them separately. The audience was numerous and splendid. Many
peers were present. The Lord President and the two Secretaries of
State attended in order to prove that the papers produced in
Court were the same which Billop had brought to Whitehall. A
considerable number of judges appeared on the bench; and Holt
presided. A full report of the proceedings has come down to us,
and well deserves to be attentively studied, and to be compared
with the reports of other trials which had not long before taken
place under the same roof. The whole spirit of the tribunal had
undergone in a few months a change so complete that it might seem
to have been the work of ages. Twelve years earlier, unhappy
Roman Catholics, accused of wickedness which had never entered
into their thoughts, had stood in that dock. The witnesses for
the Crown had repeated their hideous fictions amidst the
applauding hums of the audience. The judges had shared, or had
pretended to share, the stupid credulity and the savage passions
of the populace, had exchanged smiles and compliments with the
perjured informers, had roared down the arguments feebly
stammered forth by the prisoners, and had not been ashamed, in
passing the sentence of death, to make ribald jests on purgatory
and the mass. As soon as the butchery of Papists was over, the
butchery of Whigs had commenced; and the judges had applied
themselves to their new work with even more than their old
barbarity. To these scandals the Revolution had put an end.
Whoever, after perusing the trials of Ireland and Pickering, of
Grove and Berry, of Sidney, Cornish and Alice Lisle, turns to the
trials of Preston and Ashton, will be astonished by the contrast.
The Solicitor General, Somers, conducted the prosecutions with a
moderation and humanity of which his predecessors had left him no
example. "I did never think," he said, "that it was the part of