“I would have your lordship and the gentlemen of the jury hear me on my defence, as your lordship promised that I should be heard.”

“Why, so you shall, villain; so you shall.”  His lordship’s voice was harsh as a file.  He writhed as he spoke, and for an instant his features were distorted.  A delicate dead-white hand, on which the veins showed blue, brought forth a handkerchief with which he dabbed his lips and then his brow.  Observing him with his physician’s eye, Peter Blood judged him a prey to the pain of the disease that was destroying him.  “So you shall.  But after the admission made, what defence remains?”

“You shall judge, my lord.”

“That is the purpose for which I sit here.”

“And so shall you, gentlemen.”  Blood looked from judge to jury.  The latter shifted uncomfortably under the confident flash of his blue eyes.  Lord Jeffreys’s bullying charge had whipped the spirit out of them.  Had they, themselves, been prisoners accused of treason, he could not have arraigned them more ferociously.

Peter Blood stood boldly forward, erect, self-possessed, and saturnine.  He was freshly shaven, and his periwig, if out of curl, was at least carefully combed and dressed.

“Captain Hobart has testified to what he knows — that he found me at Oglethorpe’s Farm on the Monday morning after the battle at Weston.  But he has not told you what I did there.”

Again the Judge broke in.  “Why, what should you have been doing there in the company of rebels, two of whom — Lord Gildoy and your fellow there — have already admitted their guilt?”

“That is what I beg leave to tell your lordship.”

“I pray you do, and in God’s name be brief, man.  For if I am to be troubled with the say of all you traitor dogs, I may sit here until the Spring Assizes.”

“I was there, my lord, in my quality as a physician, to dress Lord Gildoy’s wounds.”

“What’s this?  Do you tell us that you are a physician?”

“A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin.”

“Good God!” cried Lord Jeffreys, his voice suddenly swelling, his eyes upon the jury.  “What an impudent rogue is this!  You heard the witness say that he had known him in Tangiers some years ago, and that he was then an officer in the French service.  You heard the prisoner admit that the witness had spoken the truth?”

“Why, so he had.  Yet what I am telling you is also true, so it is.  For some years I was a soldier; but before that I was a physician, and I have been one again since January last, established in Bridgewater, as I can bring a hundred witnesses to prove.”

“There’s not the need to waste our time with that.  I will convict you out of your own rascally mouth.  I will ask you only this:  How came you, who represent yourself as a physician peacefully following your calling in the town of Bridgewater, to be with the army of the Duke of Monmouth?”