He had kept up to the last an intercourse with his old comrades.  On the very day fixed for the murder he had contrived to mingle with them and to pick up intelligence from them.  The regiment had been so deeply infected with disloyalty that it had been found necessary to confine some men and to dismiss many more.  Surely, if any example was to be made, it was proper to make an example of the agent by whose instrumentality the men who meant to shoot the King communicated with the men whose business was to guard him.

Friend was tried next.  His crime was not of so black a dye as that of the three conspirators who had just suffered.  He had indeed invited foreign enemies to invade the realm, and had made preparations for joining them.  But, though he had been privy to the design of assassination, he had not been a party to it.  His large fortune however, and the use which he was well known to have made of it, marked him out as a fit object for punishment.  He, like Charnock, asked for counsel, and, like Charnock, asked in vain.  The judges could not relax the law; and the Attorney General would not postpone the trial.  The proceedings of that day furnish a strong argument in favour of the Act from the benefit of which Friend was excluded.  It is impossible to read them over at this distance of time without feeling compassion for a silly ill educated man, unnerved by extreme danger, and opposed to cool, astute and experienced antagonists.  Charnock had defended himself and those who were tried with him as well as any professional advocate could have done.  But poor Friend was as helpless as a child.  He could do little more than exclaim that he was a Protestant, and that the witnesses against him were Papists, who had dispensations from their priests for perjury, and who believed that to swear away the lives of heretics was a meritorious work.  He was so grossly ignorant of law and history as to imagine that the statute of treasons, passed in the reign of Edward the Third, at a time when there was only one religion in Western Europe, contained a clause providing that no Papist should be a witness, and actually forced the Clerk of the Court to read the whole Act from beginning to end.  About his guilt it was impossible that there could be a doubt in any rational mind.  He was convicted; and he would have been convicted if he had been allowed the privileges for which he asked.

Parkyns came next.  He had been deeply concerned in the worst part of the plot, and was, in one respect, less excusable than any of his accomplices; for they were all nonjurors; and he had taken the oaths to the existing government.  He too insisted that he ought to be tried according to the provisions of the new Act.  But the counsel for the Crown stood on their extreme right; and his request was denied.  As he was a man of considerable abilities, and had been bred to the bar, he probably said for himself all that counsel could have said for him; and that all amounted to very little.  He was found guilty, and received sentence of death on the evening of the twenty-fourth of March, within six hours of the time when the law of which he had vainly demanded the benefit was to come into force.680