became places of arms.337 In a few weeks the roads were as safe as usual.  The executions were numerous for, till the evil had been suppressed, the King resolutely refused to listen to any solicitations for mercy.338 Among those who suffered was James Whitney, the most celebrated captain of banditti in the kingdom.  He had been, during some months, the terror of all who travelled from London either northward or westward, and was at length with difficulty secured after a desperate conflict in which one soldier was killed and several wounded.339 The London Gazette announced that the famous highwayman had been taken, and invited all persons who had been robbed by him to repair to Newgate and to see whether they could identify him.  To identify him should have been easy; for he had a wound in the face, and had lost a thumb.340 He, however, in the hope of perplexing the witnesses for the Crown, expended a hundred pounds in procuring a sumptuous embroidered suit against the day of trial.  This ingenious device was frustrated by his hardhearted keepers.  He was put to the bar in his ordinary clothes, convicted and sentenced to death.341 He had previously tried to ransom himself by offering to raise a fine troop of cavalry, all highwaymen, for service in Flanders; but his offer had been rejected.342 He had one resource still left.  He declared that he was privy to a treasonable plot.  Some Jacobite lords had promised him immense rewards if he would, at the head of his gang, fall upon the King at a stag hunt in Windsor Forest.  There was nothing intrinsically improbable in Whitney’s story.  Indeed a design very similar to that which he imputed to the malecontents was, only three years later, actually formed by some of them, and was all but carried into execution.  But it was far better that a few bad men should go unpunished than that all honest men should live in fear of being falsely accused by felons sentenced to the gallows.  Chief Justice Holt advised the King to let the law take its course.  William, never much inclined to give credit to stories about conspiracies, assented.  The Captain, as he was called, was hanged in Smithfield, and made a most penitent end.343

Meanwhile, in the midst of discontent, distress and disorder, had begun a session of Parliament singularly eventful, a session from which dates a new era in the history of English finance, a session in which some grave constitutional questions, not yet entirely set at rest, were for the first time debated.

It is much to be lamented that any account of this session which can be framed out of the scanty and dispersed materials now accessible must leave many things obscure.  The relations of the parliamentary factions were, during this year, in a singularly complicated state.  Each of the two Houses was divided and subdivided by several lines.  To omit minor distinctions, there was the great line which separated the Whig party from the Tory party; and there was the great