seem to take of this Government, (contrary to that amicable correspondence so often promised, and expected by us,) in not holding us worthy to be advised of his Majesty’s being proclaimed, without which, certainly, we have not been enabled to do our duty in that particular.  Such advice would have been gratefully received by your Excellency’s humble servants.”  Thanks, Colonels Darnall and Digges and you other Colonels and Majors, for this plain outspeaking of the old Maryland heart against the arrogance of the “Right Honorable Lord Howard, Baron of Effingham, Captain General and Chief Governor of his Majesty’s Colony of Virginia,” as he styles himself!  I am glad to see this change of tone, since that first letter of obsequious submission.

Perhaps this change of tone may have had some connection with the recent change on the throne, in which the accession of a Catholic monarch may have given new courage to Maryland, and abated somewhat the confidence of Virginia.  If so, it was but a transitory hope, born to a sad disappointment.

The documents afford but little more information.

Lord Baltimore, being in London, appears to have interceded with the King for some favor to Talbot, and writes to the Council on the third of July, “that it formerly was and still is the King’s pleasure, that Talbot shall be brought over, in the Quaker Ketch, to England, to receive his trial there; and that, in order thereto, his Majesty had sent his commands to the Governor of Virginia to deliver him to Captain Allen, commander of said ketch, who is to bring him over.”  The Proprietary therefore directs his Council to send the prisoner to the Governor of Virginia, “to the end that his Majesty’s pleasure may be fulfilled.”

This letter was received on the 7th of October, 1685, and Talbot was accordingly sent, under the charge of Gilbert Clarke and a proper guard, to Lord Effingham, who gives Clarke a regular business receipt, as if he had brought him a hogshead of tobacco, and appends to it a short apologetic explanation of his previous rudeness, which we may receive as another proof of his distrust of the favor of the new monarch.  “I had not been so urgent,” he says, “had I not had advices from England, last April, of the measures that were taken there concerning him.”

After this my chronicle is silent.  We have no further tidings of Talbot.  The only hint for a conjecture is the marginal note of “The Landholder’s Assistant,” got from Chalmers:  “He was, I believe,” says the note, “tried and convicted, and finally pardoned by James the Second.”  This is probably enough.  For I suppose him to have been of the same family with that Earl of Tyrconnel equally distinguished for his influence with James the Second as for his infamous life and character, who held at this period unbounded sway at the English Court.  I hope, for the honor of our hero, that he preserved no family-likeness to that false-hearted, brutal, and violent favorite, who is made immortal in Macaulay’s pages as Lying Dick Talbot.  Through his intercession his kinsman may have been pardoned, or even never brought to trial.