if the promise of indemnity may seem to argue that there was some
attention, at least, paid to the safety of his associates in arms,
his subsequent conduct gives reason to suppose that even this
provision was owing to any other cause rather than to a generous
feeling of his breast. For he afterwards not only acquiesced in the
insults so meanly put upon the illustrious corpse of Blake, under
whose auspices and command he had performed the most creditable
services of his life, but in the trial of Argyle produced letters of
friendship and confidence to take away the life of a nobleman, the
zeal and cordiality of whose co-operation with him, proved by such
documents, was the chief ground of his execution; thus gratuitously
surpassing in infamy those miserable wretches who, to save their own
lives, are sometimes persuaded to impeach and swear away the lives
of their accomplices.

The reign of Charles II. forms one of the most singular as well as
of the most important periods of history. It is the era of good
laws and bad government. The abolition of the court of wards, the
repeal of the writ De Heretico Comburendo, the Triennial Parliament
Bill, the establishment of the rights of the House of Commons in
regard to impeachment, the expiration of the Licence Act, and, above
all, the glorious statute of Habeas Corpus, have therefore induced a
modern writer of great eminence to fix the year 1679 as the period
at which our constitution had arrived at its greatest theoretical
perfection; but he owns, in a short note upon the passage alluded
to, that the times immediately following were times of great
practical oppression. What a field for meditation does this short
observation from such a man furnish! What reflections does it not
suggest to a thinking mind upon the inefficacy of human laws and the
imperfection of human constitutions! We are called from the