Yet thinking it proper to gain time for the appeasing his majesty, by the assistance of one Maneuric a French quack, he counterfeited sickness for several days, during which he wrote his apology.  However on the 7th of August he arrived at London, where he was confined in his own house; but having still good reasons not to trust himself to the mercy of the court, he formed a design to escape into France, which Sir Lewis Stackley, who was privy to, and encouraged it, discovered, and Sir Walter being seized in a boat upon the river below Woolwich, was a second time, on the 10th of August, committed to the Tower; but tho’ his death seemed absolutely determined, yet it seemed difficult to find a method of accomplishing it, since his conduct in the late expedition could not be stretched in law to such a sentence.  It was resolved therefore, to sacrifice him to the resentment of Spain, in a manner so shameful, that it has justly exposed the conduct of the court to the indignation of all succeeding ages, and transmitted the pusillanimous monarch with infamy to posterity.  They called him down to judgment upon his former sentence passed fifteen years before, which they were not then ashamed to execute.  A privy seal was sent to the judges to order immediate execution, on which a conference was held Friday the 24th of Oct. 1688, between all the judges of England, concerning the manner, how prisoners who have been attainted of treason and set at liberty, should be brought to execution.  In consequence of their revolution, a privy seal came to the King’s-Bench, commanding that court to proceed against Sir Walter according to law, who next day received notice of the council to prepare himself for death; and on Wednesday the 28th of that month, at 8 o’clock in the morning, was taken out of bed in the hot fit of an ague, and carried to the King’s-Bench, Westminster, where execution was awarded against him.  The next morning, the 29th of October, the day of the lord-mayor’s inauguration, a solemnity never perhaps attended before with a public execution, Sir Walter was conducted by the sheriffs of Middlesex to the Old Palace Yard in Westminster, where mounting the scaffold, he behaved with the most undaunted spirit, and seeming cheerfulness.  The bishop of Salisbury (Tohon) being surprized at the hero’s contempt of death, and expostulating with him upon it; he told him plainly that he never feared death, and much less then, for which he blessed God, and as to the manner of it, tho’ to others it might seem grievous, yet for himself he had rather die so than in a burning fever.  This verifies the noble observation of Shakespear, that all heroes have a contempt of death; which he puts in the mouth of Julius Caesar when his friends dissuaded him from going to the Senate-House.

  Cowards die many a time before their deaths,
  The valiant never taste of death but once. 
  Of all the wonders, I have heard of yet,
  It seems to me most strange, that men should fear,
  Seeing that death, the necessary end,
  Will come, when it will come.——­