terms recommended by the Court.  That any unnecessary fears may not be productive of misery to the family, I must add, that the king’s attorney-general (who with Judge Ashurst attended the trial) desired me to make myself perfectly easy, for that my friend was as safe as if he had not been condemned.  I would have avoided making use of this dreadful word, but it must have come to your knowledge, and perhaps unaccompanied by many others of a pleasing kind.  To prevent its being improperly communicated to Mrs. or the Misses Heywood, whose distresses first engaged me in the business, and could not fail to call forth my best exertions upon the occasion, I send you this by express.  The mode of communication I must leave to your discretion; and shall only add that, although from a combination of circumstances, ill-nature, and mistaken friendship, the sentence is in itself terrible, yet it is incumbent on me to assure you that, from the same combination of circumstances, everybody who attended the trial is perfectly satisfied in his own mind that he was hardly guilty in appearance, in intention he was perfectly innocent.  I shall of course write to Commodore Pasley, whose mind, from my letter to him of yesterday, must be dreadfully agitated, and take his advice about what is to be done when Mr. Heywood is released.  I shall stay here till then, and my intention is afterwards to take him to my house in town, where I think he had better stay till one of the family calls for him:  for he will require a great deal of tender management after all his sufferings; and it would perhaps be a necessary preparation for seeing his mother, that one or both his sisters should be previously prepared to support her on so trying an occasion.’

On the following day Mr. Graham again writes to Dr. Scott, and among other things observes, ’It will be a great satisfaction to his family to learn, that the declarations of some of the other prisoners, since the trial, put it past all doubt that the evidence upon which he was convicted must have been (to say nothing worse of it) an unfortunate belief, on the part of the witness, of circumstances which either never had existence, or were applicable to one of the other gentlemen who remained in the ship, and not to Mr. Heywood.’[27]

On the 20th September Mr. Heywood addresses the first letter he wrote, after his conviction, to Dr. Scott.

’HONOURED AND DEAR SIR,—­On Wednesday the 12th instant the awful trial commenced, and on that day, when in Court, I had the pleasure of receiving your most kind and parental letter,[28] in answer to which I now communicate to you the melancholy issue of it, which, as I desired my friend Mr. Graham to inform you of immediately, will be no dreadful news to you.  The morning lowers, and all my hope of worldly joy is fled.  On Tuesday morning the 18th the dreadful sentence of death was pronounced upon me, to which (being the just decree of that Divine