:23):
leave his peaceful manner home and take up arms against
a sea of troubles, but how could he say no.
His family's longtime support of the Stuarts was a cornerstone
of its legacy. Winifred also came from a family of Jacobites,
so she could hardly have discouraged him. Their reputation in

(04:45):
Scotland would be forever tainted if they didn't lend their
support to the cause, and so William joined in the fight,
leaving Winifred and the children at home. Unfortunately, the Jacobite
Rebellion of seventeen fifteen was pretty much over as soon
as it started. The operation was poorly organized and lacked resources,

(05:09):
and the whole thing fell apart in a matter of months,
and the group was easily defeated by the British Army.
William was a part of a group of noblemen and
key insurgents that was brought to London and imprisoned in
the Infamous Tower. Both Parliament and the new King wanted

(05:31):
to move on from the rebellion and keep the peace
between England and Scotland. But they also knew that they
couldn't just ignore the rebellion that just happened. A few
people had to be made an example of, if for
no other reason than to discourage future uprisings. It was
decided that the seven most powerful leaders would go to trial.

(05:57):
Unluckily for Winifred, her husband William was powerful enough to qualify.
He remained locked in the Tower of London awaiting his trial.
Winnifred had been busy getting the manner ready for the
holidays just days before Christmas in seventeen fifteen, when she
received word of William's capture. Like the industrious woman she was,

(06:20):
she first made sure to safely hide any documents that
might have incriminated either William or herself, and after that
she began to make a plan. Winnifred Maxwell wasn't content
to sit at home and let her husband sit locked
up in the Tower of London waiting for his fate

(06:41):
to be decided by Parliament and the King. By all accounts,
she and William were devoted to each other, and no
doubt she was terrified by the news that the father
of her children was facing trial as a trader. To
the throne. In addition to this completely normal response, there
also may have been part of Winifred that was used

(07:03):
to cleaning up her husband's messes, but a little more
on that later in the episode. Winnifred knew that she
had to act quickly, so she and her maid, Cecilia
Evans set off for London. The journey was long and arduous.
The winter of seventeen fifteen and seventeen sixteen was especially brutal,

(07:25):
with heavy storms that dumped so much snow onto the
roads that Winnifred and missus Evans were unable to take
the family carriage. Winifred, not the type to ever take
no for an answer, changed her plan and the two
women set off on horseback. Vicious winds and brutal temperatures
accompanied them every step of the way. The journey lasted

(07:49):
over two weeks and included switching up their plans multiple
times to accommodate the nightmarish weather. It played out like
a twisted version of planes, trains, and automobiles, minus the
modern conveniences, and with the very real possibility of freezing
to death, and instead of a family Thanksgiving dinner waiting

(08:12):
on the other side, it was a husband being tried
for treason, possibly awaiting execution in the Tower of London.
There was also the very real possibility that Winnifred would
arrive to London and be greeted with the news that
William had already been executed while she was on the road.

(08:33):
But when she and Missus Evans did arrive in London,
Winnifred was greeted with an extreme case of good news
bad news. The good news is your husband is still alive.
The bad news is he's facing trial for his crimes
against the Crown and things aren't looking good. The two

(08:55):
women found lodging with a Jacobean sympathizer known as Missus Mills,
and Winifred began her campaign to emancipate her husband, employing
the same energy she displayed when traveling hundreds of miles
through a snowstorm. Winnifred got to work. First on her

(09:15):
to do list was reuniting with her husband. Lord Maxwell
was being held in the VIP section of the tower,
known then as the Lieutenant's Lodgings, later renamed the Queen's House.
Notable tenants included one time Queen Ann moln and Guy Fox,

(09:36):
neither of them had come out of the tower alive. Incidentally,
Winnifred's next order of business was to be the squeakiest
wheel that Parliament had ever heard. She drew up an
appeal on her husband's behalf and became a constant fixture
in the House of Lords. Her fervent dedication to Lord

(09:58):
Maxwell didn't go an noticed, and if she'd had more time,
she may have been able to free her husband on
charm alone. But time was not on her side. The
trial was swift and merciless, with six of the seven
men found guilty and sentenced to death, William included. Winifred

(10:21):
appealed the decision before the House of Commons, where it
failed by only a handful of votes. Thanks to efforts
like hers, the country was becoming very invested in the
fate of the Scottish rebels, with tensions rising between those
who wanted them freed and those who sought what they

(10:42):
saw as justice. King George himself got involved and tried
to smooth things over by pardoning three of the six
men awaiting execution. Those three men received their royal pardon
and walked free, but William was not one of them. He,
along with two others, was set to meet his maker

(11:03):
in just under three weeks. William begged for mercy, claiming
that he had been dragged, kicking and screaming into the rebellion,
but the King's decision was final. An example had to
be made, and noble William was one of the unlucky
few were chosen to make it. At this point, most

(11:26):
women would have visited their priests and gotten their husband's
affairs in order, but Winifred wasn't most women. She took
her business straight to the king. Clutching a copy of
the petition she'd written on behalf of William. She dressed
as a servant and snuck in through the back door
of Saint James's Palace, pretending to clean. She made her

(11:50):
way through the many, many palace rooms until she found
King George. She ambushed the unsuspecting monarch and began and
to plead her case, but George understandably wanted nothing to
do with the loud woman dressed in servants clothes, who
threw herself quite literally at his feet. According to Winifred's

(12:15):
own account of these events, written years later, King George
tried to get away, she writes, seeing that he wanted
to go off without taking my petition. I caught hold
of the skirt of his coat that he might stop
and hear me. He endeavored to escape out of my hands,
but I kept such a strong hold that he dragged

(12:36):
me on my knees from the middle of the room
to the very door of the drawing room. At last,
one of the servants who attended his majesty took me
round the waist, while another wrestled the coat from my hands.
The petition, which I had endeavored to thrust into his pocket,
fell to the ground in the scuffle, and I almost

(12:57):
fainted away from grief and disapp appointment. End quote. While
the admittedly humorous exchange clearly didn't have the desired effect,
word of the king's harsh treatment of Winifred spread and
added to the growing public support for this passionate woman

(13:18):
who would go to any lengths to free the man
she loved. Sadly, it was too little, too late, and
by now William's fate was sealed. He wrote letters back
home to Scotland to try and make sure his possessions
would go to his son after his death and not
to the crown. He also prepared the speech he would

(13:39):
be allowed to give from the scaffold just before being
put to death. His actions all point to a man
who had resigned himself to his fate. Fortunately for him,
his wife had one more trick a per sleeve, and
this one was a doozy. With the help of her maid,
Missus Evans, their landlad Missus Mills, and another friend, a

(14:02):
woman named Missus Morgan, Winifred hatched a plan for a
jail break like no other. While a typical jail break
might have involved force or some kind of aggression, the
women had to rely solely on their intelligence and powers
of persuasion. Luckily for them, Lady Maxwell had been a

(14:24):
frequent visitor to the tower over the previous few weeks.
The guards were familiar with her comings and goings, and
more importantly, she was familiar with theirs. The Lieutenant's lodgings
were a hub of activity, with many people in and
out on any given day. Winifred used that to her advantage,

(14:48):
as well as the fact that the guards also had
frequent visitors, usually in the form of wives and girlfriends.
She knew they were often distracted and preoccupied, and also
they were no doubt use to this loud woman and
her drama by now, which was exactly how she wanted it.

(15:10):
On a cold day in February seventeen sixteen, the day
before Lord Maxwell was set to be executed, Lady Maxwell
showed up at the tower for a visit. She brought
along her three friends and a bottle of cognac, which
she offered the guards, encouraging them to drink. The guards

(15:30):
needed little encouragement, especially when Winifred told them that they
were celebrating. She'd made up a story about a last
minute appeal, and her high spirits, combined with the spirits
of the alcohol, put the guards at ease. Then her
plan really kicked into motion. Because of heightened security, only

(15:53):
two visitors were allowed into William's cell at a time,
and so began a sequence of mister direction straight out
of a French farce, a human shell game that was
confusing by design. The women went in and out of
the cell in pairs, talking loudly and full of emotion,

(16:14):
causing the guards to want to give them their distance.
What the guards didn't know, of course, was that Missus Morgan,
the tallest of the women, was wearing two sets of clothes.
Winifred and Missus Morgan went in first. One can imagine
William's surprise at seeing his wife's friend enter the cell

(16:35):
and immediately begin to strip. Once her outer gown and
cloak were off, Winifred told her husband to put them on.
William may have hesitated at this outlandish request, but he,
more than anyone, knew not to interrupt his wife when
she was in the middle of a plan. As he dressed,

(16:55):
Winnifred took the real Missus Morgan downstairs and switched her
out for Missus Mills, who'd been pretending to be in
a heightened emotional state since she entered the tower. Once
the new pair were in the cell, Winifred produced some
makeup and a wig that looked very similar to missus
mills hair. The women were going in and out of

(17:18):
the cell at such a rate that the guards gave
up trying to keep track of them. Finally William's transformation
was complete, Winifred ordered him to put his head down
and pretend to weep, as Missus Mills had been doing
all day. At one point, with Missus Morgan alone in
the cell pretending to talk to the prisoner, Lord and

(17:41):
Lady Maxwell marched past the guards and exited the tower
with Lord Maxwell giving the performance of a lifetime. Winifred
handed William off to her maid and went back upstairs
to relieve missus Morgan. Then Winifred stayed alone in the cell,
loudly having a one sided conversation that sounded to the

(18:03):
outside observer that she was just a woman talking to
her husband. All the while, her maid and two friends
were carrying William away from the tower and to a
safe house. Once Winnifred had bought them enough time, she
left her husband's cell. She told the guards and servants
that he was deep in prayer and preferred not to

(18:27):
be disturbed. She wished them all a good night and
left the tower for good, joining William and the others
at the safe house. The next morning, when the guards
came to bring Lord Maxwell to his execution, they were
shocked to find an empty cell. They searched the tower,
but he was nowhere to be found. Only two of

(18:50):
the three condemned men were executed that day. It's a
shame those two men didn't have wives like Winnifred. His
jail break, William Maxwell made his way out of England
and settled in France with an assist from the ambassador
of the Venetian Republic. After lying low in London for

(19:11):
a bit, Winnifred joined him, but not before tying up
some key loose ends. Always with one eye to the future,
she went back to Scotland to gather the family papers
she had tucked away for Lady Maxwell. It was imperative
that her son inherit his father's title and lands, and
that they not make their way into the hands of

(19:32):
the British government. Once the documents were safely installed with
trusted allies, Winnifred could relax and look to a new
life with her now freed husband. Once they were finally reunited,
the Maxwells spent a little time in France at the
court of the exiled Stuart Monarch James the second, the

(19:54):
quote King over the Water, as he was known to many.
When James moved his court to Rome, the Maxwells followed
him and both obtained appointment as Lord and Lady in waiting.
Winifred and William would live the rest of their lives
in Rome, and though they were clearly glad to have reunited,

(20:16):
their lives unfortunately remained fraught with hardship. You see, William
was notoriously bad with money, and this threw the family
into strife for the rest of their days. He had
transferred the vast majority of his estate to his son
in seventeen thirteen, well before the rebellion. This might have

(20:37):
been a rare moment of foresight, but it was more
likely due to the fact that Lord Maxwell was simply
incapable of handling his own finances. Either way, money woes
seemed to be the theme of the Maxwell's time in Rome,
detailed in letters that each of them wrote. They were
constantly in debt and asking for money right and leftst

(21:00):
hitting up relatives and friends alike. There was clearly a
decrease in lifestyle after going from running her own manner
to being someone else's lady in waiting at a court
in exile, and Winnifred wasn't shy about letting people know
about the tragedy of their reduced means and her husband's overspending. Still,

(21:24):
the couple's devotion to each other and to the Stuart
monarchy never wavered about his exceedingly clever wife, William said quote,
there cannot be enough said in her praise. Everyone admires her,
everyone applauds her, and extols her. For the proofs she
has given me of her love end quote. Everything Winnifred

(21:50):
did was for her family, from rushing to secure her
son's inheritance to cooking up a wild scheme to save
her husband's life. In a time when women of her
class were encouraged to be quiet, well dressed baby makers,
Winifred Maxwell spoke her mind and refused to accept any fate.

(22:12):
She single handedly threw England into an uproar by taking
matters into her own hands, and she clearly relished her
role as a political pot stirrer. In a letter to
her sister about her time in London, she proudly wrote
that King George the First told her quote that I
had done him more mischief than any woman in Christendom.

(22:35):
She was just doing what she had to do. But
I imagine that being the pain in the ass of
a king, especially a king that she hated and saw
as illegitimate, had to feel pretty good. That's the story
of Winifred Maxwell and her daring prison escape with her husband.

(22:58):
But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about what Winnifred Maxwell actually accomplished
for the rest of his life. Lord Maxwell praised his
wife for her ingenuity in breaking him out of the

(23:18):
Tower of London, but did she actually do him more
harm than good? In their book Tales from the Tower
of London, Daniel Deal and Mark P. Donnelly lay out
the following quote in an ironic twist of fate. There
is some historical evidence that King George may actually have

(23:39):
ordered a reprieve for Lord Maxwell on the same afternoon
that his wife was busily helping him escape from the tower.
Even if the King was happy to see Maxwell free,
the jail break had made both the Earl and his
wife fugitives from an entirely new set of charges. Quote.

(24:01):
We'll never know for sure whether or not King George
actually had given into Winifred's relentless campaigning and order her
husband to be free. But I like to imagine the
King finally making the concession to let this relentless woman
have her way, and signing off on a pardon for
her husband, and then discovering that she had done the

(24:24):
impossible and broken her husband out of death row using
nothing more than a wig and an extra dress. It
had to feel a little like the warden in the
Shawshank Redemption, ripping that poster of rock hel Welch off
the wall. Take that, your Highness. Noble Blood is a

(24:51):
production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with a
ditional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Courtney Sender,
Amy Hit and Julia Milani. The show is edited and
produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producerrima il Kaali and

(25:14):
executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For
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