“Slander or poison dread from Delia’s rage
  Hard-words or hanging—­if your judge be Page.”

Page surely understood human nature, or that portion of it appertaining to the average jurymen, and he disposed of Mr. Savage’s defence by one well-directed blow when he said to the good men and true:  “Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a very great man, a much greater man than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he wears very fine clothes, much finer clothes than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he has abundance of money in his pocket, much more money than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but, gentlemen of the jury, is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that Mr. Savage should therefore kill you, or me, gentlemen of the jury.”

Whereupon the defendant began to make a speech in his own behalf, but his flow of eloquence was quenched by the judge, and the jury soon found Savage as well as Gregory, one of his companions in the drunken broil, to be guilty of murder.  Many influences were now brought to bear on Queen Caroline, consort of George II., to secure a pardon for the rascal, but that good lady was for a time obdurate.  She had heard a few choice stories anent the man, and among them, one which Dr. Johnson glosses over in this way:  “Mr. Savage, when he had discovered his birth, had an incessant desire to speak to his mother, who always avoided him in public, and refused him admission into her house.  One evening walking, as it was his custom, in the street that she inhabited, he saw the door of her house by accident open, he entered it, and, finding no person in the passage to hinder him, went upstairs to salute her.  She discovered him before he entered her chamber, alarmed the family with the most distressful outcries, and when she had by her screams gathered them about her, ordered them to drive out of the house that villain who had forced himself in upon her and endeavoured to murder her.  Savage, who had attempted with the most submissive tenderness to soften her rage, hearing her utter so detestable an accusation, thought it prudent to retire.”

Thus the Queen refused to interfere until the Countess of Hertford pleaded the cause of the imprisoned poet.  In the meantime Mistress Oldfield interceded with the mighty Robert Walpole, and the result of all this wire-pulling was that Savage received the king’s pardon,[A] being thus left free to continue the persecution of his alleged mother, to beg from friends and strangers alike, and to follow a mode of life which scandalised even his kindly biographer.  And when Oldfield, the latchets of whose shoes he was not worthy to tie, played her last part and passed away from the earthly stage, Richard wore mourning for her, as for a mother, “but did not celebrate her in elegies;[B] because he knew that too great profusion of praise would only have revived those faults which his natural equity did not allow him to think less because they were committed by one who favoured him; but of which, though his virtue would not endeavour to palliate them, his gratitude would not suffer him to prolong the memory or diffuse the censure.”