in which he had borne a part never to be forgotten, was regarded, not merely with the disapprobation due to a great violation of law and justice, but with horror such as even the Gunpowder Plot had not excited. The absurd and almost impious service which is still read in our churches on the thirtieth of January, had produced in the minds of the vulgar a strange association of ideas. The sufferings of Charles were confounded with the sufferings of the Redeemer of mankind; and every regicide was a Judas, a Caiaphas, or a Herod. It was true that, when Ludlow sate on the tribunal in Westminster Hall, he was an ardent enthusiast of twenty-eight, and that he now returned from exile a grayheaded and wrinkled man in his seventieth year. Perhaps, therefore, if he had been content to live in close retirement, and to shun places of public resort, even zealous Royalists might not have grudged the old Republican a grave in his native soil. But he had no thought of hiding himself. It was soon rumored that one of those murderers who had brought on England guilt, for which she annually, in sackcloth and ashes, implored God not to enter into judgment with her, was strutting about the streets of her capital, and boasting that he should ere long command her armies. His lodgings, it was said, were the head-quarters of the most noted enemies of monarchy and episcopacy.* The subject was brought before the House of Commons. The Tory members called loudly for justice on the traitor. None of the Whigs ventured to say a word in his defence. One or two faintly expressed a doubt whether the fact of his return had been proved by evidence such as would warrant a parliamentary proceeding. The objection was disregarded. It was resolved, without a division, that the King should be requested to issue a proclamation for the apprehending of Ludlow. Seymour presented the address; and the King promised to do what was asked. Some days, however, elapsed before the proclamation appeared.† Ludlow had time to make his escape, and again hid himself in his Alpine retreat, never again to emerge. English travellers are still taken to see his house close to the lake, and his tomb in a church among the vineyards which overlook the little town of Vevay. On the house was formerly legible an inscription purporting that to him to whom God is a father, every

Third Cavant against the Whigs, 1712.

+ Commons' Journals, November 6 and 8, 1689; Grey's Debates; London Gazette, November 18.

land is a fatherland; and the epitaph on the tomb still attests the feelings with which the stern old Puritan to the last regarded the people of Ireland and the House of Stuart.

SIR ROBERT SAWYER.

FEW persons stood higher in the estimation of the Tory party than Sir Robert Sawyer. He was a man of ample fortune and aristocratical connections, of orthodox opinions and regular life, an able and experienced lawyer, a well-read scholar, and, in spite of a little pomposity, a good speaker. He had been Attorney-General at the time of the detection of the Rye House Plot; he had been employed for the Crown, in the prosecutions which followed; and he had conducted those prosecutions with an eagerness, which would, in our time, be called cruelty by all parties, but which, in his own time, and to his own party, seemed to be merely laudable zeal. His friends indeed asserted that he was conscientious even to scrupulosity in matters of life and death;† but this is an eulogy which persons who bring the feelings of a nineteenth century to the study of the State Trials of the seventeenth century, will have some difficulty in understanding. The best excuse which can be made for this part of his life, is that the stain of innocent blood was common to him with almost all the eminent public men of those evil days. When we blame him for prosecuting Russell, we must not forget that Russell had prosecuted Stafford.

Great as Sawyer's offences were, he had made great atonement for them, he had stood up manfully against Popery and despotism: he had, in the very presence chamber, positively refused to draw warrants in contravention of acts of Parliament: he had resigned his lucrative office rather than appear in Westminster Hall as the champion of the dispensing power: he had been the leading counsel for the seven Bishops; and he had, on the day of their trial, done his duty ably, honestly, and fearlessly. He was therefore a

"Omne solum forti patria, quia patris." See Addison's Travels. It is a remarkable circumstance that Addison, though a Whig, speaks of Ludlow in lan guage which would better have become a Tory, and sneers at the inscription as ↑ Roger North's Life of Guildford.

cant.

favorite with High Churchmen, and might be thought to have fairly earned his pardon from the Whigs. But the Whigs were not in a pardoning mood; and Sawyer was now called to account for his conduct in the case of Sir Thomas Armstrong.

If Armstrong was not belied, he was deep in the worst secrets of the Rye House Plot, and was one of those who undertook to slay the two royal brothers. When the conspiracy was discovered, he fled to the continent and was outlawed. The magistrates of Leyden were induced by a bribe to deliver him up. He was hurried on board of an English ship, carried to London, and brought before the King's bench. Sawyer moved the court to award execution on the outlawry. Armstrong represented that a year had not yet elapsed since he had been outlawed, and that, by an Act passed in the reign of Edward the Sixth, an outlaw who yielded himself within the year was entitled to plead not guilty, and to put himself on his country. To this it was answered that Armstrong had not yielded himself, that he had been dragged to the bar a prisoner, and that he had no right to claim a privilege which was evidently meant to be given only to persons who voluntarily rendered themselves up to public justice. Jeffreys and the other judges unanimously overruled Armstrong's objection, and granted the award of execution. Then followed one of the most terrible of the many terrible scenes which, in those times, disgraced our Courts. The daughter of the unhappy man was at his side. "My Lord," she cried out, "you will not murder my father. This is murdering a man." "How now?" roared the chief justice. "Who is this woman? Take her, Marshal. Take her away." She was forced out, crying as she went, "God Almighty's judgment light on you." "God Almighty's judgment," said Jeffreys, "will light on traitors. Thank God, I am clamor proof." When she was gone, her father again insisted on what he conceived to be his right. "I ask," he said, "only the benefit of the law." "And by the grace of God, you shall have it," said the judge. "Mr. Sheriff, see that execution be done on Friday next. There is the benefit of the law for you." On the following Friday, Armstrong was hanged, drawn and quartered; and his head was placed over Westminster Hall.**

The insolence and cruelty of Jeffreys excite, even at the distance of so many years, an indignation which makes it

See the account of the proceedings in the collection of State Trials.

difficult to be just to him. Yet a perfectly dispassionate inquirer may think it by no means clear that the award of execution was illegal. There was no precedent; and the words of the Act of Edward the Sixth may, without any straining, be construed as the court construed them. Indeed, had the penalty been only fine or imprisonment, nobody would have seen any thing reprehensible in the proceeding. But to send a man to the gallows as a traitor, without confronting him with his accusers, without hearing his defence, solely because a timidity which is perfectly compatible with innocence has impelled him to hide himself, is surely a violation, if not of any written law, yet of those great principles to which all laws ought to conform. The case was brought before the House of Commons. The orphan daughter of Armstrong came to the bar to demand vengeance; and a warm debate followed. Sawyer was fiercely attacked and strenuously defended. The Tories declared that he appeared to them to have done only what, as counsel for the crown, he was bound to do, and to have discharged his duty to God, to the King, and to the prisoner. If the award was legal nobody was to blame, and if the award was illegal, the blame lay, not with the Attorney General, but with the judges. There would be an end of all liberty of speech at the bar, if an advocate was to be punished for making a strictly regular application to a Court, and for arguing that certain words in a statute were to be understood in a certain sense. The Whigs called Sawyer murderer, bloodhound, hangman. If the liberty of speech claimed by advocates meant the liberty of haranguing men to death, it was high time that the nation should rise up and exterminate the whole race of lawyers. "Things will never be well done," said one orator, "till some of that profession be made examples." "No crime to demand execution!" exclaimed John Hampden. "We shall be told next that it was no crime in the Jews to cry out 'Crucify him."" A wise and just man would probably have been of opinion. that this was not a case of severity. Sawyer's conduct might have been, to a certain extent, culpable: but, if an act of Indemnity was to be passed at all, it was to be passed for the benefit of persons whose conduct had been culpable. The question was not whether he was guiltless, but whether his guilt was of so peculiarly black a dye that he ought, notwithstanding all his sacrifices and services, to be excluded by name from the mercy which was to be granted to many

thousands of offenders. This question calm and impartial judges would probably have decided in his favor. It was, however, resolved that he should be excepted from the indemnity, and expelled from the house.*

CAERMARTHEN.

CAERMARTHEN was the chief adviser of the Crown on all matters relating to the internal administration and to the management of the two Houses of Parliament. The white staff, and the immense power which accompanied the white staff, William was still determined never to entrust to any subject. Caermarthen therefore continued to be lord president; but he took possession of a suite of apartments in St. James's palace which was considered as peculiarly belonging to the Prime Minister.† He had, during the preceding year, pleaded ill health as an excuse for seldom appearing at the Council Board; and the plea was not without foundation for his digestive organs had some morbid peculiarities which puzzled the whole College of Physicians: his complexion was livid: his frame was meagre; and his face, handsome and intellectual as it was, had a haggard look which indicated the restlessness of pain as well as the restlessness of ambition.‡ As soon, however, as he was once more minister, he applied himself strenuously to business, and toiled, every day, and all day long, with an energy which amazed everybody who saw his ghastly countenance and tottering gait.

SIR JOHN LOWTHER.

SIR JOHN LOWTHER became First Lord of the Treasury, and was the person on whom Caermarthen chiefly relied for the conduct of the ostensible business of the House of Com *Commons' Journals, Jan. 20, 1689-90; Grey's Debates, Jan. 18 and 20. ↑ Van Citters to the States General, Feb. 11 (21), 1690.

A strange peculiarity of his constitution is mentioned in an account of him which was published a few months after his death. See the volume entitled "Lives and Characters of the most Illustrious Persons, British and Foreign, who died in the year 1712."