Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 6.djvu/224

 210, both the colonel, and afterwards six of the other prisoners, were declared guilty; and, though the jury recommended the colonel strongly to mercy, both he and they were hanged and beheaded on the 21st of February.



The whole of this proceeding was marked by revolting features of injustice and savage severity. Had the guilt in the colonel been most clearly proved, which on the scaffold he solemnly denied, yet the cold rejection of all his demands for official inquiry into his contact as governor of Honduras, and his claims on government, ought to have pleaded as a a palliation of proceedings into which his natural irritation; might have led him. But, though the most energetic appeals were made by his wife, by the jury which condemned him, and by other parties, the king refused to listen to them. The Irish had lately shown themselves rebellious, and were still unsettled, and Despard was an Irishman. Besides, George III. had a fondness for hanging, which will for ever leave a dark stain upon his memory. The criminal code, during his reign, was a through code of Draco, and he resisted its amelioration, and the efforts of Romilly and others already at work for this end, with a pitiless pertinacity. The case of Despard was but the forerunner of a long,