the divines who absolved him did not think it sinful to assassinate King William.  Collier rejoined; but, though a pugnacious controversialist, he on this occasion shrank from close conflict, and made his escape as well as he could under a cloud of quotations from Tertullian, Cyprian and Jerome, Albaspinaeus and Hammond, the Council of Carthage and the Council of Toledo.  The public feeling was strongly against the three absolvers.  The government however wisely determined not to confer on them the honour of martyrdom.  A bill was found against them by the grand jury of Middlesex; but they were not brought to trial.  Cook and Snatt were set at liberty after a short detention; and Collier would have been treated with equal lenity if he would have consented to put in bail.  But he was determined to do no act which could be construed into a recognition of the usurping government.  He was therefore outlawed; and when he died, more than thirty years later, his outlawry had not been reversed.683

Parkyns was the last Englishman who was tried for high treason under the old system of procedure.  The first who was tried under the new system was Rockwood.  He was defended by Sir Bartholomew Shower, who in the preceding reign had made himself unenviably conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the gibbet for breaches of military discipline.  By his servile cruelty he had earned the nickname of the Manhunter.  Shower deserved, if any offender deserved, to be excepted from the Act of Indemnity, and left to the utmost rigour of those laws which he had so shamelessly perverted.  But he had been saved by the clemency of William, and had requited that clemency by pertinacious and malignant opposition.684 It was doubtless on account of Shower’s known leaning towards Jacobitism that he was employed on this occasion.  He raised some technical objections which the Court overruled.  On the merits of the case he could make no defence.  The jury returned a verdict of guilty.  Cranburne and Lowick were then tried and convicted.  They suffered with Rookwood; and there the executions stopped.685

The temper of the nation was such that the government might have shed much more blood without incurring the reproach of cruelty.  The feeling which had been called forth by the discovery of the plot continued during several weeks to increase day by day.  Of that feeling the able men who were at the head of the Whig party made a singularly skilful use.  They saw that the public enthusiasm, if left without guidance, would exhaust itself in huzzas, healths and bonfires, but might, if wisely guided, be the means of producing a great and lasting effect.  The Association, into which the Commons had entered while the King’s speech was still in their ears, furnished the means of combining four fifths of the nation in one vast club for the defence of the order of succession with