hour's notice for saving his life. The trial must proceed." Wishing to have notes of the evidence taken, he asked whether he might have somebody to write for him. The Chief-justice Pemberton said, "Any of your servants shall assist you in writing anything you please." "My lord," said Russell, "my wife is here to do it." And when the spectators turned their eyes and beheld the devoted lady, the daughter of the virtuous Earl of Southampton, rising up to assist her lord in this his uttermost distress, a thrill of anguish ran through the assembly. Rumsey swore that Russell had been present at Shepherd's, the wine-merchant, when the grandees were proposing to surprise the king's guards, &c.

LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL From a print by Vanderbank, after Kneller. Shepherd swore like Rumsey. The third and fatal witness was the infamous Howard. Though his own relative, Russell had always regarded this man with distrust and aversion; but the scoundrel had captivated Algernon Sidney with enthusiastic professions of republicanism; Sidney had introduced him to Lord Essex; and, through the representations of Essex and Sidney, Russell's objections had been removed, and Howard had been admitted to those secret meetings which Shaftesbury had first called together. Now, as a witness at the bar of the Old Bailey, the ignoble Howard began to improve upon the deposition he had made before the king and council; adding fresh circumstances, or speaking confidently of what he had before expressed doubtingly; but he had not proceeded far when his colour changed, and his voice faltered so much that the jury said they could not hear his words. Then Howard, much agitated, announced the horrible fact. "There is," said he, an unhappy accident which

:

has sunk my voice: I was but just now acquainted with the fate of my Lord Essex." Instantly a murmur ran through the court that the noble Essex had committed suicide. At an early hour on this same morning, the king and the Duke of York took a fancy to visit the Tower, where, it is said, they had not been for several years before. It is represented by some narrators of these events, that they were led thither by an unmanly desire of seeing Lord Russell pass to his certain death-sentence; but, whatever was their motive, thither they went: and after staying there some time, as they were leaving the Tower to go back to their barge, a cry followed them that my Lord Essex had killed himself. According to the Tories, the news of the dismal event came into the court of justice as the air at the doors, and neither direct nor indirect use of it was made to affect the prisoner at the bar: but the Whigs maintained that the news was studiously brought in at a fixed moment; and there is unquestionable evidence to prove that the lawyers made all the use they could of the incident to the great prejudice of the prisoner. The attorney-general said it was quite clear that Essex had murdered himself to escape the hands of justice; and Jeffreys, who was one of the counsel for the crown, said more words to the same effect. This was infamous enough and this was and is certain: but the Whigs made a bold plunge into the depths of uncertainty, and at once whispered that the Earl of Essex had been foully murdered by the procurement of the king and the Duke of York; and, in defiance of the exertions made on the other side, this belief gained ground among the people. It appears to us that the strongest presumptive evidence that the king and the duke had nothing to do with the murder, is to be found in the fact of their both being in the Tower when Essex died. If they could have resorted to such an assassination, they would hardly have chosen to be on the very spot when the deed was done. There are, however, circumstances of mystery in the horrible story, and these have not been cleared up by the royalist Evelyn, who says:-"The astonishing news was brought to us of the Earl of Essex having cut his throat, having been but three days a prisoner in the Tower, and this happening on the very day and instant that Lord Russell was on his trial and had sentence of death. This accident exceedingly amazed me, my Lord Essex being so well known by me to be a person of such sober and religious deportment, so well at his ease, and so much obliged to the king. It is certain the king and duke were at the Tower, and passed by his window about the same time this morning when my lord, asking for a razor, shut himself into a closet, and perpetrated the horrid act.

Yet it was wondered by some how it was

possible he should do it in the manner he was found, for the wound was so deep and wide, that, being cut through the gullet, windpipe, and both the jugulars, it reached to the very vertebræ of the neck, so that the head held to it by a very little skin, as it were; the gapping, too, of the razor, and cutting his own fingers, was a little strange: but more, that, having passed the jugulars, he should have strength to proceed so far, that an executioner could hardly have done more with an axe. There were odd reflections on it. This fatal news, coming to Hick's Hall upon the article of my Lord Russell's trial, was said to have had no little influence on the jury, and all the bench, to his prejudice. Others said that he had himself, on some occasions, hinted that, in case he should be in danger of having his life taken from him by any public misfortune, those who thirsted for his estates should miss of their aim; and that he should speak favourably of that Earl of Northumberland and some others who made away with themselves; but these are discourses so unlike his sober and prudent conversation, that I have no inclination to credit them. What might instigate him to this devil- | ish fact I am unable to conjecture. My Lord Clarendon, his brother-in-law, who was with him but the day before, assured me he was then very cheerful, and declared it to be the effect of his innocence and loyalty; and most people believe that his majesty had no severe intentions against him, though he was altogether inexorable as to Lord Russell and some of the rest."

But to return to Lord Russell. So soon as he had recovered from the shock his nerves had sustained, Howard went on to swear away the life of his kinsman. The prisoner acknowledged that he had been present at some political meetings in the city, but insisted that the company had met upon no fixed design. West, the fluent lawyer, was called upon to satisfy the court that Lord Russell was certainly the lord the conspirators had most depended upon. The prisoner objected to the witnesses, that they swore against him to save their own lives. Before the jury withdrew, Russell said to them, “Gentlemen, I am now in your hands eternally-my honour, my life, my all; and I hope the heats and animosities that are among you will not so bias you as to make you inclined to find an innocent man guilty. I call heaven and earth to witness, that I never had a design against the king's life. I am in your hands, so God direct you." But the jury soon brought in a verdict of guilty; and Treby, recorder of London, who had formerly been an exclusionist, and who had been deeply engaged with Lord Shaftesbury in most of the city schemes and plots, pronounced the horrible sentence of death for high treason.

Many efforts were made to obtain the royal pardon; but the heart of Charles was so set upon Russell's destruction, that he was proof even to £100,000, which were offered to him by his lordship's father, the Duke of Bedford, through the French mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. After this, nothing, surely, was to be hoped from prayers, petitions, and letters. Yet Russell himself petitioned, by letter, both the king and the Duke of York. When there remained no other chance, his friend, Lord Cavendish, offered to manage his escape by changing clothes, and remaining, at all hazards to himself, in his place; but Russell nobly refused, and prepared to die with Christian piety. He considered himself a much happier man than Howard, who had purchased a few years of life and ignominy by betraying his friends; and, when he had taken leave of his high-minded wife, he said, "Now the bitterness of death is past." The morning after this parting-on the 21st of July-he was led to the scaffold, which was not erected upon Tower - hill, but in Lincoln's Inn Fields, "in order that the citizens might be humbled by the spectacle of their once triumphant leader carried in his coach to death through the city." In passing, he looked at Southampton House, the paternal home of his lady; and the sight brought a few tears to his eyes. He was attended by Tillotson and Burnet; and while Tillotson prayed, Burnet held the pen to record his lordship's last words. These words were few, and were addressed to Sheriff Rich, who superintended the execution, though he had once been an anti-courtier, and had voted with Russell for the exclusion. His lordship said, that, because he had never loved much speaking, and could not expect now to be well heard, he had set down in a paper (which he handed to the sheriff) all that he thought proper to leave behind him. He prayed, embraced the two divines, and, without any visible change of countenance, laid himself down and fitted his neck to the block. Like Lord Stafford, he refused to give the sign to the executioner, who chose his own moment, and severed his neck with two or three clumsy strokes. The execution was scarcely over when every corner of the town rang with Russell's last paper,' which he had delivered to the sheriff in manuscript, but which was already in print and in circulation through the industry of Lady Russell, and probably of Burnet, who is more than suspected of having had a principal hand in its composition. His lordship said, or was made to say (for ourselves, we believe all that is contained in the first clauses to have been his real sentiments), that he

"His speech," says Burnet, was so soon printed, that it was selling about the streets an hour after his death; upon which the court was highly inflamed."

the established religion, would have sanctioned every stretch of arbitrary power, published its decree in support of passive obedience and of the right of kings to govern wrong without resistance or challenge from their suffering subjects.

In Trinity Term, when the court was making as much of the Rye House Plot as ever its opponents had made of the Popish Plot, judgment was given against the city of London; and, in the following month of September, the king was allowed to regulate the government of the city, changing the old aldermen and officers, and appointing new ones at his pleasure. Eight aldermen were deprived at once of the honours they had received by election of their fellow-citizens, and "were all turned out for lying under the horrid suspicion of loving their country better than king." On the 7th of September Algernon Sidney was brought to trial at the bar of the King's

had lived and now died a true and sincere Protestant, and in the communion of the Church of England, "though he could never yet comply with, or rise up to all the heights of many people;" that, for Popery, he looked upon it as an idolatrous and bloody religion, and therefore thought himself bound, in his station, to do all he could against it; that he had foreseen all along that this would procure him great and powerful enemies; that he had been for some time expecting the worst, and now blessed God he was to fall by the axe, and not by the fiery trial; that, whatever had been his apprehensions of Popery, he never had a thought of doing anything against it basely or inhumanly, or that did not consist with the Christian religion, and the laws and liberties of the kingdom; that he appealed to Almighty God for the truth of this; that he had ever proceeded sincerely without passion, private ends, or malice; that he had always loved his country much more than his life, and had always looked upon the constitution as one of the best governments in the world; and that he would have suffered any extremity rather than have consented to any design to take the king's life. After praying for the king, and wishing that he might be indeed the defender of the faith, the paper went on to explain his conduct in regard to the Popish Plot-the darkest stain on the character of Russell. We believe his assertions; but that belief must be coupled with, and made dependent upon, rather a low estimate of his intellect and penetration. "As for the share I had in the prosecution of the Popish Plot, I take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the sincerity of my heart, being then really convinced, as I am still, that there was a conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the Protestant religion. And I likewise profess that I never knew anything, either directly or indirectly, of any underhand practice with the witnesses, which I look upon as so horrid a thing that I could never have endured it; for, I thank God, falsehood and cruelty were never in my nature." He then proceeded to justify his conduct about the bill of exclusion. After praying God not to lay his death to the charge of the king's council, or the judges, sheriffs, or jury, and expressing pity for the witnesses, he added, "From the time of choosing the sheriffs, I concluded the heats would produce something of this kind; and I am not much surprised to find it fall upon me."1

On the same memorable 21st of July, when Russell perished and this paper was printed, the university of Oxford, which, with a saving of

It ought never to be forgotten that Russell, though he intrigued with the French court, is never charged with taking French money, like Sidney. Barillon, indeed, tells his master that he durst not make his base proposals to his lordship.

ALGERNON SIDNEY.-From Lodge's Portraits. Bench, where Jeffreys now presided as chiefjustice. This bravo in law mounted the ladder of promotion by wonderfully rapid strides; but he seemed made for despotism and its particular exigencies at that time, and he had nerve and face to "go thorough," to undertake and drive to a conclusion of some sort any work the court might wish to be done by law. He was, in fact, as unflinching, as confident, and, in outward bearing, as heroic, in the performance of villainy and in breaking the laws as was ever upright judge in upholding them. He was as bold with the law-books and statutes as Charles's other personal favourite, Colonel Blood, was with pistols, and daggers, and dark-lanterns. Hence

2 Jeffreys' manners had not improved under promotion. According to Burnet, he "was drunk every day." Roger North