subjoined an explanation when he took the test oath, the other for having kept company with a rebel, whom it was not proved he knew to be such, and who had never been proclaimed, resemble more the acts of Tiberius and Domitian, than those of even the most arbitrary modern governments.  It is true, the sentences were not executed; Weir was reprieved; and whether or not Argyle, if he had not deemed it more prudent to escape by flight, would have experienced the same clemency, cannot now be ascertained.  The terror of these examples would have been, in the judgment of most men, abundantly sufficient to teach the people of Scotland their duty, and to satisfy them that their lives, as well as everything else they had been used to call their own, were now completely in the power of their masters.  But the government did not stop here, and having outlawed thousands, upon the same pretence upon which Weir had been condemned, inflicted capital punishment upon such criminals of both sexes as refused to answer, or answered otherwise than was prescribed to them to the most ensnaring questions.

In England, the city of London seemed to hold out for a certain time, like a strong fortress in a conquered country; and, by means of this citadel, Shaftesbury and others were saved from the vengeance of the court.  But this resistance, however honourable to the corporation who made it, could not be of long duration.  The weapons of law and justice were found feeble, when opposed to the power of a monarch who was at the head of a numerous and bigoted party of the nation, and who, which was most material of all, had enabled himself to govern without a parliament.  Civil resistance in this country, even to the most illegal attacks of royal tyranny, has never, I believe, been successful, unless when supported by parliament, or at least by a great party in one or other of the two houses.  The court having wrested from the livery of London, partly by corruption, and partly by violence, the free election of their mayor and sheriffs, did not wait the accomplishment of their plan for the destruction of the whole corporation, which, from their first success, they justly deemed certain, but immediately proceeded to put in execution their system of oppression.  Pilkington, Colt, and Oates, were fined a hundred thousand pounds each for having spoken disrespectfully of the Duke of York; Barnardiston, ten thousand, for having in a private letter expressed sentiments deemed improper; and Sidney, Russell, and Armstrong, found that the just and mild principles which characterise the criminal law of England could no longer protect their lives, when the sacrifice was called for by the policy or vengeance of the king.  To give an account of all the oppression of this period would be to enumerate every arrest, every trial, every sentence, that took place in questions between the crown and the subjects.

Of the Rye House plot it may be said, much more truly than of the popish, that there was in it some truth, mixed with much falsehood; and though many of the circumstances in Kealing’s account are nearly as absurd and ridiculous as those in Oates’s, it seems probable that there was among some of those accused a notion of assassinating the king; but whether this notion was over ripened into what may be called a design, and, much more, whether it were ever evinced by such an overt act as the law requires for conviction, is very doubtful.  In regard to the conspirators of higher ranks, from whom all suspicion of participation in the intended assassination has been long since done away, there is unquestionably reason to believe that they had often met and consulted, as well for the purpose of ascertaining the means they actually possessed as for that of devising others for delivering their country from the dreadful servitude into which it had fallen; and thus far their conduct appears clearly to have been laudable.  If they went further, and did anything which could be fairly construed into an actual conspiracy to levy war against the king, they acted, considering the disposition of the nation at that period, very indiscreetly.  But whether their proceedings had ever gone this length, is far from certain.  Monmouth’s communications with the king, when we reflect upon all the circumstances of those communications, deserve not the smallest attention; nor indeed, if they did, does the letter which he afterwards withdrew prove anything upon this point.  And it is an outrage to common-sense to call Lord Grey’s narrative written, as he himself states in his letter to James II., while the question of his pardon was pending, an authentic account.  That which is most certain in this affair is, that they had committed no overt act, indicating the imagining of the king’s death, even according to the most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; much less was any such act legally proved against them.  And the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were expressly limited to a certain time, which in these cases had elapsed so that it is impossible not to assent to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatised the condemnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant violation of law and justice.

The proceedings in Sidney’s case were still more detestable.  The production of papers, containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never even intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers, in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of juridical tyranny.  But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time, in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction, and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.  Pardon was not to be expected.  Mr. Hume says, that such an interference on the part of the king, though it might have been an act of heroic generosity, could not be regarded as an indispensable duty.  He might have said with more propriety, that it was idle to expect that the government, after having incurred so much guilt in order to obtain the sentence, should, by remitting it, relinquish the object just when it was within its grasp.  The same historian considers the jury as highly blamable, and so do I; but what was their guilt in comparison of that of the court who tried, and of the government who prosecuted, in this infamous cause?  Yet the jury, being the only party that can with any colour be stated as acting independently of the government, is the only one mentioned by him as blamable.  The prosecutor is wholly omitted in his censure, and so is the court; this last, not from any tenderness for the judge (who, to do this author justice, is no favourite with him), but lest the odious connection between that branch of the judicature and the government should strike the reader too forcibly; for Jeffreys, in this instance, ought to be regarded as the mere tool and instrument (a fit one, no doubt), of the prince who had appointed him for the purpose of this and similar services.  Lastly, the king is gravely introduced on the question of pardon, as if he had had no prior concern in the cause, and were now to decide upon the propriety of extending mercy to a criminal condemned by a court of judicature; nor are we once reminded what that judicature was, by whom appointed, by whom influenced, by whom called upon, to receive that detestable evidence, the very recollection of which, even at this distance of time, fires every honest heart with indignation.  As well might we palliate the murders of Tiberius, who seldom put to death his victims without a previous decree of his senate.  The moral of all this seems to be, that whenever a prince can, by intimidation, corruption, illegal evidence, or other such means, obtain a verdict against a subject whom he dislikes, he may cause him to be