justice to be done; but my prayers were to me like the lifting of weights too great for my strength.  One hope only remained to me, and that lay in His Majesty; for, although he had permitted the deaths of Coleman and of Stayley, these might indeed have appeared guilty to one who knew nothing of them; but I could not find it in my heart to believe that he would suffer these Jesuits to die, of whom he had sworn to me that not a hair of their heads should be injured.  I had determined, too, to go to His Majesty, so soon as the trial was done, and the verdict given as I knew it would be, and hear from his own lips that he would keep his word, at whatever cost to himself.

It was dark then, by the time that all the evidence had been given, and the Chief Justice had done his directing of the jury.  The Court, crowded though it was with the people, was as still as death, so soon as the jury came back after a very short recess.  I could hear only the breathing of the folks on all hands.  A woman sat beside me, who had been as early as myself that morning; but she had roared and clapped with the rest, at the earlier stages, when the Chief Justice had silenced the prisoners or thrown doubt upon what they said.  She was quiet now, however, and I wondered how the evidence had affected her.

When the jury were ready to give their verdict, the talking that had broken out a little, grew silent again; but when the verdict of Guilty was given, it broke out once more into a storm of shouting; so that the rafters rang with it.  The woman beside me—­for I sat at the end of a bench and had nothing but the wall beyond me—­appeared to awaken at the tumult and join her voice to it, beating with her hand at the edge of the gallery in front of her.  As for me I looked at the prisoners.  They were all upright in their places, Mr. Ireland in the midst of the three; and were as still as if nothing were the matter.  They were looking at the Lord Chief Justice, at whom I too turned my eyes, and saw he was grinning and talking behind his hand to the Recorder.  It was a very travesty of justice that I was looking at, and no true trial at all.  There were a thousand points of dissonance that I had remarked myself—­as to how it was, for instance, that one fellow had been promised twenty guineas for killing the King and another fifteen hundred pounds; as to how it was that Oates, who professed himself so loyal, had permitted four ruffians to go to Windsor (as he said), with intent to murder the King, and that he had said nothing of it at the time.  But all was passed over in this lust for the Jesuits’ blood.

I knew that my Lord would make a great speech on the affair, before he would make an end and give sentence; for this was a great opportunity for him to curry favour not only with the people, but with men like my Lord Shaftesbury who was behind him in all the matter; and as I had no wish to hear what he would have to say (for I knew it all by heart already) and, still less to hear the terrible words of the sentence for High Treason passed upon these three good men in the dock, I rose up quietly from my place, and slipped out of the door by which I had come in.  As I was about to close the door behind me I heard silence made, and my Lord Justice Scroggs beginning his speech—­and these were the words which first he addressed to the jury.