The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

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The government might indeed have postponed the trials till the
new Act came into force; and it would have been wise, as well as
right, to do so; for the prisoners would have gained nothing by
the delay. The case against them was one on which all the
ingenuity of the Inns of Court could have made no impression.
Porter, Pendergrass, De la Rue and others gave evidence which
admitted of no answer. Charnock said the very little that he had
to say with readiness and presence of mind. The jury found all
the defendants guilty. It is not much to the honour of that age
that the announcement of the verdict was received with loud
huzzas by the crowd which surrounded the Courthouse. Those huzzas
were renewed when the three unhappy men, having heard their doom,
were brought forth under a guard.676

Charnock had hitherto shown no sign of flinching; but when he was
again in his cell his fortitude gave way. He begged hard for
mercy. He would be content, he said, to pass the rest of his days
in an easy confinement. He asked only for his life. In return for
his life, he promised to discover all that he knew of the schemes
of the Jacobites against the government. If it should appear that
he prevaricated or that he suppressed any thing, he was willing
to undergo the utmost rigour of the law. This offer produced much
excitement, and some difference of opinion, among the councillors
of William. But the King decided, as in such cases he seldom
failed to decide, wisely and magnanimously. He saw that the
discovery of the Assassination Plot had changed the whole posture
of affairs. His throne, lately tottering, was fixed on an
immovable basis. His popularity had risen impetuously to as great
a height as when he was on his march from Torbay to London. Many
who had been out of humour with his administration, and who had,
in their spleen, held some communication with Saint Germains,
were shocked to find that they had been, in some sense, leagued
with murderers. He would not drive such persons to despair. He
would not even put them to the blush. Not only should they not be
punished; they should not undergo the humiliation of being pardoned.
He would not know that they had offended. Charnock was left to his
fate.677 When he found that he had no chance of being received as
a deserter, he assumed the dignity of a martyr, and played his
part resolutely to the close. That he might bid farewell to the
world with a better grace, he ordered a fine new coat to be
hanged in, and was very particular on his last day about the
powdering and curling of his wig.678 Just before he was turned
off, he delivered to the Sheriffs a paper in which he avowed that
he had conspired against the life of the Prince of Orange, but
solemnly denied that James had given any commission authorising
assassination. The denial was doubtless literally correct; but
Charnock did not deny, and assuredly could not with truth have
denied, that he had seen a commission written and signed by
James, and containing words which might without any violence be
construed, and which were, by all to whom they were shown,
actually construed, to authorise the murderous ambuscade of
Turnham Green.

Indeed Charnock, in another paper, which is still in existence,
but has never been printed, held very different language. He
plainly said that, for reasons too obvious to be mentioned, he
could not tell the whole truth in the paper which be had
delivered to the Sheriffs. He acknowledged that the plot in which
he had been engaged seemed, even to many loyal subjects, highly
criminal. They called him assassin and murderer. Yet what had he
done more than had been done by Mucius Scaevola? Nay, what had he
done more than had been done by every body who bore arms against
the Prince of Orange? If an array of twenty thousand men had
suddenly landed in England and surprised the usurper, this would
have been called legitimate war. Did the difference between war
and assassination depend merely on the number of persons engaged?
What then was the smallest number which could lawfully surprise
an enemy? Was it five thousand, or a thousand, or a hundred?
Jonathan and his armourbearer were only two. Yet they made a
great slaughter of the Philistines. Was that assassination? It
cannot, said Charnock, be the mere act, it must be the cause,
that makes killing assassination. It followed that it was not
assassination to kill one,--and here the dying man gave a loose to
all his hatred,--who had declared a war of extermination against
loyal subjects, who hung, drew and quartered every man who stood
up for the right, and who had laid waste England to enrich the
Dutch. Charnock admitted that his enterprise would have been
unjustifiable if it had not been authorised by James; but he
maintained that it had been authorised, not indeed expressly, but
by implication. His Majesty had indeed formerly prohibited
similar attempts; but had prohibited them, not as in themselves
criminal, but merely as inexpedient at this or that conjuncture
of affairs. Circumstances had changed. The prohibition might
therefore reasonably be considered as withdrawn. His Majesty's
faithful subjects had then only to look to the words of his
commission; and those words, beyond all doubt, fully warranted an
attack on the person of the usurper.679

King and Keyes suffered with Charnock. King behaved with
firmness and decency. He acknowledged his crime, and said that he
repented of it. He thought it due to the Church of which he was a
member, and on which his conduct had brought reproach, to declare
that he had been misled, not by any casuistry about tyrannicide,
but merely by the violence of his own evil passions. Poor Keyes
was in an agony of terror. His tears and lamentations moved the
pity of some of the spectators. It was said at the time, and it
has often since been repeated, that a servant drawn into crime by
a master was a proper object of royal clemency. But those who
have blamed the severity with which Keyes was treated have
altogether omitted to notice the important circumstance which
distinguished his case from that of every other conspirator. He
had been one of the Blues. He had kept up to the last an
intercourse with his old comrades. On the very day fixed for the
murder he had contrived to mingle with them and to pick up
intelligence from them. The regiment had been so deeply infected
with disloyalty that it had been found necessary to confine some
men and to dismiss many more. Surely, if any example was to be
made, it was proper to make an example of the agent by whose
instrumentality the men who meant to shoot the King communicated
with the men whose business was to guard him.

Friend was tried next. His crime was not of so black a dye as
that of the three conspirators who had just suffered. He had
indeed invited foreign enemies to invade the realm, and had made
preparations for joining them. But, though he had been privy to
the design of assassination, he had not been a party to it. His
large fortune however, and the use which he was well known to
have made of it, marked him out as a fit object for punishment.
He, like Charnock, asked for counsel, and, like Charnock, asked
in vain. The judges could not relax the law; and the Attorney
General would not postpone the trial. The proceedings of that day
furnish a strong argument in favour of the Act from the benefit
of which Friend was excluded. It is impossible to read them over
at this distance of time without feeling compassion for a silly
ill educated man, unnerved by extreme danger, and opposed to
cool, astute and experienced antagonists. Charnock had defended
himself and those who were tried with him as well as any
professional advocate could have done. But poor Friend was as
helpless as a child. He could do little more than exclaim that he
was a Protestant, and that the witnesses against him were
Papists, who had dispensations from their priests for perjury,
and who believed that to swear away the lives of heretics was a
meritorious work. He was so grossly ignorant of law and history
as to imagine that the statute of treasons, passed in the reign
of Edward the Third, at a time when there was only one religion
in Western Europe, contained a clause providing that no Papist
should be a witness, and actually forced the Clerk of the Court
to read the whole Act from beginning to end. About his guilt it
was impossible that there could be a doubt in any rational mind.
He was convicted; and he would have been convicted if he had been
allowed the privileges for which he asked.

Parkyns came next. He had been deeply concerned in the worst part
of the plot, and was, in one respect, less excusable than any of
his accomplices; for they were all nonjurors; and he had taken
the oaths to the existing government. He too insisted that he
ought to be tried according to the provisions of the new Act. But
the counsel for the Crown stood on their extreme right; and his
request was denied. As he was a man of considerable abilities,
and had been bred to the bar, he probably said for himself all
that counsel could have said for him; and that all amounted to
very little. He was found guilty, and received sentence of death
on the evening of the twenty-fourth of March, within six hours of
the time when the law of which he had vainly demanded the benefit
was to come into force.680

The execution of the two knights was eagerly expected by the
population of London. The States General were informed by their
correspondent that, of all sights, that in which the English most
delighted was a hanging, and that, of all hangings within the
memory of the oldest man, that of Friend and Parkyns excited the
greatest interest. The multitude had been incensed against Friend
by reports touching the exceeding badness of the beer which he
brewed. It was even rumoured that he had, in his zeal for the
Jacobite cause, poisoned all the casks which he had furnished to
the navy. An innumerable crowd accordingly assembled at Tyburn.
Scaffolding had been put up which formed an immense amphitheatre
round the gallows. On this scaffolding the wealthier spectators
stood, row above row; and expectation was at the height when it
was announced that the show was deferred. The mob broke up in bad
humour, and not without many fights between those who had given
money for their places and those who refused to return it.681

The cause of this severe disappointment was a resolution suddenly
passed by the Commons. A member had proposed that a Committee
should be sent to the Tower with authority to examine the
prisoners, and to hold out to them the hope that they might, by a
full and ingenuous confession, obtain the intercession of the
House. The debate appears, from the scanty information which has
come down to us, to have been a very curious one. Parties seemed
to have changed characters. It might have been expected that the
Whigs would have been inexorably severe, and that, if there was
any tenderness for the unhappy men, that tenderness would have
been found among the Tories. But in truth many of the Whigs hoped
that they might, by sparing two criminals who had no power to do
mischief, be able to detect and destroy numerous criminals high
in rank and office. On the other hand, every man who had ever had
any dealings direct or indirect with Saint Germains, or who took
an interest in any person likely to have had such dealings,
looked forward with dread to the disclosures which the captives
might, under the strong terrors of death, be induced to make.
Seymour, simply because he had gone further in treason than
almost any other member of the House, was louder than any other
member of the House in exclaiming against all indulgence to his
brother traitors. Would the Commons usurp the most sacred
prerogative of the Crown? It was for His Majesty, and not for
them, to judge whether lives justly forfeited could be without
danger spared. The Whigs however carried their point. A
Committee, consisting of all the Privy Councillors in the House,
set off instantly for Newgate. Friend and Parkyns were
interrogated, but to no purpose. They had, after sentence had
been passed on them, shown at first some symptoms of weakness;
but their courage had been fortified by the exhortations of
nonjuring divines who had been admitted to the prison. The rumour
was that Parkyns would have given way but for the entreaties of
his daughter, who adjured him to suffer like a man for the good
cause. The criminals acknowledged that they had done the acts of
which they had been convicted, but, with a resolution which is
the more respectable because it seems to have sprung, not from
constitutional hardihood, but from sentiments of honour and
religion, refused to say any thing which could compromise
others.682

In a few hours the crowd again assembled at Tyburn; and this time
the sightseers were not defrauded of their amusement. They saw
indeed one sight which they had not expected, and which produced
a greater sensation than the execution itself. Jeremy Collier and
two other nonjuring divines of less celebrity, named Cook and
Snatt, had attended the prisoners in Newgate, and were in the
cart under the gallows. When the prayers were over, and just
before the hangman did his office, the three schismatical priests
stood up, and laid their hands on the heads of the dying men who
continued to kneel. Collier pronounced a form of absolution taken
from the service for the Visitation of the Sick, and his brethren
exclaimed "Amen!"

This ceremony raised a great outcry; and the outcry became louder
when, a few hours after the execution, the papers delivered by
the two traitors to the Sheriffs were made public. It had been
supposed that Parkyns at least would express some repentance for
the crime which had brought him to the gallows. Indeed he had,
before the Committee of the Commons, owned that the Assassination
Plot could not be justified. But, in his last declaration, he
avowed his share in that plot, not only without a word indicating
remorse, but with something which resembled exultation. Was this
a man to be absolved by Christian divines, absolved before the
eyes of tens of thousands, absolved with rites evidently intended
to attract public attention, with rites of which there was no
trace in the Book of Common Prayer or in the practice of the
Church of England?

In journals, pamphlets and broadsides, the insolence of the three
Levites, as they were called, was sharply reprehended. Warrants
were soon out. Cook and Snatt were taken and imprisoned; but
Collier was able to conceal himself, and, by the help of one of
the presses which were at the service of his party, sent forth
from his hiding place a defence of his conduct. He declared that
he abhorred assassination as much as any of those who railed
against him; and his general character warrants us in believing
that this declaration was perfectly sincere. But the rash act
into which he had been hurried by party spirit furnished his
adversaries with very plausible reasons for questioning his
sincerity. A crowd of answers to his defence appeared. Preeminent
among them in importance was a solemn manifesto signed by the two
Archbishops and by all the Bishops who were then in London,
twelve in number. Even Crewe of Durham and Sprat of Rochester set
their names to this document. They condemned the proceedings of
the three nonjuring divines, as in form irregular and in
substance impious. To remit the sins of impenitent sinners was a
profane abuse of the power which Christ had delegated to his
ministers. It was not denied that Parkyns had planned an
assassination. It was not pretended that he had professed any
repentance for planning an assassination. The plain inference was
that the divines who absolved him did not think it sinful to
assassinate King William. Collier rejoined; but, though a
pugnacious controversialist, he on this occasion shrank from
close conflict, and made his escape as well as he could under a
cloud of quotations from Tertullian, Cyprian and Jerome,
Albaspinaeus and Hammond, the Council of Carthage and the Council
of Toledo. The public feeling was strongly against the three
absolvers. The government however wisely determined not to confer
on them the honour of martyrdom. A bill was found against them by
the grand jury of Middlesex; but they were not brought to trial.
Cook and Snatt were set at liberty after a short detention; and
Collier would have been treated with equal lenity if he would
have consented to put in bail. But he was determined to do no act
which could be construed into a recognition of the usurping
government. He was therefore outlawed; and when he died, more
than thirty years later, his outlawry had not been reversed.683

Parkyns was the last Englishman who was tried for high treason
under the old system of procedure. The first who was tried under
the new system was Rockwood. He was defended by Sir Bartholomew
Shower, who in the preceding reign had made himself unenviably
conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained
from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably
resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the
gibbet for breaches of military discipline. By his servile
cruelty he had earned the nickname of the Manhunter. Shower
deserved, if any offender deserved, to be excepted from the Act
of Indemnity, and left to the utmost rigour of those laws which
he had so shamelessly perverted. But he had been saved by the
clemency of William, and had requited that clemency by
pertinacious and malignant opposition.684 It was doubtless on
account of Shower's known leaning towards Jacobitism that he was
employed on this occasion. He raised some technical objections
which the Court overruled. On the merits of the case he could
make no defence. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Cranburne
and Lowick were then tried and convicted. They suffered with
Rookwood; and there the executions stopped.685

The temper of the nation was such that the government might have
shed much more blood without incurring the reproach of cruelty.
The feeling which had been called forth by the discovery of the
plot continued during several weeks to increase day by day. Of
that feeling the able men who were at the head of the Whig party
made a singularly skilful use. They saw that the public
enthusiasm, if left without guidance, would exhaust itself in
huzzas, healths and bonfires, but might, if wisely guided, be the
means of producing a great and lasting effect. The Association,
into which the Commons had entered while the King's speech was
still in their ears, furnished the means of combining four fifths
of the nation in one vast club for the defence of the order of
succession with which were inseparably combined the dearest
liberties of the English people, and of establishing a test which
would distinguish those who were zealous for that order of
succession from those who sullenly and reluctantly acquiesced in
it. Of the five hundred and thirty members of the Lower House
about four hundred and twenty voluntarily subscribed the
instrument which recognised William as rightful and lawful King
of England. It was moved in the Upper House that the same form
should be adopted; but objections were raised by the Tories.
Nottingham, ever conscientious, honourable and narrow minded,
declared that he could not assent to the words "rightful and
lawful." He still held, as he had held from the first, that a
prince who had taken the Crown, not by birthright, but by the
gift of the Convention, could not properly be so described.
William was doubtless King in fact, and, as King in fact, was
entitled to the obedience of Christians. "No man," said
Nottingham, "has served or will serve His Majesty more faithfully
than I. But to this document I cannot set my hand." Rochester and
Normanby held similar language. Monmouth, in a speech of two
hours and a half, earnestly exhorted the Lords to agree with the
Commons. Burnet was vehement on the same side. Wharton, whose
father had lately died, and who was now Lord Wharton, appeared in
the foremost rank of the Whig peers. But no man distinguished
himself more in the debate than one whose life, both public and
private, had been one long series of faults and disasters, the
incestuous lover of Henrietta Berkeley, the unfortunate
lieutenant of Monmouth. He had recently ceased to be called by
the tarnished name of Grey of Wark, and was now Earl of
Tankerville. He spoke on that day with great force and eloquence
for the words, "rightful and lawful." Leeds, after expressing his
regret that a question about a mere phrase should have produced
dissension among noble persons who were all equally attached to
the reigning Sovereign, undertook the office of mediator. He
proposed that their Lordships, instead of recognising William as
rightful and lawful King, should declare that William had the
right by law to the English Crown, and that no other person had
any right whatever to that Crown. Strange to say, almost all the
Tory peers were perfectly satisfied with what Leeds had
suggested. Among the Whigs there was some unwillingness to
consent to a change which, slight as it was, might be thought to
indicate a difference of opinion between the two Houses on a
subject of grave importance. But Devonshire and Portland declared
themselves content; their authority prevailed; and the alteration
was made. How a rightful and lawful possessor is to be
distinguished from a possessor who has the exclusive right by law
is a question which a Whig may, without any painful sense of
shame, acknowledge to be beyond the reach of his faculties, and
leave to be discussed by High Churchmen. Eighty-three peers
immediately affixed their names to the amended form of
association; and Rochester was among them. Nottingham, not yet
quite satisfied, asked time for consideration.686

Beyond the walls of Parliament there was none of this verbal
quibbling. The language of the House of Commons was adopted by
the whole country. The City of London led the way. Within thirty-
six hours after the Association had been published under the
direction of the Speaker it was subscribed by the Lord Mayor, by
the Aldermen, and by almost all the members of the Common
Council. The municipal corporations all over the kingdom followed
the example. The spring assizes were just beginning; and at every
county town the grand jurors and the justices of the peace put
down their names. Soon shopkeepers, artisans, yeomen, farmers,
husbandmen, came by thousands to the tables where the parchments
were laid out. In Westminster there were thirty-seven thousand
associators, in the Tower Hamlets eight thousand, in Southwark
eighteen thousand. The rural parts of Surrey furnished seventeen
thousand. At Ipswich all the freemen signed except two. At
Warwick all the male inhabitants who had attained the age of
sixteen signed, except two Papists and two Quakers. At Taunton,
where the memory of the Bloody Circuit was fresh, every man who
could write gave in his adhesion to the government. All the
churches and all the meeting houses in the town were crowded, as
they had never been crowded before, with people who came to thank
God for having preserved him whom they fondly called William the
Deliverer. Of all the counties of England Lancashire was the most
Jacobitical. Yet Lancashire furnished fifty thousand signatures.
Of all the great towns of England Norwich was the most
Jacobitical. The magistrates of that city were supposed to be in
the interest of the exiled dynasty. The nonjurors were numerous,
and had, just before the discovery of the plot, seemed to be in
unusual spirits and ventured to take unusual liberties. One of
the chief divines of the schism had preached a sermon there which
gave rise to strange suspicions. He had taken for his text the
verse in which the Prophet Jeremiah announced that the day of
vengeance was come, that the sword would be drunk with blood,
that the Lord God of Hosts had a sacrifice in the north country
by the river Euphrates. Very soon it was known that, at the time
when this discourse was delivered, swords had actually been
sharpening, under the direction of Barclay and Parkyns, for a
bloody sacrifice on the north bank of the river Thames. The
indignation of the common people of Norwich was not to be
restrained. They came in multitudes, though discouraged by the
municipal authorities, to plight faith to William, rightful and
lawful King. In Norfolk the number of signatures amounted to
forty-eight thousand, in Suffolk to seventy thousand. Upwards of
five hundred rolls went up to London from every part of England.
The number of names attached to twenty-seven of those rolls
appears from the London Gazette to have been three hundred and
fourteen thousand. After making the largest allowance for fraud,
it seems certain that the Association included the great majority
of the adult male inhabitants of England who were able to sign
their names. The tide of popular feeling was so strong that a man
who was known not to have signed ran considerable risk of being
publicly affronted. In many places nobody appeared without
wearing in his hat a red riband on which were embroidered the
words, "General Association for King William." Once a party of
Jacobites had the courage to parade a street in London with an
emblematic device which seemed to indicate their contempt for the
new Solemn League and Covenant. They were instantly put to rout
by the mob, and their leader was well ducked. The enthusiasm
spread to secluded isles, to factories in foreign countries, to
remote colonies. The Association was signed by the rude fishermen
of the Scilly Rocks, by the English merchants of Malaga, by the
English merchants of Genoa, by the citizens of New York, by the
tobacco planters of Virginia and by the sugar planters of
Barbadoes.687