Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/442

428 king. Vane had been one of the very ablest counsellors and diplomatists that the commonwealth had had. True, he had not sate on the trial of the king, he had had no hand whatever in his death; but he had done two things which could never be forgotten or forgiven by the royalists. He had furnished the minutes of the privy council from his father's cabinet, which determined the fate of Strafford, and the court held him to be the real author of his death; next, though he did not assist in condemning the king, he accepted office under what was now termed the rebel government. Besides and beyond these, he was a man of the highest diplomatic abilities, and of a spotless character and high religious temperament, which cast the most odious hue on the vile spirit and lives of the new reigning power and party. The prisoners were charged with conspiring and compassing the death of the present king, and the recent acts in proof of this were alleged to be consulting with others to bring the king to destruction, and to keep him out of his kingdom and authority, and actually assembling in arms. These were vague and general charges, which might have been applied to all who had been engaged in the late government, and on the same pleas have put all the commonwealth men to death.

Lambert, who had been most courageous in the field, appeared, before a court of justice, a thorough coward. His late transactions had shown that he was a man of no military genius, and now he trembled at the sight of his judges. He assumed a very humble tone, pretended that when he opposed general Monk that he did not know that he was a favourer of the house of Stuart, and he threw himself on the royal clemency. As there was clearly nothing to be feared from such a man, he received judgment of death, but was then sent to a prison in Guernsey for life, where he amused himself with painting and gardening.

But Vane showed, by the ability with which he defended himself, that he was a most dangerous man to so corrupt and contemptible a dynasty as now reigned. The nobility of his sentiments, the dignity of his conduct, and the acuteness of his reasonings, all marked a man who kept alive most dangerous and disparaging reminiscences. Every plea that he advanced, and the power with which he advanced it, which before a fair and independent tribunal would have excited admiration, and insured his acquittal, here only inspired terror and rage, and insured his destruction. He contended that he was no traitor. That by all principles of civil government, and by the statute of Henry VII., he had only contended against a man who was no longer king de facto. That the parliament, before his union with it, had entered on the contest with the late king, and put him, on what they held to be sufficient grounds, out of his former position and authority. That they, by the avowed law of the land, the statute of the 11th of Henry VII., and the practice based upon it, were become the actual reigning and rightful power. Under that power, and by the constitutional, acknowledged government he had acted, taking no part in the shedding of the king's blood; and what he did after he did by the authority of the only ruling government. He therefore denied the right, of any court but the high court of parliament to call him in question, and he demanded counsel to assist him in any case in rebutting the charges against him. But every argument that he advanced only the more militated against himself. The court was met to condemn him and get rid of him, and the more he could prove its incompetence, the worse must their arbitrary injustice appear. The more he could prove the commonwealth a rightful government, the more must the present government hate and dread him. The judges declared that Charles had never ceased to be king either de facto or de jure from the moment of his father's death. That he was not king de facto, but an outcast deprived of all power and name from this country, was notorious enough, but that mattered little; they were resolved to have it so. In order to induce Vane to plead, they promised him counsel, but when he had complied, and pleaded not guilty, they answered his demand for counsel, by telling him they would be his counsel.

Before such a tribunal there could be but one result— right or wrong, the prisoner must be condemned; but Vane made so able and unanswerable a defence, that the counsel employed against him were reduced to complete silence: whereupon chief justice Foster said to his colleagues, "Though we know not what to say to him, we know what to do with him." And when he adverted to the promise of the king that he should not be condemned for what was past, and to his repeated demand for counsel, the solicitor-general exclaimed, "What counsel does he think would dare to speak for him in such a manifest case of treason, unless he could call down the heads of his fellow traitors—Bradshaw or Coke—from the top of Westminster Hall?" He might have added—in that vile state of things, that disgraceful relapse of the English public into moral and political slavery —what jury would dare to acquit him? The king was so exasperated at the accounts carried to him at Hampton Court of the bold and unanswerable defence of Vane, that he wrote to Clarendon, "The relation that hath been made to me of Sir Harry Vane's carriage yesterday in the hall, is the occasion of this letter, which, if I am rightly informed, was so insolent as to justify all that he had done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but parliament, and many things to that purpose. You have had a true account of all, and if he has given new occasion to be hanged, certainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way. Think of this, and give me some account of it to-morrow." What account Clarendon gave, we may imagine, for he is careful to pass over altogether so small a matter as the trial and death of this eminent man, in his own autobiography.

Vane was condemned, and executed on Tower Hill on the 14th of June, on the very spot where Strafford suffered, thus studiously making his death an act of retribution for his decisive evidence against that nobleman. On taking leave of his wife and friends. Sir Harry confidently predicted, as the former victims, Harrison, Scott, and Peters had done, that his blood would rise from the ground against the reigning family in judgment, on earth as well as in heaven.

"As a testimony and seal," he said, "to the justness of that quarrel, I leave now my life upon it as a legacy to all the honest interests in these three nations. Ten thousand deaths rather than defile my conscience, the chastity and purity of which I value beyond all this world." So alarmed were the