“If I know my own heart it is not in my nature to desire the hurt of anybody, much less to delight in his eternal perdition.  It is out of compassion for you that I have used all these words — because I would have you have some regard for your immortal soul, and not ensure its damnation by obdurately persisting in falsehood and prevarication.  But I see that all the pains in the world, and all compassion and charity are lost upon you, and therefore I will say no more to you.”  He turned again to the jury that countenance of wistful beauty.  “Gentlemen, I must tell you for law, of which we are the judges, and not you, that if any person be in actual rebellion against the King, and another person — who really and actually was not in rebellion — does knowingly receive, harbour, comfort, or succour him, such a person is as much a traitor as he who indeed bore arms.  We are bound by our oaths and consciences to declare to you what is law; and you are bound by your oaths and your consciences to deliver and to declare to us by your verdict the truth of the facts.”

Upon that he proceeded to his summing-up, showing how Baynes and Blood were both guilty of treason, the first for having harboured a traitor, the second for having succoured that traitor by dressing his wounds.  He interlarded his address by sycophantic allusions to his natural lord and lawful sovereign, the King, whom God had set over them, and with vituperations of Nonconformity and of Monmouth, of whom — in his own words — he dared boldly affirm that the meanest subject within the kingdom that was of legitimate birth had a better title to the crown.  “Jesus God!  That ever we should have such a generation of vipers among us,” he burst out in rhetorical frenzy.  And then he sank back as if exhausted by the violence he had used.  A moment he was still, dabbing his lips again; then he moved uneasily; once more his features were twisted by pain, and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he dismissed the jury to consider the verdict.

Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and almost obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that afterwards, in retrospect, surprised him.  He was so amazed by the man, by the reactions taking place in him between mind and body, and by his methods of bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed, that he almost forgot that his own life was at stake.

The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one.  The verdict found the three prisoners guilty.  Peter Blood looked round the scarlet-hung court.  For an instant that foam of white faces seemed to heave before him.  Then he was himself again, and a voice was asking him what he had to say for himself, why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, being convicted of high treason.

He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness of the court.  It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was himself a mockery — the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and vindictive king.  His laughter shocked the austerity of that same jack-pudding.