James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (26 June 1689 – 24 February 1716) was an English peer who participated in the Jacobite rising of 1715 and was executed for treason.

[1] After that, he travelled on the continent, sailed from Holland for London in November 1709, and then set out to visit his Cumberland estates for the first time early in 1710.

[1] He joined the conspiracy of 1715; he was suspected by the government, and on the eve of the insurrection the secretary of state, Lord Stanhope, signed a warrant for his arrest.

He heard that Thomas Forster had raised the standard of the Pretender, and Radclyffe joined him at Greenrigg near Edinburgh on 6 October 1715, at the head of a company of gentlemen and armed servants from Dilston Hall.

Their plan was to march through Lancashire to Staffordshire, where they looked for support, and the expedition was left mainly in the hands of Colonel Henry Oxburgh, who had served under the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders.

Radclyffe acquiesced in Forster's decision to capitulate to the inferior force of General Charles Wills.

The king, however, prompted by Robert Walpole (who declared that he had been offered £60,000 to save Derwentwater, but that he was determined to make an example), was obdurate.

On the scaffold, he expressed regret at having pleaded guilty, and declared his devotion to his Roman Catholic religion and to James III.

In October 2022, a bedsheet embroidered with human hair, by Radclyffe's wife, in his memory, was displayed at the Museum of London, which acquired it in 1934.