Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/511

] weakest part of his statement was that in which he defended his proceedings regardings the popish plot, declaring that he sincerely had believed, and did still believe, that the plot was real. But if so, his alarm must have strangely blinded him to the nature of the evidence produced, the infamous character of the witnesses, and their most flagrant contradictions of themselves and each other, and their gross and palpable inventions.

That lord William Russell was a sincere and high-minded patriot; that he was too noble to soil his fingers with French money, like so many of his coadjutors; and that he died firmly for his principles, refusing to betray the great national cause by consenting to the base doctrine—absolute submission to royal tyranny—to save his life, must always place him high amongst British worthies: but as few men are perfect, so his acquiescence in the base proceedings against many innocent men charged with being guilty of Titus Oates's plot, is a stain amid his brightness. That he ran a fair risk of forfeiting his life by his patriotic exertions, he would have been blind not to foresee, and in his last paper he admits the fact. That Charles, and still less James, should have had the nobility to spare his life, was not in their nature; though there came a time when James was reminded by Russell's father how supremely politic such clemency would have been. The drawing up his last declaration was attributed to Burnet, who, after the revolution, acknowledged this to be the fact. At that time also his attainder was reversed, on the plea of his lawful challenge of his jurors having been refused, and of partial and unjust construction of laws.

On the very day of lord Russell's death, the university of Oxford marked the epoch by one of those rampant assertions of toryism and base subservience which has too often disgraced that seat of learning. It published a "Judgment and Declaration," as passed in their convocation, for the honour of the holy and undivided Trinity, the preservation of catholic truth in the church, and that the king's majesty might be secured both from the attempts of open bloody enemies, and the machinations of treacherous heretics and schismatics. In this declaration they attacked almost every principle of civil and religious liberty, which had been promulgated and advocated in the works of Milton, Baxter, Bellarmin, Owen, Knox, Buchanan, and others. They declared that the doctrines of the civil authority being derived from the people; of there existing any compact, tacit or expressed, between the prince and his subjects from the obligation of which, should one party retreat, the other becomes exempt; of the sovereign forfeiting his right to govern if he violate the limitations established by the laws of God and man, were all wicked, abominate, and devilish doctrines, deserving of everlasting reprobation. And they called upon "All and singular the readers, tutors, and catechists, diligently to instruct and ground their scholars in that most necessary doctrine, which in a manner is the badge and character of the church of England, of submitting to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, teaching that this submission and obedience is to be clear, absolute, and without exception of any state or order of men." This doctrine of slaves, which Oxford would vainly have fixed on the nation as the badge of Englishmen, they were in a very few years, under James, taught the practical blessing of. They had, when their term came, quickly enough of it, flung the badge to the winds, and made a present of their plate to the Dutch prince, who came to drive their sovereign from the throne.

Before the trial of Algernon Sydney took place. Sir Francis Jeffreys was made lord chief justice in place of Sanderd, who was incapacitated by sickness. Jeffreys was promoted over the heads of the other judges, though merely a Serjeant. But the court wanted a man who would go thorough for it, and Jeffreys had shown that he was at once a servile tool of power, and a savage bully to the accused. He was perhaps the most singular mixture of buffoonery, debauchery, insolence, vulgarity, and brutal cruelty, that ever sate on the bench, and his name has come down to us as the perfection of judicial infamy. He hated the whigs, because they had turned him out of the recordership of the city of London, and took a savage and malignant pleasure in browbeating and hanging them. "His friendship and conversation," says Roger North, "lay much amongst the good fellows and humorists, and his delights were the extravagancies of the bottle. His weakness was, that he could not reprehend without scolding, and in such Billingsgate as should not come out of the mouth of any man. He called it giving a lick with the rough side of his tongue."

Before this alternately laughing and blackguarding demon Algernon Sidney, the last of the republicans, was arraigned at the bar of the king's bench on the 7th of September, 1683. Rumsey, Keeling, and West were brought against him as against Rusell, but the main witness was the despicable lord Howard, whom Evelyn truly calls, "That monster of a man, lord Howard of Escrick." On their evidence he was charged with being a member of the council of six, sworn to kill the king and overturn his government. That he had attended at those meetings already mentioned at Hampden's, Russell's, and Shepherd's. That he had undertaken to send Aaron Smith to Scotland, to concert a simultaneous insurrection, and to persuade the leading Scotch conspirators to come to London, on pretence of proceeding to Carolina.

Sidney, after Howard had delivered his evidence, was asked if be had any questions to put to the witness, but he replied with the utmost scorn, that "he had no questions to ask such as him!" "Then," said the attorney-general "silence—you know the rest of the proverb." The difficulty remained to prove Sidney's treason, for there were no two witnesses able or willing to attest an overt act. But if it depended on the existence of fact, there was not one of the council of six who was not guilty of really conspiring to drive out the next successor to the crown. Neither Russell, Hampden, nor Sidney, though they laboured in self-defence to prove the plot improbable, ever substantially denied its existence. They knew that it did exist, and were too honest to deny it, though they notoriously sought to evade the penalty of it, by contending that nothing of the kind was or could be proved. But what said Hampden himself after the revolution, before a committee of the house of lords? Plainly, "that the coming into England of king William was nothing else but the continuation of the council of six." The conspiracy by that time was become in the eyes of the