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lasted till the twelfth of April, and drew from the noble culprit a defence which, however we may condemn his original apostasy from the cause of freedom, or the criminal subserviency of his subsequent conduct, must ever by the truth of some of it's positions, and the pathetic eloquence of it's conclusion, command the sympathy of posterity: Speaking of the principle of accumulative or constructive evidence, by which (as Hume remarks) many actions, either totally innocent in themselves, or criminal in a much inferior degree, shall when united amount to treason, and subject the person to the highest penalties inflicted by the law; Where," he exclaimed, "has this species of guilt lain so long concealed? Where has this fire been so long buried, during so many centuries, that no smoke should appear, till it burst out at once to consume me and my children? Better it were to live under no law at all, and by the maxims of cautious prudence to conform ourselves, the best we can, to the arbitrary will of a master; than fancy we have a law on which we can rely, and find at last that this law shall inflict a punishment precedent to the promulgation, and try us by maxims unheard of till the very moment of the prosecution. If I sail on the Thames, and split my vessel on an anchor; in case there be no buoy to give warning, the party shall pay me damages: but, if the anchor be marked out, then is the striking on it at my own peril. Where is the mark set upon this crime? Where the token,

charge of high-treason, and all communication between them strictly prohibited: and when this and other rigorous regulations relative to his witnesses justly excited his complaints, he was reminded that in similar circumstances a still harder measure had been dealt to the Earl of Mountnorris.'

by which I should discover it? It has lain concealed under water; and no human prudence, no human innocence, could save me from the destruction, with which I am at present threatened.

"It is now full two hundred and forty years, since treasons were defined; and so long has it been since any man was touched to this extent, upon this crime, before myself. We have lived, my Lords, happily to ourselves at home: we have lived gloriously abroad to the world. Let us be content with what our fathers have left us. Let not our ambition carry us to be more learned, than they were, in these killing and destructive arts. Great wisdom it will be in your Lordships, and just providence for yourselves, for your posterities, for the whole kingdom, to cast from you into the fire these bloody and mysterious volumes of arbitrary and constructive treasons (as the primitive Christians did their books of curious arts) and betake yourselves to the plain letter of the statute, which tells you where the crime is, and points out to you the path by which you may avoid it. Let us not, to our own destruction, awake those sleeping lions, by rattling up a company of old records, which have lain so many ages by the wall, forgotten and neglected. To all my afflictions add not this, my Lords, the most severe of any; that I for my other sins, not for my treasons, be the means of introducing a precedent so pernicious to the laws and liberties of my native country.

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"However, these gentlemen at the bar say, they speak for the commonwealth;' and they believe so: yet under favour it is I who, in this particular, speak for the commonwealth. Precedents, like those which are endeavoured to be established against me, must

draw along such inconveniences and miseries, that in a few years the kingdom will be in the condition expressed in a statute of Henry IV.; and no man shall know by what rule to govern his words and actions.'

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Impose not, my Lords, difficulties insurmountable upon ministers of state, nor disable them from serving with cheerfulness their King and country. If you examine them, and under such severe penalties, by every grain, by every little weight, the scrutiny will be intolerable. The public affairs of the kingdom must be left waste; and no wise man, who has any honour or fortune to lose, will ever engage himself in such dreadful, such unknown perils.*

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My Lords, I have now troubled your Lordships a great deal longer than I should have done. Were it not for the interest of these pledges, which a saint in heaven left me, I should be loth "Here he pointed to his children, and his weeping stopped him. "What I forfeit for myself, it is nothing: but,

"This surely (observes Mrs. Macaulay) is very deficient in argument; since it is apparent, that a precedent of so great a criminal being condemned by the whole power of the legislature could not in it's consequences be so dangerous to the public or the liberty of individuals, as the example of crimes of so black a nature, and so destructive to the commonwealth, being committed with impunity. An honest and a wise man would never fear the severest scrutiny: and the weak and the wicked, being deterred from accepting public offices, or (if they did accept them) being kept within just bounds by the terrors of an after-inquiry and punishment, must be of infinite service to the well-governing of the affairs of the kingdom." Even Hume, it should be remembered, the apologist of the Stuarts, concedes that "Strafford was secretly no enemy to arbitrary counsels, as appears from some of his letters and despatches, where he seems to wish a standing army established."

I confess, that my indiscretion should forfeit for them, it wounds me very deeply. You will be pleased to pardon my infirmity: something I should have said; but I see I shall not be able, and therefore I shall leave it.

"And now, my Lords, I thank God, I have been by his blessing sufficiently instructed in the extreme vanity of all temporary enjoyments, compared to the importance of an eternal duration: and so, my Lords, even so, with all humility and with all tranquillity of mind, I submit clearly and freely to your judgements; and whether that righteous doom shall be to life or death, I shall repose myself, full of gratitude and confidence, in the arms of the great Author of my existence." *

This address, as we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Whitlocke, himself the Chairman of the Committee appointed to conduct the impeachment, 'moved the hearts of all his auditors, some few excepted, to remorse and pity;' and such was the general effect which it produced, aided by the arguments of his counsel Mr. Lane, † that the Commons perceiving the sentence would infallibly prove less rigorous than they desired, immediately resolved to proceed against him by a bill of attainder: and ac

* Rushworth, IV. 659.

+ From his statements it appeared that even after the enactment of the law of treason in the reign of Edward III., men had still been harassed by charges brought within the statute only by construction: that express acts had been passed under Henry IV. and Henry VIII. to prevent these abuses, and to restrict treason entirely to the specified cases; and that many instances had occurred of persons like his client accused of hightreason, who in consequence of these regulations had been found guilty only of felony.'

cordingly came to a vote, that it was sufficiently proved, that the Earl of Strafford had endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government into the realms of England and Ireland; and that, consequently, he was guilty of high-treason.'

Of this proceeding the Commons attempted to veil the iniquity by an attempt not less iniquitous, and still more absurd, to satisfy the regal rules of evidence. The advice of Strafford about the employment of the Irish army, and which by a forced interpretation was construed into a design to subdue England by that force, had hitherto been attested by the solitary evidence of Sir Harry Vane: an effort was now made to maintain the charge by two witnesses, as the laws of treason required. The younger Vane, on inspecting some of his father's papers, discovered a minute (as it appeared) of the consultation, at which the words imputed to Strafford were alleged to have been spoken; and this minute was recognised by the elder Vane as taken down by him, at the time, in his quality of secretary. In reporting this discovery to the House, Mr. Pym maintained, in a solemn argument, that the written evidence of Sir Harry Vane at the period of the transaction, and his oral evidence at present, ought to be considered as equivalent to the testimony of two witnesses and this extravagant position was actually sanctioned by the House, and adopted as a ground of their proceedings!

On the twenty-first of the same month, the bill of attainder was passed by a majority of 204 against 59.*

* To prevent, however, the retaliation of this measure upon