Mr. Baron Hatsel summed up in his dreary vacillating way.  He told the gentlemen of the jury that young men would be young men, especially where pretty wenches were concerned, and that all knew that there was bitterness where Whig and Tory were living nigh together.  Then he went over the evidence, at first in a tone favourable to the encounter having been almost accidental, and the stroke an act of passion.  But he then added, it was strange, and he did not know what to think of these young sparks and the young gentlewoman all meeting in a lonely place when honest folks were abed, and the hiding in the vault, and the state of the clothes were strange matters scarce agreeing with what either prisoner or witness said.  It looked only too like part of a plot of which some one should make a clean breast.  On the other hand, the prisoner was a fine young gentleman, an only son, and had been fighting the Turks, though it would have been better to have fought the French among his own countrymen.  He had come ingenuously forward to deliver his cousin, and a deliberate murderer was not wont to be so generous, though may be he expected to get off easily on this same plea of misadventure.  If it was misadventure, why did he not try to do something for the deceased, or wait to see whether he breathed before throwing him into this same pit? though, to be sure, a lad might be inexperienced.  For the rest, as to these same sights of the deceased or his likeness, he (the judge) was no believer in ghosts, though he would not say there were no such things, and the gentlemen of the jury must decide whether it was more likely the poor youth was playing pranks in the body, or whether he were haunting in the spirit those who had most to do with his untimely end.  This was the purport, or rather the no-purport, of the charge.

The jury were absent for a very short time, and as it leaked out afterwards, their intelligence did not rise above the idea that the young gentleman was thick with they Frenchies who wanted to bring in murder and popery, warming-pans and wooden shoes.  He called stoning poultry a trifle, so of what was he not capable?  Of course he spited the poor young chap, and how could the fact be denied when the poor ghost had come back to ask for his blood?

So the awful suspense ended with ‘Guilty, my Lord.’

“Of murder or manslaughter?”

“Of murder.”

The prisoner stood as no doubt he had faced Turkish batteries.

The judge asked the customary question whether he had any reason to plead why he should not be condemned to death.

“No, my lord.  I am guilty of shedding Peregrine Oakshott’s blood, and though I declare before God and man that I had no such purpose, and it was done in the heat of an undesigned struggle, I hated him enough to render the sentence no unjust one.  I trust that God will pardon me, if man does not.”